Love

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 The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  It is my altruism, not my narcissism, that fosters this fantasy. After all, a man can acquire such wisdom at the source of a woman’s orgasm: how to slow down, speed up, be consistent, be nonlinear, be persistent, be unpredictable, be patient, be outrageous, be generous, be witty. There is, in fact, nothing of value, philosophically and practically, that he can’t learn if he can turn the delta of Venus into the site of Vesuvius. Most men will lick and suck and drink a pussy—and I’m not complaining. But it is the rare man who does so with his whole consciousness poised on his tongue. It is this awareness that will move a woman; when her consciousness—on her clit—encounters his, orgasm marks their meeting. Ultimately, it is here—or rather, down there—that a man will learn how to be a winner or a loser, with women as in life. TRINITY If old-fashioned fucking-for-two remained a minefield for me, fucking-for-three continued to be a delight. The Pre-Raphaelite redhead plotted reunions, and we three got together every month or so with unplanned regularity for over a year. I returned to my New Year’s Eve lovers again and again, hungry for love and freedom—a previously impossible duet in my experience. Says Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same . . . then you will enter the kingdom. One day, I ventured down on the Pre-Raphaelite. First time. Terrified. Curious. I wanted to see her pleasure in order to know my own. She was a genuine redhead. Eating pussy when you are a heterosexual woman is overwhelming. To confront a pussy that close for the first time—you can’t ever get that close, at that angle, to your own—is like looking narcissism in the face with a resounding Yes! Profound. Wet. It can sometimes be so hard to be oneself in one’s own sex life. With another woman, a woman’s identity receives a brutal jolt: she is me, I am her, her pleasure is mine, mine is hers. The source, the center, the origin of the human race becomes your only view. I bonded with my own sex and learned to love myself. I also developed a new compassion for the male divers. A pussy is a wild and watery landscape of hills and valleys and ravines and mighty holes that suck one in like quicksand. Once in, you cannot escape. Diving is an act of bravery. The redhead, however, demonstrated less hesitancy, and ate me like a woman who knows how. Naughty, considerate, and relentless. Her fingers felt like tongues, her mouth like a baby’s, sucking. I resist men’s fingers. Too rough, too big, too fast. My shield goes up, my clit hides. My orgasms with her were long, open, and free.

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

  Loving is a skill. It takes practice. When you set the goal of learning to love yourself, you’ll find ever-present opportunities to practice this new skill, because you’re never further than arm’s reach, or perhaps better said, heart’s reach. Just like all forms of positivity resonance, however, self-love first requires safety and connection. Beating yourself up with the continual harshness of self-criticism is no way to make yourself feel safe in your own company. Likewise, if your self-assessments are unflappably sunny, unhinged from reality, or otherwise blind to your ingrained bad habits, you can hardly feel safe either. A true friend, after all, is the one who tells you the truth. He or she affirms you realistically and often, and yet does not abandon you or grow silent when a negative assessment is prudent. Creating a sense of safety within your own skin is just the same. To access self-love, disengage from harshness in your self-talk, but not from reality. Affirm your positive qualities, but refrain from delusion and self-deception. Be your own compassionate truth-teller. Love’s second precondition is connection. This is no less true for self-love than for positivity resonance with others. Truly loving yourself requires that you slow down enough to truly meet yourself heart to heart, letting the heart of your I resonate with the heart of your me. Allow time to reflect on your inherent strivings for goodness. Tune in to the messages your body sends you. You can’t simply rush from one activity to the next, attending forever outward, and expect to fall into self-love. Indeed, you might let rushing about serve as your cue to switch gears. Self-love, we’ve seen, is not the same as having an inflated, narcissistic view of yourself or high self-esteem. These often hinge on good outcomes, making you rigidly guard against negative feedback. When bad news crashes through, it sends you into a free fall. Self-love, by contrast, is steadier, more peaceful. This inherent calm arises because it’s not predicated on good outcomes. You can learn to be a friend to yourself through thick and thin, through good times and bad. Indeed, it’s in the toughest times that harboring compassion toward yourself makes the biggest difference. Practice standing by your own side during hard times, with openness and goodwill, and you’ll appreciate the steady security self-love offers you. It safeguards you from plunging into despair. Self-love buys you even more. It’s the currency in which all other forms of positivity resonance trade. When your reserves of self-love are low, you can scarcely meet the gaze of others, seeing yourself as either beneath or above them. A chasm forms between you and others that slashes your odds of forging true connections. Yet when you practice and bank self-love, you become rich with emotional reserves. You’re more able to recognize sources of goodness in others, to see and fulfill others’ yearnings to connect, no matter their circumstances. The next chapter describes how to do just that. CHAPTER 7

