People ask me all the time: “How have you managed to make a long-distance relationship work for over 7 years?!” (My wife and I just moved in together, finally – hence why I just moved to New York. Wish us mazel tov!)

There are a few points I always make when I answer this question – it helps to have compatible communication styles and to figure out the sex stuff ASAP, for example – but perhaps the most important one is that when my partner and I were long-distance, we spoke on the phone for hours, at least a few nights a week, every single week.

I really think those phone calls were the thing that made our LDR sustainable – because they felt like having actual conversations with my actual partner. Texting, by contrast, is usually asynchronous and sporadic, and it’s easy to lose the nuance of tone that way, especially when talking dirty and/or navigating conflict. Phone calls feel so much more connective. At this point I can’t imagine how I’d ever have a long-distance relationship again without regular, leisurely phone calls to keep us feeling close.

There is a middle ground, however, between texting and phone calls, and that’s voice notes: little audio clips you send back and forth. I used to wish there were more dating apps which offered this functionality, because I always found I could get a sense of someone much quicker if I heard their voice – not just its tone and timbre, but the way they speak, the words and phrases they use, the inflection and unique musicality of their speech. Still to this day, whether I know someone very well or not at all, I feel closer to them when I can hear their voice – sometimes in a really hot way. It’s common for me to exchange little voice memos with far-away people I’m flirting with; it concretizes our connection, making it feel bigger and more vivid, even if our entire relationship technically exists only within our phones.

Here’s some advice that I’ve found to be true across romantic, sexual, and creative realms: The more that you fail at something, the more you’ll learn about how to succeed at that thing instead – and the happier you’ll be, because you’ll learn that failure does not kill you.

This principle runs so counter to my nature that I’ve had to learn it over and over again, and even today as I’m writing this, I’m still not sure I 100% believe it (although, trust me, it is true). As a former “gifted & talented” kid, I often get frustrated with myself whenever I struggle with anything at all: cooking a new meal, trying a new art form, going to a new place. You’re supposed to be smart! says the critical voice in my head. You can’t embarrass yourself by being bad at things, especially where other people could see! I’ve given up on many endeavors simply because I wasn’t instantly good at them (ninth-grade ballet class comes to mind…) and I’m sure that in doing so, I’ve lost out on a lot of joy/fun/learning.

These days, I am trying to get more comfortable with failure. One of the best ways to do this is to take an improv class – and in fact, the first improv class I ever took, in the eleventh grade, was where I initially learned this lesson, because improv is the perfect training ground for tolerating failure. Sure, your first ~dozen terrible scenes will leave you ruminating shamefully on your mistakes for a while (if you’re anything like me, anyway), but once you’ve done enough of them, you see how ephemeral these scenes are. You also see that your classmates (probably) don’t judge you for fucking up, because they’ve had their own fuck-ups too, most of which you probably forgot about instantly, same way they probably forgot about yours. You see that each time you fail, you learn a bit more about what not to do (especially if you have a great teacher who reinforces these lessons in constructive ways), and so you get better and better over time.

I think the emotional side of “failure tolerance” is its most valuable aspect, though. The more times you’ve failed, the less afraid you become of failure, which allows you to take bigger risks, since you know even the worst-case scenario is endurable. I think getting good at improv is less about adding skills (though it’s that too) and more about subtracting fear and self-judgment, since good improv comes from a flow-state place of trusting your gut and following your momentary impulses – and in the same exact way, I think we get braver and better at life in general when we know that failure will not kill us, and will, in fact, only make us hotter. Uh, I mean, stronger.

I’ve been a writer for most of my life, and I’ve been a hopeless romantic for even longer. So, naturally, I am writing a romance novel. I’ve been drafting it on-and-off for about a year, and am about 50,000 words into my first draft.

There is plenty of writing available about the craft of romance novels: how to structure them, build romantic tension between characters, and so on. I have been devouring these texts as I slowly chip away at my draft – but I’ve also found myself craving information about the more psychological or emotional side of writing a romance novel. There’s a lot less of that type of writing, although it has been an experience unlike any other in my career – so I thought I’d tell you a bit about it today. I’m sure the experience will change a lot as time goes on (final edits might be more annoying than pie-in-the-sky drafting, for instance!) but here’s where I’m at right now…

1) I’m a total swoondog, bro.

I giggled maniacally when I encountered the word “swoondog” in Christopher Downing’s excellent book Fool Proof Romance. Chris doesn’t define it, but from context clues, I gathered it was meant as a romantic/crushy equivalent of being a “horndog” (something I also am, at times).

I think sex robots are cool, but I don’t think they’re hot.

Everyone is talking about A.I. these days. It feels like most of the pitches in my inbox are about new A.I.-based dating apps, sex toys, erotica websites, and on and on. Robots are flooding the zone!

Like many people, though, I have mixed feelings on A.I., particularly on its usefulness within the realms of sex and love. I have written a lot about sex robots over the years (most notably, this fancy column on the future of sexuality that I was commissioned to write for The Walrus) and have even sexted with an A.I., and while I think these robots are interesting toys and tools, I fundamentally don’t think they are hot…

…because I think, for me, the hottest thing about sex (and kissing, and flirting, etc.!) is wanting and being wanted, and a robot is inherently incapable of desire. It does not want me. It cannot want me. And so I cannot truly want it, either.

I’m writing a romance novel where the two leads are both sex nerds – that is to say, people who are passionately geeky and analytical about sexuality – and it’s making me more aware than ever: Sex nerds are my favorite kind of people. We are relentlessly curious, unabashedly dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure, and (if I may say so) often quite hilarious and charming. And of course, it goes without saying that if you take us to bed, we will do our damnedest to make it good for you – and we will have done the required reading in advance!

I get along so well with fellow sex nerds, in fact, that I wish there were better ways for us to recognize each other ‘in the wild,’ aside from our subtle sex toy jewelry, enamel pins from sex conferences, etc.! As-is, I mostly meet them in environments specifically designed to attract them, like fisting workshops and vintage porn screenings… and when I do, I’m always glad to know so many weird sex facts I can bust out at a moment’s notice to impress my fellow dorks.

Sharing is caring, as the saying goes, so here are a few such facts that I’ll gift to you, so you can gift them to your future sex-nerd crushes like beautiful little vulva-shaped flowers…

The plural of clitoris is clitorides.

I got rejected this week. It sucks, but it happens. And fortunately(?), I’ve been on both sides of it enough times to have a toolkit for getting through it, which I’ll share with you here today. Feel free to send this along to someone who needs it!

