In television and film they call it jumping the shark. In real life we generally call it ridiculous. In this case the only word is appalling. On second thought, disgusting fits too.

Uganda is poised to pass a law criminalizing and severely punishing people for something they have no control...

This is for everyone who insists on cutting drivers off on the highway. This is to the plumber who never shows. This is for the doctor who thinks two hours in the waiting room is reasonable. This is to the moms who hold up the carpool lane. This is for...

My mother would be dead. There's nothing complicated about it. She would be dead if she had not gone in to have her routine mammogram at age 45. There was no lump sizable enough to feel. No family history to listen to. Just a ring on a mammogram that made...

Six months ago I fired my housekeepers. Couldn't afford them anymore. I've been lucky enough to be able to hire them back. I know. I know. Seems like a luxury. But it feels like a necessity, especially when I was without them. It got me thinking about necessities and how...

Don't have sex. That's the message some groups insist on pushing to the young and/or unwed. Don't have sex. That's it. No guidance about birth control. No information about how to protect oneself against STDs. Just don't have sex. And now the abstinence movement has a brand new Barbie to...

My mother told me never to gossip. She told me never to spread rumors and to be wary of believing the ones I hear. I can't say that I have always been a faithful listener to that advice. Although my mom was certainly right. Gossiping does always seem to lead...

I am so angry that I don't know where to begin. I mean, it's not as if I wasn't angry before this. But suddenly, I feel as if I could spit fire. I don't know what the breaking point was...no...wait...I do. I know exactly what it was. It was an...

Well, times they certainly are a changin'. Just a few short weeks ago, Poly Pride Day was held in Central Park in New York City. And, believe it or not, even The New York Times gave it a nod. I was lucky enough to be asked to speak and enough...

I can't help but be intrigued by the striking resemblance between Miss South Carolina 2007, Lauren Caitlin Upton's response to the question, "Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?" and Sarah Palin's response when Katie...

From Chapter Nine of the book Open by Jenny Block. Excerpted by arrangement with Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2008.

As time went on, she realized that several key elements make a successful open marriage, and though those factors involved the community of people she...

Just to set the record straight: I don't have a problem with monogamy. I don't think people in open relationships are more "evolved" than those in closed ones. I don't think open relationships are always honest and closed ones are always deceitful.

I believe in choice and acceptance.

I say...

People can be so cruel, especially on the web. Sometimes I think it's the primary thing for which people use the Internet -- to exercise their dark side.

The Internet has made it possible for anyone to write, for anyone to share an opinion. And that's fabulous. The thing is,...

I'm mad about it. Not the fact that they're in one. Heck, I don't even know if it's true. They certainly didn't tell me personally about it. And it has long been rumored but never even close to being confirmed.

Until now.

At least so say the press reprinting the...

People in open relationships often talk about rules -- what they should be, whether or not to have any, what to do if they're broken. That can be especially true for people just starting out or thinking about embarking on an open relationship. One of the most often contended topics...

I realize a lot of people are homophobic. I think it's ridiculous, of course. But I'm not naïve enough to think it doesn't exist, despite my relative luckiness to not encounter it personally on a regular basis. I understand that it is about ignorance and lack of exposure to people...

Some people's inboxes are filled with spam. Mine is filled with questions. It's been that way ever since I began talking publicly about my open marriage. Unfortunately, the one I get the most frequently is one of the most difficult to answer.

Here's how the email usually goes:

Dear Jenny,

I get a lot of questions about my open marriage. I also get a lot of questions about why I talk publicly about it online and in my new book, "Open: Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage." The answer is two-fold. First is because I'm a writer and...

More than two years ago, I wrote "Portrait of an Open Marriage" for Tango magazine. It was reprinted here and in Cosmopolitan (Germany). It got a number of comments on Huffington Post and continues to get comments to this day at tangomag.com.

But a lot of...

As I sat in Starbucks yesterday afternoon, I figured it out. I figured out how to make the world the kind of "better place" that everyone's always talking about.

I was listening to a man in his forties talking to a young man in his early twenties. Scratch that....

"There's glory for you!"

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' " Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't--till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!' "

"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,' " Alice objected.

"When I use...