When I was growing up, I often turned to my mother for relationship advice. We had our differences, but we were close, and I valued her opinions. However, I also found myself grappling with many of the things she said, because in all of it one thing was clear: for her, the only kind of acceptable sexual relationships are monogamous, heterosexual, long-term commitments.

We first started having these conversations when I was around 14 years old, which was also when I first started to question my sexuality. From the start, I had some questions about this concept. What if I did not want to sleep with men at all? What if I did not feel interested in the marriage-and-kids thing?

A few years later, after two failed relationships (with the same wonderful person) and a lot of angst, I was fairly certain about two things: 1. I was pretty darn queer and 2. I wasn't cut out for monogamous, long-term relationships at the time. I did not feel comfortable within a relationship, no matter how awesom...

We're posting this across all of our channels, because it's mondo important.

From Reuters, today (bolding, ours):

A large real-life test of birth control methods found more U.S. women got pregnant while using short-acting methods such as pills, patches and vaginal rings — and the failure rate was highest when they were used by women under 21.

In a new study published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, about 7,500 women and teens in the St. Louis area were allowed to pick from a variety of contraception methods at no cost.

Over the course of the study — more than three years for women who completed all follow-up interviews — participants had a total of 334 unintended pregnancies. For the full study, see: bit.ly/KdMCQp

“We found that participants using oral contraceptive pills, a transdermal patch or a vaginal ring had a risk of contraceptive failure that was 20 times as high as the risk among those using long-acting reversible contraception,” said the research team, l...

Have you been through a breakup? Maybe more than one? If you have, you know how awful it can be, and how incredibly rough, especially when you're new to romantic or sexual relationships. Breakups between friends can be just as awful, too.

You probably also know that learning to deal with and get through a breakup is just as much of a learning process as learning to be in relationships is. Sometimes we'll have dealt with loss before breakups, so we have some clues and tools already when it comes to taking care of ourselves. But for plenty of young people, a breakup is a first major loss, and figuring out how to get through feeling so gutted while you're feeling so gutted can be seriously overwhelming.

Friends can be great sometimes, but not so great other times, even when they really are trying to do their best. Plenty of us know that quips like, "You deserved better than her, anyway," "His loss, seriously, you're so much better off," "Now you can go have some fun!" or "Oh, it was onl...