The conventional wisdom goes something like this: if you’re a girl who keeps falling for the Wrong Kind of Guy™, you should go get therapy with the goal of changing whom you fall for, while learning to deeply love yourself, as if a lack of self love is always the issue.

This advice is absolute garbage.

The underlying premise here is that your attraction is a malfunction you’re supposed to debug. I don’t think this is always true. Sometimes, it’s worth digging into bad patterns of behavior and fixing them. Other times, maybe those desires are actually ok??

More so, changing what you want can be ineffective at best, damaging at worst, especially if you end up repressing your true desires instead of actually engaging with them and learning from them. It takes introspection to figure out which of your desires actually hurt you or others and which ones just look alarming to other people. And even when some preferences carry risk, there are ways to mitigate the risks.

I’ve become substantially happier since deciding to pursue what I want honestly, instead of worrying about judgment.

Case in point, my recent conversation here with a friend of mine over Signal:

Wounds and preferences are different things

Some of what you’re attracted to comes from old damage, which people sometimes refer to as “emotional wounds”. These are probably worth paying attention to. In my early teens I kept dating people with low empathy, because I was used to that from my childhood. I dated a string of people with sociopathic tendencies. Ask me sometime about the guy who begged me to let him waterboard me on every date and eventually broke up with me after a year because I kept refusing to do that particular thing with him.

These relationships consistently made me unhappy, and I learned to screen for fellow high empathy people instead. Now, as soon as I see signs of this low-empathy trait, I lose physical attraction to that person pretty suddenly. But this came from the learned knowledge that these people genuinely make me unhappy, not from prescribed ideas about what’s supposed to be good for me. I didn’t decide one day “hey I’m going to stop being attracted to people like this.” I just remembered the pain/discomfort/bad feels from people like that and my brain did the work for me.

Most of what I’m attracted to does not come from emotional wounds. It’s my authentic taste. For example, I really like assholes. They make me laugh and light up. And why is this a problem? Everyone deserves love, assholes too. I’m happy to be someone who can offer genuine attraction/love/care to people who can be jerks (as long as they have genuine empathy for other people as well).

Trying to therapy your way out of a real preference doesn’t make you healthier. It just makes you repressed and miserable.

The actual skill is learning your own habits well enough to know what feels good to you, instead of cosplaying somebody else’s idea of what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like.

This conversation with a friend of mine highlights the difference:

You can’t fake normal forever

The standard healthy relationship, the one that works great for the average person, would feel awful for me to live inside. I’m a weird, quirky person and I require a non-standard relationship to be happy.

For most quirky/weird people who are like me, the advice to modify whom you like is harmful to both to the person taking the advice and to the people they date.

If you’re an unusual person, maybe with some tendencies toward mania or anxiety, and you repress all of that to make yourself palatable to a normie partner, there’s a chance that you’ve built a ticking time bomb that will eventually explode, spectacularly, hurting everyone involved.

I feel quite lucky that the normie people whom I dated didn’t interest me enough, and that I turned down their marriage proposals (twice) in favor of a much more exciting and enticing life partner that fit my exact tastes and preferences and that isn’t surprised by the darker parts of my psyche.

People sort by how weird they are

Although there are notable exceptions, from what I’ve seen, frequently people self-sort based on eccentricity and level of mental illness in their relationships, just as they tend to do based on physical attractiveness, intelligence, and a number of other traits. (Correct me if you have more/better data and I’m wrong here!)

I don’t think this is a bad thing! I want someone deeply, highly compatible to me, not to the version of myself that I’m trying to conform myself to based on what I think people will want or what healthy is supposed to look like.

I don’t just want a partner who is willing to tolerate/overlook my occasional manic tendencies. I want someone who actively was looking for someone highly ambitious, energetic, and excited about life and loves that part of me deeply.

The demand side, or: who actually wants this

Despite my friend Standard Deviant recently saying, “who would be into that?” while we were chatting at Manifest, there are actually A LOT of people who are specifically into this.

The manic pixie dream girl trope exists for a reason, after all.

