Welcome to Go ask Ali, a production of Shonda Land Audio and partnership with I Heart Radio. I don't think that there's some one soul mate. It's not like there's one. Although bon Jovi is my soul mate, there's always exceptions. Are you saying that gossiping is the same as if I'm picking lice out of your scalp and eating it. Well, you've done both, So what do you think? I want to give her too much? I don't like her to come in with an inflated head, so we won't mentioned
the Golden Globe. After all we've been through. We deserve an orgasm. Cis I deserve? Okay, Welcome to Go ask Ali. I am Ali Wentworth and this season, I'm digging into everything I can get my hands on. I'm peeling back to layers and I'm getting dirty. I mean like really dirty, like sexy dirty. Because I'm talking to a renowned sex expert about how we're all faring coming out of this demic. How did everyone do? My gosh, did your sex life
survived during the pandemic? Are you having safer sex now that you have condoms and masks as the world opens up? I'm very lucky to say that during the pandemic, my husband and I continued to have great sex, and not so much for some of the people I know. I have friends that got divorced during the pandemic. I have friends that met people during the pandemic. Um, I have friends that became closer to their vibrator during the pandemic.
So everybody had very different experiences sexually. Listen, there's so much to cover when it comes to human sexuality. It is a endless wonder to me. So nobody better than Dan Savage to talk about all things sc X Dan Savage. He's a columnist, podcaster, and author. His syndicated Savage Love sex advice column has been running for thirty years. He became one of the original podcasters in two thousand and six when he started Savage Love Cast, which is still
going strong. He's published half a dozen books on sex and relationship. His newest book, Savage Love from eight Z, was just published last fall. Dan and his husband Terry Miller found the award winning It Gets Better project, which offers support and hope to l g B t Q plus kids. Hello Dance, I have a lot of questions for you, but I want to start with saying, I've been wondering during COVID during the past couple of years,
how is anybody dating. I've known some single friends who have been having relationships that they established online, but they haven't seen each other. They like, have wine together, you know, this weird sort of cyber relationship. Are you hearing that too? Yeah, early on in the pandemic, a lot of people were having virtual relationships, even you know, having cyber sex but dating line. I think a lot of those people have transitioned to dating in real life, in the flesh now
that people are vaccinated. But yeah, a lot of people who had never really given the Internet a chance when it came to finding partners are dating suddenly adopted it, were urged to adopt it by by health departments because you know, even though there was a pandemic raging and we were ordered to socially distance. If I make quote, would he allen the heart wants what the heart wants,
and people still wanted that kind of connection. And I think what's often really important about dating is the affirmation, you know, the minder that you are an object and a desirable one as well as human being. I'm a smart one. And people needed that, and the Internet made it possible for this pandemic to be a little different than it would have been. You know, before the Internet came along, the isolation was really much less acute, although
a lot of people felt it. You know, I had friends who didn't see another living human being in the flow for a year, but they were able to stay connected. We were socially distant, but not emotionally distant. The silver lining about social media. But I will say I had a few friends that were dating online and then when things opened up a little and then they met the person, it was even though they were looking at each other, it was not what they expected. But I guess that
goes hand in hand with online dating. Yeah, well that's why before the pandemic the advice was, you know, if you meet somebody online through a dating app, you know, schedule that first in person meeting before you make a huge investment of time or emotional energy, because you can't always know, like how you're gonna vibe with someone in person,
that that chemical spark that's going to be there. You can see all their pictures, and their pictures can be accurate, and that first time that you meet face to face, it just might not click. There are three feet shorter than you, and you you didn't know, so have you heard? Because I'm curious during COVID and people finally meeting face to face, how big is the vaccine? How big a
role does it play? Because I can only think, and you know, I've been married for a thousand years, even before online dating existed, but I would imagine for me it would be a big deal. You see it on a lot of people's personal ads, vaxed. I've been with my husband since before online dating was the thing, before the internet was a thing. But I sometimes go on just to like stay current because I do have to talk about these things that people who are dating now.
