“Women should have sex three times a week every week to stay healthy.”

I am now wide-awake. A rooster with an espresso machine couldn’t have done it better. All I can think about is: That’s an awfully tall order. We work. We raise children. We fix meals and clean the house. We worry about our future and our husbands’ futures and our kids’ futures and now we’re being told three times a week?!  How do we find the energy to do it, let alone enjoy it?

There’s a big difference between having sex three times a week and enjoying it. And for a not-insignificant number of women, enjoying it is no small challenge. And I suspect that healthy sex must be enjoyable for both partners. Otherwise, even within a marriage, it can feel rote and unpleasant. It can make you feel both guilty for and bitter at not being able to enjoy it.

This brings us to the Big O.

There are a lot of misconceptions about women and orgasms. About once a month, some statistic emerges regarding a collective female inability to achieve orgasm. I’m sure you’ve noticed the headlines even if you haven’t read the articles. Sometimes this is blamed on psychology or sociology and sometimes it’s blamed on biology, but the end result is that a lot of women think their enjoyment of sex is somehow beyond their control.

This is a dangerous line of thought for a whole lot of reasons. First of all, feeling wrong or powerless in an intimate situation is not terribly conducive to feeling good. Normal adult sexuality is consensual, non-exploitative and voluntary. It is built on Trust, shaped by Desire and consummated in Love. The ratios aren’t always perfect (we all have our bad nights), but the recipe remains.

Just so we’re completely clear: abnormal sexuality is involuntary, compulsive, exploitative, guilt-ridden and rarely (if at all) pleasurable. It doesn’t have to be abusive to be abnormal. And involuntary doesn’t always imply non-consensual. It can just mean letting it happen, or just going through the motions.  A lot of single women, whether they realize it or not, are getting the message through a wide variety of sources that abnormal is normal, that the act of simply having sex is a kind of empowerment, no matter how it feels or who they crawl in bed with. One of the ramifications of this is a tacit assumption that quantity, over time, will lead to quality.  Hook-up culture, by its very nature, doesn’t allow for the three most essential components (trust, desire, love) to grow. Much of the time, random hook-ups aren’t worth the risk, especially when they achieve nothing more than a notch on a headboard and a further crack in self-esteem. (And I’m not just saying that because I’m old enough to be your mother.)  And abnormal sex is not limited to single girls and one-night stands. Plenty of wives or women in long-term relationships experience similar feelings with their partners of many years.

Chemistry is chemistry. There’s hardly a woman alive that hasn’t felt a flush at a smile or goose bumps at a turn of phrase. But chemistry is just a shuttle to the gate, and there’s no guarantee you’ll take off once you get there. If it helps, think about sex as a conversation, a private, very intimate discussion about something very important to you. In order to get meaningful feedback, you have to provide some background information and the more of it, the better. This is one of the reasons why you’re more likely to achieve real sexual pleasure with a long-term partner than with some guy in a bar. Your partner probably knows your innermost secrets.  You may not have to tell him what turns you on. But if you do (and I heartily encourage you to do so), you shouldn’t feel strange saying so.

And to that point, just because this conversation is intimate, it doesn’t mean that it’s serious. Pleasure is silly and sweet and sexy and maybe a little spicy and fun and sometimes just plain funny. Humor can be disarming in a good way. It frees us up to be comfortable in our own skin and with the person we love. And to get to that trust, that first, fundamental step toward pleasure, you have be comfortable and confident in communicating what you need. If sex is, in fact, a kind of conversation, the very first thing you have work on is communication skills.

Go ahead. Talk about it. I recommend starting with telling him what feels good.

Check back in two weeks for the science of the Big O and some directions to get you going in the right direction.

For grown-ups, holidays aren’t easy. At best, Christmas is often a double-edged sword. We go through months of planning, loads of money, stress, frustration, family conflict, inconvenience and string light tangles. Sometimes it all pays off in sublimely perfect moments. Sometimes those moments are our creation (sparkling trees, delicious food, thoughtful gifts). Often, they’re not (that white Christmas, those church bells, this cold, clear starry night). Whatever the case, they’re almost impossible to predict.

