Browsing the New York Times online, I was struck by a photo of an attractive couples and clicked on it, only to find that it was a wedding announcement/story in the Vows section. Here is a part of the couple’s story that I enjoyed:

Mr. Buckner was entranced. It was his first glimpse of her sharp sense of humor.

Ms. Barnes was smitten, too, by the easy-going banter of the stylish, thoughtful, bespectacled man she had known for years. “Literally, the world just kind of shifted,” she said.

I recommend reading the entire article about the couple’s friendship, courtship and wedding (NYT registration, as of this writing, is still free) but this particular line grabbed me. Many of us know what it’s like to suddenly notice someone you work with, are friends with, or have passed on the street in a startling way. And in that moment, the world does seem to shift. You cannot look at that person the same way again, and there is an attraction.

We talk about this “the world stopped” or “the world shifted” moment fairly often when we talk about initial attraction. But what we don’t talk about enough, in my opinion, is how this moment recurs in couples’ lives, if they are fortunate, and how even after periods of boredom or agitation, the world can shift again.

One of the magical possibilities of being with someone for years is that there is hope for a re-awakening. Couples in long term relationships often fall into routines, it’s true. Also, life just gets hard. Friends and family member get sick - sometimes very sick - or die. Work and children of all ages demand attention, time, feeding and care. Older parents demand attention, too, as may health problems. Often we have little energy left to give to our relationship partners and we may feel drained, easily irritated or no longer attracted to them.

Then, something may happen. The world may shift again with a glance across the room, a hand on yours, or support from your partner when you really need it. During different times in my life, and with different people, this has been my experience and I hope that your world shifts in good ways, too. It’s worth thinking how, if you sometimes feel disconnected from your partner, you can promote a shift in a good way. Rather than wait for a kiss or a touch, perhaps you can offer one yourself.

Related MSP posts:
- Stephen Hawking teaches me about love
- Sex, Love and Stalking on Facebook and Twitter
- Foreplay Tops to Arouse Her: Women and Sex
- Q&A: How can we spice up our sex life?

If you’ve ever wondered if you could have your friendship cake and eat it too, this article is for you. After all, as terrific as friends with benefits (FWB) relationships may sound on the surface, they’re sometimes riled in chaos, or they at least have the potential to be if not done with care. Here are five tips to make your FWB work for you:

1. Be clear about what you want – with yourself and your friend. If your heart is hoping that a lifelong relationship will spring forth from the well of friendship but your mouth is saying “yeah, I totally don’t want anything serious either”, then your FWB is not off to a good start.  Make certain that you know where your heart and head are at and that you’re being honest with your friend about your intentions.

2. Set some rules. Although one of the benefits of a FWB may appear to be that you can live life, for the time being, without a so-called ball and chain, the fact is that some rules are there to protect you (wouldn’t your parents love to know that you are just now realizing this?). If you don’t set boundaries or rules about whom else each of you can have sex with or under what circumstances, how else are you going to limit your exposure to infections? Or prevent your FWB from morphing into the laughing stock of your friend circle or the potential for someone practically stalking you with calls and texts now that they think you two have a “thing” going on?

3. Be “just friends” some of the time. One of the cool aspects of being FWB is that, by definition, you can be friends who don’t always have sex – the sex is just a benefit. Try to not lose sight of the non-sex benefits by making sure that you spend some time hanging out, getting food together, catching a movie or whatever else.

4. Communicate like whoa. Often when FWB-ers find that they’re feeling jealous (“I can’t believe he Facebooked his ex!”) they wonder if they have any right to those feelings since they’re not, after all, in a committed relationship. But that doesn’t make those feelings go away. If you’re feeling jealous or insecure, it’s okay to say that. Worried about your FWB developing a serious crush or going on a date with someone else? Speak up! Feel like you’re spending way too much time together for two people who are not supposed to be “together-together”? How else can you handle it if you don’t discuss?

5. Practice your skills. Although FWBs provide various opportunities to release sexual tension, they also provide plenty of opportunities to practice your communication and negotiation skills for everyday issues as well as sexual issues. Also, they’re ripe with opportunities for learning about your body with someone you like, trust and enjoy spending time with. You may find that having a FWB provides a fun and comfortable way to feel more confident about your body, to enjoy having sex with the lights on, to try out new styles of kissing or major making out, or to sample new positions.

