So—was Michelangelo in love with a man?

 

Letters he exchanged with the handsome young nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri certainly suggest the possibility.

 His letters were often accompanied by small, intimate drawings, like this one called ‘The Fall of Phaeton’. The tale warns of the dangers of hubris and succumbing to lust.

 It's important to remember that Michelangelo and his contemporaries didn’t have the same categories of sexuality that we understand today: people were more likely to be judged by their sexual acts rather than their emotional connections.

 In Renaissance Florence, religious doctrine threatened those who practised same-sex relationships with an eternity in hell. Michelangelo was a deeply pious man, who would have been unlikely to jeopardise the worthiness of his soul.

 None of this means that Michelangelo did not love Tommaso – it seems likely that he did, and that it was a unique and overwhelming experience for him. In Michelangelo’s first surviving letter, he says he waded out into the stream of Tommaso’s virtues only to discover it was a vast ocean with towering waves.

 Despite this, there is no evidence to suggest that the relationship ever became physical.

What emerges from their correspondence is instead a tender portrait of a deeply intimate bond, full of mutual love and admiration. While Tommaso would later marry their relationship would last the rest of Michelangelo's life, with Tommaso being present at his deathbed ❤️

Good Touch, Bad Touch, No Touch

 

When you’re so afraid of bad touch that you pull away from everyone,
you end up with no touch and miss out on the good touch
that might have healed the pain and hurt from the bad touch.

I can’t prove it and neither can you, but I think you’ll agree with me that our skin has a memory separate from our minds of Good Touch, Bad Touch and No Touch.

No Touch – when you sleep on opposite sides of the bed with your backs to each other with one partner dead asleep and the other staring into the darkness thinking, “What am I doing here?” when it’s easier to have sex than it is to kiss; when you walk in the world one moment hoping no one will speak to you or touch you and the next moment feeling painfully alone.

Bad Touch – being hit in anger; honking your horn and yelling at that elderly driver who probably shouldn’t be driving or being that older person who shouldn’t be driving; being ridiculed; being looked at with disdain, disgust or repulsion from someone who once liked, cherished, admired, respected and even loved you; the moment you get up out of bed to sleep in a separate bedroom from your partner because you don’t want to feel angrier at them.

Good touch – the smile you see when you’re seeing someone you love after being away and all you see is each other; when you spoon in bed; that gentle touch you see between older couples when one taps the other on the arm to point out something they both enjoyed in the past; when your son or daughter helps your aging mom or dad walk to the car from a restaurant; when a loving wife of 60 years gently rubs her husband's wrist while the morphine drip is attached and tells him, “Just breathe through your nose and all the pain will all go away.”

What does your skin remember?

Being listened to and feeling not just understood, but feeling felt is good touch and your skins never even have to touch. In fact if you have read this far, I’m guessing that some of what you have just read have cause you to feel felt.

Mark Goulston M.D., F.A.P.A.

Psychologists have identified 10 factors that explain why and how we fall in love

 

• Kevin Loria and Samantha Lee
• 
  

Romantic love is shrouded in mystery. What draws people together and how does the falling-in-love process work?

According to Elizabeth Philips, a research psychologist and expert in human-robot interaction, there's actually a fair amount of science that helps explain the phenomenon. Psychologists have identified ten factors that explain why and how we fall in love. 

Here are some of the factors that can play a role:

Having More Sex Doesn't Make Couples Any Happier; It's The Quality, Not Frequency, That Counts

 

By Samantha Olson

Let’s talk about sex. Are you having enough of it to make you and your spouse happy? Because it turns out frequency might not even matter. A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University studied how sex plays a role in our levels of happiness, and found frequency can make or break the mood. The study, published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, found a busy bed doesn’t mean a happy marriage.

Researchers randomly assigned sex frequencies to 64 healthy married couples between the ages of 35 and 65.  Half of the participants were nominated to have twice as much sex as they normally would in a week while the other half maintained the same pace, at their leisure, for three months. Each person was required to complete three different surveys throughout the experiment, with questions asking about a range of things, including health behaviors, happiness levels, frequency of sex, and types of sexual pleasures.

Participants weren’t happier the more they did the deed. In fact, they were less happy. The researchers explained this by saying an increase in sex frequency led to a decline in desire and enjoyment. In other words, it was the experiment's fault. 

"Perhaps couples changed the story they told themselves about why they were having sex from an activity voluntarily engaged in to one that was part of a research study,” said the study’s lead author George Loewenstein, from Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology, according to CBS News. “If we ran the study again, and could afford to do it, we would try to encourage subjects into initiating more sex in ways that put them in a sexy frame of mind, perhaps with babysitting, hotel rooms, or Egyptian sheets, rather than directing them to do so."

Human beings were created to want to have sex because their biology is dictated by the need to procreate, according to the Harvard Business Review. Our instincts drive us to the bedroom, where women find a mate with quality genes and men find a mate healthy enough to bear a child. From an evolutionary standpoint, instincts naturally kick in to increase frequency, and neurohormones such as oxytocin and vasopressin are released, flooding the body with happy feelings that keep us wanting more.

The study may have put a damper on the sexual impetus. All of a sudden, participants weren’t drawn to each other with the primal urge to procreate, but instead to follow through on their assignment by increasing the frequency of intercourse. Sexual satisfaction relies more on the quality of sex than the quantity, as it relies more on those happy hormones flowing without pressure than tallying up notches on a bedpost.

"The desire to have sex decreases much more quickly than the enjoyment of sex once it's been initiated," said Tamar Krishnamurti, a research scientist in CMU's Department of Engineering and Public Policy, who designed the study. “Instead of focusing on increasing sexual frequency to the levels they experienced at the beginning of a relationship, couples may want to work on creating an environment that sparks their desire and makes the sex that they do have even more fun.”

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