It’s my belief that the very best parts of the season are the simple, sweet and intimate ones. A night spent gathered around the fire telling stories, singing carols and enjoying each others company may seem dwarfed by the Skydiving Disco Christmas Lasers on Ice show that you drove forty miles to see (and ended up having to leave early because it triggered your mother-in-law’s vertigo). But it will be the former that lasts and sets a standard for holidays to come.

Of course, there is more to Christmas than what we managed to scoop up for half-price on Black Friday. This is a season of miracles, of magic, of faith, hope and joy. This year has been a difficult one. For many of us, it’s hard to summon a spirit of celebration. It is my belief that miracles can happen. Tidings of comfort and joy will come your way (often via an unexpected, circuitous route). It’s important to remember that no matter how dark the night, there’s the promise of a bright, shining star to illuminate your path and help you find your way forward.

The greatest gift we give is the gift of love. It’s a love we feel for our children, our spouses, our extended families and our wider communities. It is that spirit of love that keeps us decorating the tree, standing in line for extra boxes, slaving over that Christmas turkey, wishing perfect strangers a Merry Christmas and leaving the light on for friends and family members, even when they can’t always get home.

I’ll be asking Santa for comfort, peace and happiness in the New Year for all of us.  I think I’ll ask for a long lazy weekend after the tree comes down.  And finally, I pray for grace to guide us through the holidays and the months that follow.

May you have the merriest of Christmases and the happiest of New Years!

I planned to start my shopping early this year. But, as usual, life got in the way. And what would Thanksgiving be if someone in the family weren’t rushing to the last open supermarket on Thanksgiving morning to buy the one essential ingredient that we’d managed to forget? A turkey pan might not leak out into the bottom of the oven and fill the kitchen with smoke.  Some member of the extended family won’t make an inappropriate comment over pumpkin pie. And It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving. That’s what.

The follies and foibles are as much a part of the holiday season as the cranberry sauce. We go to great lengths to avoid them. We over-plan, over-think and over-stress our families and ourselves in order to insure that nothing goes wrong. But something does go wrong, usually the very thing you never considered. The candelabra burns a hole in your table cloth or Auntie Margaret sprains her ankle on the icy front steps or your eldest child announces that she’s leaving college to tour with a heavy metal band. When these things (or other calamities both minor and major) disrupt our turkey dinner, most of us are already emotionally, physically and sometimes financially exhausted (and it’s not even December yet). We may feel we lack the fortitude to laugh it off the  same way we would have if it happened any other day of the year.

But it’s likely true that whatever inevitable commotion befalls your household on Thanksgiving will not ruin everything. In fact, it will probably be the thing you laugh about next year. Memory doesn’t pick sides. Sometimes our best, most entertaining memories don’t come from moments of absolute joy, but from moments of shared frustration, inconvenience or even hardship. Happiness is more palpable in memory than it is in experience. It’s why we so often look at our past through rose-colored glasses. You remember your senior year of high school, or sophomore year of college or first year you were married to your husband as being generally happy times, even though you know they were difficult and often painful on a day-to-day basis. When you were living through those times, you may not have even realized you were happy.

This is a great gift we have, as humans. Time alone may not heal all wounds, but it certainly makes the past good times (and the bad times) look a little better from the vantage of the present. And all those memories, good and bad, are part of the tapestry of our experience, our adventure of living, feeling and loving who and what we do in this world.

So, when that coconut cake falls or the power goes out two seconds before you sit down to eat, enjoy your moment of frustration, then shake it off, crack a joke and consider just how funny this story will sound to your grandchildren.

