Men and Women on the Couch

Greetings on a Tuesday.  Recently Big Little Wolf was kind enough to invite me to offer up a guest post on the topic of men and women.

While most of you undoubtedly know BL Wolf and her writing, as we are good blog buddies, if you are not conversant in The Daily Plate of Crazy you are well-served to check out her blog—as she writes, rather elegantly, on topics ranging from parenting to culture to sex and relationships… and much more.

In addition to being an intrepid and generous spirit, Wolf also happens to be an exemplary single mom in the final heroic stretch of launching her second son off to college in a scant few months—a heroine carrying a torch and lighting the way on something I have already shed a few salty tears around (and I’m a year and a half away from the first one potentially heading off to school).

So please accept my invitation to Big Little Wolf’s today where we dish up some thoughts together on some potential reasons that men are, at least sometimes, so hard to love.

Unflagging in my wish to make this year about increasing calm and connectedness, feel free to dedicate your visit to chez Wolf to being our best, calm, lovingly kind Selves together—placing any increased understanding we may gain in the service of all of us and our collective children.

Namaste (and thanks again, BL Wolf), BD

Learning how to quarrel well—a key to a good marriage

Life is unfair for everyone in some way or another, and on this, the 19th anniversary of my wedding, I realize that I have been unfairly fortunate in love.

I first met my wife at a screening of a Fellini film, Fred and Ginger, at The Lincoln Center in New York.  It was a blustery late winter’s day not long after a stay in the hospital due to mysterious heart problems had given me a chance to read Moby Dick for a second and much more appreciated time than in high school, and also to rethink a lot of things about love and despair.

Something like the whisper of fate ran through me when I first saw her, tall, charming and unavailable.  Come summer, however, we both had keys to the apartment of the mutual friend who had introduced us—tasked with taking in the mail on opposite days.  We left notes, became friend, then lovers, then drove to LA together, then moved into Mae West’s old apartment building, then decided to get married.