Joy

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  After that fight, her parents gave up. They named their baby Rachel. In the Bible, Rachel was the love of Jacob’s life, and Rachel’s parents knew she would be the love of theirs . Rachel’s grandparents died when she was young. Years later, when her mother suggested the name Ruth for their newborn, Rachel and Marc immediately loved it. “I want my baby to be connected to our family history. I want her to know who we are,” Rachel tells me. “I researched and found that Ruth was a popular name in Hungary in the 1930s. I’m sure my grandparents didn’t want to be reminded of that, but as the next generation, I want not only to face the past but also to cherish it.” Her face lightens as she looks at Ruth, who is sound asleep. At this point Rachel and Marc begin exploring the possibility of moving with Ruth to Israel. “I’m going to fulfill my childhood dream,” Rachel tells me with a smile. “I feel so lucky that Marc can get a job there. Did I tell you that he has family there? I grew up with very few relatives around. My grandmother was an only child; she had an aunt who she was not in touch with. And there was no one on my father’s side. But in Jerusalem we had one family friend, a man who had survived the Holocaust with my grandfather and who was like a brother to him. After the war my grandfather immigrated to America, and his friend went to Israel. We used to visit him during the summers, and I remember his daughter and his granddaughter, who was more or less my age. I’m sure he has died by now, but I wonder if his family is still in Jerusalem. ” Rachel opens her phone and swipes through her pictures. She finds one from her childhood album and hands me the phone. It is a photograph of Rachel at the age of eight with another girl; they are holding hands and smiling for the camera. “This is in the old city market of Jerusalem,” she explains. “I don’t even remember the girl’s name. We are planning to visit this spring, to work out the details of moving there. Maybe I should look for this family. It would be really special if I could find the granddaughter, don’t you think?” A few months before their planned visit, Rachel wakes up covered with sweat. From that night forward, she starts having sleep terrors.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Love is also deeply personal. It unfurls within and throughout your mind and body like a wave, cresting with each new micro-moment of connection— that smile, that laugh, or that knowing and appreciative glance that you share with another. Yet even as these micro-moments are deeply personal and fleeting, they’ve also been targets of increasing scientific scrutiny. So now, for the first time, you can know and appreciate love not only through a personal, subjective lens but also through a scientific, objective lens. Through this scientific lens, you can better see and appreciate how your body and brain were made for love, and made to benefit from loving. Learn to seek love out more frequently and it can elevate you, your community, and our world far beyond what you and I can today envision. Opportunities for love abound. It’s up to you to nourish yourself with them. Acknowledgments The ideas about love that you’ll encounter here have been gestating in my mind and heart for years. Fittingly, they first arose through my connections with others. Some of these connections have been fleeting, others long-standing. Some have been mutual connections, with ideas forged through rich conversations and collaborations, others have been more one-sided, as I’ve privately mulled over and expanded on the words of other scholars. For the foundational idea that love is best seen as any positive emotion shared within a safe, interpersonal connection, I thank Carroll Izard. His 1977 book described love as moments of shared joy and shared interest, and convinced me that any accounting of the positive emotions should not omit love. What little I wrote about love in my first presentation of the broaden-and-build theory owed a great deal to Izard’s influence on my thinking. A deeper shaping of my views on love comes from the pioneering work on high-quality connections by my friend and University of Michigan colleague, Jane Dutton. I’ve long been inspired by her ways of seeing and describing the connective tissue that binds and energizes people in long-standing relationships and one-time encounters alike. Apart from her inspiring theoretical work, Jane is also an inspiring person, and I am thankful that our friendship has withstood the strain of my move from Ann Arbor. Other scholars whose work has deeply influenced my thinking about love and related ideas include Lisa Feldman Barrett, Kent Berridge, John Cacioppo, Laura Carstensen, Sy-Miin Chow, Steve Cole, Michael D. Cohen, Mike Csikszentmihalyi, Richie Davidson, Paul Ekman, Ruth Feldman, Shelly Gable, Eric Garland, Karen Grewen, Melissa Gross, Uri Hasson, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, David Johnson, Danny Kahneman, Dacher Keltner, Corey Keyes, Ann Kring, Bob Levenson, Kathleen Light, Marcial Losada, Batja Mesquita, Paula Niedenthal, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Keith Payne, David Penn, Chris Peterson, Bob Quinn, Cliff Saron, Oliver Schultheiss, Leslie Sekerka, Marty Seligman, Erika Rosenberg, Robert Vallerand, George Vaillant, and David Sloan Wilson.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Speaking of making other people more comfortable, as you learn about social anxiety you’ll start to see it everywhere. For example, watch someone stand alone at a party for a moment and it’s almost guaranteed they’ll pull out their phone to quell their internal awkwardness. So kill two birds with one stone by taking on the role of The One Who Puts Others at Ease. Indeed, the vast majority of people prefer that someone else strike up conversation and will be profoundly grateful if you initiate, even if they don’t admit their relief to you. So in the service of making others more comfortable, assign yourself the task of finding someone standing alone at an event and saying hello. Internally, they’ll thank you for it, but what’s more, you’ll come away feeling happier and stronger. A creative 2014 study out of the University of Chicago found that even in the culturally expected silence of the weekday mass transit commute, people who take the initiative to say hello not only brighten someone else’s day but also reap rewards for themselves. The study assigned commuters the task of striking up a conversation with a stranger on their train—the longer, the better. To give them some structure, they were told, “Find out something interesting about him or her and tell them something about you.