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

  What the brain images show is that, compared to imagining neutral, nonpainful situations, imagining yourself in these painful situations lights up the well-known network of brain areas associated with pain processing, including the insula, that area linked with conscious feeling states. When you are later asked to imagine these same painful events happening to a loved one—your spouse, your best friend, or your child, for instance—these same brain areas light up. By and large, then, your loved one’s pain is your pain. By contrast, when you imagine these painful events happening to complete strangers, a different pattern of activation emerges altogether, one that shows little activation in the insula and more activation in areas linked with distinguishing and distancing yourself from others, and actively inhibiting or regulating emotions, as if to prevent their pain from becoming your pain. At the level of brain activity during imagined pain, you and your beloved are virtually indistinguishable. Whereas the Taipei research team defined love to be a lasting loving relationship (what, for clarity’s sake, I call a bond), the work from Hasson’s team at Princeton tells me that neural synchrony and overlap can also unfold between you and a complete stranger—if you let it. Positivity resonance between brains, as it turns out, requires only connection, not the intimacy or shared history that comes with a special bond. Even so, the distinctions revealed in the Taipei study, between imagining your loved one’s pain and imagining a stranger’s pain, underscore that stifled emotions and guarded personal boundaries, while at times necessary and fully appropriate, can also function as obstacles to positivity resonance. As we’ll see in the next section, your attunement to various opportunities for positive connection with others is supported not just by neural synchrony, but by the hormone oxytocin as well. Biochemistries in Love Oxytocin, which is nicknamed by some the “cuddle hormone” or the “love hormone,” is actually more properly identified as a neuropeptide because it acts not just within your body but also within your brain. Oxytocin has long been known to play a key role in social bonding and attachment. Clear evidence of this first emerged from experiments with a monogamous breed of prairie voles: Oxytocin, when dripped into one animal’s brain in the presence of the opposite sex, creates in that animal a long-lasting preference to remain together with the other, cuddled up side by side, behavior taken as evidence that oxytocin sparked the formation of a powerful social bond between them.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  He was the one who looked beautiful to me when we fucked, the others all looked like men with contorted faces—best not to look. He didn’t grunt, or groan, or squeak during sex. He beamed and glowed, eyes wide open, shaking his head, saying, “Wow! Wow!” and then he’d fuck me some more. He was the thirty-third man, and the only one I really liked to fuck. The others were just men and I allowed it. Resentfully. Most men fuck in and out, in and out, in and out, on and on. But he fucked like he was actually going somewhere. And he was. He was the only one who took time to be friends with my cat. The others regarded my little fur ball as a hindrance, an obstacle, even a threat. They just didn’t get it: love me, love my pussy. He was my blood. He was the one who never got real. He was the one I never conquered. He was one I had the most fun with. He had the only cock I worshiped. He was the one with whom I couldn’t tell whose pleasure gave me more pleasure. With the others my pleasure was the only pleasure. He was the guy who could fuck for three hours . . . and still not come. He was the one who showed me real physical joy. The others just made me come. With him I came to . . . the Kingdom. He was sweet-sweet-sweet. He was the one who oozed love. Through his fingertips, his movement, his skin, and his cock. He gave me nothing outside of bed. In bed he gave me everything that I, as a woman, could ever desire. He fucked like a rolling ocean. I didn’t have those powerful but so brief and geographically specific outward climaxes with him, it was the building of an inward tidal wave that flooded my body, my brain, and then spilled into my soul. He never, unlike the others, asked me to be “his”—but I was. He was the one who treated me like his—in bed. All the others treated me like theirs out of bed, but in bed I could smell their fear. With him sex was about transcendence, with the others power. He swooped in and out of my pussy, my ass, my life. Others smothered, wishing, foolishly, to colonize what they coveted. Fucking him was like breathing in wide open space. If I never loved again I would die having known a big, big love. There was always that moment when he fucked me when all my thoughts ceased and turned to God: I was entering His territory. He didn’t please me. He possessed me. He, you see, was the one I really loved. Having now imagined its demise, I mustered the courage to proceed with the affair. #101

