quote:

ORIGINAL: LuckyAlbatross

What about all the people who say that their life love IS their best friend? Or that after so many years it just keeps getting better?

I agree- we seek the new. But that doesn't mean we leave behind the comfortable old. The trick is to grow into the new TOGETHER.

quote:

ORIGINAL: cloudboy
Yes, you can talk about "some people," but you have avoided marriage like the plague. Poly is all about avoiding the banal.

quote:

ORIGINAL: cloudboy
Yes, but you probably wouldn't embrace the banal without the extreme. Next, you really haven't pushed the envelope of banal with one person over time in a marital, monogamous relationship. This is not to say ipso-facto marriage is banality, but rather to point out you haven't put a good ten (10) years into a marital relationship, much less one that has offspring involved. As much experience as you may have, you don't have this experience and you don't have a proclivity to gain it either.

To such folks the article (not my post) was particulary addressed, the point being that the ordinary, day-to-day familiarity between long time marrieds wears on their libido

quote:

ORIGINAL: michaelOfGeorgia

you know, if i had transportation or could afford cabs like everyone else, i would...with that said...can we move on from that subject. it's really bugging me.

quote:

now, is there anyone out there with a non-bias,  non-pregidous answer to this question?

quote:

ORIGINAL: cloudboy

I read this today on the train coming back from Washington DC.

>Sexuality is all about bridging distances -- but to bridge distances, you must have distances. And for all our sentimental talk of seeking an "other half" (perhaps the only expression to loom as large in Plato's Symposium as it does in the cursives of Hallmark), most of us do not, in fact, seek "a part of ourselves." We do not long for our left leg. We do not desire our brother, nor usually even our best friend. Erotic love -- for all of its attraction to what it recognizes and identifies with -- is drawn at least as strongly to what it does not recognize. In truth, it is drawn toward the distant and dangerous more than it is to the sweet, the solicitous, the familiar.<

Arguably BDSM comports with the above because it operates as a polarity --- keeping lovers as others ---- top from bottom --- Dom from Sub ---- maintaining a more fresh, more easily revived sexual connection. Its also a kind of triumph of discomfort (bondage, beatings, teasing, exacting, testing, probing) that dovetails nicely into sensual union.

Anyway, this article gives one food for thought. I do agree that over familiarity is an anti-aphrodisiac, marriage can devolve into the banal, and that passion --- whose kissing cousin is "the thrill" --- spring from something unfamiliar, new, or rediscovered.