Thursday Night is Fantasy Night

Honey, do you have any plans for our next game night?

Hmmm. Not really. Got something in mind?

Well, how about 'door-to-door salesman and lonely housewife'?

What are you selling?

Wouldn't you like to know...


If I were to write an outsider's guide to keeping marriages strong, I'd make scheduling a top priority. Not only the day-to-day household stuff, but setting aside regular chunks of time to nurture the idea of being together and to explore each other a little. Date nights, Finance Nights, Future Nights...making a plan to spend time communicating avoids the drift and misunderstandings of less organized unions.

However, being fidgety and easily bored humans, there's not much value in "Thursday, 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm: Together Time." That'll result in the television being switched on; precisely what you want to avoid. Structure and aim is important. Yes, just like your high-school science experiments, but with more adult content, whether it be planning your savings and investments or dressing up for a date.

I'd include a Game Night in the rotation. You might prefer to call it Role-Play or Sexy Night or something, but the intent is the same - to move away from the...ummm, rut of your regular sex life, and play a little. Fantasy is a good thing, and sharing secrets with your partner is a loving way of getting closer. We mask many secrets in the name of avoiding embarrassment, but if you can't tell your spouse what turns you on in your imagination, who can you tell?

 The wonderful thing about play-acting is that it is acting - you can slip the bonds of your everyday way of thinking and take on a new persona, if only for a while. It's liberating. Especially being with someone you trust, who wants to indulge your more outré likings...because she wants you to indulge hers.

That's what I call win-win.



Bottoms Up, Lonely Housewives.

Digital Love Analogue

 Stephanie Gateshet.

We're clearly moving from centuries of an analogue world to lives defined digitally. The changes are easy to see - we no longer measure, we count;  infinite shading is now thin slicing; perhaps is either on/off.

If this isn't the revolution of all revolutions, I don't know what is.

But, like, whatever. My interest lies in whether we're changing the nature of love. Is love analogue or digital? Do we look at love like a Caravaggio or a PDF file? Is the answer as obvious as it seems?

Digital love sounds awful. A bunch of ones and zeros on a wafer of silicon won't get anyone's heart racing, let alone inspire them to write a song or pen poetry. However, those ones and zeros are canny things; they understand that they're neither warm nor sexy, so they present us with a more lovable facade. The photo above, for instance. Or blogs. Or iTunes. Somewhere along the line, the digital gods found themselves a first-rate PR firm, and followed its advice.

The problem is that all their solutions are good at describing love but hopeless at actually being it. The look that melts your heart, the feeling of her touch, the invisible communication of minds in synch - I guess a robot will eventually simulate these things, but it will still be reproduction of love, not the core.

So I think we're safe for now. Love will be analogue for a long time, probably until your DNA has sex with an iPad, at which point we're all screwed. Or apped. But at that point it won't matter: we'll all be too busy shopping at Amazon for a lover to notice.




Bottoms Up, Microprocessors.

Trophy Husband

Q: What does a woman want?

A: A man she can admire, a man she respects, a man she knows is strong.




Q: What does a man want?

A: A woman who admires him, a woman who respects him, a woman who can see his strength.




Bottoms Up, Realists.