And you know, I see so often people mentioning they're vaccinated that it's conspicuous when I feel like you need to say that you're vaxed, that everyone should be vaxed. And if you don't say that you're vaxed on your dating profile, I think it's fair for people to assume you're not and to stay the funk away from you. I'm curious, do you know if watching porn just went with the roof during COVID? Yeah, watching porn absolutely went through the roof during COVID. You know, social media, it's
a double edged sword. The more explicit kinds of social media are also a double edged sword. I've always thought of the Internet as kind of a hammer. You can pick it up and build something, or you can pick it up and beat someone to death. One of things I like about the Internet when it comes to our sex lives is it's made it possible for people with niche sexual interest to connect with other people who share them all over the country. It's shrunk the world and
made a lot of relationships happen and possible. It allows people to share pictures and videos they make of themselves. I think most of the porn that's made or shared on any given day in this country is amateur and between consenting adults and its lovers and friends, and that poinn doesn't make it onto porn hub ideally, because you know somebody share something with you privately, you're not supposed
to put it on porn hub. But so much of what people are doing when they're swapping dirty picks and videos is swapping dirty picks and videos of themselves with people who want to see them. That it's interesting you bring this up because that is sort of a newer phenomenon, isn't it. I don't remember when I was, you know, young and single and free. I don't remember that being a thing. I didn't send my boyfriend's naked nor did
I get dick pics from them. You can only get you can only get dick etches sketches then, or to cocktail napkin drawings. It's not the same thing. Yeah, unless he had a polaroid camera, and even then polaroids had to be passed around or pastor in person to person. It was the phone in our pocket with the camera on it, and then internet access that you know, made showing off for each other and you know, the tease with the visuals a part of most people's sex lives,
and not just single people's sex lives. Tracy Clark Flori as a sex writer, and she wrote a piece about how she sexed all the time with her husband and it's improved their sex lives. They like flirt and swap pictures of themselves, and I think that's really really common, and I think that's one of the benefits. Unless somebody else gets a hand of them, right, unless they escape out into the wild but I think we're reaching a kind of tipping point where everybody's going to have dirty
pictures out there somewhere. There'll be less of a negative impact or consequence for a person if they're but direaty pictures somehow go public because instead of looking at someone's dirty pictures and going, oh my god, what a terrible person that they would do that, now you look at somebody's dirty pictures and you go, well, there, but for the grace of God, go I I have my own dirty pictures out there. We're all in this together, right,
But it didn't exist when I was younger. But I feel like I lecture my girls about it because you know, that's a big thing in the teen world, and you know that gets into a whole other thing. I mean, then it's like child pornography, and it's sort of a scary slippery slope with that. It's child pornography. And there been prosecutions of kids who've taken pictures of themselves, which is a little fucked up. Ye, we do need to
warn our kids about taking and sharing photographs. We also need to get on our kids about not sharing a photo that was shared with you privately. Yes, yes, because that's the real consent violation. That's the thing that's shameful and that should be stigmatized. It makes me bananas when you know some girls photos were spread around to school and that girl gets suspended. It's everybody who shared that photo who should be suspended, not just high school kids.
Like adults will do that too. You know, we do need to have an out back of our heads. If we take and share a photograph, a phone can be hacked, somebody can share that photograph with someone they think they can trust. Too, can't be trusted. You're really not in control of it anymore. The future that I'm imagining is one where since all of us are most of us have photos online, it can't be used to socially harm anybody, any individual anymore, in the same way finding out that
somebody has used pot doesn't destroy a career anymore. And I think we're getting there with dirty photos where oh, you've never taken one, Well, that's odd because almost everyone has. And therefore, you know, in my idealized future, it can't do the damage that it has done to some people's lives and careers. Now that's of course very different when someone's under age when someone is a minor. In the same way sexual activity can pland differently when you're under
age and experience not ready for it. You know, I think a thirty year old who's shared a bunch of photographs can shrug off one of those ending up on the Internet or a friend finding them in a way that a fourteen year old can't. Yeah, I completely agree, and I liken it too. When they're the sex tapes on VHS was a thing, you know, It's like, oh,
who's making a sex tape? And that was terrifying, And then all of a sudden they all get leaked and you've seen them all, and you know the back of the day when I was like, oh, who's this Kim Kardashian, you know, so you're Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson. Remember when their sex tape got out there, somebody's doing a big movie about it. Yeah, but I remember that was like a really big deal. And now, you know, even that has become sort of dismissed as a yeah, just
a sex tape. Paris Hilton is testifying before Congress about those wilderness campboarding schools and being taken seriously as she should be on that and you know, it hasn't heard Kim Kardashian's career that her first entry and kind of into public consciousness was because of a sex tape. And you know, I think Pamela Anderson after this movie comes out, is going to be She's gonna have a revival, not be like sent away in Shame. And that's as it
