Yesterday, I posted this status on Facebook:  “For many years I have resisted selling my products in my writing, believing that it would somehow confuse the message and reduce the education about love to advertising. I am ending my silence today. For as much as I have come to understand about the relational quality of loving that makes sex true and amazing, I learned these things through Good Clean Love – our products do create real sexual healing and that’s the truth.”

This feels like starting a new chapter, or even like a change in religion. I have always been so concerned about diluting the important message of relational love that I have left my products as an orphans. I never promote my work as a entrepreneur or love product connoisseur. I never talk about why we produce the kind of products that we do unless I am doing a sales training. Even then, it is more about education than it is about taking the space that I have earned over the years as a green formulator of the best love products on the market.

I have read before that all of the most influential companies create solutions that respond to the maxim, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”  Good Clean Love was birthed from that place. After bearing and nursing four babies for a total of 12 years,  my interior landscape was as dry as a desert.  As for millions of other women, vaginal dryness is one leg of a triad of symptoms that end up in pain with sex. Not finding desire a companion anymore and unable to wake up any libido is either a consequence or an instigator or both.  It doesn’t really matter where the cycle starts and ends.

For an alarming number of women and couples it is the syndrome that eventually ends their sex life.  I was lucky enough to be sexually responsive for most of my life, so I wasn’t going to give up on my sex life that easily.  I imagine, if orgasm was as elusive for me as it is for up to 40% of women, I might not have tried so hard to find a solution.  After four kids I knew how vital our sex life was to the working of the family.  I had grown up in a violent messy divorce and I was intent on not repeating my past.

A beautiful and happy accident occurred in my search for a solution when I came across a single bottle of love oil in a metaphysical shop that has since gone under.   I bought the stuff and spent the next 6 months enjoying some of the best sex of my marriage.  I thought it was us… I thought we had hit a new level together until the bottle ran out. Then I learned the power of love oil.   After a year of unfruitful searching for another bottle or a close substitute, I finally found the woman who made that bottle with a kit of 10 year old essential oils.  Thus began my quest and the beginning of good clean love.

Interestingly, though it has not been our initial product inspiration that has grown the company.   The sexual product market is a challenging one to innovate.  It is referred to as segmented because the same products have controlled the shelf space since I was 8 years old.   Advertising and sales of intimacy aids are all about personal lubricant.   Johnson and Johnson has spent over 100 million dollars over the last several years normalizing the use of lubricants.   Now most everyone has bought a bottle of lubricant, the majority made with nasty, carcinogenic ingredients.

It was one of our earliest multi-store customers that implored me to come up with a water based lubricant product.   It took over a year of kitchen experimentation and collaboration with an out of the box thinking contract manufacturer for us to come up with our first marketable lubricant.   We made our first product with tea infused scents, a cocktail of tiny percentages of preservatives and a new clear gum, seaweed and aloe.   The gel held the color of the tea water.  One preservative ingredient was a milk enzyme.   Some people loved it and some complained.   Welcome to the world of consumer products.

We are currently in our third cycle of lubricant evolution.   In this continuous  improvement process we are always looking for new and  better preservatives, cleaner distilled flavors and new healing ingredients.   This is one of the most challenging and exciting parts of a love product company inventing products that can change your sex life and your overall health.

A sex life is actually a fairly accurate reflection of your over all health.   Hundreds of studies link a satisfying sex life with reduced stress, illness and depression.  Sexual activity is even associated with longevity.   Our sense of smell is one of our most neglected yet rooted sources of information.    Considering how you know someone or something with your nose, how their smell affected you,  his is what love oil helps you to do.

Love oil, by its nature is a sensuous commodity.   It is most useful when you rub it lovingly on someone else.   So the scent becomes part of how skin feels.   Touch is a mysterious language with few words that accurately contain its meaning. Combining scented oil with the perfectness of naked skin is what erotica was built on.

My husband, Franc, coined the term “smoking me/you” about the manner of inhaling your lovers scent,  coming close enough to kiss, but just breathe.  This is where scent penetrates deeper than conscious thoughts- with a trigger as small as mindful focus on what we smell.    Something in your limbic brain fires a fast burst of neuron activity and suddenly your sex drive is on.  Its as  easy as flicking a switch and sometimes as impossible to find in the dark of night.

Our love oil scents are exotic and erotic combinations from across the globe.  Some of the oldest recorded aphrodisiac oils, that have been revered for centuries and at times more valuable than gold for their arousing properties.  Each of our scents combines the sensuous history of faraway lands and exotic aromas into an expanded mental space, a modern consciousness of love rooted in the idyllic moments of perfect history.

Kissing with love oil turns a regular kiss into a conversation.   Scent enlarges the sensory experience ten fold or more.   Lips, tongue, breathe are all altered within the shadow of aroma.   So for a special valentines gift to my most devoted readers a private coupon to get one of our new aluminum, perfect dispensing, lovely to hold next to someone you love bottles of love oil for only $10.  This will not happen again soon.   Make up your own love oil stories that I promise will be some of your most treasured memories.   Happy Valentines Day.

