Recently, I was driving down a crowded New York City street near a large college campus. It was late, and I was in a mad dash to get home because I’m old now and I had kids to get on the bus in the wee hours of the next morning. As I inched down the street, my eyes fell upon young college kids crowding the cafes and bars. I noticed the lithe frames of the girls in tiny tank tops and perfectly straightened hair, and I observed as guys with starched shirts and ironic shorts stood around sipping craft beers. Sitting at a stoplight, I watched as the girls flipped…

As a marriage counselor, I see a lot of couples who come to me with sexual problems in their relationship. The stories that couples tell me about their sexual difficulties vary, but most of them go something like this: He wants more sex and she doesn’t. He says he needs sex to feel close and she doesn’t see why her snuggling, cuddling and stuff she does around the house doesn’t do it for him. She says she needs to feel close first to have sex and he doesn’t see why sex doesn’t help her to feel close. At the end of the day, she doesn’t see why sex is so…

Have you ever heard the “Bean Jar” theory of married sex? Before you get married, go out and buy a big glass jar and a big bag of beans. On your wedding night, during your honeymoon, and every time you have sex thereafter, put one of the beans in the jar. Keep doing this until you’ve been married for one year. Now, in your second year of marriage and in every subsequent year: each time that you and your spouse have sex, you are to remove one bean from the jar. The jar will never be empty in your lifetime. Aside from the dubious mathematics and outdated exclusion of sex-out-of-wedlock,…

I was getting a manicure the first time I learned that not all wives want to, ahem, go for a roll in the hay with their husbands. I was 16 and had picked out orange nail polish (oh, sixteen). I had a book with me but it wasn’t long before I found another source of entertainment. In-between buffings and polishings, the two women next to me talked about how much their husbands wanted IT and how little they wanted to give IT. For a girl that had not even been asked out on a date this was a whole new world. I had a suspicion that their experience was more…