Relationships

Choices about sex and intimacy will always involve some risks, and making sound choices when risks, emotions and social high stakes are involved isn’t something anyone is magically expert at. How can we learn to do it well, and what are some common things that trip us up?

(Michelle’s second post:) I previously sent you a question on what to do with my ex-boyfriend. Now it’s even worse. I don’t know if he’s being truthful or not, and I don’t know how to move on. He’s hurting me in every possible way. He had a pool party yesterday and my my best friend was there. My…

If cunnilingus isn’t an activity he enjoys, and he’s made clear he doesn’t enjoy it and doesn’t want to do it, in my book you don’t bring it up again as something you want. He’s made clear it’s just not for him right now, and he tried it twice to see. He knows you’re interested in it, so he’s…

You know, anytime anyone says or feels that they literally hate someone’s body or body parts, my advice is going to be that it isn’t a good idea for the person with those feelings to be intimate with the person with that body. If we deeply disdain someone’s body parts, or anything big like that…

We have a good piece on safety when it comes to online relationships and meeting up here, but let’s review the basics and talk about you and this situation specifically. Meeting someone who you don’t know in person and haven’t met before alone, especially if and when they may feel you agreed to be…

Many men – and people of all genders – will not and do not wait until marriage to engage in various kinds of sex with partners. That’s as true now as it was 20 or 50 years ago. For at least the last 100 years in the west, most people do engage in some kind of genital sexual activities with…

If you feel crampy and bloated, and you didn’t miss your last period, it’s more likely in terms of those symptoms and the timing of things that you’re experiencing PMS symptoms rather than pregnancy symptoms. However, if you’ve been having unprotected intercourse, pregnancy is a very real…

You are not responsible for a parent having an idea about who you are that’s about who you have been as a child, who they seem like they might want you to be, or who they think you are but are not anymore, and may – and in this case, probably – never have been. I hear you expressing what sounds…

I don’t think a relationship can be ruined by a person not having the kind of sexual responses, sexual feelings, desires or sexuality a partner wants. Unless. Let’s say people in a relationship with those things going on won’t accept that that person, try as they might (or not, if they don’t want to…

Words for gender, sexual or other kinds of identity don’t usually mean the same things to all people. In fact, they very, very rarely do. Those words also can never tell us all or even most of what someone is comfortable with sexually, what their sexual boundaries and limits are and what they are…