should be. You know, when you think about our sex lives, almost universally now, for young people their very first sexual experiences, tech is the medium that their first sort of you know, used to be like your imagination or a stray porn bag if you can get your hands on one, uh, you know, or the series catalog underwear section and you know, eighty years ago and now like so many people's first sexual experiences are sitting in front of computers, are looking
at phones, and those are interactive devices, so you can you're not just like taking it in, you can also put it out there. And it makes a kind of sense that so many people have incorporated technology into their sexual expression, into their sex lives almost effortlessly, because people who are thirty now or five now had their first iPhones, which are really porn production studios in their pockets when
they were teenagers and they've always been with them. And you know, a computer or phone isn't just for communicating or texting or reading Twitter. It's also for looking at porn, learning about sex, reading, connecting, finding sex partners. It's a porn production studio, it's a singles bar, it's really everything. And so that people are filming themselves having sex and in an kind of effortless, un self conscious way totally
makes sense. We should have seen this coming. I'm looking at your face and you're smiling, so you approve of this. Do you think it's a great thing. I think it's a thing. It's a thing. Yeah, it can you know, it's like I said, it's a hammer. You can build something or destroy something with it. The video that you made today and shared with your lover. Relationships go south. Sometimes you were with somebody and they become a vindictive X and they have these things that they could, you know,
send to your mom and your coworkers. And that has happened to men and women. Do you have callers that have called in about that? Oh? Yeah, yeah, lots of revenge porn stories. And I'm happy to say now that like there are revenge porn statutes, and I think thirty states more. When I first started talking about this issue on my podcast, there were no revenge porn statutes anywhere. It was not a crime too. You know, if you had someone's pictures or video to email it to everyone
at their workplace, it was not a crime. Now it's a crime, and people have been prosecuted, and its shifted some of the hopefully stigma, shame, and consequences onto the shoulders of people who should be stigmatis and face consequences for this kind of behavior. Not the person who took a picture of her tits or his dick and send it to somebody who wanted to see the tits or the tick, but the person who then tried to destroy
someone's life with that picture. Well, I mean, you know, to me, social media is just the wild West, and so I'm happy to hear there are laws about revenge porn. There's a lot more to come after this short break. Welcome back. You know, we're coming out of COVID. It's a little bit safer to be out and about. I would imagine your callers and some of the things you're dealing with on your podcast are a little shifted. Now what are some of the things that you're hearing from people,
or concerns or great things. Even the great thing is, you know, people are anxious to get out there. Right before the pandemic hit, there was a lot of writing and talking about a sex recession. The younger people were having less sex or waiting till they were older, right, or waiting till they were older. And you know, if you're as old as I am, you remember when the moral panic was young people having too much sex and rainbow parties and teen pregnancies and high st I rates
among young people. I got to ask you, what is a rainbow party? It was a It was bullshit. It was this thing that ran around in the nineties that high school students were all getting together and the girls were putting on different shades of lipstick, and then the boys on their penises were collecting rings until their penises looked like rainbows. Okay, and that's just not how Dick's work, or lips work or lipstick works. And yet people believe this was a thing, a rainbow party. Okay. Now the
concern is that people aren't having sex. I think a lot of people a getting back out there. Unfortunately, people are getting back out there and not being safe. We are seeing a huge explosion in the last six months in s t I rates. So people who did the right thing and took care to be safe from COVID are running out of the house now that they're vaccinated and there's some degree of normalcy and being cavalier taking
risks around styes. Isn't syphilis on the rise right now? Yeah, simphilis is on the rise, Ganaria, clamydia all on the rise. And we may see when we can finally have the data. But this year that s t I rates are higher in the United States, that's the projection, higher now than they have ever been in history. That's a problem, and that's in a circumstance where more people are waiting, where
there's a bit of a sex recession. There are lots of people young man who've never had a sex partner, and yet we are seeing this often driven by the game mail community boom in s t S so that because they feel they're vaccinated, so the imminent death threat or imminent health concern is taken care of, and so they're not really thinking about their sexual health. Yeah, and people engage in a little bit of magical thinking like I did all I did the right thing during COVID. Therefore,
like the universe owes me this risk. You know, I don't want to have to wear a condom because I wore a mask. I shouldn't have to wear a condom because I wore a mask. People engage in a lot of magical thinking when they're horny, not just people with penises. People without penises too, engaging a lot of magical thinking and rationalizations. One more thing about STI is it's sort
of a tragedy. I had a call and I talked about this with an epidemiologist on my show, that if we were all going to be locked in, remember early in the pandemic, when we thought wuld be two months, three months, everyone who had been exposed to an STI, their symptoms would appear. And if everybody got treated during lockdown, we could eradicate not HIV, not HPV, and not herpies because they persist in our bodies, but chlamydia, syphilis and ganahea.
