I ran a little piece here not long ago called "In Defense Of The One-Night Stand," making the point that sex, love, and intimacy are three related but disparate states, and that you don't have to have all three in play in order to make a satisfying connection with someone.  Unless you do, of course. 

There are a lot of us who do need to have all three at once or risk feeling used, hollow, dirty, or just plain lonely. Especially in the dispiriting aftermath of divorce, I think one ignores that need at one's peril:  If you are feeling vulnerable, wounded, and betrayed, it is no time to go prove how tough you are by hooking up with strangers.

What if they're not strangers, though? The current phrase "friends with benefits" seems to have replaced the older, crasser, and yet less coldly transactional-sounding "f_ck buddies," but we all know what we're talking about, right? There's this guy, you like each other and there's mutual attraction, and you seem compatible enough in bed.  So, once a week, or a month, or a year if you're wired that way, you get together and have fun and part friends ‘til next time, or so it's supposed to go.  By either name, it's a functional enough arrangement when everybody has exactly the same degree of attachment (or, ideally, de-tachment).  But the tightrope walking!  The potential misunderstandings! The oh-so-delicate balance between "just" and "friends!" So few people can really finesse it and, failing that, it's often just another way to cause ourselves pain and disappointment—two things we don't need more of after a divorce, thank you.

In the universe of post-divorce dating, or any dating for that matter, confused signals can occur — all sorts of misfires and miscommunications.

Take Aurora's case, for example. When her date signed a very early e-mail with an effusive "I adore you!" it gave her pause, and a mild case of indigestion. "I don't know," she wrote to her friends, "Would that be a red flag for you? It seems a little... enthusiastic."

People do tend to get a bit carried away when topics like "Is this guy an insane stalker or just kind of a dork?" come up, and nobody wants to stand by while a friend wanders into a potentially dangerous (or even a run-of-the-mill unpleasant) situation, so there was, of course, a chorus of "No no no!" and, "Drop that guy!" and,"Red flag! Red flag!" along with the more reasoned "He sounds a little too interested, doesn't he?" type of comments.

A few weeks later, though, Aurora was still dating him, so one had to ask. "Oh, it was no big deal," she wrote, "His one great flaw so far is that he just really likes me. Also, I think we have different standards for the word ‘adore.' I pretty much only adore God. He adores streaky bacon (he's English), the TV show "Coupling," and early Depeche Mode."

Good on her, then, for taking a deep breath and giving herself permission to ignore that particular red flag. Maybe we ought to ignore them more often. Of course I'm not talking about the kind of chills-producing "uh-oh" flags that personal security expert Gavin de Becker talks about in his popular book The Gift of Fear, when he tells you (especially the female "you") over and over to follow your instincts, and if you think there's something wrong there probably is.

A few years back a colleague asked me to come up with slogan for a fundraiser he was organizing, a Valentine's Day reading of stories about awkward sex, disappointing relationships and terrible break-ups called "My Sucky Valentine."

I came up with "Sour Grapes and Bitter Chocolate: Good Writers on Bad Sex," and have never really been able to think of Valentines Day any other way since, married, single, or separated. I actually love both sour and bitter as flavors but they're not precisely the attributes most of us are looking for in a holiday.

So, Valentine's Day. Did everyone survive?

I know it should be possible, theoretically, to sneer one's way past a big fakey-fake totally made-up holiday celebrating a vision of romance many of us never really fell for in the first place, a holiday observed by the ritual consumption of frankly terrible candy and the second-ugliest cut flowers on Earth (carnations are worse) but of course it's never that easy. If you've recently faced the death of hope for your own personal vision of true love, having every TV show, magazine cover, and store window (including the chi-chi puppy boutique in my neighborhood) — valentines for your dog going "love, love, LOVE!" is going to sting, no matter how tough your armor or battle-hardened your defenses. You don't fit. It hurts.

In as good an illustration of that as anything, my team of advisors, usually so voluble and so quick with an anecdote, came up nearly empty on this one. How did the formerly-married spend their holiday, or how, in the past, did they get through the ones that coincided with undesired singledom, delivery of divorce papers, or recent break-ups?

A few weeks ago, I read a few articles on the inevitability of depression as middle age draws closer. Did you see those stories? They were everywhere, but no need to scramble around for any; they all read pretty much exactly like this one, from US News and World Reports.

I focused on this particularly un-uplifting passage: "The researchers cautioned that cheerful people tend to live longer than unhappy people — a fact that might have skewed the overall finding. But they also suggested that evidence of a happiness curve might simply reflect a midlife choice to give up long-held but no longer tenable aspirations, followed by a senior's sense of gratitude for having successfully endured while others did not.

Giving up your dreams plus gratitude you're not dead yet, and those are supposed to be the good parts

Oh well. The real point of the articles, if not the study itself, was meant to be "Feel better about not feeling so great — it's normal!" And I do know from my sex education work that normalizing, the mere act of telling people how many others there are in their cohort, can be surprisingly therapeutic.

So what don't women like in a condom? Bumps and ridges, for one. Anything which might conceivably add stimulation can also add irritation, and those little nipples and pimples have little to offer as far as the good stuff goes, bringing only the possibility of a truly annoying sensation to the party.

Like I said in my previous post on the subject, women seem to like condoms thin and strong!

