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.

You know what happens to sex in marriage? Instead of inviting desire, you monitor it. Especially men: You let her sleep late, you take the kids to the park, and all that time you're thinking, "Tonight I'll get some." That doesn't work.

People cheat on each other in a hundred different ways: indifference, emotional neglect, contempt, lack of respect, years of refusal of intimacy. Cheating doesn't begin to describe the ways that people let each other down.

On some level we trade passion for security, that's trading one illusion for another. It's a matter of degree. We can't live in constant fear, but we can't live without any. The fear of loss is essential to love.

Affairs can be powerful detonators. They can invigorate a marriage that's flat, jolt people out of years of complacency. Fear of loss rekindles desire, makes people have conversations they haven't had in years, takes them out of their contrived illusion of safety.

The attraction of dating is that you don't take yes for granted - - you're fully engaged, there's seductiveness, tension.

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