Married couple David Wilmott and Darnell Morgan, co-owners of the successful Kennesaw, GA restaurant “Forks & Flavors,” will step onto the national stage during their television debut on the May 12 episode of “Restaurant Impossible” on the Food Network.

The Chef Robert Irvine-hosted reality show, now in its 19th season, works to turn around restaurants that are facing impending demise within 48 hours on a $10,000 budget. On day one, Irvine assesses the business by observing the staff and kitchen during a full service. He then updates the menu and makes aesthetic changes to the restaurant in preparation for the grand reopening the following day.

But there’s one thing that separates “Forks & Flavors” from the majority of restaurants in crisis that have appeared on the show; they are thriving.

The twice-married gay couple who first appeared in a feature story on The Reckoning in March 2021, says they experienced a significant increase in business after their story was published, with old and new customers clamoring to experience their cuisine or to get the tea on their interesting relationship journey directly from the source. So when Morgan says the Food Network contacted them in August 2021, to apply to be on “Restaurant Impossible,” instead of the other way around, it’s not surprising.

Spring is known as the season for love for good reason. Everything around us is thawing out and firing up, including our moods thanks to a springtime burst of dopamine scientists say often sets the stage for romance. But for every couple that begins a five-alarm love affair in the spring, experts say there are many more that find themselves in dry dock.

Call it libido gap, a dead bedroom, or the more clinical term “sexual desire discrepancy.” By any name, the shortfall between how much physical intimacy two partners want is one of the biggest sources of tension in relationships.

“It’s a lot more common than most people will discuss,” says Machel Hunt, an Atlanta psychosexual therapist and one of two experts who spoke to The Reckoning about getting back that lovin’ feelin’.

The cause of a libido gap can be physical, such as hormone imbalances or other conditions that lower desire. Other times the cause is mental, including stress and a history of subtle sexual trauma experts say can be particularly common among gay men.

Author Doug Cooper Spencer, 67, almost let the opportunity to fall in love again pass him by. In 1998, sitting in Fountain Square, a busy plaza in downtown Cincinnati, as he continued to work on his first novel, he noticed someone walking by.

“I saw these nice legs walk past, and I glanced at them, like, ‘Oh, he’s got nice legs.’ That's it—because I'm an introvert,” he said.

Doug had dissolved a relationship a year and a half prior and wanted to focus on writing. While glancing up from the legs that caused his temporary distraction, he caught the eye of the person to whom those legs were attached.

“He catches me [looking up] and he stops and I'm like, oh God, here we go. No, I do not want to be bothered,” Doug recalls thinking to himself.

In June, Alphonso Mills, 30, and his fiance Ja’Mel Ware, 33, will become fathers. They shared the news of their expanding family in a short video posted on their respective social media accounts on Feb 22, marking the 22nd week of their baby’s development. While Black queer couples are frequently raising children that are both biological and adoptive, especially in the South, Ware, who identifies as a queer transmasculine man and was assigned female at birth is carrying the couple’s first child. On testosterone for over a decade, Ware says he never imagined that he’d one day have to decide to stop receiving gender-reinforcing hormones in order to conceive, but that was before he met Mills.

Ware proposed in October 2020, during a trip to Walt Disney World after dating Mills for two years. It was a surprise affirmation of their commitment to each other that Mills later reciprocated with a proposal of his own.

“There was just something about our connection that made me realize as long as I could do this, I would do it,” Ware says.