A note on being the person who does the rejecting: That also fucking sucks! I hate it! Many of these tips can be adapted in some way to suit your needs if you’re struggling emotionally in the aftermath of rejecting someone, especially since I think similar feelings of shame can come up in both scenarios (although my shame, when doing the rejecting, is less “No one will ever love me again” and more “I am a heartless bitch who doesn’t deserve any of the love she receives,” but I digress).

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When you lose your way in life, it’s vital to have tools that can guide you back toward yourself and what truly matters to you, so you can get back on track.

Some people journal, some do psychedelics, some go on weeks-long silent meditation retreats. Some people hit the gym, sign up for skydiving, or book a trip someplace they can eat/pray/love. Some people read a lot of self-help books, or write one, or burn one ceremoniously in a bucket in the woods. Some people get a tattoo, a piercing, bangs, a Porsche. Some people seek counsel from their friends, their mom, their professor, or their god.

Me? I look to my crushes to see what’s next.

My journals are full of entries that pick through crushes like tea leaves, trying to puzzle out what they mean. My big attractions lead me to big questions, which lead to big thoughts about my life and my identity. A few recent examples of many:

It’s a tough time to have a job that requires you to be sexually aroused. (To be fair, it’s a tough time to have a lot of jobs, and mine ranks pretty low on the stress scale – but it’s the one I know and am qualified to write about!)

This week alone, I had three – count ‘em, three – dildo reviews on my docket. As you’ve probably heard, dildos are generally designed to penetrate an orifice… and inconveniently enough, my orifices were clenched so tight from life stress and doomscrolling that they could’ve squeezed a lump of coal into some kind of vagina diamond. (Hey, free drag name/burlesque name/band name if ya need one!)

Sure, I could review a sex toy from an unaroused state – but would you want to read a restaurant review written by someone who’d eaten a full meal before going into the joint they were meant to review? Probably not, because the reviewer wouldn’t be physically or mentally equipped at that time (in all likelihood) to give the restaurant a fair shake. Likewise, I need to be sufficiently aroused when I test sex toys; otherwise I just feel like my genitals are being poked and prodded, and that experience would make for a pretty boring and useless review.

So needless to say, my uncharacteristically low libido made it troublesome that I was contractually on the hook to fuck three dildos. As a result, my testing sessions this week were some of the most difficult I’ve ever had – which, let’s face it, it’s masturbating in my own comfy bed, so even at rock-bottom, it’s hardly a gruelling day at the office (or in the mines)! But nonetheless, it was a comedy of errors from start to finish. I’d start to get turned on from reading some hot erotica on my phone, and then suddenly get a stress-spiking notification that drained all my lust in an instant. So I’d put down my phone and switch to fantasizing about my crushes du jour, and I’d quickly get overcome by panicky doubt (“What if they don’t like me?! Or, perhaps even scarier, what if they DO like me?!?”) and have to do some deep breathing to calm down. I’d refocus on hot mental images to get back into the zone, only for my building’s fire alarm to go off (it was a false alarm, but the adrenaline it dumped into my bloodstream was entirely real). And so on and so forth, until eventually I had gathered enough testing notes to write a goddamn review.

When I go on a first, second, or third date with someone, it’s because something about them has intrigued me, so I’m interested in finding out more about them, and in discovering whether we might be compatible for a relationship, a situationship, a copulationship, or anything in between.

This is why it’s utterly bizarre to me that over the course of my adult life, I’ve been on several dates with several men (and yes, it was always and only men) who asked me literally zero questions the entire time.

You could call this behavior rude, you could call it self-absorbed, and in plenty of cases you would be right about that. But I also think there are some cases where the person isn’t trying to be an egomaniacal convo-killing dick, per se; they just don’t have the interpersonal skill or experience to know how to further a conversation. Or they get nervous and clam up in the moment, leaving their conversation partner to do all the heavy lifting (which, let’s face it, is not most people’s idea of a fun date; it’s certainly not mine, as a journalist who literally interviews people for work, and therefore would rather not do it off the clock too).

When someone asks me zero questions on a date, it doesn’t just frazzle my nervous system with the constant stress of having to run a whole conversation myself, and it doesn’t just make me assume my date finds me utterly boring and unappealing – it also makes it near-impossible for me to muster even a scrap of sexual attraction for them. How can I even contemplate relaxing into sexy pleasurable feelings with you, and trusting you with that vulnerability, if I don’t believe that you know me, like me, and want me – at least a little? And if you never ask me questions, I never feel known, I never feel liked, and I never feel wanted – so I never feel turned on, desirous, or even flirty, either. Why would I? To want sex with someone would require me to believe that sex with them could be good, and if someone’s shown no interest in my inner experience at all, I have no reason to think they’d care about my pleasure. That would require caring about what I think, and asking me questions… something you can prove your ability to do by simply doing it, starting long before any clothes come off. 🥵 

I used to think my nose and my forehead were the only things standing between me and true love. I know that sounds insane, but that’s really what I thought.

Like many of you reading this, I grew up in an era when female celebrities’ looks were picked apart in tabloids, when women’s magazines ran constant articles on how to “minimize” your body’s “problem areas,” and when TV makeover shows made it seem like a haircut and a flattering pair of jeans could fix your entire life. As an intrepid young romantic, I studied these texts like field guides, always seeking the secret knowledge that might transform me from a quivering, boy-repellent wallflower into a beautiful belle of the ball. I believed love mattered more than anything else (I still believe that), and I believed the only way to find or deserve love was to be pretty. (That one, I only sometimes still believe… and I’ve spent a lot of money on therapy to get to that point, thank you very much!)

One thing that strikes me now, looking back at all the media influences that tried to teach me how to be a Hot Girl, is how fake it all was. These types of articles frequently instructed readers to “be yourself!” while simultaneously offering scads of advice on doing just the opposite. Cut bangs to veil your big forehead, throw on a wrap dress to cinch your belly, slip into some control-top tights to mask your cellulite – hide more and more of yourself, basically, until you become an approximation of acceptable attractiveness – and then and only then, somebody might actually like you.

This struck me as unhinged and nonsensical at the time, and yet it was constantly presented as “just the way things were,” at least in the cis-het dating sphere (I thought I was straight back then). In addition to its misogynist attempts to curtail women’s personhood and spirit (not to mention finances), there’s something vaguely misandrist about this type of messaging, too – it seems to insist that all men/boys want the same things, and that they care about a woman’s looks to the exclusion of literally everything else, which simply isn’t true. Even the shallowest, shittiest fuckboys I’ve ever met must have some standards – they won’t date a woman who’s in a cult or an MLM, say – and yet dating advice aimed at women and girls in the oughts was so often just: Be blonde, thin, hairless, and agreeable, and you’re golden.

