How to Improve Your Relationship Without Talking About It

You’re not getting along. There’s little laughter and even less kindness. You do love each other but things ain’t what they should be. Most experts would say that the answer is communication. To talk things through, to understand each other’s point of view and to come to some kind of an arrangement.

But is it?

Patricia love, the author of what I consider to be the best sex book I’ve ever read, Hot Monogamy has come out with a new book called, How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It. Her basic premise is that by changing your behavior you will change your partners.  And that by first changing your behavior you set the stage for a good conversation.

These are some of her points:

Love is not about better communication. it’s about connection. You’ll never get a closer relationship with your man by talking to them like you talk to your girlfriends. There are four ways to connect with a man: touch, activity, sex, routine.

When men feel connected, they talk more. Male emotions are like women’s sexuality: you can’t be too direct too quickly.

I saw her concept in action when a friend of mine complained that the lightness in his relationship had gone out. Everything was serious, there was no playfulness, no joking around. Everything was strictly business. He tried to talk to him for a long time to no avail. Using Patricia Love’s concept, I told him to stop talking about it and instead be the lightness and the playfulness that he so wanted in his relationship.

But here’s the catch: without expecting anything in return from him.

No Expectations

is the most challenging part. If you make the effort to change and your partner doesn’t, aren’t you playing the fool? A good question, but one that can only be answered by going through with the experiment. So my friend started being lighter and more playful. He started telling funny stories about his day, he made fun of himself, he poked gentle fun at his partner. He simply became more likable.

For the first couple or three weeks, his partner did not respond at all. He was not playful back, he was not light back. My friend grew frustrated but right around the four-week mark his partner started to change. He too started cracking some jokes. He too became a little bit more playful. And as my friend saw the change in him his first instinct was to talk about it. But he saw such great results he decided that talking wouldn’t improve the relationship; it would diminish it.

The key concept here is that changing yourself forces people to change their relationship to you. This is admittedly hard to do but it pays great dividends. A simple body language trick can make the point. It’s well known in nonverbal communication circles that the worst way to get somebody to smile is to talk to them about smiling or to ask them why they’re not smiling. The single best way to get somebody to smile is to smile at them.

Why It Works

Researchers believe that there is a “mirroring” phenomenon at work. That is, people tend to mirror the people they like. You see this in romantic couples all the time. If you lean in and the other person is interested in you they will lean in. If you lean back, they will lean back. It’s a way of bonding, of saying hey I’m on the same page.

Another reason that behavior rather than conversation can change a person’s interaction with you, is that it forces them to think about their own actions even if only subconsciously. If things have gone heavy and somebody introduces lightness and you still respond with a heaviness it’s only a matter of time before you realize what’s going on. You start feeling bad about yourself and good about the other person because you see that they are trying. Not only that but that they have actually made you laugh, which puts you in a better mood.

The bottom line: it isn’t just possible to change your relationship without talking about it is often necessary.

Gay Dating Tips

How To Date A Bisexual

 

You’re sitting on the couch with the man you’ve been dating for the past month, watching a prime time series about feuding menopausal witches.

Your beau is charming, he is enchanting, and he is seductive. He brings out the playful side of you. You take his hand and flirtatiously say to him, “Tell me something about you I don’t know.” He smiles and responds, “Well… I’m bi!”

ABRACADABRA! You learned something new! Your beau finds both genders bewitching… and now the mistresses of magic on the television are no longer entertaining because you have a plethora of questions that need to be answered:

Do you like boys more than girls or vice versa?

Can you be happy with just one? In other words, can you be monogamous?

Are you just not ready to say you’re gay?

Oh my God, are you going to want a girl in our threesome?

 

The night has gone from enchanting to wicked with the simple utter of two words “I’m bi.”

What happened? You’ve convinced yourself that your beau is a confused and promiscuous man who somehow tricked you into liking him.

What triggers this unsympathetic response to their orientation? Is it a lack of education? Is it a lack of understanding? Is it jealously? Or maybe even all of the above?

I asked someone who identifies as gay if he had negative feelings towards bi-sexual men and he said:

“I have not yet met a bi-sexual man who is actually “bi.” They are all gay. Gay men don’t generally like or hang out with bi men… How many gay men do you know who have bi friends? We don’t want to hear about it. We don’t want to go to a gay bar with you or Provincetown or places where you check out guys and then the following week you’re on a date with a girl. We don’t relate and don’t want to relate…I think bi-sexual men do get excluded from gay things. I think that is just a truth. I’m not saying it is right, I’m just saying I think it is true.”

