Sex Talks

Believe it or not, I'm not a hopeless romantic. Not deep down at least. Despite my public love of all-things Nora Ephron and private love of way too many things Nicholas Sparks, I don't believe in love at first sight, I'm not so sure about soul mates, and three years ago, I couldn't have even told you what I was looking for in a future husband. I'm not quite a cynic, but I'm definitely a realist when it comes to matters of love. But over the past three years, I came to realize that all that realism was just fear. Love is scary, commitment is scarier, and marriage is a step beyond all of that. You have to give more of yourself than you ever realized you had to give while taking on more of another person than you could have fathomed existed. You have to have a certain level of immeasurable passion in your heart and an equal amount of impossible to weigh knowledge in your head. And you have to trust fully and completely without ever having all the evidence you'...

I'm pleased and proud to share this guest post from my friend Liz Adams - a Boston-raised BC grad who turned 30 on a day that held more meaning than she could have ever imagined.  Enjoy! It was the end to a week that terrorized my home town. It was a day I don�t think any Bostonian will forget. It was also the day I said goodbye to my 20s. It should have been the worst birthday. I awoke in New York to news that a shootout had turned into a full manhunt and my city was shutdown. I scrambled to the airport hoping I could at least make it back to Boston, not knowing what I would do or what condition the city would be in when I landed. I wound up at home locked in my apartment glued to the TV and listening to the police scanners with my roommates. Anxiety consumed us all. And yet by the end of the day I considered this my best birthday yet. Many of us will tell the stories of where we were when the bombs went off. The stories of how we pieced together the information ...

I can't believe I'm asking this question...on a blog that my Mom reads. I also can't believe I don't instantly know the answer. Back story (to prevent your imaginations from running wild...): The other day I was reading a friend's script that included a scene featuring a man receiving a Happy Ending (which I assume we capitalize?). Later in the script his girlfriend finds out and is extremely upset. Logical, right? Who wouldn't be? But then I got to thinking about whether or not his indiscretion technically counts as a cheat. Is it the same as soliciting sex from a prostitute? Not really . Or, as one single male friend said, "Jesus I hope not! It's not, right? Please just say it's not and let's stop talking about this." Not to get technical about it, but any time a man's privates are touched by a woman who is not his girlfriend, that's cheating. Right? In that case, a "special massage" certainly counts. But it is, say, di...

I celebrated four Marathon Mondays in my four years at Boston College, and they were among the four greatest days of my entire college life. It's not just the celebration of such impressive athleticism from so many diverse people. It's not all the good spirit resulting from the thousands of causes those thousands of runners support. It's not just the sound of deafening cheering from every direction you turn or the fact that the kegs of Sam Adams flow from the crack of dawn on. It's that Boston is its most Boston on Marathon Monday. If you've lived there for any period of time, you understand what that means. Every city has a personality, and Boston's is both that of the tenacious 26.2 mile runner and their best friends screaming in the crowd. It's that of the Irish pub owner giving away free pints of Guinness to anyone with a family member running the race and the Southie-raised cop giving the people who get drunk off those Guinesses a little more leeway. I...

For not the first time in recent history, R and I were referred to as a couple that single people can tolerate being around. Yes, #humblebrag, but I like to think it counts less since I called it on myself and since I'm about to deliver you some well-researched information. What's that? Still counts the same? Yeah, you're right. Regardless, I wanted to know what it meant to be a two-some that singles can stand. Does it have something to do with how un-couple-like we can or cannot be? Or are there universal things that all vom-worthy lovers do in the presence of their unattached friends? Here's what the peanut gallery had to say. FYI these are not specific to the way R and I behave (or don't), but they're specifically how we'll be behaving moving forward. Sessions with them are not like some "we" fest recap of every amazing thing they've done together in the past six weeks.  Agreed. My biggest peeve about people in general is their inability to...

The accidental ear flip. My absolute favorite Elliott look. We said goodbye to Elliott on Saturday, and it was hands down the hardest moment of our relationship. I remember thinking about tough moments the weekend that I moved into R's place. It was, ironically, one year ago to the day that we returned Elliott to the adoption group. All my things were strewn about the small, one-bedroom apartment in non-organized piles. R's things were uprooted from their prior rightful places and forced into their own mounds that made no sense. Just as R was attempting to finish the IKEA dresser that would hold my overwhelming collection of clothes and I was marrying our combined book collection into a color and size-coded system, we both lost it. "Oh my god this is hard!" I said.  "I don't know what to do next," he said. "How do I figure out what to do next?" 45 minutes later we were sitting at the bar closest to our newly shared space, drinking an ice-bold b...

I can't believe I just typed those words, and now I can't believe I'm going to defend them... In case you missed it: Princeton Mom Susan A. Patton (one of the "200 pioneer women" to graduate from the Ivy League school) wrote a piece for The Daily Princetonian imploring its female undergrads to find a husband in college. Patton's message was crystal clear: "Forget about having it all, or not having it all, leaning in or leaning out ... Here�s what nobody is telling you: Find a husband on campus before you graduate. Yes, I went there." Then, naturally, the Internet went wild. Here's NY Mag on the issue, and The Washington Post , and my favorite from a Yale mom over at Big Think (because no self-respecting Ivy League mom is going to let Princeton get all the attention). Susan's main points: happy marriages are between intellectual equals the highest concentration of intellectual equals that you'll find is on your college campus, especia...

On Saturday afternoon Elliott arrived for his trial run as our dog. We knew it was a big risk taking him in for a week of fostering. Elliott has spent the first year of his life living with a hoarder (as in the terrifying A&E show ), so he's socialized to dogs (because he lived with 35 of them...) but terrified of people (because he only ever saw one, and she wasn't exactly a stable "parent."). When we met him, he would barely eat treats out of our hands. He followed the woman from the dog adoption service like they were tied together with a string. It was bleak. And yet we loved him, instantly. After meeting him over a week ago, all we did was talk about how amazing Elliott would be if we could rehabilitate him. He is so cute. He is so sweet. He really, really needs us. There's just something about him...  "I think Elliott is our dog, J," R said to me one night, and I agreed. And so, we decided to give it a shot. What we didn't quite consider is...