As a therapist, author, and treatment expert in the area of problem sexual behavior and sexual addiction, I have been privileged to provide multiple educational programs for US Military Chaplains and Military Family Advocacy therapists worldwide, trainings specifically related to the growing concern of problem sexual behavior by US servicemen and women — both on and off base. 

The current drama now playing out in the media related to US Secret Service agents’ procurement of prostitutes while on assignment is without question the tip of the iceberg of a concern that is both under-recognized and misunderstood by both military leaders and the general public.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Maud Purcell. 

Running a successful business in our current economic climate takes more than just an excellent product or service. If you’re a business owner, one of the most important changes you can make is to run your business with greater “Emotional Intelligence” (EI). EI is a term popularized by Psychologist Daniel Goleman who defines it as “…the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves and for managing emotions well in ourselves and our relationships.”

The notion that using our emotions intelligently could have an impact on the bottom line is relatively new. According to The Institute for Health and Human Potential, research tracking over 160 high performance individuals across a wide variety of industries revealed that EI was two times more important in creating excellence than are intellect and expertise alone. In fact, the use of EI in business significantly impacts return on sales, revenue growth and overall profitability.

As divorce rates in the U.S. were rising by the end of World War II, so were fears over the state of marriage and family life. Skyrocketing rates sent many couples to seek expert advice to bolster their marriages.

During this time, the idea that marriage could be saved — and a divorce prevented — with enough work gained ground, according to Kristin Celello, assistant professor of history at Queens College, City University of New York, in her fascinating book Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States. A slew of experts stepped in to help American couples strengthen their unions — and with some interesting suggestions.

These experts, however, weren’t necessarily trained therapists or even anyone who had anything to do with psychology. Take marriage expert Paul Popenoe, for example. He was incredibly well-known and established one of America’s first marriage counseling centers in the 1930s, made regular media appearances and contributed to Ladies Home Journal — and he was a horticulturalist.

The marriage prescriptions of the 1950s could be summed up in one sentence: It was mainly a woman’s job to foster a happy marriage and steer it away from divorce.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Maryanne Comaroto. 

Rob, 35, from California asks:

Last year my wife flipped out when I bought her lingerie for Valentine’s Day. The truth is, I still don’t know why. She just got angry and said, “Isn’t it obvious?” and that was it. Any advice on what I get her this year that won’t set her off (and that we both can enjoy), which is what I thought the point of Valentine’s Day was?

Maryanne’s answer:

Rob, that’s a great question. Some guys might have just blown it off and thought, “Hmmm, maybe this year I’ll get her some lingerie in a different color.” Sounds like you’re guessing that is not the answer, unless you like being told off and sexually frustrated.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Paldrom Collins. 

In the land of the strange but true, as a former Tibetan Buddhist nun I fell in love with and married a man who counsels sex addicts and who is a recovering sex addict himself. Joining him in his counseling practice has allowed me a look into the lives of many people who have struggled with sex and relationship addictions.

These relationships have also impelled me to contemplate how the grace and teaching that I received from my Tibetan teachers can supply guidance in how to work with the compulsions or addictions that manifest in our world today. A young woman called tonight, crying.

Her husband had promised he would stop accessing Internet porn. She had recently given birth to their first child, and on their home computer she discovered that in the previous few days her husband had visited dozens of porn sites.

What should she do?

It all started in 1933 with a paper by Howard Warren, a Princeton psychologist and president of the American Psychological Association, who spent a week at a German nudist camp a year earlier.

According to Ian Nicholson, Professor of Psychology at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Warren’s article, “Social Nudism and the Body Taboo,” “was a qualitative and largely sympathetic consideration of the social and psychological significance of nudism.”

Warren “described nudism in therapeutic terms, highlighting the ‘easy camaraderie’ and lack of ‘self-consciousness’ in the nudist park, in addition to a ‘notable improvement in general health,’” along with the principal perspective to return to nature.

Soon after, other articles were published in psychology journals that highlighted the benefits of nudism in contributing to healthy, well-adjusted kids and adults.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Dr. Erica Goodstone.

Did you know that men, not women, are more likely to be happy in a relationship if they are in good health, if they are often cuddling and kissing with their partner, and if their partner tends to have orgasms during sex? Cuddling, it turns out, may be even more important than sexual satisfaction for long term relationships.

Women who remain in long term relationships are more likely to be satisfied with the sexual component and that satisfaction seems to improve over time. But for women, frequent cuddling and kissing does not necessarily lead to relationship satisfaction. Women often require romance as well as a sense of being heard, understood and appreciated.

“I like your blog,” someone will whisper to me at a party. It’s their secret — and I guess it’s a dirty one since they whisper it to me. Yes, I write a humor blog — which does, occasionally, address sexual penchants. Interestingly, the issues surrounding both are similar.

There’s a certain terror in being amused or aroused by something outside “the norm.” When I first started listening to my favorite comedy podcast which finds humor in all things (including truly horrific news items) I was a little taken aback by the conflict I felt at my reaction. “I’m a decent person,” I thought, “and yet I’m laughing at this…” I felt the same kind of discord in what I was turned on by: “But I can’t be this terrible… What is wrong with me?”

When it comes down to it, while we many not wish to find certain things funny, you like what you like. Similarly, many people find they have certain sexual desires — which they would, in a perfect world, prefer to dismiss.

It’s easy for couples to fall in love. Staying in love is the tough part, according to clinical psychologist and marriage counselor Randi Gunther, Ph.D.

In her new book When Love Stumbles: How to Rediscover Love, Trust & Fulfillment in Your Relationship, Gunther shares a six-step healing plan to help couples overcome eight of the most common “stumbles” or problematic patterns in their relationships.

She devotes a chapter to how couples can surmount each stumbling block. Inside, we cover the eight common relationship stumbles most couples grapple with, as well as the six steps to help overcome them.

The Pill — a term that refers to any one of the many different kinds of birth-control pills taken by women to ward off pregnancy — has been a boon to modern sexuality. Without worry of pregnancy before a woman is ready, it allows two people to enjoy sex for the pleasure of it, not for its procreation value.

But like any medication, the pill always has had side effects. In some women, those side effects are unbearable, and so another birth control method must be tried.

According to new research, the side effects also extend to a woman’s general enjoyment of sex itself. The new study, led by Craig Roberts and colleagues, conducted a survey of 2,519 women who had at least one child. The researchers asked the women about their relationship quality — including sex — with their child’s biological father.

What did they find?

We’ve long heard of premature ejaculation in men as a significant sexual dysfunction that many men experience. Premature ejaculation is when the man orgasms before he intends or wants to (for instance, long before the woman has had a chance to get close to her own orgasm).

Researchers from Portugal wondered if some women experience something similar, since nobody seems to much talk about this issue in female sexuality. Could there be such a thing as a premature female orgasm (or in scientific terms, “female premature orgasm”)? If so, how prevalent is the problem?

Here’s what they discovered.

In a recent study of young adults’ sexuality, Galinsky & Sonenstein (2011) discovered that when it comes to orgasms, men are having them a lot more often than women.

Nearly nine out of ten men in the study of 3,237 of young adults aged 19 to 25 experienced an orgasm most or all of the time. But only about 47 percent of the women in the study had an orgasm during a couple’s sexual relations.

Young women are also five times as likely as young men to have orgasms less than half the time they have sex with their partner.

The new research provides some interesting data that confirms previous research findings in this area, and sheds some additional light on young adult sexuality. There remains a sex gap not only in the enjoyment of sexual pleasure through orgasm, but also when it comes to oral sex.