Even within our own tribes and families, our similarities and genetic ties are challenging to grasp and hang onto. With both partners and children, appreciating how we are related is something that we have to learn and re-learn. It takes separating the essential loveliness of the people around us from all of the incredibly annoying traits that fill the din.

Overwhelming our sense of connection are the small things-how people chew too loudly, or swing their knees in their sleep, or drip food from the corner of their mouth, or talk while they are chewing—the noises we make when we brush our teeth, or the crumbs we leave on the counter, or the socks we can’t turn right side out. In my house these lists are infinite and trivial and weighty. Learning to sustain our relationships and choosing to stay happens in all the small moments of the everyday mess of life.

I write this at a time when I am struck by just how often and how hard I have to work at loving people and accepting them as they are even when they are so annoying. This coupled with almost a continuous chorus of people I know who can’t quite commit to their relationships, the old one foot out the door syndrome, because living with them is so excruciatingly trying. We all want our own space, and order to prevail as we would have it, but rarely is that the nature of living with other humans.

It all comes down to admitting just how annoying the whole business is and realizing that I am just as annoying as the people who annoy me. These issues surfaced frequently in the early years of creating a family and the most important takeaway lesson of our years in marriage counseling was this one-that if you can hold what is deeply loveable about someone in one hand while holding what is most annoying about them in the other-side by side; balance, patience and choosing to forgive and love in spite of the difficulty is possible.

Taking that lesson to the world at large is in some ways more challenging because strangers by definition are well, strange, (at least to us), and so holding what is loveable about them with what is annoying about them can sometimes be hard to imagine. Last weekend I was in the midst of some 30,000 of them, which even under the best of circumstances is a lot of strangeness. As a vendor of love products at the Natural Products Show, I strived to see the loveable, but I would be a liar if I didn’t admit that I was frequently faced with the dilemma of how annoying we all can be.

Among strangers we face a different list which separates us- how people dress, or smell, ignore us, talk over us or interrupt (one of my big weaknesses as a stranger) and here again the list can be lengthy. Yet, the results are universal – all of these annoying qualities make it easy to make these unknown people “other” than us, and taken to the extreme, it is not that big a jump to seeing how many of our serious social ills are the unfortunate and increasingly disastrous consequence of our inability to see past what is annoying in all of us.

So here’s my proposal, let’s just go forward admitting to how annoying and flawed we all are, so that we aren’t surprised that living together is so challenging. We all go in knowing that we choose to get over it, so that we each can find these brief yet life changing moments of holding on to what we all want the most- each other.

Our sense of smell and what attracts or repels us, is blueprinted in our immunological gene structure called the MHC. Every individual’s own genetic scent makeup is as unique as their fingerprint. What’s more, when it comes to reproduction, the healthiest progeny comes from two individuals whose MHC is most distinct and different from each other. This assures that any offspring has the widest range of immune function and therefore is the most disease resistant. This actually makes perfect sense in terms of our biological imperative to go forth and multiply, but it also profoundly affects the whole courting process as well as the likelihood of making your love sustainable. MHC compatibility is a predictor of not only bearing healthy offspring, but relationship longevity and frequency of cheating on your partner.

Even more remarkable than the biological compatibility of scent between partners is the new recognition that our ability to smell is completely intertwined with our ability to feel.

Recent research on people who suffered anosmia (scent blind) usually from a traumatic injury to the head, shows that they also became unable to feel a wide range of emotions. “Our sense of smell and our emotional experience are fundamentally interconnected, bi-directionally communicative and functionally the same.”

Suddenly the axiom to “wake up and smell the roses” is not just good advice but actually may save your life. Without scent, we lose the texture and depth that makes life the rich and varied tapestry that it is. Imagine not being able to smell or taste not just a ripe melon, but your lover, it would make the experience almost inaccessible. Practice smelling, indulge in scent and taste and bear witness to the emotional response that accompanies this. It will surprise you.