It’s been a hard year for many of us. I’m thankful for what I’ve learned, whom I’ve loved and that tomorrow is indeed another day.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The marriage model that worked for couples in 1820 or in 1920 or even 1960 may not be the same one that works for couples in 2011. The perfectly contented marriage has always been half a myth, even when those marriages weren’t lasting for the better part of a century. No marriage is without conflict. And expecting a marriage to last decades without problems is hopelessly naïve, lightly insane and a recipe for perfect unhappiness.

This is not that it’s impossible for a marriage to last. It isn’t. All those sixtieth anniversary parties are testament to that. And there’s really nothing more moving than seeing a couple in their eighties, surrounded by children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as in love as they were they day they met.

I don’t pretend to have any of the answers when it come to keeping love alive for fifty years. Like anything that lives and grows and changes, love has more than one aspect and more definition. In a relationship, there are the gasping, overwhelming, butterflies of first contact. That’s usually followed by a comforting realization of security. Being together can seem more natural than being apart. There’s the solemn, yet sometimes triumphant moment in which you realize both of you want to spend the rest of your live together. There are rocky years. There are years of smooth sailing.  There are occasional flashes of worry, of confusion and indecision.

And love settles down. At some point, it is no longer the frenzied, loud fireworks display. It becomes gentle “I love you” as you drift off to sleep. Real love means keeping each other close enough to hear the whispers and recognizing when no words need to be said. When I’m here, I’ve always been here and I always will can be communicated with little more than a glance and hand on your hand.

Real love doesn’t want much.  Just sitting on a porch together on a warm summer morning, listening to the birds and the breeze in the branches, feeling utterly content. Real love knows that life is too short to keep complaining, and some old hurts are best left in the past. By simply being together, you acknowledge that your spouse chose you, that you chose him. And you keep making that miraculous choice every day

If you have kids, then you’ve probably been there before. And if you don’t, you probably will be, whether the noise in the backseat comes from nieces and nephews or sons and daughters.  For you and your husband, it’s likely the trip was dreamt up as a means of relaxation, but it may have since become a source of stress. Real life rarely stacks up to the brochures. When you’re traveling, the road always feels longer, things are almost always more expensive and the frothy mix of anticipation and frustration summoned up by driving for hours or dealing with many irritations of airline travel would have Gandhi spoiling for a fight before all was said and done. And it may be your husband that took the wrong turn back on the Highway 9, but you’re the one that can’t seem to let it go no matter how many half-melted M&Ms you eat.

The truth is, your vacation started the moment you started packing the suitcases. The journey is as much a part of the process as its outcome. You can’t control anyone else’s behavior, but you can find your own perspective that will allow you to enjoy the trip so you can really relax when you get there.

Kids know this. I watched a lot about traveling well by watching my two sons entertain themselves at departure gates and rest areas. When they were little, they may have complained at first, but they could sit out a delay by finding ways to entertain themselves with games, stories, books and the whatever beeping handheld device might was holding their attention that month.

Keeping them interested sometimes kept me sane. I started secreting away toys and treats when I was packing. They looked forward to layovers, even as I dreaded them, because it gave them the opportunity to explore a new airport, watch planes take-off and finagle a gold wing pin off a friendly co-pilot. Long road trips lead to epic stories and family sing-alongs. I found myself learning about the places we were driving through so I could teach them. There are a lot of billboards and fields on the roadsides of America’s highways, but there are also mountains, lakes, forests, battlefields, Indian reservations, historic sites, dams, bridges, cities and other triumphs of innovation.  I started to see the world as I thought they would see it, and it gave me the perspective I needed to have fun.

My husband, on the other hand, faced the trip as a chore to be tolerated. With a steeled resolve, he would grump through ten states without a single smile. But if he was determined to not have a lick of fun until we got to our final destination, I was just as committed seeing that he did. Travel, I determined, was time to be sweethearts. Out of our ordinary routines and normal environment, we could let ourselves have a good time.

It wasn’t easy getting my husband to drop his guard and enjoy the journey. Bu once I did, it changed the way that we traveled, both with and without our children, forever.

