501 - Are you having sex or is sex having you? A conversation with Dan Savage

It's the last call for going to Greece. That's right. This spring, myself, along with dance and movement therapist Orit Krug, will be co-leading a somatic therapy retreat for polyamorous folks on the mythical island of Crete from March 31st to April 3rd, 2025. If you've been feeling like your brain is on board with non-monogamy, but your emotions are having a hard time catching up. If you've been struggling to access feelings of joy, safety, or ease.

Or if you're just feeling isolated in your non-monogamy journey and just want to kick back in a hammock or go for a walk in nature with other insightful polyamorous people, please consider joining us. We have space for solo poly individuals, for couples, for... triads, and more, but this retreat is quite small, so it's application only. Go to multiamory.com slash retreat for more information on our sliding scale rates and how to apply. Again, that's multiamory.com.

And I hope I can see you in Greece. We're told when we're kids that we will grow up one day and have sex. And the reality is we grow up one day and sex has us. What is sex doing with us? Sex is 500 million years old? Billion years old? It built everything that lives. It built us. It's building whatever comes after us. And we pretend like it's something that we control.

and that we're in charge of. To limit the drama and chaos in our lives, or to keep it to a reasonable roar, we need to find out how to channel it. We need to figure out how to ride that. beast or it's riding us really having a series of short-term relationships over the course of your life that enrich it and create a network of friends and former lovers and occasional buck buddies and the current like main squeeze that you're passionate about

That seems to me a very beautiful way to live. Welcome to the Multiamory podcast. I'm Jace. I'm Emily. And I'm Dedeker. We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past. Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently. We see you, and we're here for you. On this episode of the Multi-Emory Podcast, we're talking to the one and only Dan Savage.

Dan Savage is a renowned sex-advised columnist, podcaster, and author. His column, Savage Love, launched in 1991 right here in Seattle, where I am. I remember reading it back when I was in high school. And it is now syndicated worldwide. Dan hosts the popular Savage Lovecast, a weekly sex advice podcast with over 600,000 monthly downloads. He's the creator of the Hump Film Festival, which I know some of our listeners have participated in in the past.

That is a sex-positive showcase of short films that has become a national phenomenon. And in 2010, Dan and his husband, Terry Miller, founded the It Gets Better Project, which has gathered thousands of videos offering hope. to LGBTQ plus youth and it won an Emmy in 2012. Dan's frank, humorous, and pragmatic approach has significantly influenced cultural conversations around sex, relationships, and LGBTQ plus rights.

Dan, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. I'm psyched to be here. We're psyched to have you. So for many years, the way that I've sometimes conceptualized our show. is that it's like Dan Savage and Esther Perel had a baby. You know, that we... Were your little babies. Yeah, dispensing insights from a subculture to the mainstream.

You know, pulling on research and compassionate insight drawn from working with clients therapeutically. We all have Dan Savage's classic good looks and Esther Perel's piercing eyes. So I guess my question is, like, would you have a child with Esther Perel? I'm trying to imagine who would be more traumatized by the insemination process, me or Esther Perel, who I love, I love and respect. And we've done some events together and we have a great time.

But I don't think I'm her type. I think my sex maniac thing kind of, um, not her speed. And then there's the whole, like, vagina haver thing. I mean, this would be a fully consensual, as non-traumatizing as possible insemination process. IVF, if it's still legal, I would totally have Esther Pearl's babies. Fingers crossed. We'll still be legal when that day does arrive. Indeed. And then would you name your child Multiamory? Oh, wow. I guess that's the real question. Yeah.

It's a Greek name. One of us is Greek, I think. You did a Google talk with Esther Pearl a few years ago about marriage and monogamy, I guess actually probably what, like almost 10 years ago at this point? And I guess I'm wondering... How do you feel like the cultural landscape has shifted in the last decade around marriage, monogamy, monogamishness, and the rise of non-monogamy?

Man, I kind of feel like the world that I wished existed, the conversations I wished people would have, that world now exists and everybody's having that conversation. And I'm a little like, is this really what I wanted? You know, I just... It feels almost as if the poly open conversation and the ideas, I think, leaping from gay men and gay relationships really to straight ones. I think there's been a great cross-polemization.

in how gay people live and straight people live because gay people came out en masse. And we didn't go in for respectability politics. We didn't change how we lived. You can't be gay unless you're kind of radically honest about who you are and what you want, what you're doing. And it was really...

much easier for gay people to be honest how we structured our relationships because we were used to being honest we were used to you know i always say if you looked your mom in the eye when you were 15 and told her you suck cock saying to your boyfriend Like, I want to do this or try that. Or I want an open relationship. And then saying to your friends you're in an open relationship. Nowhere near as scary as saying to your mom, I'm gay. And inflicting all those mental images on your mom.

Gay people who were in open relationships were kind of out about it, and straight people who were in open relationships, there were far fewer of them as a percentage of the total, and most weren't out about it. So the only time straight people would hear about an open relationship or a non-monogamous relationship or a polyamorous straight relationship was when the non-monogamy or the three-way or the other partner contributed to a breakup. And then everybody would hear about it.

And it really skewed everyone's perceptions of how these relationships could work if you weren't gay. And people would think, oh, those only work for gay men. And it just wasn't true. The ones that worked, you just didn't know they were working because you didn't know your straight friends.

or your parents were in an open relationship or a polyamorous relationship. And now we've seemed to have reached this tipping point where a lot more people who are straight and open or poly are willing to be honest about and talk about. And don't want to have to, you know, disappear their partners at Thanksgiving or Christmas because their families are coming and are writing memoirs about it like more. And I think that conversation is great. And I'm a little...

I guess sometimes like, oh, wow, like I wanted like the Sorcerer's Apprentice. I wanted help dumping this water in the well. And now, oh, my God, there's so much help dumping this water in the well. We're flooding the basement.

Yeah, well, I want to drill down on that, right? Because when you said that, that you ask yourself, is this what I really wanted? I'm curious about, is it just, wow, I wasn't expecting this level of volume? Is there something else that you're finding just a little bit off-putting?

about this world now being here. Well, it makes me feel, it makes, I think, gay people feel a little less special. Like, oh, you should all be doing this, but you're not going to because you don't have our gay superpowers. And it was like, oh, guess that wasn't really a gay superpower. That was just...

kind of radical honesty about who you were, what you were doing, how you wanted to live. You know, I think one of the great truths of the last 30, 40 years is that we've seen there's nothing straight about the straight lifestyle. It's just gay people weren't allowed.

to marry or have kids. And there was nothing gay about the gay lifestyle. It's just that was all gay people were allowed. And now you see a lot of straight people living like gay people were believed to live all their lives until they're 30, 35.

You know, everything that gay people were condemned for doing. The hedonistic lifestyle, short-term relationships, lots of partners. Straight people now do that. You just rename. We called them fuck buddies. You called them friends with benefits. We called it tricking. You called it hooking up.

they just straight people just change the names of everything but kind of adopted the gay lifestyle proving there was nothing gay about it was just that was all that was possible for us and so all we could do and That, you know, I remember what the religious conservatives said in the 70s. I was old enough to be paying attention and already realizing I was gay. And it kind of came to pass, like Jerry Falwell Sr., not Jerry Falwell Jr. cuckold.

But Jerry Falwell Sr., odious founder of the Moral Majority, he would say that the problem of gay people was that we were going to put ideas in the heads of straight people about how they could live. And that happened. Yeah, I mean, I think about that with the...