If like nobody touched anybody for three months and then everybody who was symptomatic it got treated, then when we all got back out there, there would be no Simples's kind of real climity, but it did not work out that way. Well, I don't remember anyone telling everybody to do that. That would have been a great idea. Where were you, Dan? I talked about it on my show.
The problem is that like people don't have access to healthcare. Like, yes, you know, we were providing people with free COVID screenings, providing people with free vaccines when they came out, not charging people if they wound up in the hospital for COVID.
But if you know you don't have access to a primary care physician and you don't have enough money because you're broken, unemployed and at home during lockdown to pay for the meds, you know a lot of people just tough out a sexually transmitted infection and and didn't get treated. And not everybody, of course, um stayed in during lockdown. Yes, certainly during lockdown when you see the beach parties in Florida and stuff, that seemed like a big festival of STD.
So Um, I have a question for you with orgies. What happens if you go to an orgy? This is I'm asking for a friend. If you go to an orgy and there's a bunch of people there and somebody's not vaccinated. You know, if there's one unvaccinated person at an event, the risk for the vaccinated is low. The risk really is for the unvaccinated people. They're dying. And what is it nine ten times the rate of the vaccinated.
Are hospitals that are, you know, not as overwhelmed now as they were a month or two ago, but still mobbed. It's the unvaccinated. So one unvaccinated person managing to get into your orgy? All right, whatever? The question? You know what, the question I keep getting isn't about orgies. It's about weddings. Oh, I thought the two went hand in hand. I mean, that'd be fun, I think so. I don't think getting married should be the end of a sexual adventure and pleasure.
I think people should be able to go to the occasional orgy or sex party after they're marriage. I certainly have um with my husband. Yeah, the question I get it's the you know, I'm going home to a wedding and they're not vaccinated, the bride and groom, and they're not requiring anyone to be vaccinated, and they're inviting old
people in the family to attend. And I'm vaccinated, and I don't want to go because you know, even if you're vaxed, you can still get infected, absolutely breakthrough cases like Cold and Powell perfect example. So you're a big LGBTQ activist, and one of the things that I was reading and talking to people about during COVID was how many gay and trans kids were then in lockdown with people that didn't accept who they were and it was
incredibly difficult for them and their mental health. So did you find when you spoke to a lot of people from especially younger people in that community, that was the case. Yeah, I mean the world is different now. When I came out when I was a teenage, I rare ok for gay men of my generation, and then I came out in high school. It was more common for gaymen of my generation to come out in college or after college. And the assumption then if you were gay and a
teenager now it was that your family was hostile. The assumption now is like, you know, your family is probably in your corner. And we've seen that again and again with families even in like Red States defending their queer children in a way that would have blown our minds in the eighties that said, it's an often unacknowledged fact in the lives of a lot of queer young people that the worst bullying they face isn't at school, it's at home. And for a lot of young queer kids,
school is the refuge. At home is the mine field. And I heard from kids, heard from teenagers who no longer could go to the g s a who no longer could go to school and not feel policed by bullying. Parents are scrutinized by hostile siblings about their gender presentation or their second orientation. And that was very, very stressful. That said, you have you ever heard of P flag parents and friends of lesbians and gays? When I was, you know, in the early eighties, when P flag would
come up the street, everyone would lose it. At the Pride parade, everyone would be bawling because so many of us at the Pride parade watching Godby didn't have parents who loved us. A lot of us were estranged from our parents. And to see parents marching in the Pride parade and to sometimes you know, I'm gonna try talking about it. I'm gonna gay men and lesbians like be hugged by a parent did not even their parents and lose it. God bless P Flag and they've done such
great and important work. It doesn't have the same emotional impact when P Flag walks up the street in the Pride parade. Now everyone is deliriously happy to see them. Is that as devastating because it's no longer the default expectation that a gay person who's out has a terrible relationship with their parents, or that our parents don't love us.
