I would really, really like to quote the entirity of Micah Murray’s post on the idea that men give love to get sex and women give sex to get love. But doing that is frowned upon here on the internets, so I’m just going to quote a couple juicy bits. But these are no better than the rest of the post. It seemed reasonable enough. And it fit neatly with the gender stereotypes I’d heard all my life: Men think about sex every seven seconds. Women aren’t visual. Men are like microwa

Guys, what is this world coming to? Aljezeera America recently used the parable of the talents to explain current events. Christianity Today, the flagship publication of conservative, Evangelical Christianity, is promoting interracial marriage. And discussing racism. And even relying on the voice of a black women to explain the theology of the whole thing. The world’s going all off kilter here. I know the rest of the world (and many of us) find it ridiculous that the church s

In the last few months, I’ve realized something about men and women and why we often struggle with each other. It might not be THE problem, but I would venture to say that it’s certainly been A problem. And figuring this out has been really helpful to me, so I thought I’d pass it on to y’all. It all has to do with the way we express our pain. Generally speaking, there are two ways we experience the emotion of being hurt – through anger or sorrow. They look very different, but

In a more perfect world, the title of this post would be complete jibberish to all of my lovely readers. But alas, we live in a world which is in the process of being redeemed, so some of you know all too well about Christian Patriarchy and clobber verses. However – joy of joys! – we live in a world which is in the process of being redeemed and I know that some of you have no idea what Christian Patriarchy or clobber verses are. So, for the blissfully uninitiated, allow I to

Yup. I’m about as intimidating as this guy here. Back when I was 18, I had two different guys I dated break up with me and give me the exact same reason: I was intimidating. That’s the word they both used. Which is really weird. I’m about as intimidating as a tree sloth. Which is to say not in the least. Now if they had said I was sloppy or spent too much time sleeping or wasn’t ambitious enough, that I could have understood. (See – like a tree sloth!) But intimidating? Hardl

I’ve said before that the events which lead to my husband and my separation last year was so intense and sordid that it would have made a great episode of Dateline Special Edition. If only we had no shame and one of us were a homicidal maniac. But, since we enjoy healthy levels of shame and we didn’t devolve into poisoning one another (not that such a thing was never contemplated), it’s a story which will have to wait ’til the great by and by to be widely disseminated. Suffic

In the old pagan world, sex and religion were all tied up together. Temple prostitutes and depictions of group sex on ancient Hindu temple walls and all that. Christianity has too often taken the opposite tact – sex as being so unholy that for a while it was considered a sin even in the context of marriage by the Roman church. Which led to possibly the most dysfunctional set-up ever; putatively and sometimes actually celibate priests being told each time a parishioner had sex

(I spent the weekend with Mr. Kennedy a couple of years earlier when his son Teddy got married.  We were both just-outside-the-inner-circle participants in the wedding.  My ex was the best man and Mr. Kennedy was the now sober  and present father.  I am quite certain that Mr. Kennedy absolutely laughed his ass off over the whole thing.  I mean, he valued his children more than men who never went without them sometimes do.  But the whole thing was pretty rich.  He would have s

We humans have a strange obsession with being right.  Not only do we tend to think we’re always right and be very resistant to thinking otherwise, we even think that being right should change the way our lives work.  If we are right, everyone should get in line with us and life should go well for us.  Of course, it rarely works that way.  So we get all bent out of shape.  But when relationships are being destroyed and hearts are being broken, being right means nothing.  Holdi

I’m afraid I haven’t been blogging much because I’ve been SICK as a dog!  Blegh.  Hopefully I’ll recover soon and back to posting more often.  In the meantime, poke around – there’s a lot of stuff on the blog from the past that you might find interesting. Pass It On! Tweet Email More Print Share on Tumblr WhatsApp #marriage #advice #relationships #difficultpeople #life

My husband on the other hand, is a creature of habit.  He has rituals and routines.  When these rituals and routines are disrupted, he gets crabby, upset and has a hard time functioning.  He forms habits in days, not the weeks or months it takes most people.  If he takes a 3 day business trip, it will be weeks before he can wake up to the sound of an alarm clock because on his trip he got used to being woken up by a phone call at the hotel. Normally we limp along together the

“Just Because”.    In it, the author talks about how her husband has a habit of bidding on large items on ebay which are “pick-up only” and are located across the country.   So they end up making weekend trips across the country to pick up motor homes, home gyms, motorcycle trailers, etc.  (These are obviously people with more money and several fewer young children than myself.)  The first time her husband bid on a pick-up only item 5 states away, she resisted the urge to thr