When gay marriage was legalized in the Supreme Court and there was that dissenting opinion being like, what's next, getting married to multiple people? Hope so. And like, whoops, also kind of right in some counties already. And, you know, that's coming. It is weird to think like, it's not that the fear itself was wrong, but to be afraid of it is the thing we disagree with. And the thing that you are trying to make other people afraid of when that thing arrives, not so scary.

I hear a lot of young gay people say, or I've heard gay people say, that there's something assimilationist about gay marriage and gay people are getting married or betraying the spirit of gay liberation and... blah blah blah and that's just bullshit nobody i know who's gay and married is monogamous nobody i know who's gay and married and not monogamous lies about it or feels like they have to hide it we're getting married as ourselves on our own terms we assimilated marriage

into our gay lives, proving that one of the things they said when we were fighting for marriage was gay people were trying to redefine marriage. And the reality was straight people had already redefined marriage. Because marriage, about 60, 70 years ago, became whatever the two married people in a marriage said it was. And it could be religious or not, kids or not, for life or not.

It was whatever they said it was. The wife could be submissive to the husband or the wife could be a femdom. Whatever they said it was, it was. And that's why they could no longer exclude same-sex couples from marriage. Because straight people redefined it in such a way. that gender roles no longer defined marriage. And so you couldn't make a non-biblical bullshit argument to exclude gay couples from marriage as straight people redefined it and practiced.

So I'm jumping back into non-monogamy after having been in a monogamous relationship for nine years. And I keep questioning, like, what is it about non-monogamy that I find so attractive? And part of me sometimes just wonders, is it simply that I want novelty and relationships? And I tend to be a person that often will jump in really intensely and quickly and like fall in love really quickly.

But then I also find myself falling kind of out of love pretty quickly, too. And so sometimes I think from listening to some of your interviews in the past. I have a question for all of us. What is love? And is it even possible to love someone? And have a good relationship with them, but not necessarily be like deeply, intensely in love with them in the way that many of us think that is. That's an easy question.

Okay. Who'd like to go first? No, no, no. Yeah, no, it's not. Oh, boy. How do you define love? And do we each of us have a different definition? of what it should look like, what it should feel like, and what it means or portends for a future. And is it not love if you love passionately, quickly?

And temporarily, does that mean it wasn't love? Or does that mean it was a different kind of love with a shorter shelf life? But it's still valid. And, you know, I just think it's just really hard to tease out what it is about. us as individuals as humans and what we need and where socialization ends biology begins and i actually think there's some ghost in the machine there's something working in each of us that we can't quite understand to wrap our heads around

Because there's something about sex that is chaotic and desire that is fundamentally chaotic. And so much of the way we structure our relationships is to contain that chaos and to... limit its ability to create drama or upend our lives or do harm. And I think that different people have different needs around chaos, drama, variety, sensation seeking.

And I think that's not character failing. I think actually that there may be a evolutionary something or other deeply at work because some of us are driven to have multiple partners, multiple sexual experiences, seek out variety and novelty. And there's going to be a knock on.

evolutionary benefit to that kind of stirring and mixing because we know that when people breed outside their very local environment people who are maybe closely related to them or very much like them that that is good for offspring species good for the survival and this is the stuff where i get like really like stoned in my dorm room in my house yes no bring it we love it we love it because sex is bigger we we taught we're told when we're kids that we will grow up one day and have sex

And the reality is we grow up one day and sex has us. What is sex doing with us? Sex is 500 million years old? Billion years old? It built everything that lives. It built us. It's building whatever comes after us. And we pretend like it's something that we control and that we're in charge of. You know, to limit the drama and chaos in our lives or to keep it to a reasonable roar, we need to find out how to channel it. We need to figure out how to ride that beast.

but it's the beast and we're riding it or it's riding us really. And yeah, like you jumping back into monogamy, there's a certain amount of variety and new experiences you want. And you want these loves that burn fast. and quick. And some people would look at that and say, well, you're damaged somehow, or if you can't make a long-term commitment. One of the things I bang on about all the time on my show is we talk about LTRs.

and reify them and and and put them on a pedestal and i think we should also talk about strs and they can be successes and they can be very rewarding and if you know that you're the str type if you're honest about that and you're not taking advantage of the assumption someone might make about you wanting an LTR like most people want an LTR, then having a series of short-term relationships over the course of your life that enrich it and create a network of...

friends and former lovers and occasional fuck buddies and the current like main squeeze that you're passionate about, that seems to me a very beautiful way to live. Yeah, that's often something that we've talked to people about, that idea of, like, within the polyamory world, there can be still this reifying of these long-term relationships.

And a little bit of dismissal of hookups or shorter term relationships, things like that. And one of the things that we've actually seen as a bigger problem is because of that. people who actually want those short-term relationships or they want those hookups will feel like they can't be honest about that. And that's where people end up getting hurt because they're misled or there's assumptions made about what people want.

Whereas if they were honest about that, everyone would have been better off. So it's like not wanting it. That's the problem. But sometimes when we can be a little shady and how we go about that. Well, not even shit. Like if everybody is pitching woo to get. You know, romancing someone to get into their pants can be a kind of misrepresentation about your intentions, even if maybe you just misapprehended your own intentions going in. But at least in gay land, like...

Everybody in a long-term relationship I know, it was a hookup. And it was not like the hookup is the culmination of a seduction or dating or anything. It was just like, grinder hookup. I met my boyfriend. having a three-way with my husband and this person we'd never met before. Twelve years later, he's still there. I feel like I've heard that story six billion times now. But I've hooked up with other people. I've hooked up with other people where, like, that didn't happen.

I think it's different in, like, hetero, pan, bi, poly circles than gay land. Like, off on Man Island, sometimes it's a little different. Yeah, sure. Sometimes. But I, yeah, I do think that for my opinion is that I think that that behavior of this kind of maybe unintentionally shady or unintentionally confused representation of what you want.

does come from, I think, a lot of non-monogamous people, and especially people who have been non-monogamous for a long time, people who haven't wrapped up in their identity, often come from a place of defensiveness.

Because they're used to their relationships being disregarded or minimized or being accused of, oh, you're just in it for the sex. You're just in it to... use people right and and some people are some people are right and that goes down this whole rabbit hole of how like okay if you are just in it for the sex like that's also okay you know but that's like a whole other thing and so i think people do come from this place of like

If I'm going to prove to the world that my polyamorous relationship or non-monogamous relationship is legit, it's got to align very closely with what we see as the markers of success. Right. And we're reacting sometimes to people who say polyamorous relationships aren't committed relationships. I'll prove to you how committed my relationship is by committing instantly or my next relationship or my additional relationship. But we all see.

polyland, the people who we know in retrospect that, oh, we got played because we detect a pattern and how that particular person really has weaponized polyamory. to convince people that they're interested in potential relationships, but then you see the pattern where they're really not. We're just interested in having a lot of sex partners, which is a fine and legitimate thing to want and to go get, but there are...

people out there who realize that they can have a lot of sex partners if they're willing to misrepresent their intentions. But sometimes we look at somebody who fucked us and... then realize that even if they were open to a relationship, it's not us they wanted. And we will say they misrepresented their intentions when they actually didn't. Because, you know, getting to know somebody, getting to fuck them for a little while, sometimes you realize that...

They aren't what you want. You don't gel. There's something about them. You found out they voted for Trump, whatever it might be. And you reject them. And to protect their own ego, they will say, well, you were lying about being open to a relationship because we are not in a relationship. And that proves you weren't open to a relationship.