Here’s how you start:

1)    Pack lightly. Bring only what fits in your literal suitcases. You can leave your metaphorical baggage at home. This vacation is not about what’s happening (or not happening) at work or with your friends or your extended family. Give yourself permission to live for today. The rest can wait. And it might surprise you how much smaller and more manageable your old burdens look after a week’s reprieve.

2)    Get Comfortable. I think the single-biggest factor that contributes to travel stress is discomfort. Excessive heat, tight seats, unsatisfying food and general anxiety can all work together to create a perfect storm before you even start factoring in road construction, cancelled flights and foul weather. There’s a lot you can’t control when you travel, but make sure you take advantage of the things you can. Wear something you can relax in, see if you can’t get seats in an exit row or at the bulkhead if you’re flying.  Pack snacks, even if  (especially if), you’re not traveling with the kids. It may be cliché, but sometimes the different between a happy husband and an unbearable grouch is a bag of trail mix and the tacit reminder that you are thinking about his comfort.

3)    Make time for romance. Hold hands during take off, give a massage on a rest break, kiss when you’re sure no one’s looking (and maybe when you’re sure they are). It may sound silly but sometimes it’s not a terrible time to tell your husband how much you love him at 30,000 feet, or for that matter at 11:00pm on a moonlit stretch of quiet highway.

4)    Seduction can also be a kind of adventure. Plan some sexy surprises. Leave a suggestive sticky note between the pages of his atlas, switch on your most sensual persona and surprise him with what you’re wearing under those shorts. Bring the passion. It’s absolutely as important as the sunscreen.

5)    Don’t be afraid to play. Splash in the waves. Enjoy breakfast in bed after a pillow-fight. Find fun activities that both of you enjoy without worrying if you’re too old, or too stodgy to enjoy them. Go stand in front of the stage at a beachside rock concert. Try out your skills at cabana Karaoke. Go snorkeling or mini-golfing or dolphin watching or parasailing.  And when was the last time you rode a roller coaster with your sweetheart?

6)    Make new memories. A vacation represents a step outside of your day-to-day. It can be a valuable time to reset your relationship and accentuate the positive. Adore him, let him adore you and let those moments you share away from home become those moments you share when you get back.

7)    Look ahead. Not just to next season, but to the next decade and beyond. Getting out of context can provide an excellent opportunity to share your hopes and dreams and shed your worries. It’s always more productive to set goals when you’re happy.

Travel gives you a chance to try new things, to be new people and to see the world in a different way. Rev up your wild side; open your mind and your heart. Stop yourself from saying things like “That’s crazy” or “I could never.” Instead, embrace the experience. Do something crazy like fall in love with same man over and over again.

Life’s stubborn failure to stay the same may lead us into grief, anxiety and at least thirty-two other flavors of “out of sorts,” but it’s often our way out of depression. Things may not always get better or easier  (at least not in the way you expect) but they will be different. And that is just as important.

Grief  breeds stasis. Depressed people feel “stuck in a rut,” or they talk about inertia. When events are out of control, most of us tend to shift into auto-pilot. During moments of crisis, we cruise along slowly, carefully and without sudden deviation. It’s a kind of simple brain function, left over from caveman days, otherwise known as survival mode.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with survival mode. In fact, survival mode allows human beings to act like superheroes, performing acts of tremendous courage, strength and endurance, in spite of (and probably because of) the fact that it trumps some of our more sophisticated thought processes. If you’re being chased by a hungry bear, you are probably not going to stop to ponder the meaning of life.

I suspect survival mode is meant to be temporary. It gets us through the crisis and crisis averted, we’re able to move on and start thinking about more than just the immediate future. Unfortunately, depression tricks your brain into believing you are under indefinite siege.

For a lot of reasons, some of which I’ve addressed in previous articles, depression makes our brains stubborn to reason. But the simple truth here is that you’re not under siege. The galloping hordes are not waiting to storm the sitting gates. You are not stuck.