As I tossed my Magic Wand aside and struggled to catch my breath after a brain-shakingly intense orgasm, I reflected on the fantasy that had gotten me off – a virginal, inexperienced young man ejaculating in his pants from me merely kissing him – and I wondered: Am I part of the problem?

(Yes, that was a Carrie Bradshaw-ass way to open an essay. I doubt Carrie ever jerked off to the thought of a dude blowing his load in his boxer-briefs two minutes into a makeout, though, so we’ll diverge fairly drastically from here on out…)

Premature ejaculation – and dick sensitivity in general – has become a bigger and bigger part of my fantasy life over the past few years. It’s incredibly hot to me, the idea of someone being so excited, surprised, or overwhelmed by my touch (or even just my attention) that they can’t control their bodily responses. I’m sure a lot of this has to do with my own insecurities; what could be a better antidote to feeling undesirable than to have someone jizz in their jeans from just the sight of your sensuous bod? But there are other elements of the fantasy that turn me on too: the embarrassment that the premature ejaculator would feel; the shameful secrecy involved if he tried to conceal that he’d come, or (even worse) tried to push through and have sex with an already-spent dick; maybe even the extra-humiliating element of me talking shit about him in his ear, saying other men had satisfied me more because they could last longer. (This is false – partners who come quick have always excited me more, for reasons that should be self-evident at this point – but it’s still a hot thought!)

I can’t help but notice, though (oh god, there’s Carrie again), that this fantasy bears some resemblance to one that’s much more common and much more celebrated in our society: (some) men’s fantasies about “deflowering” a virginal young woman.

Recently I was in a silly mood while on some intoxicants, and I was pondering some of my favorite historical sex toys, as one does… when the phrase “The Cone is a koan” popped into my head, and I laughed so hard that I choked on my negroni.

Let me briefly define my terms…

The Cone is an infamous vibrator made by British brand Twisted Products circa ~2007. As its name suggests, it’s conical – like a traffic cone, except shorter and wider. You were supposed to sort of sit down on top of it. Theoretically it could feel good on the vaginal and/or anal opening, although I always thought it looked too pointy/pokey and wide to feel good, at least for me.

A question that shouldn’t be depressing, yet sometimes it is: “If you could say one thing to your younger self, what would it be?”

Maybe you’d tell them to spend more time with family, or to make more art. Maybe you’d throw them a financial lifeline (“Invest in some guy named Steve Jobs, trust me!”). Maybe you’d just remind them to floss their damn teeth.

But one common answer I’ve heard from people when discussing this question, especially from women, is some version of: “I wish I could tell her that even though she thinks she’s hideous, she’s actually beautiful.”

I’ve wished that too. My younger self was convinced she was unloveably ugly, and she acted accordingly: shy, skittish, and self-critical. And when I look back at her now, I sometimes wonder: If she had felt beautiful, and had acted like she felt beautiful, would people have seen more beauty in her? I think so.

There are soooo many myths about sex toys that I wish would just die, from the idea of them being "addictive," to the assumption that only awkward losers use them. (Both laughably false! I mean, hell, celebrities like Lady Gaga, Christina Aguilera and Chappell Roan have been open about using sex toys... Do you really think they're awkward losers?! Not to mention, even us awkward losers deserve pleasure!)

Another such myth, which I loathe, is that you should only use sex toys if you "need" them. Most recently I saw this raised in a Reddit thread about men using sex toys, and whether it is (or should be) more stigmatized than women using them. A woman was uncomfortable with her husband's new vibrating stroker, and tried to rationalize her reaction by saying that men don't "need" toys as much as women do, because men are more easily sexually satisfied than women – and that, for this reason, men using sex toys is somehow "weirder" than women using them.

It's certainly true that cis men's sexuality is often assumed to be simpler and more straightforward than cis women's sexuality in our culture, but the science doesn't totally back up that assumption. As I learned from Dr. Laurie Mintz's great book Becoming Cliterate, studies show that most cis women tend to reach orgasm without much trouble, so long as they're getting adequate, sustained clitoral stimulation – the same way that most cis men need adequate, sustained penile stimulation to reach orgasm. The clit and dick are effectively the same body part, after all; they just developed differently in utero. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and all that!

As I told the woman on Reddit who felt threatened by her husband's stroker, there's a reason they're called sex toys – it's because they exist for the purpose of fun and pleasure. There are occasional deviations from this – for instance, some sadomasochistic toys are more painful than pleasurable (although their diehard users may tell you otherwise), and some medical aids like vaginal dilators and penis pumps get lumped into the sex toys category even though their usage may not always be 'fun,' per se. But broadly speaking, sex toys are meant to be enjoyable tools for exploration and experimentation, like paintbrushes or musical instruments. Seen through that lens, it's obvious that you don't have to "need" a sex toy to be allowed to use one.

Unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. We’re seeing that all around us right now: protests spilling through streets, unionization efforts, grassroots healthcare initiatives. When times are especially bad, you have to do more things that are especially good in order to counteract that.

The same is true in our romantic and sexual lives, too. We must throw our cards on the table more brazenly and boldly than ever before – at least, if our goal is to continue to forge and deepen our connections to other human beings, at a time when human connection is more politically and personally important than ever.

But let me back up a sec, because this piece is actually about how I DMed a cute boy about a horror movie 5 months ago and now we talk every day.

I have spent a lot of these pandemic times daydreaming about intimacy but doing little to actually achieve it. (Maybe you can relate?) Outside of my safe and splendid relationship with my spouse, I’ve found it harder and harder to connect with people on a romantic or sexy level in recent years, for a tangled web of reasons, including COVID concerns, mental health struggles, and the lingering sting of past rejections. I’ve met a few cool people and been on a few nice dates, but mostly I’ve felt too tense and guarded to really let anybody in. My hopes for new romance receded into placid daydreams, which felt safer and more plausible than any real-life attempt to connect with someone new. Sad, but true!

I try not to be a polyamory evangelist, at least not anymore. At this point in human history, I figure anyone with an inkling of curiosity toward polyamory will have at least heard of it, so they can research it more deeply if they feel drawn to do so. You can’t “convince” someone to be poly just as you can’t “convince” someone to be gay, but you can model a healthy, happy life within this identity that might inspire others to seek the same if they desire it.

With that in mind, today I want to offer up some life lessons from the world of polyamory – not in the hopes of convincing you to “switch teams” if you’re currently monogs, but rather, with the intention of improving your relationship(s) regardless of how you prefer to structure ‘em. Here goes…

One person should not be your everything.

