relationships

If a healthy sex life is very important to you, I'd suggest you start by being sure you're approaching sex with a partner in a way that is realistic. One essential aspect of healthy sexuality for ourselves and our partners is having our ideas about sexuality based in reality, and being sure our...

Consent is an active process and agreement, and it cannot be coerced. The absence of no does not mean yes. No matter how well you think that you know your partner, you should never assume that you know her thoughts in that instant about sex and what she may want or not want to do. She should also...

Given when you had your abortion, you're right: you would not have been anything even remotely close to fully dilated. Your provider would have dilated your cervix to some degree, but only as much as is needed for aspiration, which is nothing close to what is needed for childbirth. At 10 weeks, a...

So in other words, he's expecting you to suddenly become psychic, right? What your partner is asking for here seems more than a little unfair to me and I'm guessing that's something you're seeing here as well. It doesn't make a lot of sense to tell a partner that we want them to do something for us...

Really, truly, the longer we're in relationships, the more we're going to go through times when for one partner or the other -- sometimes both -- libidos are low or sex just isn't a high priority. That's okay. To expect our sex lives as time goes on to resemble how they were when we were brand new...

What you’re describing here comes down to a word that many people interested in psychology would term “displacement.” The theory of displacement was first brought about by the well known Sigmund Freud to describe the idea that when a person is upset, they shift their impulses from an unacceptable...

A basic lowdown on interpersonal abuse and assault: what all the terms mean, why strangers are the least of our worries, what a cycle of abuse looks like, how you can start seeing abuse for what it is, where it is, and how to protect yourself and others and make abuse stop.

Frankly, if your first thought is to try and change your body -- rather than to change the dynamic of this relationship or get out of it -- something is horribly amiss. Your husband is clearly ignorant when it comes to bodies. A penis -- be it his or anyone else's -- doesn't have the capacity to...

You just take whatever time you need, at whatever pace you need, to build trust with a new partner or potential partner. Being assaulted of course impacts how we trust people and makes it more difficult to trust, especially when you were assaulted by people who you trusted, who those around you...

A partner addressing your worries or nervousness about any kind of sex by telling you you need to "grow up," needs to grow up WAY more than you do. In a word, if that's how he responds to this, I'm less worried about him dumping you, and more concerned about you sticking around with the likes of him...