John Gottman PhD has been researching marriages that work for decades, and in his book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work he distills the results into seven core principles. My article “What Makes a Marriage Work?” explores his principles. Read it on the David Yarian PhD Blog.
Learning Sex
Sexual behavior in humans is learned, not instinctual as in most animals. Humans have to learn to do sex, and the reality is most of us learn by trial and error.
I explore this challenge in my new article “Sex is learned Behavior,” on the new David Yarian PhD Blog.
The Sexual Performance Anxiety Epidemic
While there may not be a verifiable “epidemic” of performance anxiety, many people are unhappy in their sexual lives because they worry that they are not doing it right. They feel inadequate and unsure of themselves, and somehow sex isn’t so much fun anymore. (note: we’re speaking here primarily of heterosexual sexuality, though the basic approach also applies to same-sex lovemaking)
In fact, while worrying about whether your sexual performance is satisfactory, meeting up with your lover for sex can come to seem like just another household chore, or perhaps some kind of final exam, which you could flunk!
This pervasive sense of doubt about your sexual performance has a further insidious effect: it makes your performance worse. Read more
Making Love: Reaching Your Sexual Potential
I’m a sex therapist and a tantric sexuality educator. People who come to me with sexual problems are often asking that I help them make some symptom – like premature ejaculation or low desire or difficulty with having an orgasm — “go away.”
While focusing on the symptom is important, for a more integral sense of sexual health I want to help them have a larger vision of what is sexually possible. As they begin to see some initial progress in dealing with the presenting symptom I may share the chart below, which describes the continuum of sexual experience:
no sex — bad sex — good sex — great sex — transcendent sex
The point here is to begin to understand the magnitude of what is possible. Read more
Literary Erotica and Erotic Art
For millenia, artists, poets, writers and sculptors have expressed their joyous experience of ecstatic sex through their artistic creations. More recently, photographers and filmmakers have added their appreciations of ecstatic sex.
Experiencing erotic visual art or reading fiction that celebrates ecstatic sex can be profound ways to learn about sexuality and to incorporate some of the artist’s sense of ecstasy. In the Sixties, the phrase “contact high” referred to the experience of feeling high just by being around someone else who had actually ingested a psychoactive substance.
Artistic expressions of the erotic date back many thousands of years, to cave paintings and crude sketches scratched into bone. Read more
Joy of Making Love: It’s All About Pleasure
Welcome to Joy of Making Love blog!
Here we’ll post periodic thoughts on erotic life, and seek to understand how pleasure and eroticism can flourish amidst the often conflicting demands of work, family, and other responsibilities.
We are sentient beings, mind/bodies that are exquisitely attuned to all kinds of stimuli — tactile, olfactory, auditory, visual, kinaesthetic, gustatory (and more). Our senses flood us with symphonies of stimuli, and somehow the brain seeks to discern patterns, melodies that arise from the waves of sensory input. And, often, we perceive a secondary sensation, that of pleasure. Something tastes or sounds good; we pronounce it delicious or delightful. We enjoy the stimulation of our nerve endings, whether in the tongue or the nose, the auditory canal or the skin.
Ah, the skin — the body’s single largest organ, alive with the ability to sense touch. Read more