Whatever else we may say about sex, it is at least as much a social and psychological phenomenon as it is a biological one.

Sometimes we choose a friend who mirrors our fantasies, dreams of a self we wish we could be.

Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women--the quality of shifting from child to woman, theseeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, "What does a woman want?

From our earliest beginnings, we have been a nation obsessed with sex, titillated by it at the same time that we fear it, elaborating rules to contain it at the same time that we violate them.

The structure of the family is not born in nature but in human design. What we can do, we can also undo.

Contrary to all we hear about women and their empty-nest problem, it may be fathers more often than mothers who are pained by thechildren's imminent or actual departure--fathers who want to hold back the clock, to keep the children in the home for just a little longer. Repeatedly women compare their own relief to their husband's distress

The ideal visions of one age eventually are seen as its excesses by the next.