I have been promoting the use of true scent products that enhance your own natural chemistry for years, intuitively knowing that products made chemically are not just bad for your most sensitive tissue, but also covers up your own natural odor and may just interfere with our ability to find and smell our true mates. So take this message to heart and as you breathe – inhale deeply, build your vocabulary and experience of scent especially around the people you love most. It will make you feel better.

A great review of this topic can be found in the article Scents and Sensibility in this month’s issue of Psychologytoday (psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20071228-000001.xml ). The book is definitely worth the price. And don’t forget about all our scent enhancing love products for Valentines Day. If you haven’t checked out our new and improved web store, indulge and use the NEWSITE08 coupon for 15% off.

This was brought home to me in a deep and personal way as I spent the holidays with my original family. Although the visit did not include any storming out or other traumatic arguments that suggested the end of the relationship, the very lack of them and what was left over made the reality of the relationship clear.

It was a bittersweet departure, with this realization of what was left between us, and our agreement to not try to be understood or provoke a healing in all the old wounds.

My fifteen year old son commented that my mother did not bring out the best in me. He loves his newfound wisdom and I could not argue the point. Sometimes the love we can express doesn’t bring out the best in us, and although we may wish to be kinder and more loving the reality of the past and all the baggage that is visceral in us allows only the benefit of the doubt to protect us.

It is a humbling realization. To see the limits of one’s own capacity to love so clearly and still try to come to a place of loving oneself. This is actually our only choice and in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. in his speech “Where do we go from here?” He calls this creative redemptive love “ultimately the only answer we have as a human family.”

This redemptive love, which is far from the way we idealize loving relationships, is what we are given to build family and community with. It has to be enough.

With many people in my life, loving them brings out the best in me. I am inspired by my ability to give generously of my time and resources. It is comforting and easy for me to accept even my weaknesses when I am with these heart connections. I don’t have to think about giving the benefit of the doubt so much in these relationships because they make me feel strong and, on good days, confident.

But what this new year taught me is that until I can embrace the relationships where I am weakest, and meaner than I want to believe, I can’t fully embrace the rich heart connections because all those parts of me live in me and can’t be neatly separated by the quality of the relationship. In fact the more complex the relationship the more likely that the benefit of the doubt is the only thing that can sustain us living on this little blue planet spinning in space.

Building a fire in your relationship requires first the ground to build it upon. The ground in a couple is how you think of each other and your relationship. While there are often moments of frustration or anger in any relationship, if your primary mode of thinking about your current partner or relationship is negative than consider the ground of your relationship. Are you are trying to build a fire on barren land, maybe even a volcano?

Any fire, once built requires air to feed it. The air in your relationship exists in the communication between you. The quality and frequency of your conversations and ability to self disclose is the food for your fire. It is not uncommon for members of a couple to have very divergent interests and ideas, this can actually be a great gift, but not if the result is a tuning out and disengaging. How do you listen to your partner? It is the act of love that fuels your sex life.

The smallest of fires can become a wild fire without water nearby to keep it in check. The water of a relationship exists in the ebb and flow of the time you share together. Togetherness means different things to different people, and not having a shared definition, can make the relationship both unsafe and unsatisfying for both people. This fact is essential in building a fire, because where there is no safety, people can get burned.

Good sex then, is both the result and the gift of positive thoughts in your relationship, a steady flow of together time and open and honest communications. If the fire in your relationship is not holding; before looking at the problems with the sex itself, look to see if any of these other elements could be improved. I bet you will be amazed at how it affects the fire.

Yet, taboo it is; with an overriding belief that sex and intimacy are somehow tainted if they are not spontaneous and immediate. This belief system, connected to the shame and guilt we carry around from our adolescence when we could only describe a make out session if we could first say, “I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly we were just doing it…” We can only fully embrace our sexuality if it just happens to us, planning for it forces us to claim the most unpredictable and to some degree uncontrollable part of our life.