What stuck out the most to me is “I have not yet met a bi-sexual man who is actually “bi.” They are all gay.” And it made me wonder… Do bi-sexual men keep their “straight” activities separate from their “gay circles?” If they do, maybe it’s a way to avoid conflict. I had to ask another friend of mine, but this one identifies as bi-sexual.”

“Early when coming out, I was told in no uncertain terms to not tell people I was bi. My friend told me that other guys may still sleep with me, but they would never consider dating me because they’d be afraid I’d cheat on them with a woman. At one dinner I attended with several others, I was speaking with a new acquaintance about her experiences of being bisexual and shared my own identity as such.

Two older gay men across the table started laughing at me and told me to get real, that I was really just gay. They proceeded to berate me throughout the dinner. I was so angry that I wanted to leave, but having someone else who identified as bisexual there was at least a small comfort. I refuse to identify as gay because it does not fit with my experience. I sometimes identify as queer because it deconstructs the binary.

However, queer and bisexual are both loaded terms it appears, so often I am without words to come out. It truly feels like a double-sided closet much of the time.”

A recent study showed that 15 percent of American adults outright disagreed that bisexuality was a real sexual orientation. Mackey Friedman, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and director of HIV prevention initiative Project Silk, says “Bisexual men and women face prejudice, stigma and discrimination from both heterosexual and homosexual people.”

So, how do you make it work with a bisexual man? First thing first, don’t refer to all the negative stereotypes you’ve heard about bi-sexual as the truth and nothing but the truth. Open dialogue and communication are important in any relationship and necessary questions shouldn’t vary based on sexual orientation. But be clear about what you’re asking.

For example, “Are you still attracted to women?” is different than “Are you only interested in serious relationships with men or women?” or “Would you leave me for a woman?” And never ask a question you really don’t want to know the answer to: “What feels better, sex with a man or sex with a woman?”

Don’t be overly alert to the potential wondering eye. Your bisexual beau is just as likely to check out a sexy woman as your gay beau would check out a hot guy. Bisexuals have a unique ability to be attracted to both genders for a variety of reasons.

It doesn’t make you lesser or even more in their eyes. You are you and they may be attracted to you. Do not attempt to accommodate what you are assuming is what they are attracted to.

No matter what the orientation of the individuals in the relationship, it’s paramount that you and your beau be honest and compassionate friends. If you can’t even be friends with someone based on their orientation then the source of the problem is you.

If your beau is charming, enchanting, and seductive then be proud of the magical son-of-bitch! Introduce them to friends and show them the respect you would anyone else who cast a spell over you. Other people may not approve of your relationship (Like Tea Party Members and closed-minded gays), but so what? Don’t let their doctrine dictate your devotion.

So, you’re sitting on the couch with the man you’ve been dating for the past month, watching a prime time series about feuding menopausal witches. You take his hand and flirtatiously say to him, “Tell me something about you I don’t know.” He smiles and responds, “Well… I’m bi!”

Try to conjure up a more magical response.

 

Resources

Gay Dating Advice
Gay Texting Tips
Gay Body Language

Bi Bits and Gay Bobs Of The Week

A couple from San Francisco took in a Broadway show (Cinderella, what else?). They get called up onstage on a pretense and one of the guys proposes marriage. Is this romantic or the worst marriage proposal you’ve ever heard?

I think I would kill my partner if he did anything like that. First, because it’s so gay. Second, because it’s so gay. Proposing onstage at a Broadway show in front of strangers? Is this romance or narcissism? You be the judge.

———-
This amusing little video is a take-off on the ginormous success of the twitter handle “sh*tmydadsays.”

My favorite nuggets:

“I didn’t mention the wheelchair?”

“You don’t mind cleaning out my bed pan, do you?”

Enjoy!

————–

From www.nickyee.com:

Most psychology research that deal with gay men dichotomize the sex roles as Top and Bottom (if they differentiate among gay men at all) – preference for insertive anal intercourse and preference for receptive anal intercourse respectively. This paper summarizes a study that tested a more elaborate categorization, and finds that sex role preference is correlated with differences in physical preferences for a sexual partner among gay men, suggesting that the hypothesized categorization is meaningful. The data suggests that sex roles should be thought of as a continuous spectrum that map onto a continuous spectrum of physical preferences.

The new categorization tested includes 6 categories:
1) Only Bottom
2) Versatile, but prefer Bottom
3) Versatile, equal
4) Versatile, but prefer Top
5) Only Top
6) Never had anal sex / Don’t Know

All respondents were volunteers recruited from www.gay.com chat rooms over the period of 1/25/02 to 1/27/02. They were asked to participate in an online questionnaire. A total of 396 respondents completed the survey. The average age of respondents was around 33

Are you a gay top or a gay bottom?  Here’s what the research showed:

Only Bottom:  11%
Versatile, prefer bottom:  27%
Versatile, equal:  20%
Versatile, prefer top:  23%
Only Top:  12%
Don’t know:  8%

Find out how to bottom without pain.  Check out our new ebook!