Friction in sex is a funny thing: in one sense, it's pretty much nothing but friction ("90% of sex is fantasy + friction," an old colleague of mine used to teach. I don't remember what he said the other ten percent comprised but we tend to be designed to very strict tolerances as far as friction goes: this much is nice and indeed necessary; this much is annoying, this much is a "Get the hell off me right now" deal-breaker.

We'll get on to lubricants in my next post but in the meantime, avoid condoms with unnecessary bits and bobs. A possible exception is the Inspiral and Pleasure Plus types with extra "headroom" so your gentleman friend doesn't' feel so crowded in there. And these types may carry some slight advantage for women, especially extremely sensitive women who are able to feel the difference between circumcised and not without looking first. But again, if you can feel the extra material for good, you may just as easily feel it for evil. Still, as my friend Mae points out, a condom isn't much of an investment. If you want to try one, try one. What have you got to lose?

Happy New Year! Okay it's a little late, but let's hope for a good one this time.

I'm not much of a fan of the usual type of resolution (I quit smoking when I was good and ready, and I'll lose this post-baby weight the same way) because they are generally just another tool with which to bash ourselves over the head and really, haven't we got a boxful of those already?

There's a certain appeal, though, to the art of light-hearted self improvement. The stakes are low — if you promise to buy yourself a cute vibrator and you never get around to it, so what? It's not like your insurance is going to go up. In that spirit, here is a list of sexual self-improvers for the new year. Do them or don't, we'll never know!

1. If you've been faking it, cut that right out. Just quit it. If you're tired of the action, why not just say "We can stop now?" And if you feel the need to prop up a sagging ego (not your own), maybe it's time to wonder why you don't feel comfortable just telling the truth, or to start going out with someone who doesn't require that sort of bolstering.

2. Try something new: As simple as leaving the light on or as complicated as joining a special interest club and buying a whole new wardrobe.

3. Learn about something new — even if you're not sure you want to try it. A great deal of our "Ew, gross, nobody should ever do that" reaction to unusual practices comes more from their novelty than from any real inherent heinousness. That, and from our tendency to assume the worst. So much of so-called kinky sex is not only utterly harmless but rather endearingly nerdly in practice, but there's no way to know this without risking at least a little exposure. Web-surfing is safe!

This time of year, when everything is shopping and shopping guides and guides to shopping guides anyway, why not a shopping guide? I think we've already determined that if you're dating you're using condoms, but which kinds, and why?

What makes a good condom? Do any of those claims have any validity, anyway? Is anything in this world, ultimately, truly ribbed for your pleasure?

Most of us, faced with a tricky consumer-good decision, turn to something like Consumer Reports, and why should condom shoppers do any differently? CS regularly rates condoms, although the most recent rundown I can find on their public site dates from 2005.

You can find the ratings are here and an overview with some points of interest is here, but with the exception of the breakage stats for the very worst condoms (marketed by Planned Parenthood, of all people) and an admonition not to buy XXL condoms unless he really is an XXL (in width, especially), I don't find Consumer Reports' ratings all that illuminating.

Consumer Reports often rates based on the presence or absence of features I'd find unnecessary if not actively annoying: Do I care if it my coffee-maker can be programmed to make weaker coffee on alternate Wednesdays? I don't and I wish it wouldn't. So if Consumer Reports has its uses but often seems oddly ill-focused to me, who does know exactly what women are looking for in a sex-aide, be it the oscillating, alternating-current kind or merely a simple rubber safety device?

"How do you feel about exposing the body you have now?" I wrote to Charlotte, who's obviously attractive by any conventional measure (adorable, actually) but is in her 40s, divorced with two tween-age kids and feeling it.

Running screaming into the night now, she typed back, "My issues have issues with this one."

I haven't had any children," wrote Debra, "but coming out of a five-year relationship I've found that all my insecurities and fears about myself and dating have become rolled up in body image problems. It's as if, for me, any problem I might have is automatically sublimated to loathing my body. And then, of course, I can't date because who would ever want to date big old fat me and viola all dating worries are solved. Sort of."

I agree with Debra," Charlotte picked up, "Body image gets tied up with a great many other things when you're dating. I go back and forth. There are days when I'm happy with how I look, even though I don't like the number on the scale. And then there are days when it seems like all the men I'm interested in are looking for the extremely sporty, no-body-fat women and that every man who might be accepting of my shape is not someone I'd be interested in. It gets into issues of what your mental image of yourself is, vs. what you might actually look like. I've never had anyone come out and say that they didn't like my shape, but there's not exactly an exit interview when things don't work out. It's much easier to think that someone didn't like me because of a few extra pounds, rather than thinking that they don't like my personality. You can tell yourself that the weight is just a temporary issue."

"There's no entitlement to a media-approved body at any age or parity," my friend Elise said tartly, when I broached the subject of dating again, after time and childbearing have done their stretching and saggy best.

She's tart enough often enough that I may as well make it part of her nom de column: Tarte d'Elise, a delectable but bracingly citric French pastry. She was objecting to the idea that women who've had kids (she hasn't) have access to some special sort of imperfection-excusing status unavailable to those who were merely dealt a currently unfashionable body by luck of the genetic draw.

In my last column, I talked about dating friends and why it may feel comfortable. But there is a downside.