As if every dating scenario ends up in a relationship if both people are open to it when we know that's not the case. Sure, yeah. So I think we started to tiptoe into this a little bit, but you've been... dispensing relationship advice for decades at this point and i want to know is there one piece of common relationship advice that's out in the ether that you wish you could just disappear from the planet

that really gets under your skin and you wish people would stop repeating a particular piece of relationship wisdom. Oh my God, how do I pick just one? Yeah, I know it's hard to pick, but whatever comes to you first. Micro-infidelities and the damage. Micro-cheating. Right, because I forgot that that's a new-ish term. Defining infidelity down.

And that's particularly a problem for people who define cheating as unforgivable. Well, then you want to define cheating as narrowly as possible. Because if you define cheating as unforgivable, and then you define everything as cheating. You're setting any relationship you might get into up for failure or collapse. And that drives me up the wall.

Because I'm constantly, like most of the people who come to me advice are in monogamous relationships or want to be in monogamous relationships. And I'm constantly butting up against unrealistic expectations and ideas about what a monogamous relationship looks like. First started writing about this 30 years ago. I think this attitude is less prevalent now, but people really did, some still, many more did 30 years ago, believe that if you're in love with somebody...

you won't want to sleep with anybody else. Or if somebody's in love with you, they won't want to sleep with somebody else. In which case we wouldn't have a word for monogamy because it would just be like breathing. Even though we have a word for breathing, I guess maybe we'd have a word for it. But people wouldn't have to make monogamous commitments.

And monogamy wouldn't be the struggle that we all know. It is for monogamous people. And so you get this thing in relationships where people police their partner for evidence of what they should just accept is true. Yeah, your partner checked out the barista because on some alternate timeline, your partner wants, would fuck the barista, but they're not going to fuck the barista because they've made a monogamous commitment to you. And it is a struggle to honor that commitment.

And, you know, as I say all the time on my dumb show, if you're with somebody for 50 years and they cheated on you twice, only two baristas in all that time, they were good at monogamy, not bad at monogamy. And I think the piece of relationship advice I really hate the most is...

If somebody could cheat on you, they never loved you. Because I just took a call on my show this week from somebody calling about her mom who found out while her husband, the caller's father, was on his deathbed that he'd had an affair. And he was no longer able to talk or converse. And her mom now believes that their entire 30, 40-year marriage was a lie. And that he never loved her. That's how the narrative goes.

And that does such psychic damage to people. And we pump that into people's heads knowing that, you know, most monogamous commitments are going to, at some point... be touched by infidelity, touched by the angel of infidelity. And we should encourage people to be resilient and to take the relationship in its totality and to know that their partner is human and fallible and that cheating can happen for all sorts of reasons.

And the reason isn't always they didn't love you. I think rarely that's the reason. Do you think that that's why so many young people these days are more open to the possibility of non-monogamy? Because they realize shit like my parents or a bunch of people that I know or just society in general clearly knows that infidelity is a thing that is probably going to happen.

And so why don't I just kind of shift more towards a place where non-monogamy is okay in general and be okay with it or figure out ways in which to be more honest and open about what it is that I want. I think it may be, although there are some people who watch their parents divorce because of infidelity and adultery, and they quintuple down on the importance of monogamy. True. And there are some people who watch that happen and think...

The monogamous commitment, especially one as rigid as that, may have been the problem. Right, it's the whole model or compensate thing that we do with our parents. Yeah, and it's funny because I was definitely in that more doubling down on monogamy way of thinking about things for, what, the first...

20-ish years of my life, and then now I'm completely on the opposite side of that for the last 20 years. One of the paradoxes in this conversation around monogamy and polyamory is that monogamous people always believe polyamory or... any degree of openness is fundamentally destabilized.

And because they often don't know people in open relationships, they don't get to see how stabilizing a force, non-monogamy, some agreement, mutual agreement about outside sexual contact and when and how that might be permissible. can stabilize a relationship because it diffuses the bomb that blows up so many monogamous commitments. And monogamy is really binary, especially the way a lot of people define it.

I can't remember the name of the sex writer. I found this quote. It's in one of my books. I quote her and I credit her, but I can't now credit her. But she said, every monogamous relationship is a disaster waiting. Whoa. Wow, that's a bold statement. Now, we've all seen polyamorous relationships go tits up. We've all seen... I don't know what you're talking about. I've seen poly disasters. I've experienced poly disasters. But it's not...

I think our relationships are stronger. If I can go off about one of my favorite studies out of the Netherlands looking at marriage, because they've had same-sex marriage the longest, and they looked at lesbian marriages, gay marriages, and heterosexual marriages. And they found that the people who are most likely to divorce were lesbians, the people who were less likely were straight, and the people least likely to divorce were gay men.

Gay men were the least likely to be monogamous. Straight people were more likely. Lesbians were most likely. So monogamy correlates- I remember reading about this study. Yeah. In these studies with relationship instability, whereas non-monogamy correlates with relationship stability.

Fascinating. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Real quick before this next section, did you know that you can get ad-free early releases of this show, as well as access to monthly video processing groups and exclusive private channels on our Discord server, all by becoming a subscriber?

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Something on this subject of love and sex and all of this, I think that you on your show talk about sex a lot more than we do on our show. So I'm curious for your insights on this, but I know that years ago I was trying to explain to a friend of mine about relationship anarchy. I was kind of talking about... Explain it to me because I... Okay. So...

At least the way that we tend to talk about it on our show is it's more about rather than saying our relationship is this type, so therefore all these things come with it. It's more like going to a buffet and kind of a la carte. picking out, okay, do we want sex in this relationship? Okay, sure, but maybe only this type. And like, do we want to live together? Do we want...

to be emotionally fidelis, whatever. How is that different than any other relationship? Since people get to define what their relationships are for themselves with their partners. I don't get how that's distinct. Yeah, I think that it's more about...

the philosophy behind that. Because for a lot of people, when you go from we're dating to now like, oh, now we're officially an item, all this like baggage comes with it, right? All these expectations come with it. And I think the whole point is just let's not make those assumptions.

But what I wanted to get at, though, is I was talking to them about how you could have sex and, you know, like physical intimacy in a relationship, and you can have friendship in a relationship, or you could have love. And she said, wait. what's the difference between love and friendship besides sex? And I was kind of like, huh. I mean, I feel like maybe I would, or no, it was, what's the difference between romance and friendship?

besides sex that was specifically her question and i've for years thought about that where i'm like yeah i think we can sometimes feel that difference but it's not really something you can pin down quite as clearly as that There's a great book, The Other Significant Others. We had her on the show. I love that book so much. I love that book, too. You know, one of the things I think Esther Perel writes about is that you shouldn't.

That whole saw, you know, my husband and my best friend, that those are different roles. And a friendship is a kind of usually, but not always, I have friends, I have sex with, a sexless romance, right? Typically. One of the things that distinguishes a friendship from romantic relationships is the absence of sex, unless you're gay. There's a lot of gay men out there who have sex with their friends. And yeah, maybe it's like the definition of pornography. You know it when you see it.

You know, how did you find friendship versus a romantic relationship? Well, you know it when you feel it, you feel differently about these things. Right. And you perceive them differently as other people wouldn't practice them. It's funny, actually, in the screenwriting book.

Save the Cat. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that one. It's been around a long time in the screenwriting world that when he's breaking down the different genres of movies, he talks about the rom-com and then the buddy comedy. And he said that they're the same movie, just one they kiss at the end and the other they don't. That's really true. I would love to see the combination, though. I would love to watch like a buddy cop movie that's also a rom-com in the end. Right.