———————–

In a world where the shirtless pic reigns supreme it’s nice to see a site feature face pics for a part of our desire located above the belt line (the heart).  It’s like a portrait studio of every boyfriend you wish you ever had but never did.  Sigh.

Take a look:  The Very Thought Of Him Gallery, from gaytwogether blog.

————————

One of my favorite gay blogs is “The Guyliner,” run by a British blogger who mixes a command of the English language with some cockeyed insights that make you drop, tuck and roll. Check him out here.

This week he has a hilarious riff titled, “Five condescending compliments nobody should really want to hear.” From being called a “DILF” to someone looking at your outfit and saying, “I’d never get away with wearing that,” he is breathtakingly on point. Here’s his take on a “compliment” that makes me want to put a bomb vest on and run into a crowded street market:

You look good for your age
Don’t even start. Anyone who enjoys this compliment is prostituting their dignity in exchange for a cheap thrill. What does a 40-year-old look like anyway? “You look good for your age” says that despite being an ancient, animated cadaver in actual years, you are somehow managing to deceive everyone well enough to pretend you’re younger. You’re well preserved, in other words. Great, you’re a jar of pickled onions. I don’t look good ‘for my age’; I just look good. Fucking good.

Check out his other compliments here: Guyliner.

—————————

I’ll take any country song where the lead male singer says, “I’m in love with that man.” But it’s a little jarring to hear a country twang and watching a video of two gay guys in Brooklyn. I dare say that this video will not be playing in any country music festivals anytime soon. But it’s hard not to admire the effort. Plus those two guys in the video are the cat’s pajamas.

What Not To Do On The Gay Dating Apps

 

QUESTION:

 He’s in LA; I’m in Atlanta.  We chatted online for six months. I really fell for him even though we’d never met.  He’d say profound things to me like, “I love you” or that He writes poetry about me.  He was supposed to fly into Atlanta and have me pick him up.   I waited and waited but He didn’t arrive. I stayed at the airport for 3 hours before deciding to go to a friend’s house nearby to wait for him to call again.  Somehow He went to voicemail, saying that I’d stood him up, so He went back to LA.  Now He won’t return my emails, texts or calls.   I’m crushed, and I just can’t rest until I know why He ended it.  How bad is it to ask for closure from someone you’ve never met?  I mean, if you’re talking every night for months doesn’t He owe you something?

 

—  Crushed in Decatur

 

Dear Crushed:

Most online dating injuries occur when people like you fall from their desperation onto their IQ.  For all you know, “He” was a 16-year-old boy telling his friends, “watch this” whenever you got online.  You want closure?  The better question is, “how can I reverse my lobotomy?”

[Read more…] about What Not To Do On The Men Seeking Men APPS

How To Choose The Best Prostate Massager

Have you ever shopped for a prostate massager and been overwhelmed by the amount of information it took to come to a rational decision?

Us too.

The problem is that there are really only three sources of information and all of them have severe limitations.

The first source is the manufacturer or the retailer selling the product. The problem with trusting these sources is that they are trying to move product, not trying to match you with the best one.

Most of the information comes across as infomercials, with a kind of hyperbole that isn’t helpful.

The second source are sex toy reviewers. They can definitely be helpful but the bottom line is that they can only review a limited number of products and their reviews tend to reflect their own personal taste.

That’s not a good thing if you don’t share their tastes. What if your prostate sits above or below where theirs is? What if you like soft, tender stimulation and they like more aggressive moves?

You’re out of luck is what if!

The third source are customer reviews. These can be good but they’re riddled with an obvious problem. Often, what one reviewer sees as a flaw another reviewer sees as a benefit.

How do you distill a consensus among conflicting reviews?
Enter a new way of evaluating prostate massagers: Our Moan-O-Meter.

Ever been to the movie review site, Rotten Tomatoes? If you have, you know that this movie review site doesn’t actually review movies. They aggregate critic and viewer responses into what they call a Tomato-meter score. This makes it easy to evaluate the movie via the wisdom of the crowds.

That’s what we do. We are the Rotten Tomatoes of sex toys. We aggregate critic and user reviews into what we call our Moan-O-Meter scores.

This gives you an unprecedented look at what everyone thinks about the product. You don’t have to rely on any one critic review or anyone website’s customer reviews. You can look at all of them through one simple score.