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

  Witness how you experience resistance and even lean in toward it. I can guarantee there’s more to learn by leaning in than from turning away. When you avoid a challenge like this, you forfeit opportunities for experiential learning that yields wisdom. Yet when you approach these areas of resistance, your return on this investment is better awareness and understanding, both of yourself and of love. Knowing that it can be all too easy to zoom past using yourself as your target as you begin your LKM practice, you might decide up front that you’ll focus exclusively on yourself for several weeks. Even mark off this time on your calendar. This is in fact how LKM has been taught to the participants in my team’s research studies. The very first guided meditation our study participants are offered focuses exclusively on the self, and they are instructed to stay working with this particular meditation daily, for the first two weeks. This is not self-indulgence. Rather, many LKM teachers find that exploration of self-love provides a solid foundation from which to later expand love’s reach. You can use this reasoning if you need to justify this level of self-focus to yourself: Self-focus has been part of LKM practice for millennia, and it will help you deepen your skills for extending your experiences of love to many, many others. You can start in small ways simply by becoming aware of your body. Your body has its own pace, your mind another. Simply attending to your body coaxes you to slow down. Once you tune in to your physical sensations, you might discover a need to shift positions, stretch, or give yourself a few minutes of massage. Doing so is a form of self-love that instantly creates more comfort and ease. Just as eye contact is a key channel for making a connection with another person, awareness of your own body sensations is a key channel for self-love. It’s the platform from which you can offer yourself compassionate attention. Try This Meditation Practice: Self-Love Find a comfortable place to sit where you won’t be disturbed. If you’re in a chair, make your way to the back of the chair so that your lower back is well supported. Ground both of your feet flat on the floor. Sit upright, with your spine, neck, and the crown of your head pulled skyward. Gently pull your shoulder blades backward and downward, raising your rib cage slightly. These postural shifts will create a true physical openness for your heart, an openness consistent with the positive emotions you aim to cultivate. Gently lower your gaze to reduce visual distractions. If you’re comfortable, close your eyes. Begin by taking two or three deep breaths, and bring your awareness to your heart. Visualize how each in-breath affects your heart physically.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Jordan —susurro contra su piel. No sé por qué digo su nombre, pero creo que tengo miedo de que no esté realmente aquí y todo esto sea un sueño. Sus dedos se enredan en mi cabello, y me deslizo sobre ella. Alejando el sudor de su frente, la miro fijamente, observando sus mejillas sonrojadas y sus ojos brillantes, su pequeña camisa se ha levantado, exponiendo sus hermosos pechos y pezones. Bajo, tomando uno en mi boca, chupando y arrastrándolo como a su clítoris. Gime y sus manos regresan para envolverse alrededor de mi nuca. Cambio al otro, arrastrando una mano por su cuerpo e intentando asimilarla tanto como pueda. Sé que todo lo que hacemos está mal, y no sé cómo voy a explicar esto a alguien, pero aquí mismo —en este momento— no quiero estar en ningún otro lado. Ojalá pudiera morir tan feliz como lo estoy ahora. Aquí, en la oscuridad de la noche, en esta habitación oscura, detrás de una puerta cerrada, no necesitamos explicarle nada a nadie. Porque solo este momento, es nuestro. Me levanto de la cama y me pongo de pie, desabrochando mi cinturón y abriendo mis jeans. Busco en la mesita de noche y saco un condón de la caja, volviendo a levantarme y mirándola. Tiene las piernas cerradas, una rodilla ligeramente arqueada y las manos a los costados, frotando el edredón mientras me mira. —¿Estás segura de esto? —le pregunto. Asiente. Me quito las botas y el resto de la ropa, poniéndome de pie otra vez. Al abrir el paquete, la miro, pero sus ojos se han reducido a otra cosa, su respiración se hace cada vez más superficial. Siento una sonrisa curvar las comisuras de mis labios, preguntándome cuántas otras palabras adultas sabe. Pero no tengo la oportunidad de preguntar. Se sienta, balanceando sus piernas sobre el borde de la cama, y va por mi polla, llevándosela a la boca. Gimo y jadeo al mismo tiempo, su lengua está húmeda y caliente cuando se retira y chupa la punta. —Jordan, por favor. —Agarro la parte posterior de su cabello, tratando de alejarla suavemente—. Eso me pondrá al borde, y quiero que te corras de nuevo. Empujándola hacia atrás en la cama, me poso sobre ella, derritiéndome en su boca y besándola profundamente. Me acurruco entre sus piernas, y dobla sus rodillas mientras desliza sus uñas por mi espalda. Deslizando mi mano debajo de su cuerpo, agarro su culo y presiono nuestros cuerpos, el mundo gira detrás de mis ojos cerrados. Tenerla debajo de mí, piel sobre piel... mi polla está tan dura que no puedo soportarlo. Esto es mío. Recostándome sobre mis talones, me coloco el condón, sin apartar la vista de ella. —Estoy un poco asustada —dice, la preocupación arrugando su frente. Me detengo, tratando de no apretar el puño alrededor de mi polla con demasiada fuerza. ¿Asustada? —¿Qué pasa si hago demasiado ruido? —susurra.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had friends and cousins, as any girl must have who grows up in a small town in a large, old family. I had my sister Alice - my dearest friend of all - with whom I shared a bedroom and a bed, and who heard all my secrets, and told me all of hers. I even had a kind of beau: a boy named Freddy, who worked a dredging smack beside my brother Davy and my Uncle Joe on Whitstable Bay. And last of all I had a fondness - you might say, a kind of passion - for the music hall; and more particularly for music-hall songs and the singing of them. If you have visited Whitstable you will know that this was a rather inconvenient passion, for the town has neither music hall nor theatre - only a solitary lamp-post before the Duke of Cumberland Hotel, where minstrel troupes occasionally sing, and the Punch-and-Judy man, in August, sets his booth. But Whitstable is only fifteen minutes away by train from Canterbury; and here there was a music hall - the Canterbury Palace of Varieties - where the shows were three hours long, and the tickets cost sixpence, and the acts were the best to be seen, they said, in all of Kent. The Palace was a small and, I suspect, a rather shabby theatre ; but when I see it in my memories I see it still with my oyster-girl’s eyes - I see the mirror-glass which lined the walls, the crimson plush upon the seats, the plaster cupids, painted gold, which swooped above the curtain. Like our oyster-house, it had its own particular scent - the scent, I know now, of music halls everywhere - the scent of wood and grease-paint and spilling beer, of gas and of tobacco and of hair-oil, all combined. It was a scent which as a girl I loved uncritically; later I heard it described, by theatre managers and artistes, as the smell of laughter, the very odour of applause. Later still I came to know it as the essence not of pleasure, but of grief. That, however, is to get ahead of my story. I was more intimate than most girls with the colours and scents of the Canterbury Palace - in the period, at least, of which I am thinking, that final summer in my father’s house, when I became eighteen - because Alice had a beau who worked there, a boy named Tony Reeves, who got us seats at knock-down prices or for free.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  The sex, the ass-fucking, that is the only constant. We never don’t fuck. We are not monogamous. Never have been and never will be. Neither of us has ever asked for it and neither of us has ever offered it. Offering it is the only way it could happen—neither of us would intrude on the other’s free choice. Free choice is at the core of what is hot between us. The subject has been discussed only to establish what is mutually understood. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is the basic policy. He says, “I don’t need to know.” He pays attention to what is, not what isn’t. Having never done this before, I thought about it plenty. If one has sex with someone other than the Beloved, what happens? Does one risk diminishing one’s affection for the Beloved? Does it contaminate the love? Or does it merely confirm the love in every way, the contrast illuminating the beauty of the Beloved yet again, in yet another way, from yet another angle. And this gift to each other—the freedom to allow for other experiences—only enhances the love. Love without chains is love. The experience of being truly free, without recrimination, without judgment, to choose at any time, on any day, this one or that one, only reinforces love of the Beloved, reinforces the choice of the Beloved as the Beloved. Not being monogamous, and exercising that option, secures the great love—always being tested, it is confirmed, strengthened, reshaped, redefined. If a man can possess a woman sexually—really possess—he won’t need to control her ideas, her opinions, her clothes, her friends, even her other lovers. In my experience of many lovers, only he has truly possessed me and so set me free. He fucks my ass for hours with a dick an inch too big for the job: that is possession. After a round like that he doesn’t need to infiltrate my life, my psyche, my time, or my wardrobe, because he has infiltrated the core of my being—the rest is just peripheral decoration. Domination—total and complete domination of my being—that is where I find freedom . I assumed from the beginning of our affair that he was probably fucking this other woman here or there or somewhere. And he knew that I knew. This was not the Pre-Raphaelite redhead but a pretty, quiet brunette who also exercised at the gym. I was even turned on by the power I assumed he had over her. I knew about her, but she didn’t know about me, and this worked just fine. I even had my own fantasies about her. About seducing her myself, about him telling her to eat my pussy while he watched. I ran into her on occasion at the gym and we were always friendly; she seemed like a nice woman, self-effacing.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Being sodomized now, by choice, reconciles this injury with a scenario of the dominant male and the obedient little girl. Instead of rejection and criticism, I am told, “Good girl, good girl.” The nastier I am and the better I suck his cock, the better I am, until I’m the goodest little girl in the world. I am finally loved. The relief it brings me is profound. I, with my total submission, in fact wield a great healing power: the more I submit the more excited he gets, until I enter the deepest phase of surrender and he comes. He only comes when I’ve given it up. It takes a lot of surrender, discipline, and love to let a man fuck your ass hard enough, long enough, deep enough, and fast enough to shoot. His orgasm is my victory over my lesser self, over the pain of my anger. It fills the hole; I’m finally whole. #162 Owwww! My dad just left after a lovely friendly visit of a week, and three hours later I was doubled over in literal gut-wrenching pain lasting a solid twenty-four hours. Like I’d been punched in the stomach, like I’d rewound in one hour 161 unwinding ass fucks. So the only logical thing to do was go for #162. Jesus, that hurt. New levels of tolerance, new levels of release, new levels of discipline. As he entered I thought, not so painful, I’m already healed by being naked with my ass on display. I was wrong. By the time he got in five inches and then some, he was pushing into the fist in my gut and rolfing me from the inside. It hurt like hell but I didn’t say a word. I just maintained the pain level just past bearable and adored the challenge all the while thinking, Girl, you really are Daddy’s little masochist. DEVOTION A-Man does not require my devotion, he says, but he has it anyway. Sometimes I give up so much power to him, give up even more than I have, and this leaves me vulnerable just beyond my own capacity to endure. The best antidote for this is not biting the bullet and suffering like some deeply ethical woman—I have, at least, matured beyond that. No, the antidote is another guy. It’s called “The Two-Guy Solution.” Every woman should subscribe when necessary. Many already do without admitting to it. As one friend put it, “If you’re having trouble with one man, just call another man.” For me, A-Man with the occasional Hound form the ideal combination. Someone needs to give to me as I give to him—power, that is. While it is my greatest desire to surrender to him, with anyone else I am dominant. I never fuck anyone else, and no one else goes in my ass with their cock.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Me sonríe, inclina su cabeza juguetonamente, y todavía veo a esa chica arrastrándose por el suelo del cine cada vez que la miro. Me tenía incluso entonces. —Te amo —digo. Bajando, se cierne sobre mí, mirándome a los ojos mientras mi mano va a su pecho. —Oh, espera. —Se incorpora y se inclina para apagar la vela. —No, déjala encendida —gimo, rodando mis caderas contra ella—. Quiero verte. Baja la mirada hacia mí. —¿Bloqueaste la puerta? Hago una mueca. —Mierda. ¿Por qué olvidé eso? Solo he tenido hijos durante la mitad de mi vida. —No podemos dejar que echen un vistazo, ¿no es así? —regaña, pero me sonríe. Inclinándose de nuevo, cierra los ojos, hace una pausa momentánea, pensando, y luego los abre de nuevo, soplando la vela suavemente. La habitación se oscurece excepto por la luz de luna atravesando la lluvia brillando en la pared de nuestro dormitorio, y veo su contorno bajar de nuevo sobre mí. Aprieto sus caderas, sintiéndola frotarse contra mí. —¿Alguna vez vas a decirme lo que deseas? —pregunto. Me besa, susurrando contra mis labios: —Trae mala suerte decirlo. Se mueve a mi cuello, arqueo mi cabeza y cierro los ojos, dejándola entrar. —Pero lo diré —continúa, mordisqueando mi mandíbula—. Siempre deseo la misma cosa, y cada día se vuelve realidad. Penélope Douglas es una escritora y profesora de Las Vegas. Nacida en Dubuque, Iowa, es la mayor de cinco hermanos. Penélope asistió a la Universidad del Norte de Iowa, obteniendo una licenciatura en Administración Pública, porque su padre le dijo: “¡Obtén el maldito grado!” Luego obtuvo una maestría en Ciencias de la Educación de la Universidad de Loyola en Nueva Orleans, porque odiaba la administración pública. Una noche, se emborrachó y le dijo al guardia de seguridad del bar donde trabajaba (sí, estaba borracha en el trabajo) que su hijo era sexy, y tres años después se casó. Con el hijo, no el gorila. Han desovado, pero solo una vez. Una hija llamada Aydan. Penélope ama los dulces, el programa Sons of Anarchy, y va de compras a Target casi a diario. Document Outline 54647a3b1ebfee6c21bab56a646d0e88c4d090426fd93b6fc55b52785a800059.pdf 8f43ac04dd9f1bcaa00484355870d6e5693723eb65396a69187691d16f62045c.pdf 54647a3b1ebfee6c21bab56a646d0e88c4d090426fd93b6fc55b52785a800059.pdf