Even though FWBs sometimes get a bad rap (those kids are doing WHAT these days?), the fact is that friends having sex is nothing new – we just have a name for it these days. When carried out with the type of care and thought you’d give to any friendship that mattered to you, FWB can be an enjoyable, meaningful and pleasurable part of life.

Related MSP Posts:
- The unexpected nature of music, art and sex
- Stephen Hawking teaches me about love
- Sex, love, and stalking on Facebook and Twitter

[Originally published in my weekly column at CheekyChicago.com]

A week or so ago I was out with friends for a birthday celebration and - lo and behold - we came across a beer bottle that looks like a butt plug. It’s challenging enough that people lose so many things up their rectum/anuses that were never meant to be inserted there, such as shampoo bottles, light bulbs, carrots, cucumbers, salad tongs (seriously) and, yes, even beer bottles. Why encourage it by designing beer bottles that look like popular sex toys?

Case in point: the Bubble butt plug from Early to Bed in Chicago:

Are they not twins? Check out a closer shot of the beer bottle if you’re not convinced:

Okay, maybe not exact twins but they are fairly close in design. I can definitely imagine that some people consider chugging their beer so they can sit on this thing and use it as a sex toy.

Of course, there is nothing  necessarily risky about anal pleasuring or stimulation. It’s just that some people go about it in ways that put them at risk for discomfort, pain or damange such as by not using lubricant during anal penetration or anal sex, or by sticking things up their anus that are likely to get “lost”. When the latter happens, people often have to go to emergency rooms to get the so-called foreign object removed from their rectum. This is not always an easy procedure and healthcare providers have to tread very carefully lest they cause additional tearing during removal of the object.

Sex toys meant for anal play tend to:

- Have wider bases to reduce the risk of the toy slipping away and getting “lost” (out of reach) in the rectum
- In the case of anal beads, have “lifesaver rings” (circles of plastic or silicone) that one can easily hold on to during anal play
- Be smooth, with no major seams, creases, ridges or other parts that would likely cause anal cuts or tears

And remember, take your time during anal pleasuring, stop if it hurts, use plenty of water-based lubricant and check in with your healthcare provider if you have any questions about your personal health or well-being or the safety of your sexual activities.

To learn more about safe, pleasurable anal play, check out my book Because It Feels Good: A Woman’s Guide to Sexual Pleasure and Satisfaction. To find a butt plug, check out Early to Bed’s selection of plugs and other anal sex toys on their web site.

Related MSP articles:
- Masturbation sleeves: more cushion for your pushin’
- Semen in the eye: is it dangerous?
- How to use vibrators to boost desire and make it easier to orgasm
- Tips for men on how to shave their pubic hair

Recently Gizmodo reported on a guy who successfully used the Find My iPhone feature to - you guessed it - find his iPhone after it got stolen lost. This is my version except without awkward ethnic references that are later explained or major drama or anyone’s carelessness except my own.

Earlier today I picked a friend up at the airport, had a great lunch and then dropped her off at her house. On the way back I decided to stop at one of those DIY car cleaning places to vaccuum my car which had dirt and leaves from the various hikes I like to go on. I put my purse and keys on the dash, got out of my car, put my money in the vaccuum cleaner machine, my iPhone on the roof of my car, and started vaccuuming.

While I was bent over on the seat trying to vaccuum under the floor mats on the driver’s side, I had the eerie feeling that someone was watching. I turned around and, sure enough, some guy was on the other side spending a bit too much time fussing with his vaccuum cleaning (read: probably watching me bent over in my summer dress; let’s just hope he didn’t have his iPhone camera out).

In any case, I finished my cleaning, trying very hard to stay seated or otherwise appropriately placed in the front and back seat while cleaning. When my time ran out, I got back in the driver’s seat, got my purse and keys off the dash and drove off toward home. A few blocks down the road, I was at a stop light and reached for my iPhone. I couldn’t find it. It wasn’t in my purse or my dress pocket. Where could it be??? I looked on the dash, but it wasn’t there either. Then I remembered: I left my iPhone on the roof of the car! Visions of a cracked iPhone somewhere on the side of the road - or worse, driven over by a car - flashed before my eyes. What an idiot! How careless could I be?

