Happy endings can be a surprise.
My very first professional massage was in Las Vegas at a fancy hotel where you wear white robes and drink cucumber water. Actually, this was a couples massage where I went with my husband.
The experience was a decent one for me. Nothing out of this world.
A couple of years have passed since that massage, including a full year of masking wearing and people not being allowed to touch other people.
So when my husband recently wanted to find a place in our local city to get a couples massage again, I was pretty skeptical that we would find…
Every. Time.
In every relationship, there’s a certain push and pull. Each individual has their personal, emotional, and mental limits — as well as sexual ones.
Learning to navigate around and in between different sexual compatibilities is always tricky — especially when two people have been together for a very long time.
No two partners have exactly the same sex drive, and when you factor in busy schedules, careers, and families, having both the time and the energy for sex can get complicated and downright frustrating for couples.
I can always tell when it’s been a week or more since my husband…
‘You don’t have to do anything — just lie there.’
It all started with an argument about the man I was dating.
My close friend — who had been one of my best friends during some of the most formative years of my life — was angry with me. Her hazel eyes were blazing with fury and her black hair was sticking to her wet cheeks from crying.
She had always been opinionated over the men that I chose to date and it was no secret to those who knew her that she herself was only into dating women.
She was several years older than me and had taken me…
Things will never go back to being how they used to be.
Relationships are a journey full of peaks, valleys, and weird, unexpected gray areas in between.
Caring for a partner and their needs is not without a certain sacrifice.
Relationships take a concerted effort. Marriage is a serious commitment.
Those of us who have experienced these kinds of relationships already know all of these things.
Staying interested and engaged with your partner after many, many years is not only a challenge but it often takes remembering who it is that you are in a relationship with — and why you were attracted to them in the first place.
Losing that intoxicating…
It’s not for everyone.
Relationships can often be painful, draining, and uncomfortable — even though we may cherish them greatly.
This is because relationships require us to crack open our most vulnerable selves — to unveil the parts of us we may not like or the parts we rush to hide.
Relationships require far more than fanciful dreams and giddy lust. A real-world partnership and/or marriage with another human being takes guts — cold, hard, gritty guts.
It’s not for everyone.
Though we may see couples out and about holding hands, touching one another tenderly, or looking lovingly into each other’s eyes, there’s always…
It can be more thorns than roses, sometimes.
To those who dread Mother’s Day — it’s OK.
It’s OK that you don’t want to celebrate. It’s OK that you don’t want to deal with it. It’s OK if you just want the day to be over.
For all of the excitement that so many feel when Mother’s Day comes around every year, there are just as many people out there who feel a deep, aching pain in regards to this day.
There are those who have lost their mothers, those who are estranged from their mothers, and those who never got to experience their mother much at all.
…
Exclusivity within an affair sounds stunningly preposterous.
I’ve written extensively about being a mistress and how my married lover was insanely jealous even though he was obviously a taken man.
I’ve also written about how serial cheaters are usually the ones who are more prone to making accusations that their lovers are cheating on them.
In all of this, there remains one thing that always stands out: for years, I was completely faithful to my married lover.
The question as to why this was the case has a dark and unsettling answer.
Why myself and so many other women remain faithful to their married lovers — sometimes…
We’ve all heard the stories.
Do you get along with your mother-in-law if you have one? Do you like her? Do you want to spend a good deal of time with her?
We’ve all heard about or even been the ones telling the horror stories about the mother-in-law from hell. There are countless mother-in-law jokes out there — definitely many more than there are about fathers-in-law.
So what is it about the role of a mother-in-law that we often find so hard to embrace? Why are they so often feared, reviled, and persistently made fun of?
This got me thinking about my own mother-in-law and…
This is the hard part.
This is the hard part.
This is the rough part.
This is the part that hurts the most.
Throughout this journey, you’ve faced problems. You’ve faced resistance. You’ve faced silent battles with yourself.
You have felt the fear. You have felt the rejection. You have felt the isolation.
You have experienced the pain of not being acknowledged. You have experienced the sting of being forgotten. You have experienced the loneliness of not being included.
This is is why so many stepmothers cannot find the gratitude they truly need. This is why it’s so hard to feel those good moments when…
There will always be implications.
We as a society have come a long way regarding the subject of divorce.
Divorce is definitely more widely accepted and people aren’t shunned for getting one as much as they used to be.
However, people do still tend to second guess a person who’s been divorced — especially in the dating world. Those who are divorced and trying to date again might still feel a slight edge of apprehension when they have to tell a new romantic interest that they are divorced.
Why is this?
Well, it mostly has to do with the stigma of failure.
The words failure…
Michelle Brown
Ponderings on life, love, sex, motherhood & stepmotherhood. Editor at Heart Affairs, Self, Inspired, I, Mother & I, Stepmother. More at www.theponderingnook.com