… Your goal is to try to get to know your community neighbor this morning.” Alternatively, those randomly assigned to the solitude condition were told, “Please keep to yourself and enjoy your solitude on the train today. Take this time to sit alone with your thoughts. Your goal is to focus on yourself and the day ahead of you.” Predictably, participants who were assigned to strike up a conversation were initially reluctant. They expected the experience would be awkward, unpleasant, and unproductive, but the results were exactly the opposite. Surprisingly, commuters who connected with a stranger had a significantly more positive commute than those instructed to sit in solitude. What’s more, the productivity of the trip wasn’t compromised—the group assigned to connect with a stranger reported a level of productivity that was nearly identical to those who kept to themselves. Indeed, assigning yourself the task of saying good morning and making a remark about the weather may end there, which is fine, but it could also lead to pleasant conversation, boosted mood, invigorated productivity, and—most important—another brick added firmly to your building. The only word of caution: don’t choose a structure that allows you to avoid. Helping with the dishes after a dinner party is generous, but if it keeps you in the kitchen while everyone else is chatting over coffee on the stoop your building goes neglected. Volunteering on the fundraising committee for your tai chi group is great structure, but not if the committee communicates only by text.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  George Gervin 9. Mugsy Bogues I kept making list after list of the things that made me feel joy. And I kept drawing cartoons of the things that made me angry. I keep writing and rewriting, drawing and redrawing, and rethinking and revising and reediting. It became my grieving ceremony. In Like a Lion I’d never guessed I’d be a good basketball player. I mean, I’d always loved ball, mostly because my father loved it so much, and because Rowdy loved it even more, but I figured I’d always be one of those players who sat on the bench and cheered his bigger, faster, more talented teammates to victory and/or defeat. But somehow or another, as the season went on, I became a freshman starter on a varsity basketball team. And, sure, all of my teammates were bigger and faster, but none of them could shoot like me. I was the hired gunfighter. Back on the rez, I was a decent player, I guess. A rebounder and a guy who could run up and down the floor without tripping. But something magical happened to me when I went to Reardan. Overnight, I became a good player. I suppose it had something to do with confidence. I mean, I’d always been the lowest Indian on the reservation totem pole—I wasn’t expected to be good so I wasn’t. But in Reardan, my coach and the other players wanted me to be good. They needed me to be good. They expected me to be good. And so I became good. I wanted to live up to expectations. I guess that’s what it comes down to. The power of expectations. And as they expected more of me, I expected more of myself, and it just grew and grew until I was scoring twelve points a game. AS A FRESHMAN! Coach was thinking I would be an all-state player in a few years. He was thinking maybe I’d play some small-college ball. It was crazy. How often does a reservation Indian kid hear that? How often do you hear the words “Indian” and “college” in the same sentence? Especially in my family. Especially in my tribe. But don’t think I’m getting stuck up or anything. It’s still absolutely scary to play ball, to compete, to try to win. I throw up before every game. Coach said he used to throw up before games. “Kid,” he said, “some people need to clear the pipes before they can play. I used to be a yucker. You’re a yucker Ain’t nothing wrong with being a yucker.” So I asked Dad if he used to be a yucker. “What’s a yucker?” he asked. “Somebody who throws up before basketball games,” I said. “Why would you throw up?” “Because I’m nervous.” “You mean, because you’re scared?” “Nervous, scared, same kind of things, aren’t they?” “Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don’t want to play.”

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Of course, Rowdy would have thrown the book at the teacher and then punched her. Gordy showed a lot of courage in standing up to a teacher like that. And his courage inspired the others. Penelope stood and dropped her textbook. And then Roger stood and dropped his textbook. Whomp! Then the other basketball players did the same. Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! And Mrs. Jeremy flinched each and every time, as if she’d been kicked in the crotch. Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Then all of my classmates walked out of the room. A spontaneous demonstration. Of course, I probably should have walked out with them. It would have been more poetic. It would have made more sense. Or perhaps my friends should have realized that they shouldn’t have left behind the FRICKING REASON FOR THEIR PROTEST! And that thought just cracked me up. It was like my friends had walked over the backs of baby seals in order to get to the beach where they could protest against the slaughter of baby seals. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that bad. But it was sure funny. “What are you laughing at?” Mrs. Jeremy asked me. “I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,” I said. “By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn’t true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not.” I walked out of the classroom and felt like dancing and singing. It all gave me hope. It gave me a little bit of joy. And I kept trying to find the little pieces of joy in my life. That’s the only way I managed to make it through all of that death and change. I made a list of the people who had given me the most joy in my life: 1. Rowdy 2. My mother 3. My father 4. My grandmother 5. Eugene 6. Coach 7. Roger 8. Gordy 9. Penelope, even if she only partially loves me I made a list of the musicians who had played the most joyous music: 1. Patsy Cline, my mother’s favorite 2. Hank Williams, my father’s favorite 3. Jimi Hendrix, my grandmother’s favorite 4. Guns N’ Roses, my big sister’s favorite 5. White Stripes, my favorite I made a list of my favorite foods: 1. pizza 2. chocolate pudding 3. peanut butter and jelly sandwiches 4. banana cream pie 5. fried chicken 6. mac & cheese 7. hamburgers 8. french fries 9. grapes I made a list of my favorite books: 1. The Grapes of Wrath 2. Catcher in the Rye 3. Fat Kid Rules the World 4. Tangerine 5. Feed 6. Catalyst 7. Invisible Man 8. Fools Crow 9. Jar of Fools I made a list of my favorite basketball players: 1. Dwayne Wade 2. Shane Battier 3. Steve Nash 4. Ray Allen 5. Adam Morrison 6. Julius Erving 7. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 8.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Then I popped it. And then it looked even more like you.” “This one time, I ate, like, three hot dogs and a bowl of clam chowder, and then I got diarrhea all over the floor, and it looked like you.” “And then you ate it,” Rowdy said. We laughed ourselves silly. We laughed ourselves sweaty. “Don’t make me laugh,” I said. “It’s too hot to laugh.” “It’s too hot to sit in this house. Let’s go swimming.” “Where?” “Turtle Lake.” “Okay,” I said. But I was scared of Turtle Lake. It was a small body of water, maybe only a mile around. Maybe less. But it was deep, crazy deep. Nobody has ever been to the bottom. I’m not a very good swimmer; so I was always afraid I’d sink and drown, and they’d never, ever find my body. One year, these scientists came with a mini-submarine and tried to find the bottom, but the lake was so silty and muddy that they couldn’t see. And the nearby uranium mine made their radar/sonar machines go nuts, so they couldn’t see that way, either, so they never made it to the bottom. The lake is round. Perfectly round. So the scientists said it was probably an ancient and dormant volcano crater. Yeah, a volcano on the rez! The lake was so deep because the volcano crater and tunnels and lava chutes and all that plumbing went all the way down to the center of the earth. That lake was, like, forever deep. There were all sorts of myths and legends surrounding the lake. I mean, we’re Indians, and we like to make up shit about lakes, you know? Some people said the lake is named Turtle because it’s round and green like a turtle’s shell. Some people said it’s named Turtle because it used to be filled with regular turtles. Some people said it’s named Turtle because it used to be home to this giant snapping turtle that ate Indians. A Jurassic turtle. A Steven Spielberg turtle. A King Kong versus the Giant Reservation Turtle turtle. I didn’t exactly believe in the giant turtle myth. I was too old and smart for that. But I’m still an Indian, and we like to be scared. I don’t know what it is about us. But we love ghosts. We love monsters. But I was really scared of this other story about Turtle Lake. My dad told me the story. When he was a kid he watched a horse drown in Turtle Lake and disappear. “Some of the others say it was a giant turtle that grabbed the horse,” Dad said. “But they’re lying. They were just being silly. That horse was just stupid. It was so stupid we named it Stupid Horse.” Well, Stupid Horse sank into the endless depths of Turtle Lake and everybody figured that was the end of that story.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Her eyes were grey, her cheeks very pale. Her features had a strange, smooth quality to them, as if her face was a drawing to which someone had halfheartedly taken a piece of india-rubber. When she spoke her voice was thick and slightly braying. I realised then, what I might have guessed before: that she was rather simple. I saw all this, of course, in less than a moment. Grace had put her arm through her mother’s and, on being introduced to me, had indeed hung back rather shyly. Now, however, she gazed with obvious delight at the jacket that I held before me, and I could see that she was desperate to seize its coloured sleeve and stroke it. And after all, it was a lovely jacket. I asked her, ‘Would you like to try it on?’ She nodded, then glanced at her mother: ‘If I might.’ Mrs Milne said she might. I raised the jacket for her to step into, then moved around her to fasten the buttons. The scarlet serge and the gold trim went bizarrely well with her hair, her eyes, her dress and stockings. ‘You look like a lady in a circus,’ I said, as her mother and I stood back to study her. ‘A ring-master’s daughter.’ She smiled - then took a clumsy bow. Mrs Milne laughed and clapped. ‘May I keep it?’ Gracie asked me then. I shook my head. ‘To be honest, Miss Milne, I don’t believe that I can spare it. Had I only two the same ...’ ‘Now Gracie,’ said her mother, ‘of course you can’t keep it. Miss Astley needs the costume for her theatricals.’ Grace pulled a face, but did not seem very seriously dismayed. Mrs Milne caught my eye. ‘She might borrow it, though, mightn’t she,’ she whispered, ‘from time to time ... ?’ ‘She can borrow all my suits, all at once, so far as I care,’ I said; and when Grace looked up I gave her a wink, and her pale cheeks pinked a little, and her head went down. Mrs Milne gave a mild tut-tut, and folded her arms complacently. ‘I do believe that, after all, Miss Astley, you will suit us very well.’ I moved in at once. That first afternoon I passed in unpacking my few little things, with Gracie beside me exclaiming over them all, and Mrs Milne bringing tea, and then more tea, and cake. By supper-time I had become ‘Nancy’ to them both; and supper itself - which was a pie and peas and gravy, and afterwards, blancmange in a mould - was the first that I had eaten, at a family table, since my last dinner at Whitstable just over a year before. The next day, Gracie tried my suits, in every combination, and her mother clapped. There were sausages for supper, and later cake. The cake being eaten, I changed for Soho; and when Mrs Milne saw me in my serge-and-velvet, she clapped again.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  It entails simply reflecting, at the end of each day, on the three longest social interactions you’ve had that day, and asking yourself how “connected” and “in tune” you felt with the people with whom you spent your time. These people could be family, friends, coworkers, or completely new acquaintances, and it doesn’t matter whether the same person shows up in more than one interaction. Merely reflecting on whether your potential moments for positivity resonance were in fact realized seems to serve as a gentle reminder about your ever-present capacity for love. My students and I first included a brief nightly reflection task like this in one of our many longitudinal studies a few years back. We’d originally included it to track group differences in our participants’ experiences of social connection. We expected that, compared to the people in our wait list control group, those who were randomly assigned to learn loving-kindness meditation (LKM) would report more day-to-day social connections alongside more day-to-day positive emotions. They did. What we didn’t expect was that our control group—those who simply completed the daily surveys yet did not learn