I would love to watch a love triangle movie where the solution is not pick. Yeah, that would be great. We're still waiting on that one. A new Bridget Jones diary where she gets to have both the like Colin Firth and Hugh Grant. Yeah. I mean, that's the dream right there. Well, actually, I mean, because you're so connected to media, you've run the Hump Film Festival for so long. I'm curious about your perception of how media portrayals of gay relationships.

you know, non-monogamous relationships. How have you seen that change over time? And I wonder, does it track the same thing where you're like, oh, wow, this is so cool. And also I'm a little off-put by all these brooms putting water in the well. When it comes to gay relationships, I think you see better representation, but there still is this self-consciousness among people who are writing, creating.

media that they hope will be consumed by a mass audience about how they're making gay people look. You know, I wrote a screenplay with David Marshall Grant for Spoiler Alert. which was about a gay relationship, and Michael Asiello's memoir about his husband, Kit, dying of cancer, tragically, and the arc of their relationship, which was exclusive. There was infidelity.

There's a beautiful scene in the book that I was really thrilled that we were able to put on the screen where Michael, as kid is dying, invites Michael's affair partner, somebody he had a long time running affair with, to the hospital to say goodbye. Wow. You know, there's this moment where he comes out of the room and these two guys have had this like tense rivalry, like Michael knew and the guy kind of knew Michael knew, but they never acknowledged it. And they hug.

And that happens in the book and it's tremendously moving. And then we put that on the screen. And one of the things I heard from people was that would never happen in real life. And I was like, literally taken from the memoir, which is real life about what. happened. And I was really proud that we put that on the screen. But when I see the portrayals of gay relationships in media, I don't know. I don't see reflected.

in media, the relationships of the men I see around me in my life. And I'm not just friends with crazy, radical gay people in Seattle. I'm friends with gay people all over the country and in rural areas and small towns too. And when it comes to poly or non-monogamous relationships, I've seen some screenplays, I've worked on some things, I've read some treatments, and I almost feel like non-monogamy...

doing something about non-monogamy specifically is like looking right at the sun. Like, I feel like the best stuff I've seen about poly or non-monogamous relationships, that's not what it's about. It's a fact of this relationship in this story. and everything i've seen where like somebody worked on a script called monogamish and it was looking right at the sun and it was it was not good i love that listeners yeah

I've been trying to find a good way to explain that, and I like that idea of looking right at the sun. Because what we've always said, too, is it's like a good, non-monogamous, polyamorous relationship is boring. In the same way that a good monogamous relationship is boring to watch a movie, if that's what it's about. Like, there has to be something else going on. But a good non-monogamous relationship. You know, my husband and I have been together 30 years.

We have an adult child that we raised together. Most couples, married couples in our position, are kind of like waiting around to see who's going to die first. And Terry and I are just like, we have so much to talk about, so much to process.

And even when we're in conflict, and sometimes we are in conflict over committed relationships to our boyfriends, and that can bring us into conflict with each other. And, you know, the relationships between various metamors and extended poly things like we're doing.

can be tense at times too. Whatever else, we look at Terry and I, look at each other and go, even when we're fighting, one of us will say, we're not bored. Not just waiting for one of us to die. It's like, yep, yep, yep. There's a benefit. There's a perk to this. Like you were saying, like the non-monogamy, it keeps you new experiences, variety, this kind of like churn. And it's not just about like new holes to come in.

But like new people to get to know and new like eyes to see the world through. A hundred percent. Yeah. Experiences not to have almost to have vicarious experiences. My boyfriend's 22 years younger than me. My husband's boyfriend is 30 years younger than me. They have kept me young. Yeah. And like, I know who Chapel Roan is and my 60-year-old gay friends have no idea.

And I can hum a couple of her songs because they've been playing them nonstop for six months in my house. Wow, what a good strategy to stay connected to the young folks. Yeah, yeah, and you get to suck them off too. It's like, what could be not better? I did want to touch on that a little bit. Like, there's sort of a precariousness in new relationships while they can be so fun and exciting and make you feel so good.

It's also that question of like, but they could go away at any time. And there's like this lack of feeling as though it's secure in a way that long term relationships are. And I've felt that sort of back and forth.

weird dichotomy of okay i am simultaneously in a new relationship and in an established relationship and the emotions and kind of the whiplash that come with that is really challenging at times And I feel silly for saying this because I'm like, I've been on this show for 10 years now, and yet I'm kind of like going back to non-monogamy for the first time and remembering what it's like to feel these things again.

I think for all of us, like, can we just touch on that a little bit? Like that kind of back and forth that feels so scary at times. And to watch your long-term partner go through that. Yeah. That can be a challenge for people because you look at your long-term partner and those kinds of intense feelings they're having and fears that they're having around the insecurity and perhaps the potential ephemeral, ephemeralness of this new relationship.

And one of the things you have to kind of like learn how to live with as the long-term partner, the one where they do feel the sense of security, safety, intimacy, connection, but not necessarily that kind of passion. If you're watching your long-term partner have feelings for someone else that they don't have for you anymore, can never have for you again, but had for you once. And that's to let your partner have that with somebody else.

And to then be there for your partner if that like comes to shit, as it almost always does. You know, most relationships don't turn into 30 years. Most relationships are... Quickly over. Yeah, I heard the statistic was like with most, most don't make it to a year. Like most relationships do not, which is kind of wild when it's just said plainly like that.

And most should not. Yeah. That's why we have no fault divorce. It's why we don't have yentas anymore, arranged marriages, hopefully. We get to choose and sample. And I'm always, one of the things I find so fascinating. growing up in the 60s and 70s and becoming sort of aware of the adult world in the 70s, was half of the movies and TV shows and books that were out there were about the midlife crisis.

And you never hear about the midlife crisis anymore because people now have lives before they marry and settle down if that's what they want to do. My parents were married at 20 and had four kids by 24, four separate pregnancies. My poor mom. Woof.

Wow. And then like they had midlife crises in their late 30s, early 40s because they hadn't lived. Yeah. No, Dan, that's the thing is the people, at least among my own client base, who I guess I never thought about it as a midlife crisis, but it's like the people that I see go through that are the people usually that were.

raised christian got married at 18 and now at 35 they're coming to me because yeah they're realizing we never lived we never dated anybody else we never had sex with anybody else how do we live while also maintaining this base of a relationship that's now lasted for like more than half of our lives. Right. And one of the things you got to do if you lived, if you had a life before you settled down or picked one person.

was you had those relationships that lasted three months, six months, a year. You learned about yourself. You learned about other people. You learned about what you liked. And I think that's really important, particularly for women, because there's something about the male experience sexually. men kind of are fully aware of whatever it is that turns them on by 15, including their kinks, whatever. And because of socialization or something essential,

about nature and female sexuality in a way it's revealed differently or experienced differently. I think those sexual awakenings or discoveries come later in life for women. And I, my like pulled out of my ass theories, it's tied to sexual peak, which for men is in the teens and for women is like 30. Right. And like crazy things begin to manifest when you're in your sexual peak and come to the front of your mind.

Also, women then have the burden of excavating their actual desires, sexually but also relationally, out from under their socialization. And it's a double burden, I think, because I think there is something natural at play there, too. And so, yeah, when women marry at 18 and then 30, like they begin to come into their own sexually. Like, good luck. I hope that the person you picked at 18 is somebody that you can go there with who wants to go there with you.

And Yahtzee, that's a win, but often it's not the case. And if you'd been that young woman who lived the gay lifestyle in your 20s and moved to a big city and got a funky apartment and had a bunch of friends you ran with and a bunch of short-term relationships with... guys and hopefully good experiences with guys. And then when you pick that 30 at your sexual peak, I think you're better situated if you want a sexually exclusive relationship or a committed relationship at all to pick well.