Also, my friends backed me up on this, so there :P

I have found a very large number of men (namely the last six guys who I have dated) who have told me some version of “It’s not intentional, but I seem to only date manic depressive girls.” Notably, one of my exes that I am still close friends with texted me this while we were catching up:

Personally, I think there are many valid reasons to prefer dating manic depressive girls. The highs are actually very very good. Have you ever had sex while manic, or with someone while they’re happily manic? During mania, there’s a lot of energy and excitement and many people tend to be quite hypersexual, uninhibited, and open to trying new things in these states.

I asked my husband about this and he said some version of “If you want a girl who is hypersexual and has a 40-hour fuckfest with you all weekend, or who has sex with you 3 times a day while you travel all over Asia, well… you’ve got to be prepared to also do a bit of work steadying them during the lows as well.”

TLDR the highs are really fun and if you’re drawn to this, maybe you should just accept this and go for this.

On my side, even though I stamped out my attraction to sociopathic people successfully and am no longer into that, I still remain highly attracted to people with mild narcissist traits. See my previous articles where I mention that I most only date exited founders, VCs, and professors. (and once I have found someone who is all 3 and that is particularly delicious for me).

After a decade of trying to change my patterns of attraction unsuccessfully around this in particular, I realized that this is very core to how attraction works for me, and I don’t actually want to change this. No other dynamics are anywhere near as satisfying for me, and I want to feel this kind of intensity in my important relationships.

The supply side, or: what I actually want

My most passionate and quite frankly, fun, and intense dynamics are with people with narcissist tendencies who tend to like girls when they’re manic. Instead of thinking “oh this seems bad/toxic and I should avoid this dynamic”, perhaps there is a better way. Maybe we can find healthy ways to enjoy these dynamics, while mitigating the potential harms.

Risk Mitigation Techniques

I haven’t always been good at mitigating this harm, but I’ve been learning from my mistakes. I also have some friends who are spectacularly good at mitigating it and are true masters of this. Here are some crowd-sourced strategies that have worked for myself and others.

1. I tend to overcommunicate about my patterns/tendencies and especially err on the side of sharing things I feel scared to share.

Texts from a few guys I’ve been involved with:

2. I intentionally tell people if I’m likely to get attached to them, ask them about their relationship capacity and interest in me, and back off/choose not to hook up with them if they are not available. Case in point:

3. I ask people if they’ve dated people with anxiety or adhd or other things like this in the past and gauge their experience levels with this. I lean in more if they have experience and are skilled at dealing with these things.

4. Not taking on any new partners for the first 12 months of any new relationship in order to grow deep enough roots/put enough attention into that new serious relationship. (I personally don’t do this but I’ve seen this work well for 4+ people at this point.)

5. One strategy that I have for basically all secondary partners is that I only see them when I’m energetic and happy, and I tend to just spend a lot of alone time when I’m low energy. I don’t get that depressed, I just get tired and want to drink tea and read books and not be bothered by anyone for a while. I tend to tell people explicitly that I need relationships with low maintenance needs (see previous posts about relationship decay rates) in order to convey that I might have less energy to hang out for a few weeks at a time and it’s not personal to them or to the relationship.

From another recent text conversation with an ex while I was talking about being manic sometimes but just taking lots of alone time when I’m tired:

Mea Culpa / Mistakes to avoid

One of my friends was chatting with me about this article as I was writing it and said:

I can see what he means, but it’s also possible to make worse mistakes in a poly context. I’ve made the mistake of neglecting my primary partner and having fun, mania-fueled flings with others, giving them all the fun highs, and leaving him with only the lows. This is a bad deal and a pretty unfair way to treat your primary partner.

I also want to make clear that I’m not suggesting that people do a bunch of toxic, dangerous things. I’m just saying that self-awareness is key and that instead of repressing preferences, it’s worth understanding them at length and then figuring out the healthy ways to channel them.

In some cases, it may be that the only way to channel them is via a negotiated kink scene with very specific parameters. In other cases, it may be ok to date assholes or bipolar chicks as long as everyone is communicating well and setting clear expectations about it. You do you.