LKM—would also show increases over time in both social connections and positive emotions. We’d never seen this before. Across several past longitudinal studies in which we’d asked people to provide daily reports of their emotions, we’d never seen improvements simply due to the act of regularly reflecting on feelings. But in this study, we did. The only difference was that we’d added the social connection questions. With these two questions added to the very end of the daily report form, upward spirals emerged for our control participants as well. Even more remarkable, increased feelings of social connection forecast changes in the functioning of people’s physical hearts, as registered by increases in their vagal tone. If it weren’t for this pronounced effect, we might have dismissed the result as mere wishful thinking or the possibility that our study participants simply got wind of our interests (in social connection and positive emotions) and told us (through their daily reports) what they thought we wanted to hear. Yet the fact that reflecting on social connection appeared to penetrate the body to affect enduring heart rhythms made us take a closer look. This surprise finding inspired a key part of my student Bethany Kok’s dissertation. To gather definitive data on whether the one-minute thought exercise of considering how “close” and “in tune” people feel when interacting with others in fact generates important emotional and biological changes, Bethany randomly assigned working adults to reflect daily either on their social connections in this manner or on the three tasks on which they spent the most time that day and to evaluate how “useful” and “important” those tasks had felt to them. Remarkably, here again, we observed increases in day-to-day positive emotions and end-of-study vagal tone, but only in the group assigned to reflect on social connections. Clearly something powerful was embedded within this simple thought exercise.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Always, always, it came down to the same thing: that however much we had to hide our love, however guardedly we had to take our pleasure, I could not long be miserable about a thing that was - as she herself admitted - so very sweet. Nor, in my gladness, could I quite believe that anyone who cared for me would be anything but happy for me, if only they knew. I was, as I have said before, very young. The next day, while Kitty still slept, I rose and made my noiseless way into our parlour. There I did something that I had longed for months to do, but never had the courage. I took a piece of paper and a pen, and wrote a letter to my sister, Alice. I hadn’t written home in weeks. I had told them, once, that I had joined the act; but I had rather played the matter down - I feared they wouldn’t think the life a decent one for their own daughter. They had sent me back a brief, half-hearted, puzzled note; they had talked of travelling to London, to reassure themselves that I was quite content - and at that I had written at once to say, they must not think of coming, I was too busy, my rooms were too small ... In short - so ‘careful’ had Kitty made me! - I was as unwelcoming as it was possible to be, this side of friendliness. Since then, our letters had grown rarer than ever; and the business of my fame upon the stage had been quite lost - I never mentioned it; they did not ask. Now, it was not of the act that I wrote to Alice. I wrote to tell her what had happened between Kitty and me - to tell her that we loved each other, not as friends, but as sweethearts; that we had made our lives together; and that she must be glad for me, for I was happier than I had ever thought it possible to be. It was a long letter, but I wrote it easily; and when I had finished it I felt light as air. I didn’t read it through, but put it in an envelope at once, and ran with it to the post-box. I was back before Kitty had even stirred; and when she woke I didn’t mention it.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  How can people reliably and sustainably increase their daily intake of positive emotions? The methods that I and other scientists had used in the lab to test the short-range effects of positive emotions—the music, the film clips, the cartoons, the unexpected gifts of candy—wouldn’t do. They fall flat and lose their charge with repetition. That’s because we humans adapt: Even the most potent emotion-eliciting stimulus fades into the background like wallpaper with repeated exposure. After a few failed attempts to develop a viable intervention, I found myself in a yearlong interdisciplinary faculty seminar on integrative medicine. Here is where I was first introduced to the ancient mind-training practice called metta in Pali, maître in Sanskrit, often translated as loving-kindness, or simply kindness. In Buddhist teachings, loving-kindness is considered one of the four noblest modes of consciousness—the crown jewel, in some traditions. A lightbulb went off for me: This ancient practice, honed over millennia, could help me test my theory. Perhaps training in loving-kindness was the intervention I’d been seeking. Over the next year, my students and I designed a rigorous and randomized experiment to test the effects of learning to self-generate positive emotions through loving-kindness meditation. My test pilots were reasonably healthy working adults with no particular spiritual orientation. The results were abundantly clear. When people, completely new to meditation, learned to quiet their minds and expand their capacity for love and kindness, they transformed themselves from the inside out. They experienced more love, more engagement, more serenity, more joy, more amusement—more of every positive emotion we measured. And though they typically meditated alone, their biggest boosts in positive emotions came when interacting with others, off the cushion, as it were. Their lives spiraled upward. The kindheartedness they learned to stoke during their meditation practice warmed their connections with others. Later experiments would confirm that it was these connections that most affected their bodies, making them healthier. We also came to discover that other interventions to foster connection—ones that didn’t require learning to meditate—could increase people’s experiences of love and likewise improve their health. I share all of these change strategies with you in part II. These discoveries pushed me to rethink love. Taken as a whole, the numbers tell me that when you learn practical ways to generate warm connections with others—through meditation or other means—you step up to a whole new dynamic. Here is where the soft-focus you encounter in typical discussions about love sharpens into high definition. The mysteries that have long been sources both of wonder and exhilaration, as well as confusion and misunderstanding, now give way to practical, evidence-based prescriptions for how to live life well.