“Love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image… otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” ~Author Unknown

There is probably not a culture on earth that values the ideal of long-term love and marriage as much as Americans. While more than 90% of young adults aspire to marriage, fewer and fewer are choosing it because as a country and a culture we have the highest rate of romantic breakups in the world. Although we generally think about our relationships in very personal terms, it may do us well to consider the cultural values that provide their context. Media and advertising shower us with both a plethora of choices and the inherent message that we are entitled to the best; always with the goal of achieving and improving our happiness. Consequently, and perhaps even inadvertently, many of us are continuously in a self appraisal of our emotional wellbeing and personal life driven by the erroneous idea that there is always another choice available that would make us happier.

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‘Love, in all its fragile forms, is the one powerful, enduring force that brings real meaning to our everyday lives…but the love I mean is the fire that burns inside us all, the inner warmth that prevents our soul from freezing in the winters of despair.’ -Bradley Grieves

I always thought of love as the exchange, the giving and the receiving of energy in the myriad forms of life exchanges. Knowing that we all experience love differently is what makes the exchanges so difficult for so many of us. Often unable to articulate what it would take for us to feel the love of our partner, we flail about in our relationships, feeling more emptiness than connection. We long to feel full of love but don’t know how to actually feel it when it’s aimed at us directly.

When love works, it is a transmission of goodness. It awakens the seed of goodness that lives in us. But many people do not get this transmission from the loving acts that other people offer them. It is not just a mental transfer that happens through words. Waking up the seed of our own loveliness is visceral. You feel it in your body. I remember learning that the love we extend happens through our heart center, and that the love we take in happens though our backs behind our heart. I am not alone with serious tightness and blockages behind my heart. Whether they are small compliments or deep gestures of generosity, learning to let the experience of being loved into our physical bodies is worthy of attention.

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“In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare. Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange have only been enhanced.” ~Robert Sexton

One of the first questions people ask me when they find out what I do is “How did you get into love work?” My usual answer is “to learn to stay in my own marriage.”While this is true, what I realized the other day while listening to a NPR documentary called What the Divorce Revolution has Meant for Kids was that I also do this work because of my childhood experience of divorce.

Listening to the voices of other contemporaries interviewed about the pain and shame of their broken families and hearing the remarkable statistics of how growing up in divorce makes you twice as likely to divorce as an adult, I realized again why teaching people to love matters so much. Statistically, the chance one grows up in divorce is over 50 percent.

While things have improved dramatically for children of divorce (there are more than 2000 books available about helping children through divorce), the reality is that most children still end up with the adult responsibility of trying to hold the two worlds together that their parents couldn’t manage. Many kids have said that their childhood unequivocally ended when their parents divorced. Growing up without any model for how to stay together in a committed relationship makes it hard to know how to create and sustain such relationships.

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‘And in the end, the love we take is equal to the love we make�’ -The Beatles

This year we prepare for Valentine’s Day with the aspiration of Love for All. The world is demanding that we wake up and realize that the most important thing we have to discover in ourselves is our capacity to love. Sometimes the most challenging work we undertake is following through with our promises to love, other times the most pleasurable and rewarding moments of our lives occurs in the arms of our beloved. Learning to embrace them both with the same open heart is an act of boldness and courage.

The ability to love begins with loving acceptance of our selves. The Buddha once said, “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserves your love and affection.” Take this to heart from one of the greatest teachers of all time. Even in small increments � feel your own love and be prepared for the magnetic magic it creates around you.

If you are fortunate to love someone else, use this time to relish the gifts that the relationship brings to your life. In addition to any gifts you might purchase, take the time to write a list of all the qualities your loved one brings to your life. Receiving this kind of recognition will not only be a gift not quickly forgotten by your partner, but the act of writing out the list by hand will make the positive qualities in your life bigger and more real for both of you. This is a simple but deeply effective way to love and honor your relationship.

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‘All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.’ �Buddha

Life can throw a punch. Things happen. Relationships with people we love can challenge our ability to love. How we think about what is difficult in our lives makes them what they are. Negative emotions are a slippery slope for many of us. An offhanded comment in a small dispute can snowball into internal warfare and the destruction of hard-earned intimacy without even seeing it coming. ‘How could she call me insensitive? � All I do is think of her needs� How am I going to keep this going if every time I turn around she�. I should never have gotten married�’ The initial remark is long out of view in moments and the internal dialogue has slipped out of control. Scientists came up with the term negative bias to describe this phenomenon where bad feelings create and naturally link to more bad thoughts, entrapping the mind in a quick downward spiral.

We ruminate. Our attempts to work through difficult situations in our mind can and often do turn into obsessive dwelling on questions that don’t have answers, that link easily and quickly to negative ideas that you didn’t even consciously conjure up. Minds work this way, they link things together based on the tone of where you start. Feel a little sad, ruminate a bit and you will be depressed. Anxiety with a dose of rumination and you get a panic attack. How common are the angry exchanges in the world linked to ruminated frustrations? Sexual issues with a dose of rumination can extinguish the passion between people for weeks at a time. Experiencing negative emotions are a normal and grounding part of living on earth, building a script out of them is how we suffer them.

