Author: Deano

The soulmate, to me, is a conception of the human desire for laziness in all things that are most important. The idea being, that if someone is your "soulmate", that the relationship will be easier/more fulfilling/help to complete you.

This is bad for all kinds of reasons:

• Like marriage, thinking of finding the soul mate as an "end" to one's relationship problems is kind of like thinking that knowing how to swim is the same thing as being able to breathe underwater.
• It puts an external value or limitation on one's sense of completeness. Tom Cruise is a dick(*): you complete yourself, and don't let that Scientolojerk tell you any different.
• Being in love may make you happier, or more contented with your life. But it does not make your life easier. Suddenly, you have responsibilities to and for another human being. Even if it's just scheduling a mutually agreeable date night, it's more work than entertaining yourself. A lot of the time, that work is worth it, but it's not a case of meeting a magical person who fits your needs – it's meeting the person who you are best able to communicate those needs to, and whose needs you can reciprocally understand.
• When you have the potential to say "I thought he was my soulmate, but I was wrong", you're externalizing the blame for relationship issues, or failures. Own your problems, and your weaknesses. Work on them, alone and with your next partner. The only way to get a soulmate is to be a soulmate, and the only way to be a soulmate is to become one. It's a process.

In short, it's bad to think that relationship issues aren't your fault or responsibility, or that finding the right person will prevent such issues from happening in the future. Be honest with yourself and your partner. Negotiate the rules of your relationship. Stick to the rules until they no longer make sense. Then, renegotiate, even if that means agreeing to part ways.

It never gets easier, but it never stops being worth the effort.

How do I forget a former lover?

Let me put it this way: heterosexual women who enjoy receiving anal sex are no closer to being gay men than their male partners.

Put even more simply: No. There are no physiological differences between gay and straight men that allow one to experience heightened pleasure during anal sex (topping OR bottoming).

Rather, it is the psychological and sexual identity differences (which may, indeed, have a genetic or other biological component) that allow some men to enjoy giving or receiving anal. Note that I'm not making a strict gay/straight delineation here – there are plenty of straight men who enjoy receiving anal sex from their wife/girlfriend using a strap-on. Heck, it's a whole educational video series:

• Bend Over Boyfriend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben…

In theory, everyone in good colo-rectal health has the physical capacity to enjoy anal sex. In practice, this is a lot more a case of "nurture" rather than "nature" determining the outcome – both in terms of sexual identity and being comfortable with the idea, as well as being comfortable with the act itself (usually involving cautious insertion and lots of lubricant).

With enough patience, practice, and prostate stimulation, just about anyone can come to enjoy anal sex. Er, pun intended.

Do gay males have special biological traits that make anal sex enjoyable or do straight males also have the capacity for this?

This may sound like an odd answer, but I'd lean towards 100%… Simply because of a larger conceptual argument – if you're not enjoying it, it's not sex.

That said, the pain and frustration issues around willing receivers is common to men and women – how do you "relax to fit" in a situation where the orifice/passage are not self-lubricating? This challenge, and discovery process leading to a satisfactory answer, seems to be "too much work" for a lot of women (and men, for that matter), which leads many to think that because their initial attempts were painful, it's just always going to be that way.

Getting an idea for how many people "give up" on anal sex before learning how to properly accomodate, plus those who genuinely dislike this form of stimulation, is very difficult to assess statistically.

About the closest you can get these days is to use the "practicing" numbers, and assume that people practicing anal sex do enjoy it (which is my original point, actually). For details on those numbers, try reading the great top answer to the question How common is anal sex?, by Anonymity on Quora (D'oh!).

How many women enjoy anal sex?

Killing the initiative will have nothing to do with accidental deaths. It will be killed by:

• an automotive industry that cannot survive the transition to a pay per use model for its product,
• the fuel industry, which makes much higher margins on consumer vs. fleet sales,
• and to a lesser extent by the taxi cartels in major metro areas.

The primary use case for a self-driving car is not to get you home when you're drunk, or let you join the "foot high club" on a road trip. Instead, self-driven vehicles are a mashup between Zipcar and Ubercab – cars that pick you up at your door within minutes, then go find their own parking space (or a new passenger) when you reach your destination. It frees the lower and middle class entirely from monthly car payments (okay, now banks hate the cars too), and reduces local government income from metered parking and yes, parking and moving violation fines (is there anyone left to love these awesome tech marvels?).

Long story short, they'll come, they will happen… But the level of disruption is so great, you can bet the self driving car will not be an America-first phenomenon – and even when it does get here, it will be the small to mid-sized rising metros, with fewer entrenched interests, that get them first.

How many deaths from self-driving cars will kill the initiative?