Some friends and I were discussing sex and relationships the other day and one of them brought up an interesting premise. She thought that most people could be divided into two types: thrill-seekers, and comfort-seekers, and that those impulses drove their sex and relationships behavior.

In every part of the blogosphere, new voices arrive, and old voices go. Sometimes, they are the same people moving to new blogs(and new identities), other times they are new bloggers who command a wider audience as if they’ve suddenly found their voice, or their topic (and sometimes they have).

The first time it happened, I didn’t think anything of it. I was on FaceBook, surfing around and answering mail, when a guy I knew pinged me. 50-something, smart, and techie (like many of the people I knew), he was a distant acquaintance.

Rachel Kramer Bussel has an excellent piece live in the Huffington Post about Carla Bruni, her reported number of sexual partners(15) and whether counting out loud makes you a big slut (she says in our culture, it does). Worth a read and thought provoking.

Despite the provocative photo (and the big ass tattoo), the cover essay in the Sunday New York Times Magazine starts sweetly enough.

The buzz heard round the blogosphere last week when the New York Times did a story called When the Ex Blogs, the Dirtiest Laundry Is Aired wasn’t so much a start of surprise as a nod of recognition.

During my last gig, at the online dating service, I used to joke about how differently men and women seemed to approach online dating. In interviews and click stream behavior, women indicated, again and again, that they wished the dating service would pick out a small selection of absolutely perfect matches for them; guys, on the other hand, seem to want ways to get the broadest possible number of women to read their email, find them fascinating and write back. The women wanted quality, the men, options.

In the process of tangling with some bloggers around social software, a new service called FriendFeed and the experience of lifestreaming data, I ended up going deep into Stephanie Quilao’s blog, Back in Skinny Jeans, and reading a series of entries from 2006 that chronicled her rape by a co-worker at a Silicon Valley firm and the subsequent pain, suffering and dysfunction that followed in

I'll just put it out there right up front: I am opposed to spanking. The reasons are many and varied and I won't bore you with all of them; the bottom line is it's not right for my family, and I even get all Judgy McJudgerson (silently, usually) when I see other parents making the choice to discipline children via physical force. I've never had any problem justifying my choice, either. Nor did I ever trot out "because it could warp them sexually later in life" as a reason why it might be better to find a different method of correction.

I remember, back in the day in the early 80’s, when I first saw the picture of Patti Smith on the album cover for Horses. That narrow white face, that long dark hair—and the lanky body in boy’s clothes—Patti was breaking all the rules I’d grown up with and it simultaneously thrilled and scared me half to death.

In my three years as a single, I’ve learned that if I’m going get past the first few dates and actually start seeing someone, the next big milestone happens around six months. This is the point at which it’s clear, that while we get along, there are bigger questions to ask, like: “How closely does this person fit with what I think I want?” and “Do I know enough about this person’s strengths and weaknesses to really see him/her as they really are (in other words, without all that New Relationship Energy (NRE)?

It was tempting, when I was working on this guide to gifts that will spice up your love life, to resolve that I’d have to test each and everyone myself.