And not then have a midlife crisis. Well, so that's so interesting because also the overlap, the other trope that I tend to see among that same demographic, you know, the heterosexual couple that got married at 18 is then that 30, 35, they open up their relationship, they bring in a... hot bi babe to be their third and that's when the wife is like oh actually i'm a lesbian right like i've seen that play out so many times yeah i have i have seen that play out too

Not in my life. My husband is still not a lesbian. The night is young. Well, if you just tried hard enough, maybe, or you've explored, if you found the right person, maybe. Right. Okay, so... I'm so sorry that this question is, I'm realizing right now, is almost like a little bit of a homework assignment. So my apologies in advance.

Looking back on your 30 plus years of writing your column, I'm curious, like, do you have a sense of different eras or different chapters based on the predominant relationship concerns or sexual concerns or trends of each period? Talked a little bit about, you know, people have maybe a while ago having these more unrealistic expectations of monogamy versus now. I'm curious if there's any other trends like that that you could notice. I've straddled a really momentous time.

began to write the column before the internet existed before internet porn came along before same-sex marriage before there have been so many changes you know when I first started writing the column I would often get the question, what is a butt plug? Because somebody would hear somebody mention a butt plug.

And they had no one to ask and no way to know. And I loved getting that question because I could write that column in my sleeper with the hangover. And I often did. And now butt plugs have a wiki page. So nobody, all my questions are relationship. and situational ethics. And I wished I'd coined the phrase, am I the asshole? Right. Yeah. I always said, like, the questions are all now. I did this. They did that. Who's the asshole? So I wish I'd gotten out in front of Reddit. It's brilliant.

But I was the original having to weigh in on who the asshole was. Now everybody gets to do it on Reddit. I follow that. I read it. I love it. The thing is then the question, am I normal always? Am I normal? Am I normal? You know, I got a letter once from a woman whose boyfriend would massage her feet after her work shifts as a waitress putting herself through college, which was almost something you could do 30 years ago, but can't do. And then she found out he had a foot fetish.

And then she broke up with him because he was getting something out of that massage too. And she wanted a normal guy. And I think internet porn and the online discourse about sex and hope part of the discourse about sex I've helped drive. Is the understanding now in everybody's bones that when it comes to human sexuality, variance is the norm. And everybody's got their weird shit. And the proof of that is in the Pornhub stats. Yeah.

And you just can't pretend anymore. The one radical thing that we did when I started Savage Love and the paper The Stranger Took a Risk on it was I said, I want to write about sex the way people talk about sex with their friends. using the language people use when they talk about sex with their friends. Now, like post-blogging, post-sex columns, post so much, that doesn't seem new or different or anything. But when I started doing that in 1990, nobody was doing it.

If you wrote about sex for the newspaper, you wrote about it in a kind of stilted Sanskrit, a kind of archaic, ancient language. And you didn't say... You know, I sucked a dick. You said, I performed fellatio. Well, wasn't it in Seattle that columnist who said visiting to Quilla used visiting to Quilla?

as a euphemism for married sex. Have you heard of this? No, I love it, though. We say it all the time because we live right near Tequila. Yeah, it was like in the 90s or 90s. Yeah, it was some advice columnist. Or no, it was some columnist he'd covered. a story of some couple.

Some married couple that have been married for decades and they had sex every single day, or at least they claimed to have sex every single day. No one wants to go to Tukwila that much. Yeah, come on. Wow, that's a lot. In interviews, this writer, this journalist says... I've been to Tukwila, I know. This writer just says...

Like, I don't know. That's just what came out. And then it stuck. So at least he was trying to maybe push the ball forward a little bit. My son walked on. I was having sex once and I jumped out of bed and said, I was just saying good morning to daddy, which then became what we said. Saying good morning to daddy was... Yeah. We live close to Tukwila, so now it's a joke anytime I have to drive past Tukwila. That's been the big change in the 30 years, is just watching...

You know, there was a study in the UK, or a study a few years ago, I'd have to dig it up, where they wanted to measure the prevalence of paraphilias. And what they found was more than 50% of people had paraphilias, which meant paraphilia is a non-normative sexual desire, a kink.

And so if more than half of everybody has one, it's normative, it's not non-normative. It's not non-normative anymore, yeah. And I think that's what everybody has through their heads now, is that you would say to somebody 30 years ago, walk into a room, there are two people having normal sex, describe it.

And they would say, husband, wife, missionary position, lights off. And now we all know that that is not normal in the sense of being the most common form of. That you walk into a room, you see two people having sex. Odds are better. It's not that. And I think really the internet, online pornography and the discourse about sex, which was partly driving and driven by what the internet was doing and what sex was doing on the internet and how porn was a driver.

sex workers were a driver and that conversation reinforced itself on both sides. It's really, I feel like that's been the big, the big sea change. Okay, but to play deviled advocate, now I have to give the disclaimer that I don't agree with this stance or this argument, but it is one that I've often heard. I've heard people make the argument...

No, it's the other way around. It's the rise of Internet porn that encouraged people and told them it is OK. Where, you know, maybe 50 years ago, if you had a fetish for like putting your body parts in a toaster.

You just realize, oh, that was silly. I shouldn't do that until the Internet comes along. And now you have a whole community of people who want to put their body parts in toasters. Boy, I tell you about my kink before we start recording. And then you just fold it into your comments to embarrass and humiliate me, which I love.

I think there's a reinforcing kind of snowball effect there. And you look at, I think, Debbie Herbanek at Indiana University has done great research on choking and its ubiquity and how it's been widely adopted. And it really was porn that kind of mainstreamed it and shaped people's expectations around it and normalized it in a way that's very dangerous and for some people potentially traumatizing, although some people like it. Like some of the people...

who have been traumatized by choking are people who were asked to do the choking by a sex partner, not just people who sprung the choking on a sex partner. And yeah, that was porn. And yeah, it has had these knock-on effects. and this back and forth, but there was nothing entering the porn pipeline that was a creation of porn. Weren't things that people were doing and enjoying. And yeah.

Some people have a kind of reactive sexual kind of, they can imprint on something or, but I don't think there's anything that we see out there in the world sexually that we want to then do that doesn't vibe with something that was already in us erotically that wasn't. present if dormant in our erotic imagination somehow. And so while I do think porn can have a negative impact or it can script things for people that they need to be more thoughtful about.

engaging in, especially around consent and safety. Toasters, yeah, you don't want to put your genitals in just any toasters. Some of them are sharp. Porn is a reflection of, but it also is a distorting mirror. Before we go on to the next section, we want to let everyone know that we have an amazing community of subscribers who get access to ad-free early releases of episodes, monthly video processing groups, as well as exclusive lock...

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Why is it that even though you can find just about anything that you possibly could ever want on the internet and that has brought so many people together now? in terms of we have communities that are toaster fetishists and spanking and whatever. And yet, I feel like the discourse now is that young people are not having as much sex as...

Our generation and above did and does still. So why the hell is that happening? Why are people not having sex? The Internet can be isolating. You know, one of the things when I was in college. There were the anti-porn protests that would say, porn is the theory, rape is the practice. And then we watched as different states got online and internet porn came to different states. As a state got online...

you would see rates of sexual assault and violence in that state drop. And so the arrival of just this pipeline of porn, the tsunami of porn, it resulted in people who might otherwise be out in the world. to get their sexual satisfaction, violating people, just staying at home and jacking off. And that's good. We don't want those people in our bars. We don't want those people putting drugs in the drinks of our friends, although that is a thing that still happens. But I also think that...