There are a lot of good reasons to start including love time in your regular schedule. Leaving love to the spontaneous in a life that is overbooked with commitments to family and careers, means that our love often gets the lowest ebb of our energy. Most of us arrive at our bedrooms exhausted, finally turning away from the last email, the last bill to be paid, the last dish to be washed, the last light turned off. Even the most spontaneous among us can barely muster the energy of imagining a wild interlude at that moment.

Planning love dates can add excitement to the rest of the week. Looking forward to an intimate time which can but doesn’t have to include full on sex can be both relaxing and stimulating. Couples that are struggling to find physical connection may find it easier to agree to mutual massages than envisioning hours of lovemaking. Either way, setting aside time and energy for your partner sends a message that sustains commitments. While my husband and I don’t have set days of the week, we do agree to “dates” either later in the day or the next day. Setting this time for love making becomes part of the foreplay and gives permission to entertain thoughts that might come in handy later.

Inventing a shared language for intimacy connects partners. Revisiting the art of flirting can spice up even the most common of conversations, “What’s for dinner?” suddenly has multiple meanings. We are more playful with each other when we are waiting for our date time. Unfulfilled or even worse, conflicting expectations about intimacy are often the most difficult ground for couples to maneuver. This is where communication is the currency of the relationship on every level.

Learning to schedule time for love requires that we acknowledge and are willing to talk about our sex life together. This is challenging because the taboo is so strong against speaking honestly and openly about sex. Yet developing a language for love is one of the strongest predictors of having a good sex life. Couples who can talk about what they want or prefer in their physical lives, may actually be able to get it. Code words are OK, they may even add some excitement to the game. First and foremost, make time to play.

It is with great pleasure that I invite you to visit our brand new, rebuilt, completely secure, beautiful and highly functional website. A true labor of love, that has taught me a great deal about patience and process, and trusting myself.

www.goodcleanlove.com is open for you.
We will be adding the “perfect gift for someone you love” section soon, and offer daily opportunities for conversation about making your love sustainable. Share the sight with your friends and tell us what you like.

The greenhouse effect and fragility of our atmospheric conditions provides a sound metaphor for how the language of sustainability translates to the concept of Making Love Sustainable. The atmosphere in which love thrives can be defined and cultivated. Just as is the case with global warming, small daily changes can make a huge difference in our planet’s well being- the same is true about daily loving acts in a relationship.

Sustaining an atmosphere for love to grow starts with how we think about our partner, both when we are together and apart. Our thoughts set the tone for the time that you share as a couple. In turn, the quality of your time together is influenced by your ability to talk to each other. Taken together these factors coalesce and define the quality and quantity of touch and intimacy in a relationship.

Our thoughts are incredibly powerful, they keep us connected or they drive us apart. When was the last time you monitored the emotional quality of your thinking about your partner? Giving people the benefit of the doubt, giving up the need to be right, and looking for what is loveable in your partner will help you to choose thoughts that sustain a loving atmosphere.

The art of conversation is yet to be fully discovered between the sexes. Men and women have very different ways of expressing and listening to each other. Begin your work in this area with this sensitivity and don’t take missteps personally. The goal of talking should be to develop a sense of communication; and sometimes that means engaging in conversations that may not be particularly interesting to you, but promotes an atmosphere of togetherness.

Being together doesn’t mean constant dates, but every now and again, it is nice to take time away to really be with someone. However, on a daily basis, creating an atmosphere of togetherness can be accomplished through small acts: Instead of reading the paper, offer to help with dinner. Share a funny story, recount part of your day, or offering to listen to your partner’s day is a more sustainable choice than putting on the television.

While it’s true that happy couples share a satisfying intimate life, the reverse statement- a satisfying intimate life doesn’t necessarily imply a happy couple is also true. Touching- the sharing of your physical body with your partner opens both the height and the depth of a what a loving relationship can offer. It is the glue that holds couples together during their most challenging moments, and yet it is not the answer to a troubled relationship, rather it is the response to the work of sustaining a relationship.

