Sometimes I want so badly to have a happy, intimate marriage that my heart feels like it actually hurts. The cynic in me says that no marriage is actually happy, and anyone who claims to be happy in a marriage is either lying or living in denial. The realist in me, however, knows that there must be something to this whole marriage thing because otherwise we wouldn't all be doing it, right?

Sometimes I just want to scream, "HOW DO I GET HAPPY IN THIS RELATIONSHIP?!" I want someone to tell me what to do to fix things so that I can stop living this life of emotional Atari. I want someone to take my hand and tell me that eventually, everything is going to be okay.

A big part of why I haven't ended things is because I want to believe that there is hope that this can work. What a fantastic thing it would be to someday look back on how we almost split up but then were able to repair the relationship and stay together. I think about how much stronger we can potentially be as a couple after going through all this and then coming out of it all okay.

Then I look at how lukewarm we are toward each other and I wonder if couples ever really recover from something like that.

When does a person decide to actually give up hope and file for divorce? Does it feel like a loss of hope, or does it feel more like a triumph of having made a decision finally? Is it terrifying, empowering, or both?

If my editor at First Wives World one day decides to decrease my word limit all the way down to one, no problem. I could still convey my feelings about my marriage. In a word: meh. Rob drinks too much — meh. We don't have sex — meh. Now Rob is turning things around — meh. Life ekes on, and it's hard for me to muster anything other than indifference over my lackluster marriage.

Indeed, sometimes I wonder if the only reaction my posts about my endless indecision elicit is a big "meh" from readers.

There was never a wife so wishy-washy. It's not without justification entirely — my husband was indifferent to my needs and feelings for the first few years of marriage — but it's embarrassing nonetheless. Some days I wonder what's wrong with me.

So I had to laugh today when I read that the powers that be (in this case, HarperCollins, publisher of the Collins English Dictionary) legitimized the expression. Yep, "meh" is in the dictionary. (So is "yep," by the way.)

When I read it I thought of our honeymoon. (I believe we had sex once the entire week — and that includes our wedding night. I should have known then to expect trouble ahead.)

Our lakeside cabin came replete with a fireplace, canoe...and one fluffy orange cat as neighbor. We laughed whenever Buttercup came around. "Meh...meh...meh," she cried at the porch door.

We thought it was adorable that she couldn't muster a complete "meow." But now I have to wonder, were our little friend's pleas a warning? Maybe she knew something we would remain in denial about for years. Smart cat. 

Okay. I haven't written about the boyfriend in a while. Truth be told, I haven't wanted to jinx it. Things have been going so smoothly I sometimes wonder if there's something wrong?

In the past, I've kept my finger on the pulse of my relationships. If the heart wasn't racing so hard one of us was in danger of a heart attack, then the relationship didn't seem real. It was all emergency-room experiences.

Reality was at such a high pitch, such a fevered pace, there wasn't any down time or room for ambiguity.

Maybe it's maturity. Maybe I'm just exhausted post-divorce, but my new boyfriend and I have a rhythm that's positively lethargic. I'm loving it.

Here's the 411: I'm so busy rushing around with kids, job, music and meetings, that when I make a date with Mr. Right these days, I'm finding peaceful relaxation, safety, security, and the warm-fuzzies are what I'm looking for. Not a racing pulse.

First, I never worry where I stand. He thinks I'm wonderful all the time. Second, whenever I ask, "Would you like to go to such and such?" his response is always, "Are you going to be there?"

He continually assures me that the largest measure of his happiness has to do with being near me.

I remember when I was in my 20s, writing about how I needed a wife. That just goes to show how lowly the position was back then, because I was writing about needing someone to do my laundry, scrub my floors, and cook my dinners.

While Mr. Right isn't angling for the wifey position, he isn't above helping me with household chores. And, he does yard work.

Now you're saying that this sounds too good to be true.

Although divorce has damaged me to the extent that I find it hard to think of a romantic future of more than a single day, I can honestly say that, from a new-age perspective, you really can dream your way to reality.

The family joke is that if I had stopped at two children, I'd be the most insufferable mother who ever lived. My two oldest daughters have never given me moment's pause — well maybe a few moments — but I saw none of the screaming, slammed doors, sullen withdrawals or general obnoxious teenaged behavior I've heard about (or exhibited myself as a self-absorbed young lass). Never had to set curfews, never had to mete out punishments for missing said curfews. How clueless I was.

But daughter number three — bless her little heart — has given me a run for the money from the very start. Didn't want to be born; we had to induce. Once born, she didn't want to leave my arms — or the house. Where most babies are lulled to sleep in their car seats, K would scream bloody murder the entire time. I remember one wretched ride where I compulsively kept reaching for the radio knob, as if that could turn her volume down.

Now it's just the opposite. At 15 with her first beau, it's all about The Boy, and she can't wait to get into his car. She doesn't want to spend any time with me — and certainly not with my beau and His Boy, four years younger. And I understand her need to be with her guy, her first love, so it's a delicate dance between her legitimate needs and ours.

So I thought she was being particularly magnanimous, when S and his son came over one Saturday afternoon and she agreed to go iceskating with us at a nearby rink. Afterwards, we came home, baked cookies together. When she said she'd like to skip going out to dinner with all of us to meet her guy, I thought it was a reasonable request. But S got a little pissy, which annoyed me, so I sweet talked her into it. We had a lovely dinner, then she went off with The Boy, S and I retreated up to my room for a movie, his son settled with video games downstairs.

