Even a good marriage leaves people with longings for certain things their marriage will never be. So, do they accept that, make compromises, and say, "You can't have everything in life," which is what we always did? Or do they say, "I deserve more. I want to experience that thing and, you know, I have fifty more years to live than I used to." It's not necessarily that we have more desires today, but we do feel more entitled to pursue them. We live in this "right to happiness" culture, and yes, we do live half a century longer than we used to.

Most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day - the erotic mind is not very politically correct.

The kiss that you have never given is just as powerful as hours of actual lovemaking. The erotic isn't just what is happening between people's legs. It is also what's happening in their erotic mind.

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.

The one word I hear when people have affairs is that they feel alive. They don't talk about the fact they're having sex. They feel like they are engaged with their life. They describe an experience that beats back the deadness inside, which isn't the fault of the marriage or the partner. It's often the deadness that they have allowed to creep in for years on their own. But by definition, it's a transgressive act. And transgression is a breaking of the rules. And it gives you a sense of ownership and freedom. And ownership and freedom gives you a feeling of aliveness. It's a chain.

The mom doesn't become sexy; the woman does. You have to retrieve the woman from the mother. And she may need to separate to do that: a bath, a walk. She must cordon off an erotic space.

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