Most of my posts are insights I’ve had or experiences I’ve lived through. Lately I’ve been thinking that I actually have no idea how to date. There are things other people seem to have figured out way sooner than me, and my “insights” on them might just be obvious to you.

But just in case you’re like me, here’s the list.

You Can Just Choose Not to Feed a Crush

A crush is like a fire. You can feed it oxygen or you can starve it. It’s actually pretty easy to not fall into my long-term pattern of intensely falling for people before checking that they’re available and we’re compatible.

I figured this out from being on the receiving end of it, though it took me ten years to realize.

When I was an undergrad, I dated a physics grad student. I had pretty intense romantic feelings for him, and he seemed pretty into me too. He was the first guy to cook me dinner (baked Hungarian eggplant for my birthday) and to consistently give me great orgasms. I have really happy memories of spending time with him at his apartment talking about biophysics, about “what is life,” about living the life of the mind. I also vividly remember a great 69 session where we were each trying to outcompete the other and overwhelm them with pleasure until they had to stop what they were doing. I won. ;)

I’d told him I was poly from the start, but the reality of it didn’t actually hit him until I had a girlfriend and another boyfriend. He slowly distanced himself, said he was just depressed, and we ebbed naturally into a friendship. Ten years later I still care about him. We chat occasionally. He’s monogamously married now, and we are very clearly just friends.

At one point a few years after we’d stopped dating, I was heartbroken over some other guy, and he said to me: “Why are you spending so much time obsessing over this ex? When I realize that a relationship isn’t going in the direction I want, I stop thinking about it and just move on.”

He was describing, almost verbatim, what he had done to me ten years before, and somehow I’d never connected the dots until then.

We didn’t communicate well about it at the time (probably typical for young people). And at the time, I was so scared of seeming clingy or needy that I didn’t just ask him what was going on. I wish I had. He’d realized that poly wasn’t for him and slow-faded on me, leaving me with a broken heart that took some time to heal, and a lack of complete understanding of what had actually happened until much later.

But he was right. If you’re disciplined with your thinking, you can just choose to set it aside. If you accept that something is done, you can stop torturing yourself, put it on a shelf mentally, and move on with your life.

I’ve been developing a few new dating strategies based on this approach.

The easiest one is to sleep with people you can’t actually picture yourself dating long-term. Try to imagine doing something with them that you’d do with a serious partner. A friend of mine said, “An example would be helpful here; I imagine for many people, sex would be such a thing”, so here are some examples: cooking dinner together or watching a movie before going to bed, or booking flights for a trip and handling annoying logistics. If you can’t quite see it, accept that. I don’t know how I didn’t think of this sooner. You can just fuck people you would never date, and then it’s easy to not date them. They often make great friends, and sex is a great shortcut to intimacy.

The other strategy is more stressful. You do something casual, but stay disciplined about how often you let yourself think about them and what kinds of fantasies you allow.

Honestly, I am not sure this one is working. I think I’m falling for someone right now despite actively trying not to.

You Can Take Your Time

I used to worry that if I didn’t meet up in person fast enough with someone I matched with on a dating app, they’d give up. To be fair, this has happened a few times.

But the last two really great flings I’ve had were 8 years and 2 years of communication, respectively, before we first met in person.

To be clear, the first 6 months of a new relationship are very fun and limerence is addictive. But delaying the first meeting has never actually been a problem for me.

I’m worth the wait. And honestly, I prefer people who aren’t in a rush, at least for the more intense kind of dating. There are only so many great loves I’ll have in my life, and I’m completely fine with a slow burn for them.

(One night stands are obviously different. I try to meet those within days of the first message.)

Communication Boundaries Matter as Much as Physical Ones

In decades of dating and 35+ people I’ve slept with, exactly one person has ever brought up communication boundaries on a first date. One!

“How much will you discuss our private conversations or what we do physically with your primary partner?” is a totally reasonable thing to ask. People are used to negotiating physical boundaries. We’re terrible at the verbal ones.