I think I'm all for me, too. I'm all for holding shitty men accountable. But we do now live in a moment where men are still expected to make the first move. But the consequences, if you guess wrong. when you make that first move for a boy in a high school or a college, can be really severe. And we aren't educating kids around, you know, with sex education, you know, to cover reproductive biology.

We don't cover what you can do in three minutes. We don't cover what should be covered in sex education is how do you talk somebody into fucking you? And what does that look like? And what does that sound like? And how do you guess right? Right?

You know, I get letters from people who say, I got a letter from a woman saying there's a guy in my class and I want to hit on him, but I don't want to sexually harass him. I want to ask him out, but I don't want to sexually harass him. Like asking somebody out once is not sexual harassment.

asking them out again and again and again after they said no the first time, that's sexual harassment. But I've also heard from people, parents whose sons have had their lives upended because they asked somebody out once and were accused of sexual harassment.

Or they were, you know, at a drunken party where people drank to lower their inhibitions and then people did things because they were disinhibited that then were kind of not violent, but they were like... non-consensual go for it reach touch that then was framed as sexual assault and yeah we created a real minefield and abandoned people under 30 in it and then we're wondering why they don't fuck as much

But we're also looking at the fucking that we were doing, you know, those of us who are older and middle age, we're looking at the fucking that we were doing at 18 and 20. With the benefit of hindsight and with rose-colored glasses on. Yeah. And a lot of that fucking wasn't great. And a lot of it was clumsy and awkward. And if there's less sex because there's less clumsy awkward sex, I'm for less sex. But...

It is a problem that there are people out there who are very deeply frustrated, who don't have sexual partners, who have touched anybody and don't know how to find it. And because we socialize men and women so differently, you've got guys now.

Guys who are being thoughtful about it are the guys who aren't approaching because they don't want to do anything wrong. They don't want to hurt anybody. They don't want to get accused of sexual assault. So then you have a self-selected group of Andrew Tates who are going for it because they don't care. And it's really warping the sexual landscape in ways that we're going to need some, the kind of sex education we will never have in this country to correct for. Yeah.

I mean, all of that hits home very hard. I know that even for myself as not a young person, who I guess was in high school before we had the internet, and I still struggle with that. Like that's a big part of why I just haven't dated since 2019. And even then it was like people that I already knew just because it is a little bit of this minefield of like, you know, if I'm doing all right, it's maybe just safer to not.

And that's sad because then you don't have those kinds of experiences and you don't make those kinds of connections that sex can make, the chaos of sex can make. I do feel like we need a two-pronged approach where we tell people... hitting on someone more than once, and you hit on people with your words, you don't lunge at people, you ask is not sexual harassment. And you have not been sexually violated if somebody asks if you are interested or want to.

They keep asking, well, then you're being harassed. But there's an old Tina Fey skit from Saturday Night Live. It was like, yeah, that's kind of good. Where, you know, what's sexual harassment in the workplace? It's when Fred Armiston asks you.

isn't sexual harassment is the workplace is when i forget who like the hot male football star actor was the other guy when he asks you out that's not sexual harassment and that's that's not not a good example setting What's so funny is, you know, Jace, I think last year you took me to Queen Anne, like your old neighborhood where you used to live when you were like in your early to mid 20s or whatever.

And you took me to this park where you're like, yeah, I used to bring dates to this park or whatever. And I was asking, grilling you all these questions because you were dating at that time before dating apps and even before dating websites, right? And so I was like, how did you meet people? And you were just like, I don't know, just like...

talk to someone I found was attractive in the cafe, like ask them out. And I was just like, what? Like you would just ask someone out in person, like just on the street. Right. Which it's so mind blowing to me now, even though it was not that long ago, that that's just kind of how it was. Right. That there was that risk. However, I can, I think that Dan, what you're describing is there is still this big gap.

between like the way we socialize men and the way we socialize women as far as expectations around sex, courtship, flirtation, romance, dating, hookups, all those things, that when I think about my experience as a woman, that... if a guy does randomly approach me and ask me out, there is all this socialization that dictates it is safer for me to assume he's not going to take the first no for an answer. Like, it is safer for me to assume he's going to be persistent, right?

And then that creates in me a sense of like, oh, if a guy's asking me out and if I'm not into it and not feeling it, like I really need to push back against it because like just my no thank you is not going to be listened to. which is not always true in every single case. But like, I do think there's still a lot of women and still young women that carry that socialization. And so, yeah, there is this weird morass in the middle of all this, this fog that we can't quite cut through or see through.

And now we need to talk about slut shaming. And now we need to talk about the ways many women feel that they do need to say no first as the opening play so they don't look like a slut. Right? So your sincere no can be hard for a guy to tell apart from another woman's opening. Playful, maybe not. And yeah, the way we socialize men, the way we socialize women is to set heterosexual relationships up for failure.

And I think on some basic fundamental level, men and women are fundamentally sexually incompatible, but that's just my bias showing, which also has to be controlled for and worked around. Yeah. And I think there's a difference. You know, when I talk about asking a person, I'm not talking about some rando approaching a woman on the street. I think men should be told that's not okay because women move through the world having to deflect unwanted male sexual attention.

everywhere they go. And it's always from assholes, almost always from assholes. So if you approach some woman that you don't know on the bus or in a cafe, perhaps these days, she's not going to be able to tell you apart from somebody with no judgment and who.

is not somebody she would ever say yes to. It's putting yourself in situations where you interact with people. Leave the house, join a club, volunteer, do this, do that. You know, have a friendship network, which many men do not have anymore. Many young men do not. Get away from the fucking internet. And then women that you interact with, where you begin to get a sense of perhaps there's some interest or vibe there, then you can ask that person.

But not like, go plop your ass down next to somebody on the bus who's got headphones on, is listening to something and reading and has a hoodie up. Leave her the fuck alone. Yeah, that's not what I mean when I say it's okay to ask somebody out once. It's not okay to do that at all. And God bless, you know, everyone complains about dating apps, but in a way, God bless them because it is the place we can go where we say, here you may approach me, stranger. Yeah.

And you never know who you might meet. You know, my cousin and I, we predate the dating apps because we met at Rebar in Seattle 30 years ago, the way people used to meet. He came up to me. Anyway, I won't tell that story again. But like my boyfriend and I met on...

hookup app and like i approached him like he was much younger and i thought i would never meet him he lives on the other side of the world and i was just like your pictures are really hot and i literally i think i said and i'm never going to meet you because And we're never going to probably interact. And he took that as a challenge. He didn't take it as a challenge. He just took that as a... I guess we just began to chat because I was polite and respectful.

I had reasonable expectations, which were no expectations at all. And we just kept chatting every once in a while. And then like my husband and I were in Berlin and we said, hey, we're in Berlin, not too far from where you are. Do you want to like come to Berlin and hang out? And he did.

So yeah, God bless dating apps. And I think, you know, you say to people, don't approach strangers on the bus, but you can, you know, open Tinder on the bus and see if that person on the bus that you thought was cute is on Tinder at that moment. or Grindr or whatever else, which is how a lot of young people who are more successful dating and fucking around do it. Like all the young gay guys I hang out with because my husband's boyfriend is so young.

They go to the bars and they don't pick people up. They go to the bars, they see people they might think are hot, and then they look to see if they're on Grindr, which they will be if they're out that night and they're interested in inviting. And then you message that person on Grindr who's across the bar. And send him your pictures. You don't walk up to him and start talking like I walked up to Terry and started talking 30 years ago.

Okay, all of us talk about relationship communication on our shows. So kind of to close things out here as we're starting to sort of wind down. I want to know from each of us, what do people really get wrong about communication? And what can they do better when it comes to communication and relationships?