The farther away monogamy gets in my rearview mirror, the more clearly I can see that its philosophical foundations are absurd. It has never made sense for two people to have to fulfill all of each other’s needs. You know that old proverb about how it “takes a village” to raise a child? Well, children aren’t the only people who benefit from having wide-ranging social supports in their lives!

I’ve been trying to live in the moment more. It’s hard. But improv helps, and so does sex.

The other day in class, I was tasked with improvising a Hoedown about an aquarium. The first two lines formed in my head almost immediately once I heard the suggestion:

Why go on a date to a movie or a park,

When you could go someplace instead where you could see a shark?!

The other night, after my latest musical improv show, I was too exhausted to regale my spouse with the full details of my evening, although I wanted to. “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, if that’s okay,” I said over the phone, through a yawn.

She understood completely, but asked me: “Can you just tell me how it felt, then?”

I smiled, because her penchant for asking great questions is one of the many reasons I married her. “It felt great,” I said. “I felt in control the whole time. I didn’t feel nervous at all. It was the best.”

And really, that’s what she needed to know, anyway. The details are fun, but they’re not the point. The feeling is the point.

Are you in therapy right now, and do you take notes during sessions? I was just re-reading some of my old therapy notes the other day, and felt deeply grateful to my past self for writing down all these insights when they were fresh. I come back to them time and time again, and they often take on new meanings for me as my life changes and grows.

Recently I stumbled across notes from a session where my therapist posed one of those really juicy therapy questions, a question so good it unlocked something in my brain. They’d asked me: What would it take for you to believe that [false belief] isn’t true?

While this bears some similarity to activities I’d done before in cognitive-behavioral therapy workbooks, most of my CBT experiences have been about gathering and affirming evidence that already exists against my harmful belief (e.g. looking at old texts where my partner says “I love you” when I’m feeling unloveable). But my therapist was doing something a bit different in this case: they were asking me to identify what type of evidence would definitively disprove my belief, and then seek out or create that exact evidence. 

I immediately liked this idea, because it felt so much more empowering than what I’d done with CBT practitioners before. I didn’t have to wait around for evidence to present itself. I could go make my own.

As you know if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, sometimes I get obsessed with things. Currently I am obsessed with Severance, the sci-fi/thriller/speculative-fiction TV show – because, among numerous other reasons, it makes me think more deeply about sexuality. All my favorite media does.

A brief rundown on the premise of Severance for those unfamiliar: it’s set in a world where a mega-corporation called Lumon has created something called the severance procedure. They implant a chip in your brain, which basically splits you into two selves: your work self, and your personal-life self. These two selves have no memory of each other, and no knowledge of the other one’s activities. When you go to work, your consciousness switches to your work self, referred to as an “innie,” and when you leave work, your consciousness switches back to your personal self, or your “outie.” This creates a situation where the innie is essentially trapped at work forever, since all of their experiences occur at work – while the outie has zero awareness of what they do at work all day, allowing Lumon to get up to some shady shit.

(If you haven’t seen Severance and don’t plan to, you can go ahead and skip this piece, because I think it’ll sound like unhinged gibberish to you and also it’s loooong, but thank you for being here! I appreciate you!)

Anyway, with that being said, sex was barely discussed in season 1 but is becoming more of a thing in season 2, and I’m (obviously) massively nerdy about sex, so I have lots of questions about how it functions in this universe. There are spoilers ahead for all the episodes currently released, so don’t read this yet if you’re not caught up and would like to be. Oh, and (content note:) I will be discussing some dubious-consent-y and non-consent-y stuff, as that is the nature of this show. Let’s dive in.

I’ve wanted to be somebody’s girlfriend before… but have I ever wanted to roleplay as somebody’s girlfriend? What would be the point of such a thing – and, perhaps even more pressingly, what would be the difference?

I pondered this when I saw a recent post on the /r/RandomActsOfMuffDive subreddit – a forum for finding no-strings-attached cunnilingus partners – where a man had specified that he was seeking a woman to whom he could offer “BFE”: the boyfriend experience.

BFE, and its counterpart GFE (the girlfriend experience), are terms commonly used to describe particular types of sex work sessions. Wikipedia describes these sessions as involving “reciprocal sexual pleasure and some degree of emotional intimacy.” The provider expends emotional labor to help the client feel that they are engaged in mutually desired, mutually enjoyable sex between two people of equal standing.

One wonders, then, what exactly an offer of BFE would entail in a non-monetary transaction. What would the “provider” – in this case, the thirsty man shouting into the Reddit void in search of munchable cunt – be getting out of such an interaction, if not money? 

It’s funny how a person can change your whole life with one sentence.

In 2007, I was at a meeting of my high school’s queer-straight alliance, and the author S. Bear Bergman was our guest speaker. In between readings of beautiful excerpts from his new book about gender, selfhood, and love, someone asked a question about compatibility in relationships. I don’t remember the exact question, but I remember Bear’s answer with startling clarity:

Thoughtfully, slowly, he said that in terms of a potential partner, “you want someone who’s similar enough to you to make you feel comfortable, but different enough from you to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.”

Similar enough, but different enough. Both.

I’ve heard a lot of hypothetical questions about clone-sex over the years. (Can you tell I’m friends with a lot of sex nerds?) Sometimes people will wonder if fucking your clone would be considered incest or masturbation. Sometimes we debate the consent ethics of clone-sex. Sometimes the question is just “Would you fuck your clone, if you could?” – to which my answer is always a resounding no, because I don’t find myself sexually attractive and wouldn’t be sexually compatible with myself. (It’s funny for a professional masturbator to say she’s not sexually compatible with herself, but hey, you know what I mean…)

That being said, when I do occasionally permit myself the indulgence/horror of picturing it, one other thing that worries me about sex with my hypothetical clone is that I might not be able to get her off.

See, imagine that I lay her down in my (our?) bed, and get her all turned on by watching the porn I (we) like, and talking dirty about the fantasies I’m (we’re) into, and then I start touching her clit in the exact ways that I know feel good for me (us), the ways I’ve practiced and honed over decades… and then it doesn’t work. What then?

It’s not as impossible as it may sound. Even setting aside the fact that a clone grown from birth would have her own set of preferences forged in the fire of life experience, what if she did like all the same things as me, and I still couldn’t get her off? What if, without the ability to directly feel what each touch feels like from moment to moment (as with masturbation), I couldn’t accurately read her body language and the ascent of her pleasure well enough to make her come? Oh god, the horror!!

One of my oldest and most strongly-held opinions, not to mention one of my most obnoxious opinions, is that everyone should take an improv class. Absolutely everyone. Yes, even if the very thought fills you with extreme confusion and/or terror. Perhaps especially if that’s the case – and perhaps especially in times of global chaos and tumult.