Speaking of physical boundaries: someone recently asked me “what kinds of touch do you like?” as an opening into that conversation. It eased me in so much more gently than being grilled on “what are your hard limits” from the jump. I can answer the hard limits question, but it makes me tense. The softer entry point worked way better.

Some other things worth bringing up early:

Outness. Some people aren’t out as poly for very valid reasons (professional, custody, etc). I’m probably not a great person to date if you care about staying private, given that I literally write a poly sex blog. But I do ask people before quoting them and before writing about them at all. I’ve forgotten once or twice and felt awful about it, but I really do try.

Digital privacy. You may never tell a soul about your sex life, but if you’re not using Signal, you should be prepared for any sexy texts between you to eventually be made public. This one’s easy for me. I just say “if you want to chat more, I’m XXXXX on Signal. Signal only.” If you won’t use Signal, I won’t meet up.

Bonus signal: How someone texts and sexts is a really good predictor of whether the sex will be good for me. I like people who write well. This is probably more personal to me than universal, but it’s worth knowing what your own predictors are.

Communicating Sooner Is Almost Always Better

Note: I’ve never regretted asking people what they want, even when they didn’t fully know yet. I’ve never regretted being honest about what I’m going through, good or bad.

A Love Letter to the 26-Year-Olds of San Francisco

I’m going through an intense period of transitions and growth, so I’m experimenting with new ways of dating.

I recently had a wonderful one night stand with an extremely sweet guy I met on Glosso. (Message me if you want an invite to Glosso! Happy to help folks out.) I’d happily set him up with a friend or run into him at a party. He’s the youngest guy I’ve ever slept with. (I started hooking up with men when I was 19 and dated mostly much older guys for a long time.)

Turns out younger guys are just delightful in a lot of ways. Having now tested my thesis that I can have a one night stand and feel genuinely good about it after, I’m opening up my messages to the mid-to-late-20s founders of SF who are curious about the slutcloud and the wider community of folks adjacent to it.

Please message me. :) DM me here on Substack or find me on Glosso as vortex_goddess. I’ll also be at Less Online and am looking forward to meeting people there.

I never understood what people meant when they said they were emotionally unavailable. No matter how exhausted or sad I was, I could always find some reserve energy to fall in love. The possibility of being loved re-energized me the way there’s always room in your dessert stomach.

Case in point, the one time in my twenties that I solemnly announced a year off dating (hear ye, hear ye!!), the break lasted 2 weeks before I met a cute sociology grad student and started dating him. A few months later I met my husband and barreled into that romance too.

When I asked my husband why he originally fell in love with me, he said I was a sponge for love and affection. I was so hungry for it. I valued moments of deep connection, bodies and minds meeting, above anything else and prioritized this experience. It took me much later in life to realize this isn’t true for everyone. People find meaning in different things and people act very differently depending on their revealed priorities.

Recently I found out that one of my long-term partners has been cheating on me for years, with many people.

We were at a teppanyaki restaurant (a cuisine that is now ruined for me, thanks). His phone was face up on the table. A text came in. Then another. Nudes. Texts about meeting up to hook up the following week.

His panic was evident. He grabbed the phone. I begged him to stay and talk to me. He ran to the bathroom anyway.

I stayed at the counter, sobbing while the chef kept performing in front of me.

When he came back, he told me he had panicked. What he had actually done, in his panic, was delete the texts I’d just seen, along with every other text thread with that person on his phone.

It’s a particular kind of humiliation to be cheated on inside of poly. The whole structure is built on the idea that you don’t have to lie. You can sleep with whomever you want. You just have to say so.

I thought that because I was poly, I would be safe from this specific kind of hurt. Turns out not.

I wish I had spicy stories of adventure and romance to share with my lovely readers, but I’m running a bit low right now. I feel so hurt that I can barely write.

The real injury here isn’t the sex. And it’s not even lying in the abstract. It’s the asymmetry of it all. I was fully transparent while he wasn’t, which makes me a sucker.

I’m a little worried for myself because this state of emotional unavailability is such a departure. But I’m also weirdly relieved to finally feel the other side. For years I didn’t understand the emotionally unavailable people I dated. I’m happy to have some insight now.