It's almost shocking now when you hear from a gay person in the West, in the United States whose parents, even if they had a bad reaction at first, have not yet come around and don't love and accept them. And that's what we fought for. We want to live in a world where the expectation is that you will have the love and support of your family, if not immediately, hopefully shortly after you come out. The social norms and
expectations have changed. It's a bitter irony that some parents rejected their gay kids because they thought that's what they had to do to be good people, because they didn't want to be judged or shamed for accepting their gay kids. You know, forty years ago, what would the neighbors think if I was okay about my kid being gay. So I'm gonna not be okay about it lest I be judged.
Now people are judged when they don't accept they're gay kids, and thank god, and they should be, but it you know, I have a friend who's thirty who's such a lovely person, and you know, his father was dying, and he was the one who went home and took care of his father, and his dad was very hostile about him being gay. Kind of came around, but his mom, even after his father's death, his mom is still like, you're going to hell and you need to repent and you need to
stop this. He was the one who went home, He was the one who was there for his parents as his father died, and his mother is still like bullying him. It affects him in a way that you know, of course, how could it not. Yeah, the only comparison is, like you know, transracial adoptions, mixed race kids sometimes feel like
they have a racist parent, and it is devastating. I can't even imagine to be gay or trans or by and have a parent who is you're the worst bullying in your life and the one you can an't escape, and the one who's approval on some level, you always crave and who's the withdrawal of their love? You will always feel right and be punished by and yeah, be
wounded by. Yeah. I sometime get in trouble with some people in the gay community because I will tell or the LGBT community, I will tell you know, gay kids who want to come out to wait. I'm the one who will tell a fifteen year old gay boy that coming out is not the end of all of your troubles, it's the beginning of new troubles. And if your parents
are really hostile. Homeless kids, homeless miners are LGBT kids who are kicked out or thrown out after they came out, and they're only like three or four of the population, so they're disproportionately represented among homeless youth. And so, my god, if you're fifteen and you think your parents might throw you out on the street, maybe you should wait. You know, their parents taught them not to lie, and now they're
having to lie to their parents. And I've told kids like that's a lot you tell your parents under duress, and it's their fault. You have to tell that lie, and you shouldn't feel guilty about it. So if you have to lie to your parents that they're paying for your college and they'll withdraw that support if you tell them you're gay, don't tell them you're gay till you got your first job. Then tell them you're right until you're more independent. Yeah, And it's on them that you
couldn't be honest with them, not on you. It's their familing, not yours. Right, we're gonna take a short break and we'll be right back, and we're back. Did you find that a lot of people kind of lost their libido during COVID Justin Leigh Miller, who's a sex researcher and writer host of the Sex and Psychology podcast at Kinsey Institute. They've been tracking it. They've been gathering data throughout the pandemic.