Sharing physically intimate moments requires a leap – a leap out of our normal day to day physical boundaries and a willingness to go deeply into ourselves and another person. Creating a sustainable love environment of kindness and respect provides the safety net for the leap.

This month we are highlighting our Passion Massage Candles – available in all our signature love oil fragrances, they are a sweet addition to creating an atmosphere to experience loving contact. They can be used as an aromatic mood setter or for use in a hot oil massage. The candles are made without wax or paraffin, So experience the heat of summer and light a fire between you. Enjoy this summer’s discount- Ten percent off our entire passion candle line.

This is why I urge all of my closest friends to explore an entirely different dialogue, one where the spoken word is left outside the door, and the conversation is lead and answered with what some would argue is our true intelligence – the body.

Our bodies do have a profound intelligence that we rarely give them credit for. Emotions are not actually thoughts running around your brain, although this is how we often describe them. Actually emotions are visceral experiences that live in one’s body, as true as chills on a windy night or burning skin in a late spring sun.

A conversation without words is often times the only answer in a conjugal life. It took me a very long time to learn this. The countless ways that I would rephrase my frustration with my husband’s silences and perceived lack of interest was continuously lost on deaf ears. I’m not sure the messages ever even reached his ears, my expression and body language was loud enough for him to get my negativity toward him with out needing to hear a word.

Contrary to popular belief, these wordless conversations of the body, have nothing to do with being “in the mood”. In fact, if you haven’t been physically intimate in a while, then the mood concept is a moot point. A physical conversation requires a willingness to be vulnerable enough to be touched. To allow your body to truly feel someone with you, has nothing to do with sexual arousal, and yet with out this permission, sexual arousal is impossible.

Listening and asking questions with the body are skills we mastered as children. Some of these conversations will culminate in sexual pleasure, some may provide a physical reflection of the borders that keep you separate- in either case, the journey of opening up to your own body will change the conversation. I guarantee that by taking the conversation to the body you will hear something that words could not communicate. Physical conversations can only help to make the subsequent verbal conversations kinder and more meaningful.

Basically, we are finally being compelled to listen to the voice of indigenous wisdom to our lives in such a way that we can meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

This wisdom is rarely applied to love, which, I believe is the source of energy from which all else springs. Why then is it so difficult for so many of us to maintain our loving relationships? What skills and insights can we bring to our love relationships to allow them to flourish and sustain our lives into perpetuity? These questions are at the core of the mission of Good Clean Fun- we exist to increase the awareness and experience of love in the world.

We need to begin to appreciate that being in relationship, having a family and history with someone is a precious resource. If we could understand that the huge amounts of trust, time and loving intention that we invest in our early relationships are actually renewable resources, the currency of our future health and well being we may be motivated to create new strategies to maintain them. Sustaining your relationship with loving words and actions not only keeps your own intimacy vibrant, it becomes a living education of what love is for future generations.

A significant and yet, often misunderstood part of sustaining love is in making love. Sexuality is such a seriously repressed and misrepresented part of our identity and culture, that it is often the place that suffers first when the going gets rough in difficult phases of relationships.

This is a shame on several levels- not only because more and more medical studies are supporting strong correlations between better mental and physical health and a strong sex life, but also because human sexuality has a transformative power that heals emotional issues by creating a bond in the deepest parts of ourselves.

Besides all that, Making your love sustainable is fun – good clean fun, in fact.

Our need for love and intimacy is a basic human need, as basic as our need for clean food, water and a decent night’s sleep. In fact, when push comes to shove, I know that I will often sacrifice sleep for love and still wake up feeling better for it.

Do your own experiments – Feeling stressed, make love, see if it helps. Feeling under the weather, try a little intimacy – I don’t want to be accused of over simplifying life here, and yet I feel compelled to remind you that human babies who are not physically loved, even if they are provided with their other basic needs, tend not to thrive. There is a baby inside all of us, that needs to be held. Trust the instinct.