Dealing with stress.

By which I mean, my partner is stressed, and therefore I am beginning to feel stressed. Because it multiplies like that, lovely.

The problem is - well, the main problem is that I cannot readily solve any of her problems, and thus I am a bit stuck. Viz this little Catch-22:

She is tired, therefore she should go to bed and sleep.
If she goes to bed without me, she will become upset and cry, and thus not sleep.
If I go to bed at the same time as her, and read, she will be unable to sleep because of the light.
If I just go to bed and try to sleep, I will toss and turn because I am not at all tired.
Or finally, I stay up, and she stays up, until we reach some balancing point of the trade-off.

Additional bonus fun: she is avoiding decision-making because she is too tired, so said balancing act is all up to me. GAH

Fidelity, and the limits thereof

Riffing off something I read originally on the Slacktivist's new site about a man who is sorry that he ever kissed another woman but his wife...before he married her.

Well, personally I find this disturbing.

It shows a view of your body as like a white sheet, where sexual contact is black ink, and any mistakes are indelibly marked on you.

Now, this question does not apply to anyone who has never had sex, but...do you really think you can tell the difference between a virgin and a non-virgin?
Apart from the fact that a virgin will fumble around more, and be more likely to get things wrong, there's no difference whatsoever.
Technically there's the issue of the hymen, but most girls have lost their hymen from things such as bike-riding, tampon use etc before they have sex anyway, so not having an intact hymen is by no means an assurance that a girl has sexual experience.
Besides, that hardly applies to kissing. If someone is mad enough to not want to kiss until they marry, and their partner is nuts enough to let them then fair enough; personally I hold that there's no way to either build a sufficient level of intimacy to be able to genuinely consider marriage without some physical contact...and equally that compatibility is a genuine issue.

I am a very tactile person. The amount of support and reassurance I can take from my lover slipping her hand into mine when I didn't expect is is immense, and we only build from there.

Gah, I'm losing my thread, so I think I'll leave it there. Abstinence probably deserves a couple more posts on it's own. Essential point remains: a virgin's body is not essentially different from that of a non-virgin. That's magical thinking. Why should you regret having kissed someone, if you were otherwise unattached at the time and you both enjoyed it?