communication

My hat’s off to you for being so thoughtful about the readiness of your partner. Too many people not as concerned as they should be about a partner’s readiness, and people are often particularly prone to presume male partners are always ready: that if men want sex, it’s all go, with no need to…

Hi aroplane, I’m sorry to hear that your long-distance relationship is causing you so much pain. It sounds like the two of you both really love and just downright like one another, and time has told you that those feelings are really strong. The one and only but huge challenge is the distance…

A lot of what I’m reading in your post suggests to me that you two are just not in a good place for sex together right now. Someone telling you they don’t want to be intimate, that they don’t like it when you do sexual activities for them, that they don’t like to do them for you is usually telling…

It sounds like you’ve found an effective and pleasurable way for you to enjoy masturbation! There is huge variety in what people find pleasurable or comfortable. Lots of folks report that direct clitoral stimulation is too much or otherwise uncomfortable, and then there are plenty of others who…

The first thing I want to mention here is that I’m not sure there is such a thing as “a normal teenager”! Seriously, each individual is different, with different needs and desires, and so there is no one way to be in the world. The best we can do is make decisions that are well-informed and that…

What it sounds like, to me, is that whatever it is you’ve been doing sexually just isn’t something you feel okay with yet or good about right now. I get that it feels good at the time, but when I talk about sex feeling good, any kind of sexual activities at all, what I mean is sex feeling good…

Short answer: Absolutely, yes. There could be—and likely are—plenty of other reasons why your boyfriend does not want to do sexual things with you. Longer answer: Our decision about whether to have sex, or whether to engage in any type of sexual behavior is rarely the result of a single factor. It’s…

If I only had a dollar (heck, even a quarter) for every time a young person wrote into Scarleteen to ask us if we think they might be [fill in a sexual orientation here], I’d be pretty freakin’ wealthy. This is in no way to make light of your question to us, more just to let you know that this is…

A friend dying is usually a really big deal, especially when you’re young and death isn’t expected like it is when we’re 60, 70 or 80. While young people can sometimes feel like their lives are going to be short, I think it’s safe to say few people actually expect anyone’s life to end when they’re…

Libido – the desire for sex of any given kind – is a very complex thing, much like sex and sexuality are complex. It’s emotional, it’s intellectual, it’s chemical and physiological, it’s both personal and interpersonal, it’s spiritual, it’s metaphysical, it’s historical, it’s aspirational. Our…