What a gigantic question, because I think people do so many things wrong with communication. They do. The four magic words. This is communicating with somebody you're about to have sex with. This is what... This is the advantage that gay people have over straight people. When two guys go to bed together for the first time, when they get to yes, they get to consent, they have to keep communicating because what's going to happen next can't be assumed.

who's going to fuck who, whether he's going to be fucking or not. As a young gay man, 16, 17 years old in Chicago, young gay boy, 16, 17 years old in the city of Chicago, the first time I slept with a guy and he looked at me and said, what are you into?

And I, at that moment I was like, oh my God, I have to tell you, I have to say, because it can't just happen. And at that moment I was able to, I was empowered to rule anything in and anything out and ask for what I want. I had to ask for what I want. And the problem with straight people is they get to yes, they get to consent, and they stop communicating. Because it's going to be normal sex, vanilla sex, straight sex, a little rolling around, maybe some oral, and then...

penetrative intercourse. What is there to discuss? And the reason gay people are better at sex, have more sex, which is a double-edged sword, as we've seen, you know, HIV AIDS, monkeypox, other things, is that we communicate in a way that Straight people don't have to. Some straight people do, but they don't have to, and so many of them avoid it. And nothing makes you better at sex and relationships than good communication and having to practice good communication from the start.

with a new sex partner sets you up for a kind of felicity around having these conversations and ease and comfort with having these conversations that contribute to sexual satisfaction relationship satisfaction in a way that is so beneficial i just wish like we we got marriage from you guys please take what are you into from us and straight guys like if every time you said yes to sex your ass got fucked open

you would say yes to sex less often than you might otherwise. So for a woman to be asked, what are you into? One of her answers has to be, one of the possible answers that you are willing to accept has to be, I'm not into vaginal.

Or I'm not into penetrative sex today, but oral frittage, rolling around, mutual masturbation, there's all sorts of things. You know, every what are you into conversation between gay men doesn't end with somebody getting fucked in the ass. It just doesn't. But straight sex always ends with...

her getting fucked and if every time you said yes you got fucked you would say yes less often so straight guys if you want to have a lot more sex define sex more broadly and sometimes take for an answer what are you into I'm into all these other things tonight, but not into that. Not tonight. Maybe another night, but not tonight. And then you can't treat handjobs, oral sex, mutual masturbation, running around for Taj as sad consolation prizes, but as sex too.

And good sex and rewarding sex are here. Use this vibrator on me while you kneel between my legs and jack yourself off. That's sex too. And it can be great sex. And I'm kind of a proselytizing evangelist for this point. But nothing would improve straight sex and relationships more than that being adopted, normalized, mainstreamed, than everybody having the what are you into conversation.

I remember seeing you say that in an interview once. It's specifically the piece about like, can you imagine a straight woman saying to someone, yeah, I'm not into vaginal penetration. Whether it's I'm not into it tonight or it's like, no, I'm not into it ever. That's just not what I do. But everything else. I'm not a bottom is one of the right answers. So mind blowing to us culturally. And I know for me, you know, I think over the past five.

five-ish years or so, I've definitely been in, I think, a big transformation about my attitudes around sex has shifted to be a lot more like pleasure-oriented rather than performance-oriented and much more oriented around. what do I actually want? What does my body actually feel like today? And then communicating that, whether it's weird or non-normative or anything.

And, yeah, I mean, I don't want to. We already covered ground with kind of, you know, the way that women are socialized. But that's why I said earlier that I think excavation is such a good word.

for it that I think a lot of women are having to excavate out from underneath all these layers of socialization and expectation and this sense i know for me when i heard you first say that like way back in the day that the first thing that struck me was like oh is that an actually an option like i can actually not be into vaginal penetration like i can actually say that to somebody and

and he's not going to die, right? Like, his partner's not going to die because we're socialized that way, right? Of like, if he has an erection and you don't do what he wants, like, he is going to die. So you have to do it at all costs.

Or more horrible to contemplate. The fear women often negotiate in that moment. If I say no to him, is he going to kill me? Or is he going to hurt me? Is he going to react violently? Which is something that... any decent sex education would pound into the heads of men who are interested in sleeping with women, whether they're straight or bi, is that it requires a kind of solicitousness and awareness that most men coast along for years and years and years before it.

they realize. Often it takes a loved, intimate partner sharing their story of sexual violation for it to really come through to a guy. And that should be something we talk about in sex ed in a way that doesn't paralyze people. Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to say on that, I think that to add to this communication piece, something that I often encourage men to do specifically, I think this is good for everyone, but is to, if you are going to be the one to ask for something.

to, in the way you ask it, try to make it clear that no is an okay answer to give. And it's possible to do it in a way that kind of shows that's also possible, even just saying. And no is also fine. You know, maybe they still won't trust you. That's, I mean, society's going to encourage them not to. But there can be a lot of freedom in that for the other person to go like, no, and then to actually follow it up with a...

Thank you for taking care of yourself. The only thing I would add is encouraging people who are being asked about something that they've never thought about doing or wanted to do to not lead with a no. Just drop the N. Go with an O. Instead of a no. Because it can be hard for people to ask for what they want. They may have been dumped before when they tried to bring it up, whatever it is.

And you get into dicey territory when you tell people, like, sometimes you should do in bed something that you didn't want to do. You should never do something in bed that would traumatize you, that you are disgusted by. Sometimes you do for your partner. Amy Mews calls it communal sexual strength. When you go there for a partner and you try something, you step outside, you're not quite your comfort zone, but like.

it wasn't your idea it wasn't anything that had ever occurred to you that you would want to do but if you don't like we because we live in a sex negative culture we recoil from that and also it's we have to be really careful about saying to women you should just do whatever he wants and Because then women do wind up doing things that are traumatizing or make them feel dehumanized or objectified in a way that isn't hot. Like we want to be objectified time to time, but not in a way that's not hot.

I always think of that woman who found out her boyfriend was a foot fetishist. That's so sad. Don't be honest foot fetishist and you will marry the dishonest necrophiliac is my curse on you. Boy. letting somebody touch your feet because it gives them sexual pleasure, even if that's not something that you ever thought of because it doesn't give you sexual pleasure, how is that not a gift you can give somebody that you love and are attracted to? But we often...

don't want to do the things that we don't want to do, not because they would harm us or gross us out or leave us curled up in the fetal position on the floor, just because we've also got it in our heads that we should never do anything that we don't want to do. And then you end up in a relationship with two people who the Venn diagram of their shared sexual interests...

has such little overlap that neither is sexually fulfilled in that relationship. And some effort to push those circles closer together... By stepping outside your comfort zone, by being GGG, as I like to say, and being game for anything within reason and is not reasonable to do things that traumatize somebody or leave you traumatized. But within reason, like...

Let your foot fetishless boyfriend suck your toes. How hard is that? If that traumatizes you, how are you going to function in this world? Because worse is going to happen than getting your toes sucked. And getting your toes sucked is actually kind of hot.

Or it feels interesting afterwards. Not my thing, but like I've let guys do it. And it's just like, how can you not take pleasure from the pleasure that you have the capacity to give someone in a moment? And if you can't take pleasure from your capacity to give pleasure to somebody you care about who gives you pleasure. who solicitous about your interests and needs too, you're cheating yourself out of a lot. I guess mine would be, and as I've again left...

like a long, long-term relationship and tried to figure out now, like, what it is that I want. If you can get clear on what it is that you're hoping for in your relationships, whether that be trying to find someone long-term, trying to just... be monogamous or non-monogamous, trying to just find your next hookup partner, that you're upfront about that with the person that you're going to start dating.

but then also understand that there should be some flexibility there. I think there's so many of us who get into this mindset of, I have to find this specific thing, and they don't allow for the possibility of... more or something different. And so there's a rigidity there, I think. And the what do I want conversation has to include what do you want? Absolutely. Abso-fucking-lutely. And see if those two things align.

