Is love dead?
Not Bland
Not if you have the right toys! But it is a serious question asked by Cristina Nehring in her book A Vindication of Love, reviewed in (of all places) the Wall Street Journal. Who knew that the Journal was a romantic type of newspaper? At any rate, since we’ve been delving into controversy this week, we thought this was an interesting take, with which many people will disagree. Here is a snippet from the full review.
“No more the passionate hunger that swept up Tristan and Iseult, Abelard and Heloise, or even Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo: The flashing ardor produced by such combustible couplings is scarcely possible in today’s feminist-dampened culture, Ms. Nehring believes. “We inhabit a world in which every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked, and emptied of spiritual consequence,” she says. “We imagine that we live in an erotic culture of unprecedented opportunity when, in fact, we live in an erotic culture that is almost unendurably bland.”
Not that feminism has been a total bust, of course; legal equality and the expectation of female sexual satisfaction are surely pleasant results of centuries of activism. Ms. Nehring concedes this but notes: “We need not trash feminism’s flowers to dispose of the rotting fruit in its cellar.”
Well, if you’re a fan of strong opinion, that should be right up your alley. We aren’t experts on romance, but we do know that one way to make play time “unendurably bland” is to fail to communicate. And that means weighing both partners’ opinions and desires to get the most out of play time.
Don’t fear alternate opinions. It is lack of communication that kills during play. With opposing desires, you can reach compromise and get the most from your sex and partnered play.
And if your romantic life is fine – thank you very much – let us take it to a new level with Sex Toys designed for Couples!
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Tags: controversy
June 17th, 2009 at 10:27 am
No WAY is love dead!
I love a good love story. True, Abelard & Heloise had a tragic, romantic tale. But let’s say, for example, they had never been torn apart. Would their love have been less impressive under the daily routine of changing diapers or washing laundry? Every day, they would have had the opportunity to have their own kind of love story. Just like every day we ALL have the opportunity to write our own love story.
Each day, we wake up with a possibility of writing our own partners love letters (or texts, in our modern world). Of saying we care about them by packing their lunch. Of spending nights of pleasure together (maybe with a few of the goodies found on sextoys.com!) And for single people, like me, I wake knowing that each day holds the possibility of sending romance my way.
And if you can get a hard-core cynic like me to still hold belief in love, then there has to be something to it.