Marriage isn't meant to make you happy - it's there because it gives you a life in which you can find happiness.

The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.

Modern love is the enterprise that everyone wants to be a part of, yet there's a fifty percent divorce rate in round one and a sixty-five percent divorce rate in round two.

For some people, the experience of sexuality is that they are entirely inside their body, but others feel they have totally transcended the physical boundaries of their body. Transcendence is the ability to no longer feel you are contained within the physical world. For many people, the definition of spiritual is a sense of complete abdication of the self. For some people, it's union with another that transcends the borders between where one stops and where the other person starts and creates a sense of infiniteness and timelessness.

There's something very full in knowing that your partner accepts you as is.

I think love is often a bit selfish, even before we had consumerism. That's not new. A consumer society gives you the illusion of having massive amounts of choice and saddles you with the freedom of being able to dabble in that choice. And at the same time, you are left with the tyranny of self-doubt and uncertainty about whether you made the right choice.

I say no to a double standard that men can roam and women must stay put at home. I say no to the fact that men are allowed to claim their sexuality and women just have to pretend that it doesn't matter to them. It's resisting poor relational arrangements. An affair is a way of saying, "No. I'm not playing by the rules." And sometimes betrayal is part of that because you deceive somebody else but you feel like you are, for the first time, being honest with yourself. Sometimes when people have affairs, they feel like they have been lying to themselves for years.