Many people who know me IRL will have heard me give this impassioned speech already, but I realized recently that I don’t think I’ve ever codified it into writing. So here, for your consideration, is my pitch for why you – YES, YOU! – should take a local improv class, at least once in your life. (The last reason on this list is the most important one, FYI…)

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I had a super useful idea once, while I wasn’t feeling well. I don’t recall whether it was during a psychedelic trip or a hangover, but it was definitely one of the two.

Those are two pretty different mental states, as you may know if you’ve sampled both. But one thing they have in common (for me, anyway) is that your thoughts can guide your experiences while you’re in those states, even more than they do in everyday life.

When I’m on psychedelics, for instance, even just thinking about a cute, cuddly cat from my childhood can make me burst into tears, or can flood my body with happy chemicals that feel like the god-given message “Everything is going to be alright.” On the flipside, when I’m hungover, thinking about last night’s hamburger and fries for a second can send me racing to the bathroom to puke.

You can see, then, how either one of these two states – or perhaps both of them – could lead me to the idea that your thoughts are the roiling ocean beneath you, but they are also the ship you use to navigate that ocean. And if you want to find your way out of the storm and into safety, you have to know how to steer the ship.

Content note: This essay contains some discussion of daddy dom/little girl kink, and some minor spoilers for the movie Babygirl, which you don’t need to have seen before you read this (although if you like my writing, you’d probably dig it!).

Imagine you’re at a seedy biker bar, surrounded by surly old men with fistfuls of beer and smokes. They’re milling around, grumbling, drinking. Radiating the misery of repression, their bodies held stiff and strong as pillars of masculinity, load-bearing defense mechanisms keeping them upright.

Imagine the stuff flowing from the jukebox all night was fairly predictable – old-man country, classic dude-rock. And then imagine that someone pressed a few buttons and suddenly, a shiny, sparkly song came on that lit up your whole heart. My mind goes to Carly Rae Jepsen, but maybe yours conjures Chappell Roan, or Prince, or Beyoncé, or some obscure chiptune band you saw at an underground video games festival once… Whatever it is, imagine that the whole room goes still, struck by the oddity of what they’re listening to, its total wrongness in this environment. And then imagine that you lock eyes with the person standing at the jukebox, the person who wanted to hear this song as much as you needed to – and imagine how you would feel toward them, knowing that in this whole big scary room, you’re the only two people feeling what you’re feeling. The only two people feeling that specific shame, and that specific joy.

A reader asked: “What were your favorite new acquisitions in 2024? Purchases, gifts, etc.”

Oh, you have inquired about one of my favorite subjects: THINGS!! Items. Objects. Possessions. Love ‘em. I am a product of my time, unfortunately, and my time is consumerist as fuck.

That being said, a lot of these objects have tangibly improved my life in ways that go far beyond just “Ooh, pretty!” Let’s talk about ‘em.

Did you know: I send out an essay like this to my premium subscribers every week (actually it’s usually quite a bit more personal than this one!), and becoming a premium subscriber also gives you immediate access to all past essays, on topics like sex, love, kink, dating, creativity, trauma, tattoos, & more! It’s a great, cheap way ($5/month) to support my work so I can keep doing it, even as Trump and his cronies make it harder and harder for sexuality content to continue existing. Thanks, babes!

I’ve been thinking a lot about recommendations recently. Maybe it’s because over the holidays I hung out a lot with my mom and brother, who basically speak in movie/TV/music references. Maybe it’s because I have a crush on a cinephile right now who keeps seeming cuter to me with each stellar movie recommendation. Maybe it’s because the internet is somehow both worse and better at recommending things than it’s ever been, with soulless but mathematically-optimized algorithms pumping out “For You” feeds and “Discover Weekly” playlists, as good old-fashioned human art criticism and curation seem to die a slow, sad death.

I miss the old internet, I really do. Much of my early taste in music, for instance, was shaped by the MySpaces and music blogs of the early oughts. I loved that each recommendation had real weight to it, enough to overcome my natural Taurean hesitance to try new things. If a new song or album was recommended by somebody I thought was cool, that would often be the push I needed to seek it out, even if I’d otherwise resist it – and in some cases I’d end up loving it enough that it shaped my entire musical taste thereafter. And all because someone thought to tell me (or even just to write online), “Hey, I think you’d really like this.”

See, any old algorithm can recommend things that are similar to things you already like, or the things that are often liked by other people who like the things you like. And that’s certainly a valid and sometimes-useful way of seeking out new stuff. But a recommendation from a human is often based on something deeper, something a robot might find ineffable. A human (especially a perceptive one who knows you well) can make recommendations based on your emotions, your psychology, your longings, your fears – sometimes even the aspects you yourself are not fully aware of.

Even recommendations from public figures, who don’t know me at all, can hit me harder than anything in a Discover Weekly playlist – perhaps because I see these works of art as windows into a soul I wish I knew better, a soul I want to emulate. I view these pieces of art with an open-mindedness I’d otherwise never afford them, if I know they’re beloved by a writer I admire, or a musician I worship, or an actor I have the hots for.

I truly don’t know why it took me so long to figure out I was destined to become a journalist: I was raised by two journalists, I’ve always gotten good grades in English classes, and I often take notes during conversations. All pretty big clues, I’d say!

While I was always a note-taker, I really honed my skills in that area when I got to journalism school. For the entire first year of our program, we were not allowed to make recordings of our interviews, and instead had to just take notes (either handwritten or typed). This was meant to teach young journalists how to take good notes quickly, and while it was wildly annoying, it worked – I graduated nearly a decade ago but am still pretty good at summarizing key points of a conversation in hastily scribbled notes, and grabbing pull quotes verbatim as they come. It’s a useful skill to me constantly – so constantly that I don’t even understand how other people function without frequent note-taking!

I don’t take notes during every conversation, to be clear. I’m not pulling out my notebook when I chat with a barista or a shop clerk (unless they drop an intriguing movie recommendation). And I don’t typically take notes when talking to friends in-person, because some people find it rude or distracting.

Ever find yourself avoiding something, and you’re not really sure why? Yeah, that’s me with sex sometimes.

After all these years of writing and thinking about sex – and about my own sex life and sexuality, specifically – you would think I’d have enough self-awareness that this wouldn’t happen anymore. But once in a while, I do realize, all of a sudden, that I’ve been avoiding sex or masturbation lately – and that I haven’t even given any conscious thought to why.