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  For the first time in my life I understood that lovers could be so foolish as to entwine their initials together. I felt like carving his name on the bark of trees, that the birds seeing it might twitter it from morn till eventide; that the breeze might lisp it to the rustling leaves of the forest. I wished to write it on the shingle of the beach, that the ocean itself might know of my love for him, and murmur it everlastingly." "Still I had thought that on the morrow—the intoxication passed—you would have shuddered at the thought of having a man for a lover?" "Why? Had I committed a crime against nature when my own nature found peace and happiness thereby? If I was thus, surely it was the fault of my blood, not myself. Who had planted nettles in my garden? Not I. They had grown there unawares, from my very childhood. I began to feel their carnal stings long before I could understand what conclusion they imported. When I had tried to bridle my lust, was it my fault if the scale of reason was far too light to balance that of sensuality? Was I to blame if I could not argue down my raging motion? Fate, Iago-like, had clearly shewed me that if I would damn myself, I could do so in a more delicate way than drowning. I yielded to my destiny, and encompassed my joy. "Withal, I never said with Iago,—'Virtue, a fig!' No, virtue is the sweet flavour of the peach: vice, the tiny droplet of prussic-acid—its delicious savour. Life, without either, would be sapidless." "Still, not having, like most of us, been inured to sodomy from your school-days, I should have thought that you would have been loath to have yielded your body to another man's pleasure." "Loath? Ask the virgin if she regrets having given up her maidenhood to the lover she dotes on, and who fully returns her love? She has lost a treasure that all the wealth of Golconda cannot buy again; she is no longer what the world calls a pure, spotless, immaculate lily, and not having had the serpent's guile in her, society—the lilies—will brand her with an infamous name; profligates will leer at her, the pure will turn away in scorn. Still, does the girl regret having yielded her body for love—the only thing worth living for? No. Well, no more did I. Let 'clay-cold heads and lukewarm hearts' scourge me with their wrath if they will. "On the morrow, when we met again, all traces of fatigue had passed away. We rushed into each other's arms and smothered ourselves with kisses, for nothing is more an incentive to love than a short separation.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Despite all my recollections of his cruelty, all my thoughts upon his disinclinations toward women, upon the depravity of his tastes, upon the gulf which separated us morally, nothing in the world was able to extinguish this nascent passion, and had the Count called upon me to lay down my life, I would have sacrificed it for him a thousand times over. He was far from suspecting my sentiments... he was far, the ungrateful one, from divining the cause of the tears I shed every day; nevertheless, it was out of the question for him to be in doubt of my eagerness to fly to do his every bidding, to please him in every possible way, it could not have been he did not glimpse, did not have some inkling of my attentions; doubtless, because they were instinctive, they were also mindless, and went to the point of serving his errors, of serving them as far as decency permitted, and always of hiding them from his aunt. This behavior had in some sort won me his confidence, and all that came from him was so precious to me, I was so blinded by the little his heart offered me, that I sometimes had the weakness to believe he was not indifferent to me. But how promptly his excessive disorders disabused me: they were such that even his health was affected. I several times took the liberty to represent to him the dangers of his conduct, he would hear me out patiently, then end by telling me that one does not break oneself of the vice he cherished. Chapter 12 "Ah, Therese!" he exclaimed one day, full of enthusiasm, "if only you knew this fantasy's charms, if only you could understand what one experiences from the sweet illusion of being no more than a woman! incredible inconsistency I one abhors that sex, yet one wishes to imitate it! Ah! how sweet it is to succeed, Therese, how delicious it is to be a slut to everyone who would have to do with you and carrying delirium and prostitution to their ultimate period, successively, in the very same day, to be the mistress of a porter, a marquis, a valet, a friar, to be the beloved of each one after the other, caressed, envied, menaced, beaten, sometimes victorious in their arms, sometimes a victim and at their feet, melting them with caresses, reanimating them with excesses.... Oh no, Therese, you do not understand what is this pleasure for a mind constructed like mine....