To make things even easier you can access our Moan-O-Meter scores through the prostate massager that best fits your needs.

How?

 

Find out which prostate massagers got the highest scores in our Moan-O-Meter rankings for:

Best Prostate Massager Overall

Best Prostate Massager for Beginners

Best Prostate Massager for Intermediate/Advanced

 

 

Meet our new prostate massager quiz. In just four questions, which takes about 20 seconds to answer, we can give you the highest scoring prostate massagers for the categories you selected.

The quiz is made up of four simple questions:

• Are you a newbie or a pro?
  Do you want to spend a little, a lot or somewhere in between?
  What kind of material turns you on more (Silicon, plastic, etc.)
  Do you prefer a massager that vibrates or one that doesn’t?

All of the combinations from these 4 questions result in 48 different conclusions about which prostate massager is best for you.

Nothing like it exists anywhere else and we are proud to introduce it to you today.

If you are not a quiz taker you can read the questions verbatim in our post called, How To Choose The Best Prostate Massager.

Now go, spend 20 seconds answering for questions and prepare for the o face of your life!

What’s The Best Prostate Massager?

There’s a fun new way of finding out.

 

There is a new way of buying sex toys and you are going to love it. You know how that movie review site Rotten Tomatoes aggregates reviews from critics and users and puts them together in one tomatometer score?

Well, that’s what this site does for sex toys.

They start off by looking up sex toys that are made with body safety materials and finding out what professional bloggers who’ve reviewed the product have to say about them.

Then they go through 200 online sex toy retailers and find out if the product has had any reviews. Then they collate the number of reviews and the average score of those reviews and turn them into statistically sound rankings from their “Moan-O-Meter.”

The result?

Critic and user scores for each and every product. We really like the way they lay out the critic and user scores side-by-side like this:

 

 

You get a real sense of what people and professionals feel about the product, no?

This is the first time we’ve ever seen a site like this. What they’ve done is really interesting––instead of relying on one reviewer, whose body may not be like yours at all––they’ve created a data-driven review score.

We think this is much more useful than any one individual’s review. Some of these products have hundreds of reviews spread across dozens of sites. By looking at the overall scores averaged from the stores you are much likelier to get information you can trust.

Find out which prostate massagers got the highest scores in our Moan-O-Meter rankings for:

Best Prostate Massager Overall

Best Prostate Massager for Beginners

Best Prostate Massager for Intermediate/Advanced

 
 
The site is very much like the rotten tomatoes site but there’s a lot of grand gesturing towards wirecutter.com. For example, they put links to one or two stores that have the cheapest prices for the products they’ve reviewed.

Of course they haven’t actually reviewed the products. They’ve produced a sort of meta-review (review of reviews), aggregating all the reviews that exist on the web, stuffing them into a meat grinder and coming up with a kind of “review sausage” if you will.

Getting data-driven scores is important because as anyone who buys sex toys knows, they can be extremely expensive. There’s nothing worse than laying out $100 or $200 or more for a sex toy product only to find out it sucks and not in a good way. 🙂

The site is relatively new and only has one sex toy product line for us to look at––prostate massagers. But if this is any indication of things to come we’re going to be first in line to buy product. Here is a list of their rankings:

 

OVERALL

Best Prostate Massager

 

BEGINNER	Best Prostate Massager
BEGINNER	NON-VIBRATING
BEGINNER	Best Non-Vibrating Prostate Massagers
BEGINNER	Best Non-Vibrating SILICONE Prostate Massagers
BEGINNER	Best Non-Vibrating PLASTIC Prostate Massagers
BEGINNER	Best Non-Vibrating STEEL Prostate Massagers
BEGINNER	Best Non-Vibrating GLASS Prostate Massagers
BEGINNER	VIBRATING
BEGINNER	Best Vibrating Prostate Massagers

 

ADVANCED	Best Prostate Massager for Advanced Players
ADVANCED	NON-VIBRATING
ADVANCED	Best Non-Vibrating Prostate Massagers
ADVANCED	Best Non-Vibrating SILICONE Prostate Massagers
ADVANCED	Best Non-Vibrating PLASTIC Prostate Massagers
ADVANCED	Best Non-Vibrating STEEL Prostate Massagers
ADVANCED	https://callmemaybe.us/best-glass-prostate-massager-for-advanced-players/
ADVANCED	Best Vibrating Prostate Massager for Advanced Players

Where To Buy Sex Toys Online

You’ve finally decided to take the plunge and buy a sex toy.

Maybe you’re a newbie and want stretch your sphincter to prepare for your first bottoming session. Those anal stretch kits look pretty good.