Sometimes it’s because I’ve been struggling through a chronic illness flare-up or a stressful life situation. Sometimes I just haven’t been in the mood. All of those are valid reasons to avoid sex (and, as a reminder, you don’t even need a reason to avoid sex – “no” is a complete sentence, and all that!).

But sometimes, if I dig a little deeper, I’ll find that there is a specific thing which has been draining my sexual desire. And often, that specific thing is entirely fixable, now that I’ve identified what it actually is.

’Twas the end of November, when all ‘cross the ‘net,

Not a penis was stirring, not a pussy was wet;

Self-deniers on Reddit got ready for fun,

Knowing No Nut November soon would be done.

…is to pay attention to what they do, not what they say.

I give this advice often – to friends, to readers, to anyone who’s unsure whether their crush is into them – because it’s one of the truest things I know about relationships. You’ve heard it a zillion times before, because it’s simply the case, not just in the realm of crushes but in many other realms as well: Actions speak louder than words.

The trouble with this advice in a romantic context, however – and really, the trouble with any advice about sex and relationships – is that it’s not universally applicable. There are definitely reasons why someone might act like they don’t like you, when actually they do. Maybe they are trying to play it cool. Maybe their phone is malfunctioning. Maybe they are very busy with professional or personal obligations at the moment. Maybe they’ve got a complicated situation going on with a recent ex and they want to breathe for a sec before pursuing someone new. Maybe they struggle with answering messages in a timely way because of ADHD, depression, or other chronic conditions. Maybe they just have no game whatsoever and don’t know how to demonstrate their interest. (I have definitely been guilty of that!)

But by and large, it has been my experience that if someone is into you, there will be signs – and those signs will be most easily spotted in their behavior, not their words.

I don’t know when I’ll ever go on a first date again. Not to be dramatic about it, but like, the amount of energy and vulnerability it would take to seek out and set up a first date – a FIRST?! DATE?! – is just unfathomable to me right now.

I still wish I could go on one, because, while the worst first dates can be hellish beyond measure, the best first dates are a high like no other. Being on a great first date feels like doing drugs and winning the lottery at the same time – at least, to me. I’m sure at least a few of you find first dates categorically nervewracking and are cringing as you read this, and that’s valid too. I’m just a major slut for romance, chemistry, and connection – and I try to remain optimistic in matters of love, as a basic survival strategy in this bleak grey world, so I always try to believe that another great date could be right around the corner, because it always could.

To that end: I sure do fantasize a lot about first dates. Sometimes at night, when I’m trying to get to sleep, I’ll pick a current crush – from celebrities to social-media mutuals to people I know IRL – and just imagine what a first date with them would be like. It’s an oddly calming little game, seeking and pushing all the pleasure buttons in my own brain to help me sleep.

In your head, you can make a date go any way you want, and can all but ensure that anything you do or say will be well-received. For that reason, in these fantasies I often find myself asking questions I’d be far too shy to ask on a real first date, such as…

My dear darlings: I don’t have the words to express my devastation about this week’s election result. I’m so, so sorry that we live in a world where authoritarianism is so readily embraced, time and time again, and where marginalized people are regularly thrown under the bus. It fucking sucks, and I’m furious and heartbroken and scared, and it’s absolutely okay if you are too.

People have all kinds of reactions to strong emotions like these. When the situation in question involves access to reproductive healthcare (or a lack thereof), sometimes people react by proposing a “sex strike.” Usually these strikes involve women declining to have sex with men for the duration of the strike. Sometimes, as in the 4B movement in South Korea (which unfortunately is TERFy), these strikes extend to other activities too, such as dating men, marrying men, or having children.

Some American women have proposed launching similar sex strikes in the U.S., to protest the loss of Roe v. Wade and the re-election of a rapist. Since pregnancy is even more medically risky in a Roe-less world than it already was, it makes total sense to me that many people would become voluntarily celibate at a time like this. Better to have no sex at all, they might be thinking, than to have sex that could end up literally killing them (if, for example, the pregnancy goes awry and doctors are legally forbidden to intervene because of reproductive healthcare bans).

“Sex strike” discourse is often very cis-hetero, because these strikes are largely borne out of unequal gender dynamics in the cis-het dating world, and specifically out of the healthcare disparities between cis men and cis women. However, as a queer person and an erstwhile sex educator, I can’t help but notice that these strikes are usually based on two common assumptions in hetero dating culture, both of which are simply false:

While staying overnight at my parents’ house recently, I flipped through an old journal of mine from when I was 17, and spotted an exhortation I still often give myself today: “You should tell cute people they’re cute more often!”

Sounds obvious, maybe. But it took me a while to understand that it’s okay to give compliments freely – nay, that it’s a good thing, and that it tangibly brightens people’s days.

See, my social anxiety insists that randomly complimenting someone – specifically, someone I don’t know super well – is awkward, because it could make them uncomfortable. It took practice and experience for me to figure out that the likelihood of this is pretty low, assuming I stick to complimenting people on the right kinds of things (more on that in a sec).

I’ve also sometimes feared that complimenting someone might lead them to believe I’m attracted to them, even if I’m not (although, let’s be real, many of the people I compliment are indeed people I’m attracted to!). This, too, is probably a fabrication of my anxiety more than it’s based on actual fact. When someone’s trying to figure out if you’re into them, generally they’ll assess multiple different signs-or-lack-thereof, not just one offhand comment – and anyway, the more I compliment people, the more it becomes obvious (at least in group situations) that that’s just something I do, so it’s less likely to be taken as an automatic come-on.

I kinda hate the way sex writers and sex podcasters are depicted in movies and TV.

I’m sure that every industry is somewhat misrepresented by Hollywood, even Hollywood itself. You have to simplify big ideas sometimes to make them comprehensible and palatable for the masses, and the truth doesn’t always make for neat, easy narratives. I get that.

But whether it’s Carrie from Sex and the City, Joanne from Nobody Wants This, or any of the other major sexual media-makers in fiction these last couple decades, one recurring trope is these people’s insistence that their work “isn’t just about sex.”

The implication, of course, is that there would be something wrong with their work if it was just about sex. In an episode of And Just Like That, for instance, someone calls Carrie a sex writer, and she responds angrily, “What, do I write porn?!” as if that would be the worst thing in the world.

This past month, as I’ve watched all my favorite Twitch streamers play through the new Legends of Zelda game, Echoes of Wisdom, I’ve thought a lot about porn.

No, not because these playthroughs were pornographic in and of themselves – they make me want to beat Ganon, not beat off! – but rather, because they highlight how fun it can be to watch someone do something for their very first time.