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“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability… To be alive is to be vulnerable.’ -Madeleine L’Engle

The life of the heart is one of contradictions. It is where our greatest strengths are often our most profound weaknesses. Finding balance between seemingly opposing forces or feelings is key to finding balance in love. I can’t think of any two more complementary forces for love than the capacity for vulnerability and the experience of confidence. Consider each one on its own: The confident but invulnerable heart can be brash, ego driven and unavailable. The confidence does not serve because it is not tempered. The vulnerable insecure heart is pitiful, full of self doubt and starts to resemble childlike dependence. It is easy to see how the vulnerability of childhood is easily confused with its more mature adult version.

To really love life, yourself or others these traits must work together. Ancient eastern scripture has long valued the cultivation of the heart broken wide open. The teachings say that it is raw, confident vulnerability that allows you to deeply feel with true compassion and leads you to the road to enlightenment. Confident vulnerability allows you to keep showing up for yourself and others even when your heart gets a bit trampled. You have the courage to actually feel what happens to you. In turn, experiencing your feelings as they happen builds courage.

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‘Confidence in the goodness of another is good proof of one’s own goodness.’ -Michel de Montaigne

Many relationships suffer from a lack of self-esteem. A relationship’s self-esteem is connected to that of the partner’s but it also has a life of its own. Genuine esteem is founded in the courage to see oneself truly, both the positive and negative aspects of who we are and how we function and malfunction in the world. This path, which the Buddhists have called the path of the warrior, instructs that even through struggle and difficulty, we thrive in the openness of true knowing and seeing. The courage to confront the brittle edges and the messy corners of our own life and how we relate to others offers its own reward: acknowledging our brokenness is also the gateway to our ability to bear witness to our own basic goodness.

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‘My advice is this- don’t follow trends, start them.’ -Frank Capra

A reporter from Time magazine interviewed me this week. Mainstream media is starting to discover the idea of the eco-sex trend that has been carrying Good Clean Love along. Early in 2003, I didn’t start my business with a plan to ‘green’ the sex industry, I was just trying to fill a niche by creating products I couldn’t find for myself that were healthy and natural. In those early years as I searched for my market and recited my schtick about ingredients, adult storeowners were skeptical, disinterested or amused. The adult market is not known for being health conscious, although of late even they are starting to catch on.

Natural product stores were skeptical, nervous and uncomfortable with adding ‘those kind of products’ to their shelves. My customer base in the natural product market was predicted by the buyer’s relationship to his or her own sexuality. The discomfort of promoting sexual health remains my biggest challenge. Whether I was educating about the importance of cleaning up the products we use on the most sensitive tissue in the body or the importance of normalizing our relationships to our sexual selves, I was never in for an easy sell.

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‘Sexual love is the most stupendous fact of the universe, and the most magical mystery our poor blind senses know.’ –Amy Lowell

Wealth, even extreme wealth cannot purchase the most magical, mysterious life-changing sex on the planet. On the other hand,the only way to discover and cultivate this most coveted of human experiences is to be ready to devote your entire life to the object of your love and the work of the relationship. It is without question the most powerful of all human exchanges, which not only unites lovers to each other but also connects them to the great, mysterious force that is love. Perhaps this is why it is said that sexual instinct is never fully satisfied without love. Our hunger goes way beyond the biological drive for sex- we want union.

Today the study and proliferation of Tantra and the teachings of the Kama Sutra are available to everyone and often sold as educational pornography. What most people don’t know is that these sacred texts were originally available only after many years of study and devotion to a partner. Taking the art of lovemaking to spiritual heights was not intended for casual lovers or for mere opportunistic pleasure. Learning the secrets of deep union was considered one of the most demanding spiritual practices that literally opened your eyes to God through your lover. This was the forbidden fruit that churches tried to keep secret.

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The relationship between money and sex is as old as the human race itself. Prostitution, often called the oldest profession on the planet, is also the one that employs more women than any other. The range of meaning when it comes to sex for money arrangement is as large as the vast economy it produces. The deep and pervasive relationship of sex and money is not going away; if anything it is a growth industry. Our discomfort about sexuality in general allows this industry to go unchecked and unregulated. There is a vast difference in sexual purchasing between patronage of child prostitutes and wealthy politicians paying for expensive call girls. The confusion between our indignation about the political hypocrisy disguised as extramarital affairs dilutes the horror we should feel and react to about children being abducted or sold into the global sex trade.

The sex trade, like few other industries, offers one of the most highly desirable products in the world and one that is often inaccessible to many people otherwise. A recent international debate about the right or wrong of paid sex highlighted the polar positions this question instigates. More often than not, money trumps sex. If the payment is high enough, sex workers will perform whatever sexual act is demanded. Acts that she would never consent to perform otherwise. Prostitution, addiction and poverty are close bedfellows. Regardless of the leader the combination creates a sex trap for many women that becomes an inescapable lifestyle of dehumanized degradation. The majority of women keep only pennies on the dollar of their earnings.

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