Wintertime magic can mean many things. For many lovers, it can be an end to the waiting game. During the holiday season, he (or she) popped the question, and now you're getting married! Let the wedding planning begin!

These (often frenzied) preparations include a...

Belle the pot-bellied pig has found sanctuary-within-a-sanctuary, in her human caretakers' spacious living room. She is a winsome pig who happily greets visitors and encourages belly rubs by rolling over onto her back and snorting with pleasure. But in the pig pen Belle had a problem; a male bullied her,...

Cheating? Stepping out on one's spouse? Marriage vows notwithstanding, infidelity is a constant theme in the history of marriage, and has never been restricted to husbands. Wives, too, have always strayed outside the marital bed; some even transformed that marital bed into the setting for extramarital trysts. But...

From the small, beach-blessed Caribbean island of Antigua comes The Skin, a full-length feature film screened at Toronto's CaribbeanTales Film Festival as part of its North American/European-wide tour. The fourth film by husband-and-wife team Howard and Mitzi Allen, The Skin is a supernatural thriller steeped in...

In the 21st century, egalitarianism reigns -- or does it? Why, if a husband can have a mistress, can his wife not have a mister? Not just a "piece on the side," certainly not a gigolo, but a man with whom she shares a long-term, extramarital romantic and sexual relationship...

I grew up hearing about mistresses from my mother. She would tell us about the "fancy women" her grandfather, Stephen Adelbert Griggs, an affluent Detroit brewer and municipal politician, maintained in what she disdainfully referred to as a "love nest." Why did Great-grandmother Minnie tolerate this? Because in her comfortable...

I hadn't been back to Haiti since the tremblement, the earthquake that killed countless people and devastated so much of the country. The destruction was immediately evident. On both sides of the airport road, settlements of uniform grey tents were pitched close. In the crammed capital of Port-au-Prince that was...

Legalizing gay marriage has opened the floodgates of impassioned debate about its most contentious sequel: gay parenting. The classic questions -- how does their parents' gayness affect children? Do gay parents "create" homosexuality in their children? -- reflect baseless homophobic fears. The children of gay parents are no likelier to...

Whether straight men and women know it or not, New York's new Gay Marriage Act will have an enormous impact on them. The reason? It will eliminate or at least drastically reduce the likelihood of gays attempting to conceal or even change their orientation through heterosexual marriage.

In the...

Google "New York Gay Marriage" and 73 million plus stories pop up, explaining, celebrating or lamenting the legalizing of gay marriage in New York. Bridal and tuxedo shops are bracing happily for an onslaught of wedding-minded gay partners. An ever-cautious President Obama praises the process of New York legislature's democratic...

Literature is rife with naming mysteries, from Dominick Dunne-like romans à clef to Shakespeare's "Who is Sylvia?" Esteemed poet Ken Babstock has introduced a new twist into the name game, and it's jarringly personal. In "Russian Doctor," a poem in his just-released collection, Methodist Hatchet, Babstock concludes that Nobel Literature...

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a traditional man! His cheating on Maria followed the age-old tradition of the sexual double standard for husbands by allowing them to have mistresses or concubines. Nobody understood this better than Bill Clinton, who offered this definitive explanation of why he dallied with Monica Lewinsky: "Because I...

Each Nov. 11, we pay tribute to our veterans of wars past and present for their service, their courage and their sacrifices. But these men and women seldom return home unscathed by their wartime experiences and as they attempt to reintegrate into civil society, resuming or reshaping intimate relationships is...