It always seems to me like knowing what you want will make things so much better. And yet, once you get there – no matter how long THAT takes – you soon find that knowing what you want is more like a first step in a process. And getting there is the real nightmare. I remember in my 20s when I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. If only I could figure it out, I reasoned, then everything would be so much better. I ached to be rid of the quest to figure out what I wanted.

The "immigrant experience"  is a phrase I usually associate with the U.S., what with people from across the world streaming in here everyday. A travelogue is what I'd associate with literature by foreigners from India. But the blogosphere is telling a different story. Many American and other Western citizens, who have either got on the love train or are riding the global economy wave that took them to India or simply love living there, are blogging about their experiences in a personal way that travel guides are unlikely to offer. Some are there for a few years.

1 Man, older and less educated than the woman 1 Woman, at least 5 years younger (be sure to check freshness date!) and smarter than the man 0 Couples of the same sex 0 Previous divorces 0 Cougars Place man and woman in same home. Stir. Voila! Enjoy your happy, lasting marriage!

Last year during national Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and I mean exactly one year ago on October 28, 2008, I wrote about one of the most disturbing cases with a connection to domestic violence the nation had seen in a while. A tale of horror unfolded, the murders of the mother, brother and young nephew of acclaimed actress and singer Jennifer Hudson. The alleged perpetrator, her sister's estranged husband William Balfour, was later arrested.

Some parents never fight in front of their kids, and their kids grow up fine. Some parents scream at each other day, and their kids grow up fine. And some in each camp end up with kids who either think a fight means the end of the world or that love is best expressed by yelling and cursing.What's the right thing to do?

Rather than an overall theme this month, I find that my short list of posts from the Sex and Relationships BlogHer Blogs comes in pairs. And so I bring you: Two darling dogs, Two Facebook friends, and Man Hair... times two. Did she rescue him, or did he rescue her? BlogHer kdsalyer writes about her dog Bear in her post, Rescued:

The first time I was truly, madly, deeply in love I began to live with an ongoing fear that something horrible would happen. I envisioned car accidents, deathly illness, and gave fleeting thoughts towards my beloved falling for someone else. The fear would come in flashes that I swatted away like an evil mosquito, and the closest I ever came to telling anyone about it was that I wrote an undoubtedly horrible film short that I only showed a couple people who didn't really get it. So I buried it somewhere amid papers and files, and now I don't even know where it is.

I've been thinking about love lately. About different kinds of love for which I'm hard pressed to come up with names for. I guess I've been thinking about giving and receiving.

A few weeks ago, Leonora Epstein wrote a post on The Frisky, which fed into CNN about something her therapist told her. "Some women are just happier in a relationship," the therapist said. This does not strike me as a particularly revelatory statement, but Epstein felt as though a bomb was dropped on her:

I found some really moving posts in the BlogHer Sex & Relationships Blogs this month. I so value when a blogger really opens up and shares something powerful. And I'm going to jump right in with kdsalyer's post, The Suitcase.

The controversy surrounding the Gardasil vaccine has been around from the moment it was approved for use in young girls. And from the very beginning I have had a problem with Gardasil being referred to as a cervical cancer vaccine - because it's not. I also have a problem with the 'fear mongering' commercials designed to look like public service announcements, and the possibility of making this vaccine (yet another) required by the government.

One can only imagine the size of the Post-Its in Jenny Lawson's house. Or the size of her cat.