As for what comes next? I have no idea. What will Vortex’s love life look like in 2026? Too early to tell.

I guess, for anyone who has wanted to casually date me but wasn’t able to commit to a full-blown relationship, now is your time to strike ;) It might not last very long. Eventually I think I will bounce back and return to my full romantic self.

Work is the new sex. Do you know what’s even better than NRE? Working at a very fast paced AI startup in San Francisco. I get all the same adrenaline rush but without the emotional complications. And I get paid.

Here’s the other thing about working 12+ hour days: I no longer have any mental or emotional bandwidth to cultivate new crushes. I used to spend hours per day fantasizing about dancing or sex with my crushes and that disappeared overnight.

At the same time I have no tolerance for emotional bullshit. Every single interaction outside of work and husband and family, I’m now filtering through the lens of “does this relieve my stress or increase my stress?” If it increases stress, I cut it out.

How do other people have the time and energy to date polyamorously and also work?

Here’s the thing about San Francisco that outsiders don’t fully understand. At its most elemental, the city runs on two economies. There’s the tech economy, and then there’s what I think of as the fuck economy: the secondary ecosystem of artists, dancers, musicians, and free spirits that crystallizes around the tech money like a beautiful barnacle. This isn’t new. It goes back to Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, to the 60s counterculture bleeding directly into the personal computer movement. The original Silicon Valley nerds and the Bay Area hippies were neighbors who kept ending up at the same parties.

Burning Man in recent years feels less like a countercultural experiment and more like a corporate offsite with better costumes. Vibecamp is the more self-aware version of this dynamic, explicitly designed as a reminder to techies to touch grass, with artsy hippies as the guides and the techies themselves quietly footing the bill. It works because each side genuinely has something the other can’t generate alone.

The techies bring money and intellectual rigor. The artists bring beauty and embodiment and the stubborn insistence that human bodies need to feel things.

When they date, the artists tend to have more time and do more of the emotional labor in romantic relationships, regardless of their gender.

I’ve been both types, so I have a unique window into this world. And what I’ve noticed is that the women navigating the executive side of it often develop a coping strategy I find quietly depressing. I know several high powered female lawyers, engineers, and executives who’ve solved the “I’m too intimidating” problem by simply hiding. They date artists or tradespeople and make an implicit agreement never to bring work home. Work stays in one box. Fun and sexy and dancing and hobbies go in another box. Their partners know one side of them. The full picture stays private.

I understand why. I’m just not capable of it.

I want to be fully myself, sometimes fierce and intimidating, sometimes silly and playful. I don’t want to perform a partial version of myself to make someone more comfortable, whether in a relationship or a casual sexual dynamic.

Because I date primarily founders, I’ve dated a lot of CEOs, mostly men, who work very high stress and high responsibility jobs and use poly dating as their stress relief. They’re able to date because it’s their primary hobby and form of decompression after work each day.

When I first moved to San Francisco, I dated a CEO whose favorite kind of date with me went something like this. After work, he would book us a hot tub with a private room and bed for an hour. We would start by relaxing and enjoying the hot water. Then we would start kissing passionately. I have synesthesia and experience warm water as intensely pleasureful. I would crawl into his lap facing him and start massaging his neck and back and shoulders while moaning as his hands traced over my hips and my butt pulling me closer. Eventually he’d pick me up over the side of the hot tub, standing facing me, and fuck me roughly, hanging out over the edge. Usually next to the hot tub and again on the bed. Then we would shower at the end. We would go out to omakase afterwards for really nice sushi.

Another similar dynamic was with a CEO who once got coffee with me and then took me to his new office on Montgomery Street at 7am before anyone had arrived for work that day. Look at this big beautiful office with all these nice standing desks we just purchased, he says, isn’t it a nice office? What about that couch in the middle of the room? It hasn’t been broken in yet and no one’s here yet, want to go have sex on that couch?

Yes readers, yes I did.

He fucked me on the office couch in the middle of the room, where anyone could have walked in at any point. We left a small stain on the couch from me squirting unexpectedly. Oops. For months after he told me that whenever he got stressed at work, he would look at that little stain and feel instant relief and joy again.