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  My students and I first included a brief nightly reflection task like this in one of our many longitudinal studies a few years back. We’d originally included it to track group differences in our participants’ experiences of social connection. We expected that, compared to the people in our wait list control group, those who were randomly assigned to learn loving-kindness meditation (LKM) would report more day-to-day social connections alongside more day-to-day positive emotions. They did. What we didn’t expect was that our control group—those who simply completed the daily surveys yet did not learn LKM—would also show increases over time in both social connections and positive emotions. We’d never seen this before. Across several past longitudinal studies in which we’d asked people to provide daily reports of their emotions, we’d never seen improvements simply due to the act of regularly reflecting on feelings. But in this study, we did. The only difference was that we’d added the social connection questions. With these two questions added to the very end of the daily report form, upward spirals emerged for our control participants as well. Even more remarkable, increased feelings of social connection forecast changes in the functioning of people’s physical hearts, as registered by increases in their vagal tone. If it weren’t for this pronounced effect, we might have dismissed the result as mere wishful thinking or the possibility that our study participants simply got wind of our interests (in social connection and positive emotions) and told us (through their daily reports) what they thought we wanted to hear. Yet the fact that reflecting on social connection appeared to penetrate the body to affect enduring heart rhythms made us take a closer look. This surprise finding inspired a key part of my student Bethany Kok’s dissertation. To gather definitive data on whether the one-minute thought exercise of considering how “close” and “in tune” people feel when interacting with others in fact generates important emotional and biological changes, Bethany randomly assigned working adults to reflect daily either on their social connections in this manner or on the three tasks on which they spent the most time that day and to evaluate how “useful” and “important” those tasks had felt to them. Remarkably, here again, we observed increases in day-to-day positive emotions and end-of-study vagal tone, but only in the group assigned to reflect on social connections. Clearly something powerful was embedded within this simple thought exercise.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  In the beginning, I bought the tiny little travel tubes, good for one or two sessions, small, discreet, deniable. Once I knew, initially, the ecstasy of the act, I also knew it could only be a very rare occurrence, sort of like a birthday special. I reasoned that it would not be healthy for my little asshole to be so invaded too frequently. I reasoned that bliss was not free, not plannable, and definitely not something that might come my way very often. Such reasoning led me to buy those little travel tubes. But those tiny tubes kept running out and denial became an effort. Ass-fucking was part of the regular repertoire. The next time he opened the drawer, he pulled out a giant, phallic-sized white-and-blue tube, looked at it, and fell off the bed howling with laughter. It was a risky move for me. Presumptuous. Practical. After several months of using one large tube after another, I put two large tubes in the drawer at the same time. That is how he developed the ritual of dispersing the tubes while I sucked his cock. The beautiful man with a fierce erection tossing large white-and-blue plastic tubes around the room (wherever we land he can fuck my ass, right there, right then, no reaching): it is an image of promise as close to a guarantee as I’ve ever known with a man. The gold band on my left ring finger guaranteed far less. Soon there are as many as five tubes in the drawer at one time, each in a different stage of emptiness, the emptier the better. I still haven’t figured out how many ass-fucks per four-ounce tube. Probably about eleven. At $4.19 a tube, that is about 38 cents a fuck . . . add that to the price of a condom (thirty-six for $14.99) at 42 cents, and the best thing in the world costs less than a buck. Then I found the tubes discounted at Costco, two for $4.00, and bought six. That brings the whole affair down to 60 cents per cum shot. (Ass-fuckers: use dark glasses for K-Y shopping and don’t turn around in the checkout line: they’re all staring at your butt in disbelief.) I’m going to buy stock in K-Y. The Lexus of lubricants. Grateful for the smooth ride. I heard a television talk-show shrink quizzing a cross-dressing man to test if he was gay or straight. Playing quick word association, she says “football,” he says “beer”; she says . . . he says . . . she says “KY,” he says “Kentucky.” She announces triumphantly that he is heterosexual. And, I would add, clearly not a heterosexual sodomite. Of the liquid lubricants, Astroglide is king. But be forewarned: if you pour Astroglide onto K-Y during a single vigorous ass-fucking, then expect a large amount of froth. Froth everywhere.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Coming up on the back side of the store, I turned left into what I figured was the back entrance, planning to make my way around the parking lot to the storefront. Only it wasn’t really an entrance. It was just a short gravel road that led nowhere. I stopped the car and stared at the distant storefront. I’m sure I was only frozen like that for a matter of seconds, but my husband found it amusing. “Stuck on a gravel road?” he chided. We shared a laugh at my stunned response. I can’t tell you how many times in the years since Jeff has resurrected this phrase to gently tease me for being a bit slow to figure out an unexpected situation. Knowing me so well, he gets that surprises can make me deer-in-the-headlights stuck for a moment (or six). Yet instead of taking this recurrence as a character flaw to overlook, or as cause for annoyance or criticism, he has made it our running inside joke. Ever an alchemist, he transforms predicaments like these into micro-moments of love. Love that not only brings me swiftly back into action but also reinforces the safety of our bond. This silly example points to yet another thing