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  But you must be ready for it. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL I dry the freshly washed K-Y tubes on my bath towel and put them back in the bedside drawer. I turn off the bathwater and strip into the wet heat. Knees drawn up, I fill my pussy with water and shoot it out like an underwater fountain. I watch the ripples in the water, sometimes lifting my hips so I can watch the fountain above water. After soaking, soaping, and shaving, I pull the plug, crouch on two feet, and with a slightly soaped middle finger reach gently into my ass and give it a good warm water bath. You could eat out of my ass, and on my ass; it’s that clean. Out of the tub I dry, cream, and powder my entire body—calves, thighs, ass, stomach, arms, neck, breasts—brush my teeth and hair, perfume my wrists and neck, and stain my lips red with a liquid rose potion. I prepare the bedroom, clearing all books, papers, magazines, and remotes off the bed and piling the pillows at one end. From the closet I retrieve Pink Square, a rectangular pillow I bought because I liked its fleur-de-lis pattern. It doesn’t match the colors of the other pillows, but it fits perfectly under my hips, raising them to cock height. It is one of A-Man’s favorite amenities and once, when I forgot to put it on the bed, there was a moment when I saw him scanning the bedroom, perturbed: “Where’s Pink Square?” I go in my closet and plan an outfit. Sometimes a black bra and thong, or, occasionally, crotchless panties when I want to be a slut. Applied slutdom doesn’t do much for A-Man, though, he just smiles indulgently when he sees those dainty crotchless wonders. But they don’t turn him off, either. A long silk or velvet gown, elegant but easily raised, is the most frequent choice. If I’m feeling like more exposure, I’ll choose high, tight shorts and a skimpy top. Lady or slut, I wear high-heeled mules and keep them on throughout—or, at least, I try to. The sound of those shoes hitting the floor, pounded off me, one by one, is his sign that things are going well, that now we’re rocking, that now she’s lost control of her facade, her fears, even her shoes. It’s usually when he’s deep in my ass that I can’t cling any longer to those heels. I lay out my outfit on the bed and fill a couple of water bottles and place them around the room and open him a cold beer. I draw the curtains and light candles—at least ten of them. Frankincense adds to the smoke, the chapel is prepared for his confession—and my baptism. I turn off the phone machine and turn on the music.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Here the suit - which I had, indeed, grown rather used to while strolling in it for Walter - began to feel strange again. When Kitty undressed I pulled her to me; and it was lewd to feel her naked hip come pressing in between my trousered legs. She ran her hand once, very lightly, over my buttons, until I began to shake with the wanting of her. Then she drew the suit from me entirely and we lay together, naked as shadows beneath the counterpane; and then she touched me again. We lay until the front door slammed, and we heard Mrs Dendy’s cough, and Tootsie laughing on the stair. Then Kitty said we should rise, and dress, or the others might wonder; and for the second time that day I lay and watched her wash, and pull on stockings and a skirt, through lazy eyes. As I did so, I put a hand to my breast. There was a dull movement there, a kind of pulling or folding, or melting, exactly as if my chest were the hot, soft wall of a candle, falling in upon a burning wick. I gave a sigh. Kitty heard, and saw my stricken face, and came to me; then she moved my hand away and placed her lips, very softly, over my heart. I was eighteen, and knew nothing. I thought, at that moment, that I would die of love for her. We did not see Walter, and there was no more talk about his plan to put me on the stage at Kitty’s side, until two evenings later, when he arrived at Mrs Dendy’s with a parcel, marked Nan Astley. It was the last night of the year: he had come to supper, and to stay to hear the chimes of midnight with us. When at last they came - struck out upon the bells of Brixton church - he raised his glass. ‘To Kitty and Nan!’ he cried. He gazed at me, and then - more lingeringly - at Kitty. ‘To their new partnership, that will bring fame and fortune to us all in 1889, and ever after!’ We were at the parlour-table with Ma Dendy and the Professor, and now we joined our voices with his, and took up his toast; but Kitty and I exchanged one swift, secret glance, and I thought - with a little thrill of pleasure and triumph that I couldn’t quite suppress — poor man! how could he know what we were really celebrating? Only now did Walter present me with his package, and smile to see me open it. But I knew already what it would hold: a suit, a stage suit of serge and velvet, cut to my size to the pattern of one of Kitty’s - but blue to match my eyes, where hers was brown. I held it up against me, and Walter nodded. ‘Now that,’ he said, ‘will make all the difference.