I have a pivotal porn memory along these lines. I must’ve been in my late teens or early twenties, because I was scrolling through PornHub trepidatiously, still not entirely accustomed to using visual stimuli during masturbation. I stumbled across a video called something like “HER FIRST TIME TRYING ANAL.” Without even pausing to think, I clicked the thumbnail and began to watch.

What ensued was (to my mind) an over-acted approximation of what someone’s first time having anal could be like: nervous giggling, salacious lube application, cartoonish exclamations of pleasure-tinged-with-pain. I’ll never know whether it was actually her first time, or just a skilled porn performer fulfilling that fantasy for the viewer. But it made me aware, in a way I hadn’t been before, that I like seeing people’s authentic reactions to first times.

Hi! I’m gonna tell you all about polyamory in The Sims today, but before we get into that, I’d like to humbly ask you to vote for my miniseries, Making Magic, in the Signal Listener’s Choice Awards, which are ending very soon. Voting is quick and easy, and will help more people discover the series. Thanks so much! 😘🪄

As I’ve told you on a few occasions before, the Sims franchise has always been ahead of the curve in terms of sexuality and gender representation. Your Sims can be queer, trans, nonbinary… and now, they can be polyamorous too.

Oh, don’t get me wrong; people have been making polyamorous Sims since the game’s inception (myself included). The trouble was, the game – like much of modern society – was created with monogamy in mind. I used to get around this by entering a cheat code to give my Sims the “Player” trait, which would supposedly make it so that they could flirt with/kiss other people in front of their partner(s) and no one would get jealous; however, The Sims is a notoriously buggy game, so this often didn’t work quite right, souring many a birthday party with sudden Simlish arguments when someone got too lovey-dovey in front of their metamour.

(If you want to listen to me reading this piece aloud, the link is below for premium subscribers!)

The first time my now-spouse and I kissed, it felt like a scene from a movie. Like a capital-M Moment. Like it should’ve been soundtracked by a swell of sentimental strings, warbling with wonder.

Notably, it didn’t feel like the end of the movie. It felt like a moment near the beginning, when everything clicks into place, black and white becomes technicolor, and the protagonist’s life truly begins.

I live in fear of regretting my tattoos.

Getting tattooed is really the ultimate test of fortitude for someone who constantly second-guesses their own decisions, isn’t it? It’s a way of saying, to yourself and to the world: No, I’m sure about this. I’ve thought about it, and this is what I want. On my body. Forever.

As a Visibly Tattooed Person, I get asked about tattoos fairly often, even though I wouldn’t particularly consider myself an expert. Most commonly, someone will compliment my tattoos and then admit that they’ve long wanted to get inked themselves, but haven’t yet come up with an idea they’d be willing to commit to for eternity.

I felt like going down the Google Scholar rabbit hole this week, so here’s a little digest of (what I thought was) some of the most interesting recent news in the science of sex and relationships:

Some research showed that being ghosted increases your anxiety and decreases your self-esteem. Anyone who’s been ghosted could tell you that, of course, but it’s interesting to see it proven!

Here’s a sexual label that’s new to me: symbiosexuality! To be symbiosexual is to be attracted to couples. Rather than being attracted to either person as an individual, a symbiosexual might feel attracted to the dynamic between two people, or the energy they embody when they’re together. Interesting! I know a few self-identified unicorns who this label might apply to.

Content note: some discussion of fatphobia and disordered eating – nothing too detailed/explicit because this is a triggery topic for me, but thought you’d like to know, so you can take care of yourself, too!

One of my pet peeves on dating apps is when guys say “I’m looking for a woman who takes care of herself.”

It would be fine if they meant it literally, but they don’t. What they mean, for the most part, is: “I want a woman who is thin and goes to the gym multiple times a week.”

I don’t think I had heard the phrase “gender euphoria” when I was 15, in 2007, and I certainly hadn’t applied it to myself. But my first conscious experience of this type of euphoria was at a queer-straight alliance meeting.

The author S. Bear Bergman was reading aloud from his then-new book Butch is a Noun, and during a passage about femmes, something clicked for me. I understood that there was a sacred lineage of butch-and-femme as a duality and a spectrum, and I understood that I was a femme myself. I understood that my femmeness was beautiful, and queer, and desirable (at least for some people). I felt the “aha!” of alignment between how I saw myself and how the world seemed to see me. I felt gender euphoria.

Trans friends of mine, like Billy Lore, would teach me more and more about this concept over the years that followed, including that cis people can feel it at all. In fact, cis people’s gender euphoria-versus-dysphoria (to the extent that we feel it) is seen as such a pressing and valid issue that it’s much easier for cis people to access treatments that may help bring their bodies into that euphoric alignment, such as when cis women are prescribed estrogen to address coarser facial hair they may notice after menopause, or when cis men are prescribed testosterone because their dwindling sex drive is making them feel “like less of a man.” It’s infuriating and unfair that many, many trans people can’t access these same treatments because their fight against dysphoria (and quest toward euphoria) is pathologized and politicized in a way that cis people’s usually is not, even though, for trans people, it’s much likelier to be a life-or-death issue. (Orgs like the ACLU are fighting for better trans healthcare access, among other things.)

I’m thinking about this lately, because my internal sense of my own gender has shifted somewhat in recent years. I’m still very much a cis woman and a queer femme – but lately, when I see old photos of myself in hyperfemme ‘50s-pinup drag or what-have-you, it feels like just that: drag. When I wear outfits that feel too delicately, sweetly feminine, I feel boxed in now, rather than right at home, the way I used to. I find myself counterbalancing femme outfits with a beanie, sneakers, or a boxy leather jacket.

I’ve been sexting with an AI again.

The thing is, you’re not supposed to do this. Many AIs are specifically programmed to avoid generating sexual content, or so my smart software-developer spouse tells me.

There are some AIs out there that are built specifically for sexting, but the one I want to talk to you about today (which I’ll link to below) is not designed for that purpose. However, with a little know-how, you can bypass some of the guardrails that might otherwise inhibit your high-tech textual trysts. Let’s get into it…

I’ve been writing a lot of sexy fiction (including fanfiction) these last few years, and it’s fascinating to note all the ways it’s different from my usual nonfiction fare, the workaday stuff that pays my bills.

For one thing, I’m a lot faster at nonfiction. I swear I spent 5 hours working on fiction yesterday and cranked out just under 1,000 words. On a nonfiction day, that’d be my output in an hour. Maybe forty minutes, with coffee. I guess this makes sense, given that nonfiction writing has been my bread-and-butter for many years and I have a degree in it, but still – it’s staggering how different the mental processes can be between these two types of writing, and how I can feel like a grizzled old pro at one and a shiny-eyed newbie to the other.

But one specific difference I want to talk about today is pacing.