I was the decompression. I was the artsy hippie reminding the founder to feel something after a long day of optimizing.

I’m not unused to that dynamic. I’m just not used to being on the other end of it, being the one who needs the decompression and having no idea how to find it.

Maybe in some ideal parallel universe I would figure out how to find a handful of low commitment lovers to service me sexually after a long, hard day at work. But I don’t really like casual encounters. I want all of my sexual partners to genuinely like me as a person and find me funny and clever.

I’ve also been reflecting lately on what actually feels good to me at this stage, and dating younger or less experienced founders just doesn’t do it for me anymore. My husband is an exited founder, I’m now a senior executive myself, and dating down no longer feels fun in the way it used to. I’m only open to dating exited founders these days.

In the meantime, I’m having much better sex with my husband lately. As both of our jobs pick up, we’re using each other heavily for stress relief and it’s going well.

But underneath that is another fear I haven’t fully shaken. Not the fear of being too intimidating or too busy to date. The fear that I’ll gradually hollow out. That without enough time for dancing, for deep friendships, for the slow cultivation of real connection, I’ll become exactly what I was most afraid of becoming: a corporate zombie who is extremely good at her job and very boring at everything else.

The CEOs I dated understood this intuitively. Dating was their decompression, their way of staying human. I used to be the one they were decompressing with. Now I understand, viscerally, why they needed it.

Yes, I’m a slut. But I’m also a work slut.

And I need to find my own way to stay human.

Thank you: To my husband for supporting this journey, to everyone who went on dates with me, to the new friends who emerged from this year.

This past year was my big year of sexual re-awakening.

I had taken a long break from dating due to serious pregnancy complications that had me hospitalized for an extended period, combined with covid, figuring out life with newborn babies, and a bunch of other hard-to-anticipate life circumstances. Life was good in many ways, but I had been in survival mode for many years. One day I just looked up and realized I had forgotten to invest in having a sense of self outside of being a wife/mother/employee.

So in 2025, I decided to aggressively pursue my happiness.

The Hobbies Comeback

I started by reincorporating hobbies I had abandoned for 5+ years. Playing music. Reading for pleasure. Things that had fallen off my priority list during the chaos of early parenthood.

I set a goal of reading 25 books for fun this year. I read 50!

I started going to fusion and tango dance festivals again all over the US and taking private dance lessons to focus on technique and rapid improvement. Getting extra childcare so that I could do hobbies again turned out to be extremely high ROI. I became substantially happier as a result of having hobbies again.

And then I decided to tackle the romantic partner situation.

Dating as a Part-Time Job

Similarly to how I found my husband, I decided to treat the search very intensely, like a part-time job. In true Vortex form, I went all in. I’m not really someone who does things halfway.

I spent substantial time responding to messages on dating apps. I told my friends I was looking and asked them to set me up. I went to events like Vibegala and Slutcon. I even put a date-me form in this blog. (The only response was from my husband who still definitely wants to date me.)

What was the result of all this hard work and substantial time investment?

The Data

Number of times I fell in love hard and had my heart broken: 3 (I only had sex with 1 of these 3)

Number of people I had sex with: 5

(Where did I find them? 1 of these was my husband, 2 were from feeld, 1 from fetlife, 1 I met irl at lessonline)

How many were one night stands? 1

(He was perfectly nice and the sex was amazing, but I was happy to have purchased the knowledge that I’m not really into one night stands.)

How many sex partners turned into close friends? 2 of 4 (excluding my husband who is my best friend) That’s a 50% conversion rate. Turns out having sex and falling in love is a surprisingly effective way to make really close, lifelong friends.

Number of people I exchanged nudes and ongoing dirty talk with via text: 6

New very close friends from metamours: 2

Note: I’m not dating either of these guys, but I regularly talk to both of these women and truly adore them and care about them deeply.

