Not long after I graduated from college, I worked at a government agency. One of my co-workers was in the middle of a bitter divorce. Prior to the divorce, he stayed home caring for his two young sons. Once his wife left him, however, she filed for custody of the children. At the time, he did not contest the filing, as he did not want to upset his kids any more than they already were. However, he was clearly heartbroken and missed nurturing his children.

Harry & Sally. Rhett & Scarlett. Lancelot & Guinevere. Lucy & Ricky. Johnny & Baby. Name famous romantic couples and since 2007, Marlboro Man and The Pioneer Woman deserve a spot in the Top Ten.

I visited a friend in London this past weekend. While I was there, I ate lots and lots of yummy chocolate and cheese and baked goods. I basked in the idea that national health care was a given. Even more, the UK National Health Service doesn't rob women of their reproductive rights by allowing religion to dictate what health services are covered; except for in Northern Ireland, termination (abortion) services are covered. After a horrible week in the US, where Democrats sold out women and allowed religious lobbies to impose their beliefs on my health, I thought about defecting. London is perfect! Well, except that even in the UK, women are told that you need set aside your own preferences and needs if you want to get and keep a man.

What do you do when one spouse wants another child and the other does not? Add advanced maternal age and one fallopian tube to the equation and you have a recipe for disaster. I am an only child and in my ideal world would be the mother of two children. However, my desire may not be fulfilled. My husband is not too keen about having another child, I've heard every excuse from the economy to sleep deprivation and am honestly at my wits end.

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.