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

  In fact, a recent attempt to pinpoint the most essential feature of love—a feature that spans all varieties of love, from romantic to parental to platonic—identifies such care and concern, expressed abstractly as your “investment in the well-being of another, for his or her own sake,” as an essential, always-present fingerprint of love. Love’s characteristic care and concern drive you to attend more closely to other people’s needs and help you vigilantly take in and evaluate incoming information so that you can protect them from harm. Love also leaves you with more positive automatic reactions to the persons with whom you’ve shared micro-moments of positivity resonance the next time you meet, an implicit goodwill that paves the way for future experiences of positivity resonance with them. Indeed, studies show that as you learn to cultivate micro-moments of love more readily, your everyday interactions with friends and coworkers become more lighthearted and enjoyable. Simply put, love changes your mind. Doing If, like me, you are a product of Western culture, odds are you tend to see the mind and body as rather separate. “Thinking” seems like one thing, and “doing” quite another. Yet this sharp distinction is only an illusion. New science makes clear that each is cut from the same cloth. Knowing then that love alters your mind’s modus operandi, swinging open your doors of perception wider, allowing you to recognize your unity with others, care for them, and capitalize on your combined strengths, should make it easier to understand how love alters your gestures and actions. For just as neuroscientific studies show that positive emotions open your perceptual awareness, kinematic studies by my collaborator Melissa Gross show that they also open your torso, literally expanding the (rib) cage in which your heart sits. When your mind and body are infused with good feelings, those feelings lift and expand your chest, a subtle nonverbal gesture that makes you more inviting to others, more open for connection. Genuine good feelings also open up your face, as your lips stretch up and open into a smile, raising your cheeks to create (or deepen) the crow’s feet at the corners of your eyes. Any positive emotion can draw you to smile and carry yourself with a more open posture. And so any positive emotion can be taken by those around you as a sign to relax and connect. When someone feels safe enough to accept that invitation and joins you with his or her own heartfelt good feelings, love’s positivity resonance fires up. The nonverbal gestures unique to these shared micro-moments of love eluded scientists for decades.