People I hooked up with/kissed but didn’t have sex with: 2 (Yeah, I really like to jump straight to sex)

Number of people who gave me an orgasm just by partner dancing and flirting with me, without genital contact of any kind: 2

Number of people who expressed mutual romantic/sexual interest but the logistics didn’t work out to have sex: 7

Number of people who have an outstanding offer that I can visit them and have sex whenever I’m in their city: 6

What This All Means

So what do I think about this experiment?

In the end, I had many great sexual adventures. I fell in love and experienced heartbreak. I finally believed that I was hot again (Thanks to everyone who told me I was hot this year, it really helped!!) But the biggest thing to come from it was new friends.

I made a surprisingly large number of very close, connected friendships from both people I tried to date and from metamours. I’m grateful that I have a vibrant social life with many great friends that I admire and adore. I was discussing this with one of these new friends recently via Signal:

Recalibrating for 2026

For next year, I’m going to remain open to opportunities that come to me, but I’m going to stop putting so much effort into reaching out to others and trying to hunt for a new partner.

Besides, what does a new partner even entail? I’m fuzzy on the boundary between sexy friends and romantic partners. If we’re counting sexy friendships, I honestly don’t even know how many partners I have. Of people where we have a very defined, committed relationship, I would only count my husband. And do I even have the time/mental bandwidth for another serious committed relationship? If I’m being honest with myself, right now, the answer is no.

Another reason for reprioritizing in 2026 is that I underestimated what a time commitment dating would be. In the year where I was intensely looking for a new partner, I underinvested in the maintenance an ongoing happy marriage requires. I’m enjoying being able to just put my focus in one place right now.

Lucky for me, he’s exactly my type. It’s like shopping in your own closet. Everything already fits. ;)

Who knows, maybe I’ll find a great comet-type relationship at some point. But I’m in no rush. Instead, I can channel that extra time and energy into my hobbies and friends and get the work-work balance I’ve always dreamed of (workaholics of the world that joke’s for you :P). Plus, after all of that dating, I could really use some alone time with myself.

Here’s my elevator pitch:

I believe that the world would be a better place if everyone had more pleasurable sex. To that end, I wanted to create a device that could help us take a more rigorous scientific approach to that goal: a wearable biometric tracker designed to objectively measure sexual pleasure.

Despite the fact that sex is one of the most powerful human motivations, the scientific understanding of sexual pleasure is surprisingly limited. Since Masters and Johnson’s seminal work in the 1950s, the vast majority of published research consists of survey results, with only a small number of lab studies that are difficult to coordinate and do not necessarily generalize to natural environments.

What’s missing is objectively measured (not self-reported) data that is collected in a naturalistic (non-clinical) setting.

As a scientist, I was initially motivated by the research possibilities, but I later realized that such a tool had several other exciting applications and business opportunities.

I worked on this project for over a year, reading the literature, collecting pilot data, and developing the business model through an accelerator program.

Unfortunately, I recently experienced a disappointing setback. This is what happened.

It was a Friday evening in May.

I’m driving home from a busy day in San Francisco, overwhelmed from a long day of meetings. I imagine how nice it would be to have a glass of wine. I impulsively pull off the 101 at the Palo Alto exit to stop at a wine bar, planning to sit and write in my journal to process my day.

It’s a busy evening at the wine bar. I had hardly started to write when people sit down next to me and I’m pulled into conversation. The atmosphere is lively, and I meet several characters that evening.

The first pair who sit beside me are two lovely women – a romance novel author and a government scientist. We talk about their jobs and their longstanding friendship. When they leave, a couple from Chicago sits down. They’re in town for a bar mitzvah. The man, a partner at a major consulting firm, is boisterous and social, and chatting up everyone in the bar. The woman has an equally strong personality, and chats to me about her political aspirations. When her husband wanders off to socialize with more strangers, she tells me, “Don’t get married. It’s NOT worth it. Do NOT do it.”

Later in the evening, the Chicago man insists I come outside to meet two men he has just met, both of whom work at a large search engine company. They seem like typical, friendly Bay Area tech employees.

We’re talking about all kinds of things, including our work, and I mention this pleasure detection project to one of them. He is amused and fascinated. You’ve got to talk to [the other guy], he invests in this kind of stuff!

