Delighted you're getting married

Samuel Pepys, English diarist, was born on this day in 1633.

"Strange to say what delight we married people," Pepys wrote, "have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition."

His reverence for women hadn’t forestalled him from treating them vilely. He’d always approached the opposite sex with trepidation, if not outright terror, but once he’d made inroads he was often over-aggressive, particularly when stoked by alcohol. Even so, he was typically astounded and somewhat suspicious whenever a woman consented to have sex with him, and no matter how satisfying the experience turned out to be, he invariably came away from it with a lower opinion of his partner than he’d had before. That attitude, he realized, had foredoomed his marriage.  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten.

Happy Valentine's Day

"To be in love is to be in a state of perpetual anaesthesia." -- H. L. Mencken.

His reverence for women hadn’t forestalled him from treating them vilely. Rae Ann had a point there, too. He’d always approached the opposite sex with trepidation, if not outright terror, but once he’d made inroads he was often over-aggressive, particularly when stoked by alcohol. Even so, he was typically astounded and somewhat suspicious whenever a woman consented to have sex with him, and no matter how satisfying the experience turned out to be, he invariably came away from it with a lower opinion of his partner than he’d had before. That attitude, he realized, had foredoomed his marriage.  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten.

Surprise us, surprise us

Pioneer sexual researcher Alfred Kinsey (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, known together as The Kinsey Reports) was born on this day in 1894.

"There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror." -- W. Somerset Maugham.

When the issue of sex had come up, for instance, and it was obvious the time was ripe, Sully had been sweating bullets but she’d told him to relax and not think too much, and she’d taken the matter in hand, so to speak, and refreshed his memory about how to go about it, even though she’d said that she was probably more out of practice than he was. See, it’s just like riding a bicycle, she’d told him afterwards, and he’d had to laugh. -- Chapter 16, The Misforgotten.