The LTR and Me

This is the LTR and me. I've posted this picture here before, but it's my blog and if I choose to be narcissistic get over it (the very nature of blogging is narcissistic, I think. We bloggers post items about our opinions or lives thinking they have merit when mostly it's just noise. But I digress).

Anyway, this year we will have been together two decades. 20 years. And we actually still talk to each other. Someone close to me is losing the man she loves because he's leaving her and watching her heartache makes me realize all the more how lucky I am.

People sometimes ask "what's the secret?" I don't think there is one. I do think that love is not enough...that sometimes it comes down to making a choice to be together. And managing expectations is part of that. We've learned that although our relationship fulfills each other's basic needs it can't fill every single one. That knowledge takes a certain amount of pressure off the relationship. And, after 20 years, we repeatedly learn that communication is key and that good communication even between people who know each other intimately doesn't just happen. You have to make it happen.

Our relationship is not a perfect one. But it's a damn good one. Love you, honey.

Sex at Columbia University

Bjorn posted a link to a New York Daily News article with the headline "Wild Sex 101."

It's about the S&M, sex toys and nude and sex parties that go on at one of the nation's most elite schools, sometimes on school property.

The article details one such party:

Late on the night of Nov. 13, a Daily News reporter sat in room 303 of Hamilton Hall, a venerable classroom building where Columbia students have studied Poe, Plato and Plutarch for nearly 100 years.

As a female student volunteer stood facing the blackboard, and two dozen Columbians watched, a lecturer who identified himself only as Dov flogged her repeatedly with leather whips, rubber hoses - and a cat-o'-nine-tails.

As unusual as that may sound, there really isn't much shocking here-- you'd expect kids with raging hormones to be raging sex fiends. I remember the existence of a co-ed nude study group on campus when I was a student. There were probably S&M clubs but I was too naive at the time to have noticed them.

But the real surprise of the article is buried at the end. Quote of Note:

So does anything go at Columbia? Actually, no. Flogging and bondage are accepted, but the school apparently draws the line at another form of communication between the sexes: love letters.

They were good enough for Cleopatra, who sent them to Mark Antony, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who exchanged them with his wife, Zelda. But Columbia University Health Services lists love letters as a form of nonphysical sexual harassment, according to its Web site.

Let me see if I got this right: I can flog my significant other in front of the student body, on school property, but I can't send him a love letter after?

Gimme a break.