Pacing is certainly important in nonfiction. (Ask any great documentarian.) It’s often about the speed and intensity at which you dole out information, and the way you lead someone from one argument to the next. Sometimes I pace things quickly, like a newspaper article, tugging the reader briskly down one set path – and other times, I’ll linger at certain scenic stops along the way, to point things out to the reader, or make them think. It all depends on the intended effect, and what I want the reader to take away from the piece.

Now that the finale of my podcast miniseries on the Magic Wand vibrator, Making Magic, has gone live, I’m in the mood to reflect on this massive project and what it’s been like to work on it for the past year. Here’s a bunch of stream-of-consciousness notes and observations:

Making Magic was originally a book – or rather, it was going to be a book; that’s what I pitched to Vibratex when we met via Zoom in May of last year to discuss potential collaborations. It was the company’s CEO Ken Herskovitz who suggested doing it instead as an audio series. I may still write a book about the Magic Wand someday – life is long; who the hell knows? – but I’m really glad that this project ended up being audio-based instead. Hearing people’s Magic Wand stories in their own words, in their own voice, really hits different.

I didn’t know how to make a show like Making Magic before I started making it. I was literally learning how to make it while I was making it. That’s really scary! I mean, I’ve been podcasting since I was 12, but mostly that had involved recording a conversation between myself and 1-3 other people and lightly editing it. The only audio project I had done in a more complex, patchwork storytelling style before Making Magic was Beating the Stigma, an audio series about kink and mental health that I made in my final year of journalism school. So, going into this project was daunting, but I was exceptionally lucky to get to work with an editor, Jamie Pityinger, who turned my obsessively detailed scripts into fully-formed episodes.

I interviewed 35 people for this series, including several people I consider heroes and inspirations. My literal first interview for this project was with Carol Queen – talk about intimidating! And there was one day during production when I interviewed Stoya and Danarama in the same day – thankfully with a few hours in between for me to calm my starstruck nerves! I only got to speak to maybe one-third or half of the people I reached out to, and I think my original project proposal overambitiously said I’d aim for 40-50 sources, but 35 was a lot, and gave me more than enough material for the show.

(Premium subscribers, scroll down and you’ll find a link if you want to listen an mp3 of me reading this essay aloud!)

Goddamn it, it happened again: a Netflix dating show gave me a good idea for a newsletter. How dare Netflix do this to me? How dare they keep making thought-provoking content that both spotlights and lampoons the psychodrama of human relationships?! (To be fair, it’s also ethically disastrous, but I’ll leave it up to Emily Nussbaum to tell you about that part…)

So, Too Hot to Handle is back. I’ve ranted about you at the absurdity of that show before, so I won’t do that again here. I’ll just tell you about one scene in the show that surprised and delighted me this season.

I love being special. Oh boy, do I love it.

That’s what was going through my mind when I was blowing my FWB a few years back. They had told me that a medication was affecting their ability to reach orgasm. It was especially challenging during sex acts where they weren’t directly controlling the motion themselves. Like a blowjob.

And yet, as I found the right rhythm and the right placement, and kept at it, their voice went hoarse, and they gasped, “I think I’m gonna come.” And they did. And lemme tell you, it made me feel special as hell.

I thought about this again today when I went to a screening of the 1959 film Some Like It Hot. I’ve seen this movie a zillion times before, but one particular scene stood out to me on this re-watch – the one where jazz saxophonist Joe (Tony Curtis) pretends to be a sexually tortured millionaire in order to hook up with jazz singer Sugar (Marilyn Monroe). He tells her about his sex troubles:

Recently, a sex worker named Aella posted a link on Twitter to a “date me” survey she’d made. She wrote, “I’ve met, had sex with, and dated people from my previous date-me surveys. It doesn’t work all the time, but when it works it’s great, and causes me to fall for guys I never would have considered otherwise.” My interest was fuckin’ piqued, dude. It was piqued as hell.

See, for ages I’ve been wanting to date someone new, and ideally someone local – but it’s been tough. It seems like the dating apps are a hellscape for just about everyone, and I’ve found it especially challenging to meet people who are chill about my job – by which I mean, people who neither sexually harass me nor slut-shame me about it, and people who are actually open to dating a woman who talks about her sex life on the internet. I also just find that most people seem really boring on dating apps, even if they’re far from boring IRL, and that conversations on these apps tend to devolve into silence pretty quickly because nobody wants to put any damn effort into anything anymore. (Myself included, don’t get me wrong…)

So, the more that I thought about making a “date me” survey of my own, the more it seemed like a fantastic idea. I could ask the questions that matter to me most, and filter out the people who aren’t a good fit. I’d also be selecting for 1) people who already know about my work and are fine with it, and 2) people who are willing and able to put effort into their connections. When I assessed my dating frustrations of the last several years, all of the issues seemed to be more-or-less solvable by switching from the apps to a survey, at least in theory.

So, next, I had to decide what questions to ask. Some are multiple-choice and some are writing-based; some are marked as mandatory and some are not, though my preference is for folks to answer as many of the questions as possible, since each one gives me different information that is useful to me in my decision-making. I won’t reveal all of the questions here – there are 29 in total! – but I’ll talk you through most of them and why I felt they were important enough to include.

Being smart is central to my identity. If you asked me to describe myself in one word… well, first I’d probably make some jokey-not-really-a-joke like “tired!” or “depressed!” but, if pushed, I’d say smart. I definitely don’t think I’m a genius or anything, and there are moments daily when I feel dumb as hell, but my intelligence is the thing I’ve been complimented on the most in my life, so it feels like the realest and best part of me. (It’s also something my therapist has repeatedly advised me to untangle from my self-image, so that I don’t have an identity crisis any time I try something new and am bad at it, but that’s another story…)

Anyway, all this to say, I’ve always been a smartie, and so there is almost nothing hotter to me than being outsmarted.

Let me be very clear about what I do not mean when I say I like being outsmarted: I do not mean that I want to be condescended to, or to have things mansplained to me. I do not mean that I want someone to pedantically quibble with things I have said. I do not mean that I want someone to assume I need their tutelage and then inflict it on me unsolicited.

What I do mean is… When someone clearly sees and understands exactly how smart I am, and in what ways, and can meet me where I’m at, and volley our conversation back and forth like a lively tennis match, perhaps playfully pointing out some actual holes in my argument or blind spots in my thinking along the way, well… I’m not sure what could be hotter than that. Further, while I do date people other than men, I think it’s worth mentioning here that a man who can value a woman’s intelligence on its own merits is usually a man who sees women as full people – something I wish I didn’t even have to say, but unfortunately the bar is low enough that I do.