that your intimates uniquely offer you: shared history. Earlier this year I took a late-night cab ride at a conference with my former office mate from graduate school, whom I’d just run into for the first time in nearly a decade. Although we’d lost touch for so long, within a matter of minutes, we were laughing uproariously in the back of that cab about old times, conjuring up our old goofy sayings and antics. In the short commute to our respective hotels we were transported back to the late 1980s as well, and to the fun times we’d had together. Wiping the tears of laughter away as we said our good-byes, we dreamed up ways we might reconnect again in the future. Your intimates offer you history, safety, trust, and openness in addition to the frequent opportunity to connect. The more trusting and open you are with someone else—and the more trusting and open that person is with you—the more points of connection each of you may find over which to share a laugh, or a common source of intrigue, serenity, or delight. What About Babies? Appreciating the deeply shared understanding and care that supports the micro-moments of love you feel with intimates can make you wonder whether newborns have the wherewithal to truly engage in love. While (most) parents love (most of) their newborns, are their newborns truly capable of loving them back? With their limited capacities, how can newborns muster up the selfless focus on others seemingly required by love? The trick is, they don’t need to muster at all. Under the right prenatal conditions, newborns arrive thirsty for connection with caring adults, trusting and open.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  She’d signed up at the town pool without a word to her parents, shoving the bottom half of the permission slip in front of Tawny one night, telling her it was for a class trip that didn’t cost anything. Tawny scribbled her signature without even reading it. Vix paid for the course out of her baby-sitting money and had enough left over to buy a neon yellow maillot, the latest in swimsuits according to Seventeen . And what good timing! True, her stroke was crude, clearly that of a beginner. And she wasn’t going to win any races. But the first time she marched out to the end of the dock, jumped into the water, and swam out to Lamb’s boat, the expression on Caitlin’s face made it all worthwhile. “I thought you didn’t know how to swim.” “You shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” Vix told her. “I was hardly jumping. This is your third summer here and until now I’ve never seen you in water above your knees.” “I wasn’t hot enough to swim until now.” Caitlin laughed. “I just love the way your mind works.” They prepared for the arrival of the Chicago Boys by installing a hook-and-eye lock on their bedroom door. But nothing could have prepared Vix for the day Gus took her by surprise in the pond, grabbing hold of her foot while she was swimming out to Lamb’s boat. She panicked, going under, coming up gagging and choking, flailing her arms. The second her feet touched bottom she ran for shore. Gus was right behind her. “Hey, Cough Drop,” he called, tossing her a towel. “You’ve got snot coming out of your nose.” Daniel stood by slapping his thigh as if she were performing a comedy routine for his pleasure. To get back at them she and Caitlin raided their room. Caitlin found a jock strap dangling from a hook on the back of their door. She sniffed it and proclaimed the owner this summer’s winner of the Dingleberry Award. They found a Victoria’s Secret catalog under a pile of dirty clothes, which only enraged Vix more. Imagine a sexy underwear catalog with her name on it! And one or both of the Chicago Boys had annotated the pages: best tits, best ass, best all-round-lay . “These guys don’t think about anything else!” Vix said. Not that she and Caitlin weren’t thinking about it, too. Their Power had turned into an itch that never went away. But at least it was hidden, not dangling between their legs for all the world to see. Caitlin taped a photo of Georgia O’Keeffe to the Chicago Boys’ bunk bed. Dear Baumer and Pustule, Try jerking off to a real woman for a change! After that Vix tried to ignore them, until the night they all wound up on the ticket line at the Strand to see Alien . While they were waiting a group from Camp Jab-berwocky passed, on their way to the Flying Horses.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  And it is the birth of love. His cock is my laser healer. Every point it probes inside me pierces my armor, the armor of self-protection, and the two fears—love and death—momentarily lose their grip and I experience a moment of immortality. #75 Vertical fucking. Upside down, legs over my head, knees by my ears, ass up, he perches over me like an acrobat and points his cock down into me. He thrusts downward to Earth’s center, and I am grounded. I point upward, outward to the sky, to the Milky Way, to heaven’s gate, and I see clearly between my legs his cock pumping like a piston. Angle is everything. We achieve a kind of gravity-free coordination, complete transcendence of the “fight”—the fight that is life—total trust allowing his deep, hard, long, and fast plunges entirely without self-protective gripping. Undulating . . . and great inner peace as I am rocked like a mermaid in the ocean. THE DOUBLE-SPHINCTER THEORY More mechanics: the inner anal sphincter is not within conscious control. It is regulated by the brain in the gut, the enteric nervous system, and is reflexive, opening on demand. The external sphincter, the internal’s sister sphincter, is, however, connected to the conscious brain, regulated by conscious control— witness the ability to grip and hold when necessary, when angry, when scared, when stressed. Unconscious internal sphincter, conscious external sphincter, only centimeters apart. Where else is one’s unconscious and conscious mind so intimately connected, so readily regulated, so easily probed? It is a psychological playground of the most intriguing potential. Put an ass on the couch and much is revealed. But the external sphincter did not begin with consciousness. For the first year or so of life it was unconscious, reacting in conjunction with the internal and letting go on demand—hence diapers. The brain and spinal cord at birth are not yet developed enough for conscious control. And then comes toilet training. When the brain is sophisticated enough and the parents encourage (or scream) enough, the little eighteen-month-old becomes conscious of that external anal sphincter and learns to grip it, control it, and not to let the shit fly at every urge. Shame is born. All this is to say that when I get fucked in the ass, I have learned to play with, and even reverse, that long-ago, probably traumatic coming to consciousness about gripping my ass, holding on to it, showing it to no one. After all, Freud hypothesized that one’s shit is the first gift one offers one’s parents—one’s first creative production.