The data is a little maddening, and how sort of right down the middle it falls roughly half of people during the pandemics, all their libidos tank, Roughly half of people during the pandemics, all their libidos just skyrocket. So interesting,
and do they know why. No, it's just like some people reacted to the stress in the isolation by just being super horny, and some people reacted to it by shutting down sexually, you know that feeling of confinement for some people like to have to sit with your thoughts or sit alone in your home. Their thoughts go to sex and they can feel it. The real problem was, like everyone who's libido tanked wasn't necessarily in a relationship with someone else who's libido tanked. And some people were
in mixed tanked relationships. Mind tank, yours did in my tank, your skyrocketed. Now what do we do now You're super frustrated or I'm having to do things I don't want to do. Yeah, exactly. It's much more complicated than the statistics that said, you know, a lot of people ended up getting divorced or separating or breaking up because they
were confined together and it wasn't working. Some people thrived with it, but I would imagine sexually, I mean, to get both trains on the same track are a little bit difficult. I mean, I can only speak for myself. I mean, thank god I have a healthy sex life with my husband. But there were moments during lockdown with my dark roots coming in and I've just packed on ten pounds because I'm living for Ben and Jerry's at night, and I just didn't feel sexual because my own health
wasn't thriving. I would imagine, like you said that, it's very hard to get you and your partner kind of symbiotic anyway. Yeah, not during a pandemic. It's hard to be on the same page all the time, and you have to seize those opportunities when they come. I'm a big proponent of maintenance sex. I'm a big proponent of assisted masturbation. Uh. Sometimes you you know what's maintenance sex. You have sex with your partner because they want to have sex. It's not like perhaps the most off the
wall or energetic or athletic sex you might have. But you're just like you're being a good partner. You're being a good partner. And this gets dicey when you talk about sort of men and women. I's gonna say every woman, every female audience person right now is going, oh, girl, I know what that is. Yeah. Yeah, you know, women are socialized to defer to men and not say no to men. And you know a lot of the standard advices now you should never have sex that you don't
want to have. Well, there's sometimes you might want to have sex, but not because you want to have sex there. Sometimes you might want to have sex to meet your partner's needs to maintain the relationship, or you know, the expectation that your partner will do the same for you if you're horny and they're not. I think it's really important and sexually exclusive relationships that you make an effort. Yeah,
I agree with you. I think there are times for me where I feel like, yeah, he's he's in a sexy mood, and I don't want to be the one in the turnalneck sweater nightgown going like don't touch me, don't look at me, and you know I I do it for him. But there's a there's a lot of this wave of empowerment where people say like only when I want on my terms, and I think that that just hurts the relationship in the long run. I think
it does hurt the relationship in the long run. And there's something you can get out of sex other than sex, intimacy, connection, release, And often when you're having maintenance sex, you catch a groove and suddenly you're having sex that you want to have to y and you deny yourself all of those opportunities to like catch that groove and suddenly be into it and really glad your partner instigated and you went there.
The other thing that I often suggest to people besides maintenance sects, you know, I say this straight guys all the time. If every time you said yes to sex you're as scot fucked, you'd say yes, probably less often than you might otherwise. Then, you know, penetration can be a high bar for the penetrate t sometimes, so be willing to like mutual masturbation, light oral rolling around. You know, sometimes maintenance sex isn't intercourse. Sometimes maintenance sex is what
I like to call assisted masturbation. And if you're open to that and you don't guilt your partner about it or treat it like a sad consolation prize, but as actual sex, you'll have more and better yes and hence it's a stronger relationship. Before I let you go and
have sex, I'm going to go out a sandwich. Tell me this for people that sort of got through the pandemic with a pretty good sexual relationship, For people that are now sort of crawling out from under the rocks and looking for other sexual partners, what kind of advice can you give us? Now? Well, if you've been not very sexually active throughout the pandemic. Get tested before you get out there. You have get an s t I screening. You know. Sometimes people can have GONERI in their throat.
They can have GONA and the rear end and they don't have a lot of symptoms and a syphilis or it can be very subtle, you know, and then it goes away and you stop thinking about it. But you have syphilis and you can be infectionous. So if you haven't been screened in a while, get screened, and if you do have something, get treated before you get out there. But I think my only other piece of advice is one of the things we should take away from the pandemic, all of us, is something that a lot of game
men took away from the HIV epidemic. Life is short and precious. You don't have as much time to waste as you think. So ask for what you want and go look for what you want and find somebody who you're what they want, and the things that you want to do are the things that they want to do. I'm always in the position of telling people to kind of embrace rejection. You know, people will not be fully who they are with somebody they're afraid of being rejected.
They won't ask for what they want because like, and then what if the person doesn't want that and they reject me. Well, if they don't want what you want, then you're not a match and it's going to end eventually any way. So put it out there in a you know, an emotionally intelligent and reasonable way. You don't like, blurt out all your kinks in the first date, but lay that out there and if they're not into you, bye bye, Yeah, put it out there. Don't fear rejection.