I awoke at 3 am with a start. I was sure K was home by now, but something made me check.

Not in her room.

Do you want to know which nights I get the best sleep? I get the best sleep on the night after I have sex with my husband. Not the night of the sex, but the night after. He initiates every few nights, but the night following an evening of sex, he doesn't expect anything from me — so he just drifts off. It's great.

Here's what it's like to go to bed when my husband wants sex:

1. I lay down and he rolls over, puts his arm around me, asks me how I'm feeling.

2. If I don't respond physically he starts running his hand up and down my arm or trying to rub my shoulders. He might ask me if I want a massage or if there is something I want to talk about.

3. If I still don't respond physically he'll start making suggestions about the things he wants to do. Unless I want to stay up for a few hours arguing with him, I have sex with him.

4. If we don't have sex, he intermittedly grabs and paws at me throughout the night.

Here's what it's like to go to bed the night following sex:

I lay down and my husband rolls over, putting his back to me. He doesn't say a word.

It's a pattern I'm used to. If he's physically satisfied then he doesn't stir when I come to bed. If he wants sex, he's suddenly awake when I come to bed no matter what time it is. Apparently I'm really interesting and intriguing when he wants to get some, but when he's satisfied I become a stealth ninja when I come to bed. Funny how that works.

On the nights that I'm really tired and just want to go to sleep — but don't want to get intimate — I've fantasized about sleeping on the couch just to avoid the whole song and dance with my husband, but I know he'll come looking for me and it will turn into a lengthy discussion that will evolve into sex if I want to get any sleep.

It really shouldn't be this complicated. 

I got to talk with Harville Hendrix, the author of Getting the Love You Want, last week. He's in Portland for a conference of Imago Relationship Therapists, the school of therapy he and his wife pioneered.

In the hour we talked, Hendrix answered my questions with great depth and careful consideration. Typed-out, his replies to each of my four queries were several pages.

Boiled down, edited and over-simplified, here's the heart of it:

"It really is very simple, how to be in a great relationship," Hendrix says. "It can be stated in a few sentences."

1. Your relationship will become more satisfying to the extent that you get it that you live with another person. This person is not you. They are an other. If you get it that you are living with difference and you give up trying to make them be like you, then the conflict starts to go away.

2. You have to drop negativity. Negativity is all an attempt to change the other person. Replace it with affirmation and finding all the things about your partner that are beautiful and wonderful. If I'm getting curious about my wife when she's doing something that makes me uncomfortable, 99 percent of the time, my discomfort has nothing to do with what's she's doing. It has to do with her not matching an inner image I had of her. She moved out of my picture frame, and I want her back in the frame.

3. Affirm and advocate their otherness. Become curious about it. And the way I can make all this happen is to engage in dialogue. So I can hear her disclose who she is and get at who this person is I'm living with. 

Ok, here's the latest cougar news — because everyone and their mother now thinks I am a cougar expert, except my own mother who may I remind you, I keep sending out of the country every time I am on the air somewhere talking about this. She is now a very frequent flier.

On Wednesday I was a guest on "Sex Files" on Sirius Satellite Radio Maxim Channel 108, which is hosted simultaneously by the lovely Anna David (out of NY) and the lovely Amy Spencer (out of LA). Every week they talk to men about sex, and this week's topic was "Dating & Cougars: How To Meet One, How To Woo One and How to Keep One Happy." No worries, I handled it.

Also on with us was Illona Paris, a sex therapist and self-described cougar, whose latest book out this week is called Hot Cougar Sex: Steamy Encounters with Younger Men. Her mother must live in Bora Bora.

She told hot stories. I tried to give warm advice but I used my every day Cougress voice. Wink. Listen to it here.

I should add that before allowing me up to the studios, for security purposes, I had to go through a "cat" scan. LOL — thought that was funny. Sort of purrfect timing.

Truthfully, the biggest thrill for me was hearing the show's hostesses with the mostesses, Anna and Amy, jump on board with my temporary new word for cougar — "Cougress," which I feel is at least a bit more feminine and a touch less harsh. By jove, I think I've started a movement.

Looking back, L's death was the point where things started to unravel, not just with my love affair with S, but with his family. It was so incremental that I wasn't sure if I was imagining things, perhaps subconsciously sabotaging the relationship because I was afraid of where it might lead. More likely that I didn't want to acknowledge that nagging question mark, simmering at the back of my mind. Which I really should know to trust by now. 

With L gone, I offered to host the first Thanksgiving without her and it went really well...except S and his siblings only invited his mother, not the step mom and dad as had been L's habit. Awkward. The sister stepped up to the plate for the holidays...but was put in the strange position of having to host both Christmas Eve and Day, identical menus, identical guests, but with the mom at one; dad and step mom at the other.

But the real shocker came a few months later at the annual benefit for the organization that L had co-founded, the one where S and I became an item. She was being honored that night for all the work she had done; her son was presenting the award.

And her widowed husband came with a date.

Trying to hide my shock at this, I glanced sideways at B, L's delightful son who I loved as much as my own daughters. "I hate her already," he said flatly, as he prepared for his speech. I looked at S, who shrugged as if to say: time to move on. I sure as hell wasn't ready to move on; obviously her children weren't either.