There is light at the end of the tunnel and it may be just be that you can’t see it without getting up and taking the first step in a new direction.  It will not always be this way. Hear that? Let me repeat: It will not always be this way. Everything changes, including you, in millions of tiny little ways every day and the world is a very big place, no matter how small it may seem from time to time. Time passes. Life goes on, gloriously enriched by all that has come before and the promise of what has yet to be.

With change comes growth. Embrace it.

We believe we can feel better. We believe we can be cured. Confidence in these two notions keep mono-stricken teenage girls shopping for prom dresses on the internet and sufferers of serious diseases from walking away from difficult procedures or painful treatments. We can accept a lot if we believe, in the end, that we will improve.

Depression interferes with the basic mental and emotional tools we have to cope with illness and work toward recovery.  And despite many effective treatment strategies, including drugs, counseling and simple lifestyle adjustments, depression is not a quick fix. Five months is a median recovery time, and for a significant number of people, it can take upwards of two years.

While seeking recovery, the basic steps you could or would take to feel better feel futile because depression tends to turn things upside down. This one of the reasons why, when you’re depressed, hearing a friend telling you to “just get out and have a good time” sounds so preposterous. Depression makes it harder to feel pleasure. The things you’ve always loved, that have always made you feel great—whether Girl’s Night Out or roller coaster rides or a day at a spa—suddenly seem to have no effect, and in fact, may make you feel worse.

This is just one example of the common hurdles that make depression such a double-edged sword.  The very basic things we need to combat depression are oftentimes the very things depression doesn’t allow for.  Getting a good night’s sleep, for example, is essential for recovery. But insomnia can be a symptom (as a well as a case of depression).  Exercise can improve your general physical health and emotional well-being but lethargy often sets in with depression, making near-impossible to summon the energy.  These hurdles extend past basic physical health and include relationships and general worldview.

The best strategy for dealing with any or all of these hurdles is patience. Acknowledge that recovery make a long time and cut yourself some slack. Set small goals and recognize that they may not be accomplished in the speed or style you’re used to.

Though it’s very difficult, try not to be discouraged by your inability to follow your own best advice.  Feeling defeated may just be a symptom of the depression, but it doesn’t make it any less real to those feeling it.

Keep strong. You will find your way out.

I’m not alone. An estimated 19 million American adults are living with depression. Though there are a variety of effective treatments, it can be difficult to conquer. Sometimes depression creeps up gradually, slowly altering your perception of yourself and the world around you. Other times it emerges suddenly, like a monster in a box, released by stress or trauma often resulting from a dramatic loss or change (in health, environment, employment or family).

Trauma wreaks havoc on almost every element of your life and can affect a large circle of people. You may find yourself saddled with an enormous amount of responsibility: making painful decisions, managing others’ grief and dealing with a litany of difficult, but essential tasks without an effective support network. It would be a lot to have on your plate if you were at your strongest, most well-rested peak. But in moments of crisis we’re often fragile as kittens, no matter how stiff we keep our upper lips. In order to recover (and in order to help your loved ones recover), you first have to heal yourself.

I don’t want to be depressed, but I can’t change the circumstances that made me depressed. My first reaction to this is to feel trapped, overwhelmed by a past I cannot change and unable to see through the present to the future. It’s such a small sliver of space to inhabit, it’s no wonder we so often end up lashing out against ourselves. And it’s very hard not to feel defeated.

Depression may be hard to crawl out of, but it’s much harder to live with. But there is a way out. It begins with acceptance and ends with empowerment. I can take a positive, measured approach to get through what I cannot get over, one small step at a time. Over the next three or four articles, I will share some of my own journey in the hopes that it might help you on your own.

My prayers are with you.

But there’s no reason to pout. The relative quiet of January offers an excellent opportunity to turn up the romance on those long winter nights.  Next time you and your man find yourselves with the house to yourself, turn up the mood music, slip into something a little more comfortable and take it to the next level.

