National Mistress Day is February 13. It’s an unofficial holiday - unlike the observance of Valentine’s Day which, as we all know, seems to be rigidly enforced by powerful chocolate and flower cartels - but one that’s.
Where did it come from, you ask?
Well, the Examiner (via Gothamist via Gourmet Magazine) seems to think that it’s a natural outcrop of overbooked love calendars. While February 14 is taken up by dutiful doting on a spouse, the day before is when highrollers in big cities spend time and money on their other other halves.
Noel Biderman, president of a website which helps married partners cheat, says “It might not be a nationally celebrated day, but it’s at least a day to practice your ‘mistress retention’ skills.” The NY Daily News article he’s quoted in breaks the event into its constituent elements.
So what should you do if you’re married and faithful? Take your spouse out twice! And always always always treat your wife like you would a mistress: consider yourself embroiled in an illicit, hot-like-lava affair, where the conversation crackles, the champagne flows, and the sex sizzles.
You know it’s gotta be mid-February when the flurry of sex/lust/love research goes from a few snowflakes to a full-on blizzard.
The big theme of today - only two! days! before! V-day! - is about our favorite neurochemicals ever, oxytocin & vasopressin and how they conspire to be the boss of you.
It’s so inspiring that we just insist they make a movie or two out of it. So, here are the pitches:
Option A: The Love Dramedy
The research: Bianca Acevedo and company are researchers who, this explains, are “part of a new field in science that seeks to biologically explain love, and so far they have found that love is mostly understood through hormones, genetics, and brain images.” Moreover, says her colleague Larry Young, love “has a biological basis”.
Sure, sure. It’s all between your ears, and magical sparking neurons release chemicals that make you feel good and gooey and keep you coming back for more. It’s drug-like, right?
Of course! “The brokenhearted show more evidence of what I’ll call craving,” said Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist. “Similar to craving the drug cocaine.”
“Romantic love is an addiction; a wonderful addiction when it is going well, a horrible one when it is going poorly,” another researcher on the team said, adding that “People kill for love. They die for love.”
The movie: In the tradition of non-fiction getting spun into rom-coms, someone could write this into a movie. They could set it in a high school and call it Love is the Drug. This is what a trailer might look like:
Option B: The Rom Com
The research: A high-brow piece in the venerable NYT features Hannah Holmes, and her new book “The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself.” Both writer and researcher are helpless against the grey goo-ey-ness of it all, unable resist the lure of likening love to a labyrinth of neurochemicals. In this too-long-to-hold-our-attention article, we learn that “humans, like dolphins and some chimpanzees, are one of the few species that have sex for pleasure, not just reproduction” and that “other unusual human behaviors include the ability to cooperate (especially when we know we’re being watched, as one study showed), and to share resources and territories — albeit with difficulty”.
The piece then blathers on about ring finger vs. index fingers lengths. And then it meanders around Holmes house. Then something about Match.com and how she met her, well, match there. Effing great. But what about brain drugs?
Ah yes, here we go - it’s in that final paragraph about how cute and nice her husband is: “So just by reading my prospect’s face — and humans are very good at gauging personality in a face — I already had an idea he wasn’t aggressive toward me. And since I’m not very aggressive either, that Berlin Wall of caution crumbled pretty quickly. And of course, the oxytocin didn’t hurt.”
The movie: Could this be a movie? Of course. They could call it Love.com. With sexy, hip but non-threatening youthful characters. But it would probably skew too geeky and need be set in Japan.
Good news, Indiebrides and girl geeks! There recent nuptials of one-time It Girl Lisa Loeb means that there’s some hot new wedding porn to pour over and it’s totally catered to our quirky aesthetic sensibilities.
The full photo spread is in People magazine, but unfortunately, not online.
From this photo, we can see that her dress looks pretty cute and very vintage. Thanks for living up to our girl-crush expectations, Mrs. Herskovitz!
Take indie rock star Ben Lee, for example. Why he’s a brand-spanking-new newlywed, tying the knot last month to actress Ione Skye.
And not only does he gush profusely about her and they’re awesome nuptials in India, but in this article for Spinner he seems pretty blissed out about his new album, too:
“It’s actually more of a song about the universe,” Lee asserts. “It’s a love song to life. I mean, it can be perceived as a love song to a person, but I really wrote it as a love song to the process of existence. Devotion — it’s all the same whether you have devotion to a person or devotion to music or to nature or to God or whatever you call it.”
There are two potent arbiters of pop cultural relevancy presently: Wikipedia and reality TV.
So, while it’s troubling that there’s still no wikipedia entry for newlyweds, there’s solace in the renewed attention paid to us by the latter.
As I reported previously, MTV is casting an update on its patented Newlyweds-style docudrama, and the eternally undead The Newlywed Game is getting resuscitated once more by Carnie Wilson.
And though some of these vehicles hold the promise of showing how married couples be committed as well as sexy, fun-loving and well-adjusted, the public eye doesn’t tolerate such normalcy without a trashy counterpoint.
Enter CBS, which has ordered up a new reality series from the Magical Elves (for real) production company titled “Arranged Marriage” according to pitch on the show’s website and a lengthy article by the Hollywood Reporter.
The premise? Four people “between the ages of 25 and 45 who are eager to wed but have previously been unsuccessful in finding a soul mate” will rely on friends and family to do the choosing for them.
Fine so far. But here’s the kicker: According to The Reporter, “the newly-formed couple will then exchange marital vows and the series will follow marriages”, which also noted the series is only tentatively-titled and additional details about the project are not being revealed yet.