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

  At the heart of love is a feeling—a feeling with both physical as well as mental components. Physically, your whole body feels relaxed, with a warmth and openness in your chest, as if your heart were stretching open to let in or embrace another being. This is the feeling that makes you want to move in closer, to listen and observe more carefully. Mentally, you yearn for good fortune for others. You wish them well with great sincerity. You also wish to show how much you care, to enact tenderness and concern. We’ve all experienced love like this at one time or another. It’s that warm and tender feeling you have when you first hold a newborn, or greet a cherished friend after many months, or even years, apart. Some of this tenderness, along with its associated impulse to show care and concern, is even released when you come across a kitten, puppy, or other baby animal. Think here of a time when some small creature drew a slow “Awwww . . .” out of you. If you’re like many people, you recognize this tender feeling rolling through you mostly when you’re with loved ones. Indeed, scientists from Darwin to Ekman suggest tenderness like this honors familial bonds. Yet by now I hope you’re recognizing that your potential for micro-moments of love is far greater. Each time you encounter another—or yourself—you have the opportunity to do so with tenderness and warmth, and with relaxed openness and goodwill. The goal of this chapter, and indeed part II of this book, is to provide specific tools for expanding the circle of those with whom you share the warmth and tenderness of love. Preparatory Practices As you read through part II, you’ll notice that most of the practices that I recommend to seed love are solo activities. They are activities you can undertake completely on your own, just by redirecting your attention, or taking time for self-reflection, or meditation. How can these practices work, you may wonder, if love is only experienced in connection with others? Why not dive right into interventions that alter how you interact with others, such as that you smile, nod, or lean in toward them more often, or mirror their gestures?

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

  All your waking moments give you opportunities to practice opening your heart. You choose the best way for you to do this. It may well be best to meet your new ideal of “loving all” by adopting the more modest aspiration of “loving one more” and then renewing this more achievable aspiration time and again. Your goal can be to see past the borders that traditionally constrain love, and to exclude no one. By nature’s design, your genetic and psychological makeup grant you the capacity to recognize, protect, and cherish your kin and the other special loved ones to whom you have bonded. Just as surely, however, evolution has also designed you to benefit from sharing micro-moments of love with even the most distant and dissimilar other. Don’t miss out on your chance to give love . . . and health . . . and oneness . . . freely, to all. CHAPTER 9 A Closing Loving Glance I NEVER KNEW HOW TO WORSHIP UNTIL I KNEW HOW TO LOVE. —Henry Ward Beecher After spending months building the case for this book for why it’s worth upgrading your view of love, I’ve become convinced that this simple call opens the door to an endless process. The work of science, after all, is never done. Even though the latest discoveries about love’s impact on your body, brain, behavior, and future prospects can fill volumes and fill you with amazement, it’s equally humbling to recognize how little we actually know about love’s full impact. New discoveries about love’s power will continue to unfold. As they do, you and I alike will be called to upgrade our views of love, time and again, to reimagine this life-stretching experience from the ground up once more. Whatever your prior beliefs about love, my hope is that I’ve piqued your curiosity to begin to see love as your body experiences it, as positivity resonance that can momentarily reverberate between you and virtually anyone else. Before these reverberations fade, they initiate biochemical cascades that help remake who you are, both in body and in mind. It’s also worth considering whether you’ve unwittingly placed constraints on your own experiences of love by following cultural norms. These constraints may have been holding you back from reaching your full potential for health and happiness, and from making deeper contributions to the lives of others. Beyond sharing the latest science on love, my aim in this book has been to release you from these constraints. The task of upgrading love remains incomplete without self-reflection and self-change.

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

  Toward this end, consider the spiritual lessons from Buddhism. In his acclaimed 1995 book, Living Buddha, Living Christ, Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that he resonated with how a Catholic priest once described to him the Holy Spirit as “energy sent by God.” Nhat Hanh shared that this phrasing both pleased him and deepened his conviction that the most reliable way to approach the Christian Trinity was through the doorway of the Holy Spirit. Integrating this with his Buddhist perspective, he likened the Holy Spirit to mindfulness and its fruits: understanding, love, and compassion. When you purposely tune in to the present moment, this view holds, and see and listen deeply in an open, accepting manner, you open a door to divine oneness. As does Armstrong, then, Nhat Hanh sees both Christian and Buddhist spirituality in the doing. From this vantage point, love, compassion, and other deeply moving spiritual experiences become holy states that you can cultivate through your own intentional efforts to be present, grounded, and mindfully aware of both yourself and others. Learning to trust that your deepest emotions can lead you somewhere good is what my collaborator and American Buddhist writer Sharon Salzberg calls faith in her 2002 spiritual memoir by the same name. Faith, or alternatively trust or confidence, is the usual translation of the ancient Pali word saddha, which Salzberg points out literally means “to place the heart upon.” Like Armstrong and Nhat Hanh, Salzberg emphasizes that faith is a verb, an action—something you do—not a received definition of reality or belief system that explains away life’s mysteries. In Buddhism, to have faith is to open your heart to your experiences, or as Salzberg puts it, to be willing “to take the next step, to see the unknown as an adventure, to launch a journey.” Faith is a way of leaning in toward your feelings of love and oneness, trusting that—somehow—they will nourish you and lead you closer to your spiritual higher ground. Faith, according to Salzberg, is “an active, open state that makes us willing to explore.” It draws you out of the safe and familiar territory of labels and constructs, and into the more challenging and always changing flux of your own inner experience. From what I’ve highlighted so far, you won’t be surprised to learn that I especially resonate with how my friend and Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, an expert in adult development, defines spirituality. In his 2009 book, Spiritual Evolution, he equates spirituality with positive emotions, noting that these states are what connect you to others, to the divine, and over time help you attain wisdom and maturity. Succinctly, he concludes, “Love is the shortest definition of spirituality I know.” I see no need to improve upon this definition.