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  A gift. A state of grace. A dance of time and space. It resides inside the ego and outside the ego, a place of pure harmony, another body riding your ass like it was the last fuck on earth. Paradise is an experience that in real time may last only seconds. But in those immeasurable fragments, time stops, and only when time stops does death die and Paradise is entered. It is revealed in the spaces of time when the self is penetrated so deeply that it is pried wide open and love rushes in like an ocean through a porthole. And Paradise, once known, becomes the goal of every waking moment, its loss inherent in every waking moment. This is the burden of Paradise found. #262 He’s back! He was gone but now he’s back. A phone call and he’s over. Declarations. Tears. Hilarity. Clarity. In front of the blazing fire, insane kissing, sucking, and fucking. Insane. Completely insane. I am clear. Clearly blinded. I am his mother, sister, daughter, and friend. He is my father, brother, son, and friend. After, we watch the flames and he says, “See what we’ve done?” “What?” “We’ve created love out of sex . . . And we’ve only just begun.” “Yeah,” I say, “Maybe I’ll fuck you in the ass next.” He grins, pauses, and tells me to stand in front of him, turn around . . . and he bends me over . . . No dice with A-Man. REAR-ENDED Where do you go once in Paradise? What happens when Adam and Eve enter Eden? And eat the apple? I will tell you. Perfection cannot be maintained. With time, cracks appear in the walls of the Garden—and reality, insipid reality, slithers in with its insidious poison. The snake of knowledge. At some point well past the two-year mark, my relentless attempts to trust that A-Man was real and really in my life paid off. I had finally convinced myself that there was some form of unpredictable continuity to our connection. Before, I had only one focus: the need to believe in our existence. But once I finally accepted “reality,” the rest of the world soon followed. I tried to plug the leaks, ignore the signs, deny the chaos—but the world proved to be even stronger than my passion for A-Man. He was constantly leaving town for work; sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months. I found his absences increasingly difficult to manage. One time, I hired a pretty woman in a pink-sequined minidress to come to my house and pray for me, while I cried, for a hundred and fifty dollars. That’s how bad it was . Then he called. Prayer answered. All’s well, he says, except one thing. His cock won’t reach across four states into my ass. Things are funny and good again, for a few hours. And I don’t tell him just how difficult things are for me.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Taken as a whole, this truly “crotchless” design is perhaps the most elegant of the bunch, but I’m also fond of a rather amusing pair that has clearly been based on the design of a ballerina’s tutu. Sporting a split thong between the legs and a witty little tutulike black gauze ruffle around the waistband, they are quite adorable. But the very best of all, my favorite, is the Butterfly. I have these in both black and powder pink. These are the most expensive and it is clear why—they have the least fabric of all. These petite, delicate works of art best embody the great irony of this particular garment: they are classy crotchless panties. G-string style, the upper pubic area is designed and woven in the shape of a spread-eagled butterfly complete with wings sprinkled with beads and shimmering sequins. I just adore glitter, pomp, and circumstance around my pussy—I’d wear red velvet curtains with gold-tasseled tiebacks between my legs if I could. But the real pièce de nonrésistance in these particular panties lies in the two slender elastic straps that connect the lower wings of the butterfly to the center of the thin elastic waistband in the back. Properly placed, alongside the outer pussy lips, they pull up ever so slightly, visually accentuating from the front the beginning of one’s slit. But one day those two little straps slipped—ooh la la!—and demonstrated yet again that accident is the mother of invention. With those elastics placed securely inside, on either side of one’s clit and hood, the butterfly soars. Oh my, oh my, oh my—that feels good. And it looks absolutely beyond porn queen, like the summit of high art—like a Modigliani by Mondrian. To be so framed, positioned, and exposed and then have a lover find his target—well, I could come right now just thinking about it. It seems to me to be, at the very least, respectful to utilize these various crotchless darlings to aid and abet those men whose only object is my clit and whose only reward is my clit. HOUND SEX In those first years after my marriage, I discovered that the great antidote to bad fucking—or no fucking—is fantasy, and that fantasy’s greatest aide is the Pussy Hound: the man who lives to dive. Every woman should have at least one; it can mend years, even centuries, of patriarchal ramming. Thank heaven, then, that women’s liberation has fostered what appears to be an entire generation of this particular man: the male masochist who can now masquerade, legitimately, as the feminist man, the male lesbian. They can be spotted on street corners everywhere.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I wanted to raise it to my own face - and was about to, I think, when the clatter of the hall pierced my brain at last, and made me look about me and see the inquisitive, indulgent looks that were turned my way, and the nods and the chuckles and the winks that met my up-turned gaze. I reddened, and shrank back into the shadows of the box. With my back turned to the bank of prying eyes I slipped the rose into the belt of my dress, and pulled on my gloves. My heart, which had begun to pound when Miss Butler had stepped towards me across the stage, was still beating painfully hard; but as I left my box and made my way towards the crowded foyer and the street beyond, it began to feel light, and glad, and I began to want to smile. I had to place a hand before my lips so as not to appear an idiot, smiling to myself as if at nothing. Just as I was about to step into the street, I heard my name called. I turned, and saw Tony, crossing the lobby with his arm raised to catch my eye. It was a relief to have a friend, at last, to smile at. I took the hand away, and grinned like a monkey. ‘Hey, hey,’ he said breathlessly when he reached my side, ‘someone’s merry, and I know why! How come girls never look so gay as that, when I give them roses?’ I blushed again, and returned my fingers to my lips, but said nothing. Tony smirked. ‘I’ve got a message for you,’ he said then. ‘Someone to see you.’ I raised my eyebrows; I thought perhaps Alice or Freddy were here, come to meet me. Tony’s smirk broadened. ‘Miss Butler,’ he said, ‘would like a word.’ My own grin faded at once. ‘A word?’ I said. ‘Miss Butler? With me?’ ‘That’s right. She asked Ike, the fly-man, who was the girl that sat in the box every night, on her own, and Ike said you was a pal of mine, and to ask me. So she did. And I told her. And now she wants to see you.’ ‘What for? Oh, Tony, what on earth for? What did you tell her?’ I caught hold of his arm and gripped it hard. ‘Nothing, except the truth -’ I gave his arm a twist. The truth was terrible. I didn’t want her to know about the shivering and the whispering, the flame and the streaming light. Tony prised my fingers from his sleeve, and held my hand. ‘Just that you like her,’ he said simply. ‘Now will you come along, or what?’ I did not know what to say.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  They shared stories of breakups and other failures. He encouraged them to notice how feeling down, just by itself, becomes self-defeating, because it zaps their energy and confidence. He also asked them to notice that feeling good can sometimes escape awareness altogether, but that these good feelings could do quite a lot for them. Celebrating the good feelings that they were learning to create in the classroom—by listening to and supporting their classmates—could renew their energy, give them confidence, and build the resources they needed to face tough math problems. Together as a class, they drew on this discussion of emotions to create extended analogies to tough situations in sports. They talked, for instance, about how a baseball player, up at bat in the bottom of the ninth with the tying run on second base, needs to have confidence and to be able to visualize his own success and give it his all. He told them that math class was just like that, that they’d need to marshal up their own resources and confidence to persevere and give each step of a math problem their all. One by one, Jeremy helped his students tie this particular math course to what they wanted to do in life. He helped Tisha see how, as a nurse, she’d need math to measure blood pressure or dispense a particular dosage of medicine. “She was like, ‘You need math for that?’ and I said, ‘Yeah! You think you are just going to stick someone with a needle?’” With Ty, Jeremy talked about engineering, tire pressure, and rotations per minute and speed, and emphasized all the math that these ideas involved. “He was like ‘Really? I need math? I didn’t know any of this....’ ” Jeremy went on to tell me, “I think that was the big key . . . that we tied the course to something positive and we even talked about how they felt. Like, does it make you happy when you think about your career or what you want to do? And they were like, ‘Yeah!’ Well, then math should make you happy too because it is going to get you there!” After days and weeks of “conversating,” as they called it, these twelve lowest-achieving students bonded in Jeremy’s math class. Along the way, he encouraged them to celebrate one another by sharing what they found interesting in one another’s stories. He also encouraged them to help each other through difficult steps on math problems and cheer on one another’s successes, however small. Then, instead of mumbles, silence, and no eye contact, “if Tisha got something right, they would shout ‘You go, girl!’” and eventually “the kids were celebrating one another’s success without me, and that was huge.” He described the classroom now as “full of life.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Marriage was regarded in the church from the beginning as a sacred union of body and soul for the propagation of civil society, and the kingdom of God, for the exercise of virtue and the promotion of happiness. It was clothed with a sacramental or semi-sacramental character on the basis of Paul’s comparison of the marriage union with the relation of Christ to his church.642 It was in its nature indissoluble except in case of adultery, and this crime was charged not only to the woman, but to the man as even the more guilty party, and to every extra-connubial carnal connection. Thus the wife was equally protected against the wrongs of the husband, and chastity was made the general law of the family life. We have a few descriptions of Christian homes from the ante-Nicene age, one from an eminent Greek father, another from a married presbyter of the Latin church. Clement of Alexandria enjoins upon Christian married persons united prayer and reading of the Scriptures,643 as a daily morning exercise, and very beautifully says: "The mother is the glory of her children, the wife is the glory of her husband, both are the glory of the wife, God is the glory of all together."644 Tertullian, at the close of the book which he wrote to his wife, draws the following graphic picture, which, though somewhat idealized, could be produced only from the moral spirit of the gospel and actual experience:645 "How can I paint the happiness of a marriage which the church ratifies, the oblation (the celebration of the communion) confirms, the benediction seals, angels announce, the Father declares valid. Even upon earth, indeed, sons do not legitimately marry without the consent of their fathers. What a union of two believers—one hope, one vow, one discipline, and one worship! They are brother and sister, two fellow-servants, one spirit and one flesh. Where there is one flesh, there is also one spirit. They pray together, fast together, instruct, exhort, and support each other. They go together to the church of God, and to the table of the Lord. They share each other’s tribulation, persecution, and revival. Neither conceals anything from the other; neither avoids, neither annoys the other. They delight to visit the sick, supply the needy, give alms without constraint, and in daily zeal lay their offerings before the altar without scruple or hindrance. They do not need to keep the sign of the cross hidden, nor to express slyly their Christian joy, nor to suppress the blessing. Psalms and hymns they sing together, and they vie with each other in singing to God. Christ rejoices when he sees and hears this. He gives them his peace. Where two are together in his name, there is he; and where he is, there the evil one cannot come."