Instead of just expecting, well, we'll figure it out someday, but try to be like as upfront and clear about it from the beginning as you can. I want to tie this all back to something I said earlier about sexual peaks and women come into their sexualities and really profound. sometimes shocking to the woman ways, like at 30, like you dumped the foot fetishist when you were 20. And then because you wanted normal sex and that was gross and weird.

And then at 30, suddenly your gross weird stuff starts to surface. And rather than having a foot fetishist that you love, who loved you, who's in your debt, who's filled with gratitude for the way you've indulged him for the last decade. 30, you married some boring mope with no kinks. Oh, but does that person exist really? I think anybody who tells you they have no kinks is lying to you.

Like they have a kink. They're lying to themselves. They're embarrassed or ashamed or it's too illegal. They can't talk about it. There you go. Yeah. Okay. Last question. What keeps you going doing this work for so many years? I mean, like the 5,000th time you had to tell somebody, you know, to dump the motherfucker already. Like, how do you maintain a sense of hope and drive to keep doing this work?

I sometimes have to remind, like I will be with Nancy, the producer of the Savage Lovecast, and we'll take a question and I'll be like, oh, I can't talk about that. I've talked about that. And she'll go. 10 years ago you talked about that. We go through the same thing with episode topics where we're like, didn't we just do that? And we look back, we're like, ah, that was three years ago. That was five years ago. Right.

And so, like, this person, when you covered this topic, was 10, 9. And they weren't listening, hopefully. And so I try not to be too self-conscious about it. Like sometimes repeating myself. I remember when Emily Yofi, who wrote Dear Prudence, signed off after like nine years. And she said, I've said everything I have to say. And I was already 20 years into Savage Love at that point. Wow. Yeah. I just feel like.

It's such a great gig. I'm Ann Landers. This computer is propped up in the Ann Landers Encyclopedia, which I have read and referenced in my work. Like her column had to be pried from her cold, dead hands. And that's how I feel about having a successful advice column. Like I'm going to die writing this column. It's too much fun. It's too interesting. The trust people.

demonstrate in me or the faith they have in me when they write to me, even though like sometimes I'm wrong and people like take a piece out of me, which I welcome because I've learned a lot writing my column. It's not just me coming down from the mountain with the tablets. It's a conversation.

It's just such a great gig. I couldn't understand how anybody could walk away from it. And so I never, ever will. I will be carried out in a box. And I love it. I love it. The only thing I don't love is I used to get... because the column is so old. You used to get descriptions of, people would write me and say, I'm too embarrassed to go to the doctor. And then they would describe the sore, their anus or their vulva or their penis.

And I would have to print this letter and say, I'm not a doctor. You still have to go to the doctor. You've just delayed going to the doctor. People don't write the descriptions anymore. They just take digital photographs and ingress them with their email. I'm too embarrassed to go to the doctor. Not too embarrassed to stand on a sink in my dorm room, bend over, take this picture. Send it to Dan Savage. Send it to you on an unsecured server.

with my real name attached to it. Not to embarrass for that. Please tell me what this is. Write these people back and say, I don't know what that is. Go to the student health center. Go to the doctor. Yeah. Well, we're lucky. I don't think we've gotten any of that in our line of work. Not yet. Please don't. Don't take that as an invitation, anyone listening. It makes it impossible for me to read The Savage Love Mail in a cafe or on an airplane. Right. Yes, that makes sense. For sure. Yeah.

So normally we've put a question on our Instagram stories every single week that's usually tied to something about the episode where people can essentially answer anonymously. If you can't think of anything, that's totally fine. But we like to offer like if there is one thing you'd want to know.

how the multi-amory audience feels. Would you have any questions you want to pose? Yeah. Do you feel there's something illegitimate or abusive about hierarchical polyamory? And are you so deluded as to think that...

There are non-hierarchical polyamorous relationships. Oh, Dan, we've covered that ground so much and our audience will have a lot to say. Because I really want to stick it. I really want, like, because I don't believe there's any such thing as a non-hierarchical polyamorous relationship.

And I think people get hurt when they have to pretend or they're conned into believing. That's often something we've talked about. Even just recently, we were talking about that on an episode of like... the harm caused by people thinking they're not allowed to have it and so they try really hard it's kind of like we were talking about with the pretending as if you're interested in a long-term relationship because you think that's the only thing that's acceptable to want

when really what you want is hookups i feel like hierarchy can fall into a similar thing but boy people are passionate on the other side of that my husband's boyfriend was new and like terry and i at that point have been together 25 years and or 24 years and somebody said to him you should you have to insist it's non-hierarchical just like oh no that's not happening like we'll we'll grow together in time and things will get more equal but like i'm the fucking husband

Right. Like we can't pretend that Terry and I haven't been together for a quarter of a century and don't have shared property and other ties to each other that you can't compete with pretty twink. Sorry. And we're not going to lie to you and pretend that you can. Because that would be dishonest and us being manipulative. We would be selling to you an idea of the relationship you're in that's fundamentally untrue. That's my problem when I see people who say they're practicing hierarchy.

They almost always are practicing hierarchical polyamory. They're just lying about. I think it comes down to a language problem, honestly, because what I'm starting to see is that like when people say hierarchy. It's collapsed into, if you're practicing hierarchical polyamory, that means all of the horrible, toxic, controlling, power dynamic behaviors that people have fallen victim to, you know, when they're like the unicorn hunted by a couple or whatever.

And then when people say non-hierarchical polyamory, it's a fill-in for everything good and everything nice and everything ethical. It gets flattened like many things on the internet do. I thought it was ethical for us to say to Terry's boyfriend then, you're not the husband. You don't get to have an opinion about whether we sell the house or not. Sorry. That'll impact you if we sell the house, but you don't get a vote. But I think you're absolutely right.

People use hierarchy to stand in for manipulative, abusive, controlling. Right. When we use it to mean like we're being honest about the facts on the ground. Yeah. And, you know, seven years later, like. it's a much more egalitarian relationship that we have with Terry's boyfriend, Tom. He's earned much more of a say in like how we run our affairs because he is now embedded in them. Yeah. Right. Like three months in, six months in.

You don't get a vote. Yeah, and I think the discourse has difficulty grappling with that nuance. Because surprise, surprise, things get really black and white on the internet. People have a lot to say there. This was so much fun. Thank you. This was awesome. Yeah, Dan, thank you so much for joining us. I'm sure we could talk for many, many more hours, but thank you so much for taking the time and diving into all these topics with us.

And we also want to hear from all you out there. Is it possible for a non-hierarchical polyamorous relationship to actually exist? Now, this is going to be the question that's going to go on our Instagram stories this week. So go check that out. All of the answers that you submit are anonymous. And so we will be sharing the most interesting and intriguing ones.

Also, the best place to share your thoughts with other listeners is in the episode discussion channel in our Discord server, or you can post about it in our private Facebook group. You can get access to these groups and join our exclusive community by going to multiamory.com slash join. In addition,

you can share with us publicly on Instagram at Multiamory underscore podcast. Multiamory is created and produced by Jace Lindgren, Emily Matlack, and me, Dedeker Winston. Our production assistants are Rachel Shenewerk and Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know. Know I Did by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. Full transcript is available on this episode's page on multiamory.com.