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

  Others play bit parts. They are not particularly consequential to the overall arch of your plotline, and by consequence they often undergo little character development in the script that your mind follows. You sometimes even treat them as though they were mere props, inanimate objects that populate the setting, yet bear no real importance to you or your day. Why wouldn’t it be this way? The play is all about you. You see where the illustration is going. Each person is, after all, the star of his or her own play and day. If you dropped the script of your own day and picked up the script of another person’s day, this other person would suddenly undergo considerable character development. You’d come to appreciate his or her own wishes, plans, and goals. You’d understand that this person isn’t merely a bit part or prop, but rather fully human, like you. Just like you, this person is full of yearnings and strivings, hopes and insecurities. This is true of every person. It’s equally true of all those with whom you cross paths, as well as all those you’ll never meet, not even once. LKM opens the doors of perception to break you out of your cocoon of self-absorption and restore others to their full humanity. It challenges your natural tendency to treat others like props or thinly developed characters who play only bit parts in your own self-centered play. By widening your awareness, LKM opens your eyes, mind, and heart to seeing others more fully, with warmth, kindness, and tender wishes for their well-being. The practice expands your outlook in ways that help you create the safety and connection between you and another that can seed positivity resonance. Like other meditation practices, LKM involves quiet contemplation in a seated posture, often with eyes closed and an initial focus on the breath and the heart region. You might start by setting an alarm to chime softly after ten or so minutes, so that you can experiment without concern for the time. As the practice becomes more familiar and comfortable, you can experiment with longer meditation times, aiming for twenty to twenty-five minutes of daily practice whenever possible. I’m not suggesting that you become a monk. Keep in mind that randomized controlled trials from my lab and others have revealed a wide array of benefits after just a few months of practicing LKM for an average of sixty minutes a week, which translates into three to four times a week for just fifteen to twenty minutes each. LKM is a bit like guided imagery, although the practice targets loving feelings more than visual images per se. You encourage those warm feelings to rise up by repeating a set of phrases—silently, to yourself—each of which is a wish for another’s well-being.

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

  Then, repeat the classic phrases for each subset of your focus, calling forth your heartfelt goodwill. May all children feel safe. May all children feel happy. May all children feel healthy. May all children live with ease. As you extend these wishes, gently coax yourself to truly feel the sentiment that underlies that simple word all. Give this one word just a bit more emphasis than the other words, to nudge your heart just a bit wider with each wish you offer. May all adults feel safe. May all adults feel happy. May all adults feel healthy. May all adults live with ease. As you end this practice session and move on into your day, know that each person you encounter has already been the focus of your loving intention today. Use that awareness to forge new micro-moments of connection. Unlock Your Opportunities for Focusing on Others Outside the formal practice of LKM for all people, it can be heart-stretching simply to notice how much of your attention each day is devoted to your own concerns. There’s nothing inherently wrong with self-concerns. You are responsible, after all, for navigating yourself through your day, and at times doing so can require planning or strategic self-presentation. Problems arise only when you get swept up in swirls that appear to run on indefinitely. It can seem, sometimes, as if you’ve entered a hall of mirrors, completely alone. All you see reflected back at you is yet another view of the same self-concern, and you can no longer find the way out. Redirecting your focus toward others is the way out. Your intent, of course, matters. Focusing on others comes in many forms, not all of which are generous. It can be yet another selfish act. I spent several years early in my career cataloging the psychological damage done to girls and women who face the message that they can be reduced to how they look. The question an objectifying stance asks is, “What can you do for me?” By contrast, a genuine wish to understand and appreciate who this other person is asks, “Who are you?” and trusts that taking steps to find out will reveal inherent goodness. From this openhearted perspective, caring sentiments surface quite effortlessly. One way to become more mindful of the degrees of your focus on self versus others is to revisit a typical day—your yesterday—and comb through it episode by episode. In doing so, you uncover the sheer number of untapped opportunities for creating micro-moments of positivity resonance. This added awareness can then inspire you to begin turning toward these recurrent opportunities, rather than let them slip away unnoticed. Try This Micro-Moment Practice: Reconstruct Your Yesterday to Uncover Opportunities for Love Here I walk you through how you can adapt an assessment technique developed by a former collaborator and mentor of mine, Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of the best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow . It’s called the “Day Reconstruction Method,” or DRM for short.