Maybe you’re an incorrigible bottom who wants to massage his prostate when he doesn’t have a sexual partner around. Those prostate massagers have your name on them.

Or maybe you want to be even prouder of the prize between your legs. Those cock rings sure would look hanging off yours.

But here’s the problem: Where do you buy sex toys? There’s over 200 online stores that specialize in pleasuring parts known and unknown. How do you know which ones to trust?

You don’t want to end up buying a sex toy that stops working from a fly-by-night operator who won’t accept returns or give you a refund. Don’t get taken to the cleaners by a packaged wiener!

INTRODUCING THE FIRST RATINGS GUIDE FOR ONLINE SEX TOY STORES

You’ll never get hoodwinked again with our comprehensive list of online sex toy stores rated by customer satisfaction. We spent weeks compiling the data by hand.

So put the kibosh on your kibitzing. Quit your hand wringing. Stop the consumer angst–with our ratings you’ll never pick a store that’ll do you wrong. Here’s our list of the top 10 sex toy stores online with the highest customer satisfaction ratings:

Rank	Store	Best Sellers Page	Hot Deals Page	Free Shipping on orders of	Support	Return Guarantee	Free Return Postage?
1	Adam & Eve	Best Sellers	Hot Deals	$59+	Phone, email, chat	90 days	Not specified
2	Babeland	Best Sellers	Hot Deals	$69+	Phone, email, chat	30 days if defective	Not specified
3	Too Timid	Best Sellers	Hot Deals	$65+	Phone, email, support form	30 days	No
4	Edenfantasys	Best Sellers	Hot Deals	$50+	Phone	30 days if defective	Not specified
5	Liberator	Best Sellers	Hot Deals	$75+	Phone, email	Yes if approved	No
6	Stockroom	Best Sellers	Hot Deals	$99+	Phone, email	30 days if defective	Yes
7	Ella Paradis	Best Sellers	Hot Deals	$49+	Phone, email	30 days if defective	Not specified
8	Vibrators.com	Best Sellers	Hot Deals	NA	Phone, email	30 days if defective	Not specified
9	Early 2 Bed Shop	Best Sellers	Hot Deals	$125+	Phone, email	60 days if defective	Not specified
10	Hustler Hollywood	Best Sellers	Hot Deals	$0+	Contact form	30 days	Yes

But that’s just a taste. What about the other 190 online sex toy stores? Click here to see the complete listings in our report titled, Where To Buy Sex Toys Online

Of course, the vast majority of these stores cater to a straight clientele, mostly women. Nothing wrong with that as almost all of them also carry sex toys for men. A butt plug is a butt plug, gentlemen. It cares not whether the sphincter it’s in winks for women or other men.

If you want to support companies that are either gay or gay affirming then sad to say the pickings are slim. Not that there aren’t a lot gay-owned sex toy stores but few of them cracked our high quality list.

In fact, only three did:

Adam Male
forttroff.com
adamstoybox.com

How We Got Our Ratings For Online Sex Toy Stores

First and foremost, any store with a coveted Google Seller Rating hit most of our top spots. That’s because Google only gives its ratings to stores that paid independent product review companies to conduct surveys of verified purchasers.

An online sex toy store can only get its Google Seller Rating published if it has at least 100 reviews that average 3.5 (or “above average”).

Of course, most stores don’t have a Google Seller Rating, either because they’re too cheap to pay for surveys of verified purchasers by independent companies (or too scared to find out what their customers have to say about them!).

Sidenote: Companies can easily get a Google Seller Rating for free. They can embed Google’s codes for reviews on their site so that customers can input their thoughts directly onto Google’s platforms.

But again, do they want to?

Our position is clear: If you want our business we want to know what your customers think of you.

So.

While there are plenty of gay-owned sex toy stores and probably many of them are solid we cannot recommend them without seeing the results of customer satisfaction surveys. We say to them: “Don’t be a dick if you want us to buy your dicks!”

What’s A Guy Like Me Doing In A Place Like This?

 

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29

Love thermometer:  Not registering.  Sex thermometer:  Not registering.  Am going to have to return and ask for money back.

Home.  7:30 p.m.  Richard barks into the phone, “I’m not in the mood for your bitching and moaning about being single, Dale.  Go to a sex club for God’s sakes.  Maybe you won’t be so annoying if you got some dick.

Me:  “Yeah, right.  Me at a sex club?  That’ll be the day.”

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 31

Sex club.  2:15 a.m.   Can I get any lower than this?  Am I that desperate [Read more…] about Excerpt #3 From Dale Dent’s Diary, The Gay Version Of Bridget Jone’s Diary.