Still stopped at the red light, I put my car in park, jumped out, stood up and - oh my gosh! - it was still on the roof of the car, glistening like a ray of hope. I approached it like Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson, in Marley & Me (such a sad movie) approached Marley when he held the beautiful gold necklace in his jaws, ready to swallow it at any second. I didn’t want the universe to swallow my iPhone like Marley swallowed the necklace. If the slightest breeze or shake of the car tipped my iPhone the wrong way, it would likely crack on the road.

I popped over to the other side, got it safely back in my hands, waved to the driver behind me (as the light was now green), and got back in my car. As slippery as iPhones are, it would never have survived a several block drive - especially as I am kind of a jumpy driver, I’ve been told - had it not been for my egrip. Earlier this spring, some friends who work for the Associated Press (AP) gave me a freebie egrip that was at their conference exhibit and I immediately placed it on the back of my phone. I always thought it was neat the way it kept my iPhone in place on my desk, but I never thought it would save my iPhone’s life.

Egrips are affordable and many companies now put their logos on them, like AP has, and give them out, according to the egrips site, so maybe you can see if your company can get some too. I am in no way paid by egrips or making any money off of them, I just honestly am so glad and excited that I had one on my iPhone today. Then again, maybe you will be less careless than I was today.

Pros:
+ Free (mine was) or at least affordable
+ Easy to apply and to remove
+ Stays in place if you don’t pick at it
++++ Potentially iPhone life saving

Cons:
- Nothing major, unless you prefer to only look at an unfettered solid black back of your iPhone.

UPDATE: Dr. Sandor Gardos, of MyPleasure.com, blogged about our research study, the NYT’s coverage of it, as well as the role of MyPleasure in the mainstreaming of sex toys.

Today someone graciously came over to my house to do some work and, as I was killing time checking TweetDeck on my iPhone (there was nothing else to do), I saw that someone posted a link to a post by Sarah Lacy on TechCrunch about sex and work. Not “sex work”, just “sex” and “work”, as in your job. Unless you’re a sex worker, then I guess they’re conflated.

But I digress. To pass time, I browsed the comments and found a fun exchange that I then screenshotted. Basically, in case you can’t read it in the above photo, a guy admitted to masturbating “daily at work”. Except then he realized that his username is his real name and it was now posted online for all to see and he had no way to delete it. Did the other commenters have sympathy? No way. And though I would be mortified if I posted something on the internet I didn’t want others to see, I still had to laugh. I did try to darken out his name in my picture though, so as not to further broadcast it.

Oh, internet, you. Always throwing your people-friends curveballs.

The New York Times has a lovely audio slideshow of a woman’s so-called “Renegade Caberet”, in which she (Elizabeth Soychak) sang on the fire escape landing of her friend Patty Heffley’s apartment. I enjoyed it just for the sake of enjoying it, but it also made me think of the different ways we enjoy music, art and - I think - sex.

When one knows that something is going to happen, there are expectations. If your expectations are low or realistic enough and the music, art or sex are “good enough”, then the experience may be highly satisfying. If expectations are set too high, one may feel disappointed. You may wonder if you should have spent so much money for the music, art (or yes, the sex) or why you bothered to even get dressed up to go (again, for any of the three).

Then there are the unexpected moments when we encounter art without knowing it. I experience such joy, personally, in stumbling across an inviting, compelling, beautiful or provocative piece of graffiti art. I like to find flowers poking out of sidewalk crevices, and I enjoy - with a mesmerized pleasure I’ve found difficult to articulate to others - coming across two or three ants trying to carry something so much bigger than themselves. Especially if they are trying to carry the other thing upward, as up a step.

As such, I believe I would have taken particular delight if I had been there to stumble upon the Renegade Caberet as a surprise. Not that planned music, art or sex are never joyful - they often are, and for their own reasons. In fact, there is a particular ease and relaxation surrounding things that you know will happen. Not to mention the opportunity for build-up and anticipation when you’re quite certain - or hopeful - that good music, art or sex is just around the corner.  But there is also pleasure in certain surprises.

The slideshow reminded me of one of my favorite newspaper articles ever - Pearls Before Breakfast in the Washington Post - in which writer Gene Weingarten set out to learn whether people would be able to discriminate unusual beauty in the middle of their rushed days. His test? He asked the world famous violinist Joshua Bell (who is from Bloomington, I should add) to play his violin at a DC metro station in the middle of rush hour and then video taped what happened. Would anyone stop? Would they notice the beauty? Would they drop any dollars in his case?

[Above image of a city plant makings its way sun-ward courtesy of a stroll through Georgetown this spring]