Already, comparisons to an earlier, similarly themed show called “Married by America” are cropping up. The Reporter notes, “CBS’ “Marriage” presents itself as a documentary series about finding true love, a show that extends the Eastern tradition of an arranged marriage (where friends and family select the mate) into the West.
“Arranged Marriage” also will inevitably draw comparisons to another arranged-marriage reality show, Fox’s infamous debacle “Married by America” where couples were “paired by viewers voting from home and then sequestered in a hotel to learn more about each other”. “Arranged Marriage” by contrast, “presents itself as a documentary series about finding true love, a show that extends the Eastern tradition of an arranged marriage (where friends and family select the mate) into the West”.
And those concerned that the lack of wedding - by far the loudest complaint over “Married By America” - will be repeated, there are already guarantees that on the CBS show, couples will really tie the knot.
Yesterday, I fully endorsed the Kosher Sutra. Rabbi Shmuley won me - a secular humanist with esoteric Buddhist leanings - and thus secured a slice of the married-person demographic. But we secular humanists with esoteric Buddhist leanings are not as powerful or plentiful as the Liberal Elite Media would have you believe.
So the good Rabbi is courting a more influential pool or people: Christians.
Lots of headlines (and a Newlybed blog post) were made when proclamations from radical religious leaders encouraging their congregations to spend more time attending to their spouses as sexual partners.
Shmuley is careful to dial things back. A long, well-reasoned article introducing his book is careful to include lots of endorsements from Christians of many stripes, like religious historian Martin E. Marty (yep - that’s his real name) who summarily says: “It is hard to get around the observation that, overall, sexual issues — be they biological, theological or moral — are the most controversial subjects in religion today. Like it or not, understandings of human sexuality combined with issues of authority — who decides about practices? — concern everybody from Mennonites to Greek Orthodox.”
Often, though, people of the cloth get confused by the whole sex thing. Why? They don’t have much training in seminary school, and, says Shmuley, they forget that the bible “includes an entire book, The Song of Solomon, which is an erotic love poem”. Perhaps that explains why unmarried probably-virgins like Rev. James Healy misguidedly advise their flock to think about married sex as a Biblical parable:
Catholic couples should look to three episodes in the life of Jesus as a model for their marriage — the transfiguration, the crucifixion and the resurrection. he says.
The transfiguration was a “mountaintop” experience for Jesus and his three disciples, much like a honeymoon, he says. When Jesus came down from the mountain, he was hung on a cross, and that is what awaits every couple sometime in their marriage. A child is born and the dynamic changes. Or no child comes. Or a job is lost. Or an identity is smothered.
“But if we are faithful, we will rise with Jesus again. And it doesn’t happen just once in a marriage, but over and over,” Healy says. “If we can handle that, nothing can separate us from God.”
Other tomes indicate that marriage is really about the public performance and not about private commitment. According to a Christianity Today article, a soon to be released Christian marriage book called Just Sex? counters the notion of “‘consenting adults in private’, and instead focuses on a couple’s public declaration of love and commitment in front of friends and family, who in turn promise to support them in their relationship, that gives marriage its intimacy and stability.
But isn’t it wrong to see marriage, even when paraded around a closed-off and supposedly supportive Christian community, as a showmanship competition? Like Shmuley says, too many religious couples view such eroticism as somehow unholy, as if a kind of sisterly familiarity were more righteous: “It’s essential to bring back lust into a marriage, he says. Love may be beautiful, but it’s not enough.”
The most revealing tidbit of the article wasn’t the comically inept couple who had trouble distinguishing sex organs, but that in the South African Indian community of Durban “men’s G-strings are very popular with the younger Indian girls who buy it for their boyfriends,” according to an exhibitor at the city’s annual Sexpo.
Congratulations to the 50% (give or take) of consenting adults who are married: it’s National Marriage Week! Woot!
Finally, a week to tend to ourselves and our libidos, free of the pressures of work, grocery shopping and kidcare.
Or at least, that’s what you’d think it was if you believed your spiritual advisers, because they way they’re discussing a new book coming out this week it seems that marriage is all about decade after decade of hot, delicious sex.
If that doesn’t describe your coupledom, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach plainly asks why the hell not: “What happened to that magnetic force that we call desire?” His new book, Kosher Sutra: 8 Sacred Secrets for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life. Says Boteach, “when you think of how powerful the sexual drive is, the idea that it has been lost between two people in the same bed every night is truly shocking. Sex is supposed to be hot, about yearning and deep lust, not a sedative to help you sleep.”
True, dat. But where’s the transcendental part come in? Shmuley reveals it through edicts #7 and #8, which center on “Unquenchable yearning — longing and lusting after someone in front of you but whom you can never quite reach” and going “Beyond the body — sex is the key to spiritual awakening that can happen within us.”
I’m game. This not only makes sense, but it makes me want to fondle Mr. Abraxas. So, mission accomplished, Shmuley: Your cross-over appeal to the secular humanist crowd is secured, and I will be buying your book.
But what about the all-important Christian perspective on this Rabbinically-penned text? Check back tomorrow.
W mag raised the bar pretty high with their retro fabulous take on coupledom with Brad and Angie a few years back. But lemme tell you, newlyweds of the moment Fergie and Josh easily soar over it in next month’s spread for Elle magazine.
X17, being a usurper of attention, has posted some of the best window-fogging pics on their site here.
National Mistress Day is February 13. It’s an unofficial holiday - unlike the observance of Valentine’s Day which, as we all know, seems to be rigidly enforced by powerful chocolate and flower cartels - but one that’s.