“I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.” -Elizabeth Barrett Browning

We are not a happy sexual bunch. According to a recent CNN poll nearly 40 million Americans are stuck in a sexual rut, and more than 52% of us are dissatisfied with our love lives. A neglected unhealthy sex life makes relationships more vulnerable to anger and resentment and is often cited as the primary motivation for infidelity. Unfortunately, you can’t really cure an unhealthy sexual life without curing the aspects of the relationship that lead you to avoiding intimacy. I know from the thousands of people I have spoken to over the years, that malfunctioning sex lives is the result of malfunctioning relating and almost never the other way around.

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“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.” -Helen Keller

When we end our relationships badly, we get stuck in a continuous rebound relationship cycle.  Tragically, the most common and destructive bad endings that plague millions of relationships is when we use infidelity as an exit strategy. Some sex therapists would argue that most affairs, especially when they occur in succession are nothing more than the continuous cycle of ineffective rebounding that takes over one’s relationship history. Certainly repeat marriage statistics bear this out. As dismal as our 50% fail rate is on first marriage, success rates for second marriage drops to 25% and the third relationships only have a success rate of 10%.  Failure rates in successive relationships out of marriage are no better. When we don’t authentically and definitively end our relationships, we carry what remains unresolved into everything that follows.

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“A final comfort that is small, but not cold:  The heart is the only broken instrument that works. “ ~T.E. Kalem

I wonder what is going through the mind of the man or woman as they fill out their Ashley Madison profile. What emotions dominate as one plans to cheat on one’s partner and betrays promises made?  The spike in signups after holidays like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day is probably a good indicator. It isn’t just the promise of some great sex that gets prospective customers to hit the payment button. In fact many say it is companionship, appreciation and recognition that are the greater fuel towards their path to indiscretion.

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“You can have no greater or lesser dominion than the one over yourself. The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” -Leonardo DaVinci

Infidelity is a topic on just about everyone’s mind at some point in their relationship. Whether it lives as a quiet fear, a desperate fantasy or a shame-filled memory, the occurrence of infidelity is so frequent and widespread that it is one of the cultural phenomena of love that holds us all. It is rare for illicit affairs to turn into the lasting relationships we envision when we begin them. The excitement and intrigue produced in the clandestine efforts for secrecy can turn mediocre sex passionate, but generally doesn’t translate well into the mundane action of making a life together. Besides that, the affair itself is often tainted with the pain it inflicts on others left in its wake. Still, the number of people who self report infidelity continues to rise, even in some unlikely relationship categories like newlyweds.

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Recognizing that our relationships are our most gentle teachers in life is a great way to approach the work involved in staying with them. We too often don’t value and trust the huge amounts of resources that we have invested into them and are too willing to dispose of them before really digging into the work before us. While some relationships were a bad idea from the day they started, the majority are actually perfectly designed to help us grow into the best people we can be. I have been sharing these love tips for years and consistently hear back from our friends and customers that doing the work of love rewards them in ways they couldn’t have imagined.   Remember that often the feeling of hitting the wall in love lives in us only moments before a breakthrough that gives meaning to our promises. Make this New Year full of love.

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“Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn reverence for life until we know how to understand sex.”  -Henry Ellis

Sex scandals are us.  The news is replete with what seems an endless account of seemingly good people whose sexuality has literally transformed them into a criminal. The stories of childhood sexual abuse are deeply troubling and extend into the millions when you consider the many youths sold into the global sex trade. Yet, stories of coaches and kids in locker rooms hit an even deeper nerve because they make us question, at the deepest level, our own sexual urges. We are all caught in the conundrum of longing to experience our sexual depths, while simultaneously being terrified of whether our fantasies are normal or worse still, make us dangerous.

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“Healing requires far more of us than just the participation of our intellectual and even our emotional resources. And it certainly demands that we do more than look backwards at the dead-end archives of our past. Healing is, by definition, taking a process of disintegration of life and transforming into a process of return to life.” -Caroline Myss

The holidays present a feast of opportunity to listen to the wisdom in your broken relationships.  Most everyone shares these, whether they be wounds from a recent divorce, a sibling or parent relationship that remains sharp with bitterness, or a persistent disconnect with your partner, which the holiday season only serves to magnify. Old hurts seem to more easily resurface in the twinkling lights of what should feel loving and we frequently walk away from our holiday exchanges feeling more alone and less connected than ever. Even the empty space of silence that lives in the broken spaces between you and the people you once loved seem to expand at this time of year.

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“Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing – peace is the measure.” ~George Melton

As a child I dreaded the holidays. Weeks of uninterrupted solid family dysfunction were made unbearable by what seemed like everyone else having the best time of the year. I remember one year buying a tiny plastic tree and decorating it with cheap lights and tinsel so I could have some holiday spirit, too. I got sick a lot during those vacations and, sitting feverish in front of the holiday film reruns and advertising, only made me feel worse. I know from being married to a doctor for the last three decades, that the holidays are a peak time for illness and emotional breakdowns.

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“All healing is first a healing of the heart.” -Carl Townsend

I remember the first time I heard the maxim that “Bad things happen fast, and good things happen over time.” It was a recognition that hadn’t occurred to me until I was faced with sweeping and traumatic shifts in health and relationships. Illness, accidents, natural disasters and even broken hearts happen seemingly instantaneously. In retrospect, we can sometimes see the choices or events that lead up to them, but after the fact it usually doesn’t matter what was missed because now life has become a mission of healing.

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