Here are some simple ways to help make your next date night one worth remembering:

1. Leave your worries behind.  A rough day at work? A stressful week? Some lingering social frustration that’s been needling you? Do what you need to do to let external stresses go, so you can enjoy the moment. Intimacy is what happens between you and your husband. Not what happens between you and your husband and whatever’s been going on at the office.

1. Relax. Loosen up. Let your stresses go. Feeling sexy is, in large part, about feeling comfortable in your own skin. Know that you are beautiful. Know that you are loved. Ease into it.

1. Have a sense of adventure. Don’t be afraid to try something new. Even longtime lovers can surprise each other every now and then.

1. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want. Everybody is different. If something doesn’t work for you, let him know, even, and especially, if, you haven’t let him know before.

1. Intimacy might be serious business, but you don’t have to be so serious about it. A light-hearted attitude and a sense of humor will increase your energy and make you feel younger. The warmth you exude can kindle all kinds of passion.  Never underestimate the power of laughter.

Just last night, my husband and I had our date night. I threw the spaghetti against the wall to see if it was done. I thought the guy was going to fall off the couch he was laughing so hard. We’ve been married for thirty years, but he’d never seen me do it before.

We ate our spaghetti. He laughed at each bite. We watched old movies and it was like when we were back in college. Nothing fancy, no special clothes, no dinner reservations.  I fell asleep on his lap. He stayed there on the couch until two in the morning and stroked my hair. And it was one of the sexiest nights of my life.

The warmth you exude can kindle all kinds of passion. Find your hot spot.

That was a long time ago. You look back now from the vantage of a couple of decades. You wonder if you travel back in time and tell your younger self all the things you’ve learned about marriage and family and the holidays over the years. You wonder if your younger self would listen. Probably not, you think. A lot of the stresses of that first decade or so of Christmases seem pretty funny in retrospect. Like the time his mother insisted you all spend the holidays at her condo in Florida and your mother insisting that you come for Christmas dinner at her house in Michigan. Or the time you invited your whole family to stay at your house on Christmas Eve, the same day that your household plumbing would effectively cease to function. Or the many Christmas Eves, too many to count now, in which you and your husband would sit up until four am on Christmas morning trying to assemble some impossibly complex Santa Clause gift for a son who would invariably wake at five and start opening presents.  Or the year that Great Aunt Lucy, the self-proclaimed family matriarch, bought every member of the family, regardless of age or sex, the same pair of fuzzy red mittens.

A lot of things about the holidays are frustrating. You figured out pretty early on that your family and your husband’s family had very different ways of doing things. His traditions (or lack thereof) did not dovetail so neatly with your own. There were somewhat trivial arguments about what constitutes Christmas dinner and whether to top the tree with a star or an angel and somewhat less trivial arguments about how much money the two of you anticipated spending on gifts. Some Christmases money was pretty tight; you shopped with a stomach aching with worry and a credit card metaphorically worn thin by too much use. Other times, the promotion or odd windfall allowed you to be extravagant, surprising your son with that new computer and then turning around and surprising his father with that electronic gadget he’d talked about all year.  Over time, you’ve discovered a rhythm to the season, a schedule that, more or less, works for you. You’ve accepted that the higher the expectation the more likely they are to be disappointed and that no one gets through a holiday without something going wrong.

These days, the family increasingly looks to you to make the decisions, to host the Christmas dinner, to determine the theme of the holiday.  Aunt Lucy passed away years ago. You’d never call yourself the family matriarch, but it’s your dining room table that the family flocks to once a year.

You call your children back and tell them not to rush. This year, you won’t add to their stress or create stress of your own. Take it easy, you say, we’ll see you when we see you. This is the greatest gift you can give your kids: a guilt-free Christmas.

You slip off your shoes and curl up with your husband on the sofa and look at the tree. It’s a big one this year, round and bushy. He’s a pro with the stand. You have boxes of beautiful ornaments. And he’s still pretty darn cute. So you turn up the music and turn down the lights.

It’s going to be a wonderful holiday.