Rejections your friend. As painful as rejection is, because the sooner somebody that's not right for you rejects you, the sooner you land in the bed, in the lap, and the life of someone who's right for you not perfect. There's no perfect, there's no the one. There's only the point six four that you round up to the one. But rejection gets you to that person faster. And what about people that have been in long term relationships? Any
advice for them? Now? Don't pull the plug. You know, this was the pandemic and all the time we had to spend with our partners. That's not normal. And some people are over determining and saying, well, because I couldn't be with this person locked into one bedroom up Parkman in Manhattan twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, for months on end, obviously this isn't the right person for me. No, no, No, time away is good and
that will come back now into your life. Don't look at your partner and say, because I can't be with you twenty four hours a day, I shouldn't be with you at all. Look at your partner and say, well, we'll get back to that time away that we all need from our partners. It was really an unprecedented time that we've all been through, and you know, we we underestimate the anxiety and so many of the other factors that played into it, which make it hard for yourself,
for your partner, for everything, for sex, for love. You have to make sure you're making an instiction between I can't stand this person, and you know, the being with them all the time just really made me face that and be honest with myself about it. Or I've spent so much time with this person that I can't stand it. I can't stand spending so much time with one person. You know, we need other friends, we need work, colleagues. We need to leave the house and move through the
day and then be excited to see somebody. You know. When it comes to sex in relationship advice, literally every cliche applies. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Yeah, I mean, believe me, nothing turns me on more than when my husband does a dishes. So I get it. So, Dan, I like to turn the tables now. And have you asked me a question? Anything you want? Go ask Ali? How do you feel about constitutional monarchy as a political system. No, here's one that I've never got before. How do I
feel about monarchy? I don't. I'm not. I'm not a believer in monarchy. I'm much more pro democracy. Although I love the crown, um I uh, and I love the clothes. I don't think monarchy works. Why do you like? What do you think of it? I'm not or monarchy when you're talking about like the Sultan of Brunei or Saudi Arabia. But Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Spain, a lot of like liberal
progressive Paradise, the Netherlands are monarchies. And I really sometimes, particularly you know, having observed American politics over the last the entirety of my life. I think it's attractive, and I think we should invite Harry and Megan to become King and Queen of America. Oh wow, I was going to say the problem with our countries we don't have a royal family. I was going to say George and a mall Clooney. But I guess if you want, that's
the problem. We'd have to elect them, like who's who's the person that goes? Okay, here's our new monarchy. I mean when Norway got there king and Queen only a hundred years ago, it was through referendum. Not that they rule. They're just constitutional monarchs like the Queen of England. And I'm kind of a fan. I think there's something to it. We should call Megan and see if she's into it. Where my husband, he could be Queen of America. I
think you'd be good at it. All right, Well, send me a picture of him of the crown in a row and I'll we'll put it on social media and get people to vote. It'll be a reality show. Dan Savage, thank you very much for talking to me about all these things. My pleasure. Well, we covered a lot, but there I think when it comes to sex, there's you know, you could just talk forever. There are so many different channels we could go because sex is an all consuming subject.
But it seems, you know, I sort of thought that during the pandemic people were sitting alone in their houses reading Sylvia Plath. But it's great to hear that there was a silver lining during the pandemic when it came to social media and people's sexuality, that people were able to connect. You know. I think when it comes to sex, where there's a will, there's a way, and people people will find ways to connect. And the most important thing
is I learned what a rainbow party was. God help me anyway, Dan Savage is always incredible to talk to you about all things sex. And now I'm going to stretch, take a hot bath, and go jump on my husband. Thank you for listening to go ask Ali. I hope you blushed a little bit. I did. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast, and follow me on social media on Twitter at Ali e Wentworth and on Instagram
at the Real Ali Wentworth. Now, if you'd like to ask me a question or suggest a guest or a topic to dig into, I would love to hear from you. And there's a whole bunch of ways to do that. You can call me or text me at three to three three six four six three five six, or you can email a voice memo right from your phone to go ask Alli podcast at gmail dot com. If you leave a question, you never know you may hear it and go ask Alli. Go ask Alli is a production
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