The O-town Scene

The Advice Goddess Amy Alkon By All work and no foreplay My husband and I are entrepreneurs, de- veloping a new product. We're both working long hours. He's miserable because he has no time for his art (painting), and our sex life is in shambles. There isn't a lot of blame or anger. We simply go about our entire days with little or no flirting and fall into bed completely exhausted at night. Even if we crave sex, we're too tired. We kiss goodnight and promise it'll be different tomorrow or on the weekend, but it never is, and I see no reason to believe things will change. We used to race home from work to have wild sex and then do silly things together in the evenings. People always called us "the sensual couple" because we couldn't keep our hands off each other. How can we get the zing back? Eighty percent of sex is just showing up. (The other 20 percent is remaining conscious while you're having it.) Of course, you'd need to leave work at a reasonable hour to make your role-play in bed more dirty doctor/naughty nurse than adjacent coma patients. I know, that's not what it says you're supposed to do on your printout of the Puritan Work Ethic. Former Harvard psychology professor Shawn Achor writes in "The Happiness Advantage" that we're taught that we have to sacrifice hap- piness for success and told that only when we're successful will we be happy. Achor counters that happiness isn't something that falls in your lap when you attain some level of accomplishment; it's "a work ethic." He cites a decade of research suggesting that happiness "raises nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37 percent, productivity by 31 percent, and accuracy on tasks by 19 percent, as well as (leading to myriad) health and quality of life improvements." Remember, people called you "the sen- sual couple" because you couldn't keep your hands off each other, not because you couldn't take your eyes off the clock. Ditch- ing the clock for at least some of the day is essential. It's activities that make you lose track of time that make you happy — activities like sex (and painting) that also make you forget yourself and that package your husband neglected to bring to the post office. To put this in entrepreneurial terms, you need to relaunch your sex life and take it as seriously as you would a business launch. Look at sex as a mandatory meeting you need to have naked. — Accidental Celibate And as unromantic as this sounds, you need to put "flirt with husband" on your daily schedule — until it becomes a habit again. Implied in that is "be fun!" Be silly like you used to. Make an effort to leave work well before the cows not only come home but start watching "Seinfeld" reruns. And replace any motivational posters deco- rating your office with ones that reflect your newfound knowledge of trickle-down happy- nomics, for example: "As you climb the ladder of success, be sure to stop every now and then to let your husband look up your dress" and "Behind every successful woman is a man with his pants down." The benefit of the dowdy I'm a recently divorced 40-something mom who's having trouble making female friends. I'm excluded from group activities, and my attempts at get-togethers fall flat. I attributed this to my being a bit quiet and reserved until a mom at school — previously a friend — casually remarked, "You're one of the moms we all love to hate!" What?! What am I doing that makes me hateable? Male friends say it's because I am "hot" and "have a killer body" and other women are jealous. — Lone Mom Middle-aged women who've gotten a little frumpy, schlumpy, and stretchmarky cling to how "what's on the inside is what re- ally matters"…right until what's on the outside is a hot, shapely, newly available divorcee col- lecting their husbands' eyeballs like the Pied Piper commandeer- ing the rodent population of Hamelin. Being "reserved" surely doesn't help. If you were mousy, you'd probably be considered shy. Being a looker and reserved possibly marks you as a snob. To take this less personally, recognize that these women are probably driven by fear, envy, admiration, and/or intimidation. To get them to see you more as a person than a hot person, you need to extend yourself: Be assertively friendly; join a volunteer organi- zation so people get to know you through your actions; and seek out women who seem happy and secure. All in all, you need to be realistic. Understand that the first thing in some women's minds will always be how much cuter they are when they aren't standing next The print edition is available online at Amy Alkon is a syndicated advice writer whose column runs in more than 100 newspapers across the U.S. and Canada. Although the column reads as humor, it's based in science, psychology, evolution- ary psychology and ethics. to you — unless you're dressed in something that's figure-hugging in the manner of those bags they zip the dead bodies into at the morgue. (c)2011, Amy Alkon, all rights reserved. Got a problem? Write Amy Alkon, 171 Pier Ave, #280, Santa Monica, CA 90405, or e-mail AdviceAmy@aol.com (www.advicegoddess.com) Read Amy Alkon's book: "I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society" (McGraw-Hill). www.otownscene.com Oct. 27, 2011 O-Town Scene 31

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