“I’ve had the blues, the reds, and the pinks.
One things for sure: Love Stinks!” – J. Geils

I put “Love” as the first part of the site title because I’m a realist. The reality is that people do what they love. Sometimes what they love is struggling against loving the things they love, which makes for merry complications and Shakespearean-level drama, but everyone needs a hobby.

But really, from what I’ve observed in others and in myself, you always tend towards that which you love. Sometimes there is something you don’t love (like exercise) and you force yourself to do it until suddenly you discover that hey, you love it after all! More often there are things that you love that aren’t good for you. Hamburgers. Real Housewives of Orange County. That person who you can’t stop thinking about.

You either give in to that love (and deal with the ensuing complications) or you spend a lot of time and energy trying not to give in to that love. Either way, Love takes up a significant percentage of our time, attention, and energy.

Cheeseburger Love

Yet we don’t spend a lot of time really learning about how to do it. Is there a way to love hamburgers that can be constructive and healthy? I suspect there is – free-range grass-fed beef, prepared with pink Himalayan sea salt on a cast-iron pan over a campfire, for example, might be a good example of “loving” a hamburger. I’m pretty sure that when I went through Checker’s the other day and got a mushroomzilla meal which I ate while chatting on the back porch was not “loving” the hamburger. I only vaguely remember it, but I do remember at one point looking at the gooey cheese and mushroom and wishing two things:

One, I wished that I was paying more attention to the things I liked about the burger I had.

Two, I wished that I had a better quality burger.

Regardless of what kind of love you’re talking about, from sex to monday night football, I suspect that those two ideas would improve your love life. Immediately.

Let’s Be Honest

One caveat, before we talk more about love: when I say we’ll talk about all kinds of love, I mean it. Personally, I was lied to about sex as I was growing up. As a sexuality educator for the last ten years, I see more and more lies about relationships and sexuality propagated as “information”.

Frankly, it pisses me off. So there will be posts in this blog that are tagged “explicit” where we will talk about the realities of sex, like communication, honesty, consent, and other really hot topics that people usually avoid.

Sorry. This is about reality, about being a responsible adult, rather than clinging to illusions of shelter because the child in us thinks such things are “icky” or the parent in us thinks they are “inappropriate.” They are real, and avoiding them is not going to make them go away.

It’s not quite what the Beatles said: All you need is love. But sometimes, as U2 opined, it’s what you got, and all you got, shouldn’t we try and make the most of it?