Talking about this project is a unique challenge that I’m still not particularly comfortable with. Of course, sexual topics easily get attention – it’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. Attention is advantageous. Still, it’s difficult to manage people’s perceptions and actually get to serious engagement with the ideas.

I have prior professional experience with research related to sexual topics. Despite being relatively comfortable with taboo subjects, I was initially shy to discuss this work at times. But over time, I’ve come to thoroughly enjoy telling the story of that research and seeing how people react to it.

I get to chatting with this investor friend. He happens to be highly experienced in the wearables’ algorithm development space. He’s the ideal person for me to get advice from. In addition to his work in wearable development, he has a high-up role at the search engine company. He makes practical suggestions about how to label the training data, and I’m scribbling notes in my journal as he speaks.

He’s leaning towards me and tells me that I caught his eye earlier. All good. It’s a Friday night at a wine bar, not a business conference. But on my end, he’s not someone I would have been drawn to outside of a professional context.

One of the wearable companies that he’s invested in makes a device that he thinks would be great for my project. He offers to give me a device for free. I accept the offer. I pick it up from him at his office a few days later.

Fast forward several weeks. I’m testing out the device. I need the raw signal for algorithm development. The consumer-facing app doesn’t let me extract raw data, so I contact their support team. At first they say it’s not possible, but once I mention my connection with their investor, I am connected to their internal team, including the CEO. He is interested in the project.

The CEO of this publicly-traded wearables company invites me to his office to meet and discuss in person. Amazing! I’m so excited. Things are falling into place. I’m so lucky to have made this connection at the wine bar.

The meeting goes better than I expected. Immediately, he’s raising thoughtful points about signal quality and training data collection procedures. I don’t have to persuade him of the commercial potential. He offers to provide a set of devices and have his team analyze the data pro bono, while my team will manage the data collection and research.

I am on cloud nine walking out of this meeting. For the first time, it feels like the project has found real traction. I can’t believe this is actually happening.

I decide to let the investor know that things are moving forward and to thank him. He asks to meet, and we agree to see each other again at the same wine bar.

I would like to note here that I am not naive. I understand that a wine bar is not a neutral professional context. I knew that he was interested in me, and I had no intention to date him, but I believed I could manage it. Be friendly, keep things on good terms, and maintain a clear boundary. I also wasn’t seeking money from him – I just wanted to keep the connection warm out of gratitude, to get further technical advice, and possibly to receive future introductions.

I misjudged. I did not manage it as I had hoped.

He made his interest explicit. He didn’t directly offer me money for sex, but the implication was unmistakable. Some tidbits I remember:

“Why did you decide to study this topic? I think you must be a nymphomaniac.”

“How much do you need? Tell me how much you would need.”

Me: “Do you think this is actually promising technology, or do you just want to sleep with me?”

Him: “It may or may not be, but anyone who invests in it will definitely want to sleep with you.”

I have newfound respect for women who manage flirtatious interactions professionally. I imagine that in-person sex workers are constantly toeing a line of keeping customers satisfied without surrendering control. Shout out to Cleopatra for managing to mix romance with her political alliances. That type of social navigation is extremely difficult.

At this point, I had already outlined a deal with the wearables company and was waiting for their final approval. Two days after this meeting with the investor, I received a brief email from the CEO’s assistant declining to proceed, citing a reason that seemed minor and easily addressable.

Hi _,

[CEO] has a very full travel schedule over the next few weeks. Once the survey is developed, we’d be happy to reconnect and discuss. In the meantime, if any questions come up, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Likewise, if we have any ideas on our end, we’ll be sure to connect with you!

Best,

[His assistant]

I exchanged a few follow-up emails, even sending over the aforementioned survey, but I had already understood that the decision was final.

I do not actually know whether their pulling out had anything to do with my meeting with the investor. Perhaps they would have backed out regardless. Perhaps the investor feared reputational risk and quietly advised them to step away. He never spoke to me again.

Regardless, this whole experience made me take a pause.

I genuinely wish to know how to better identify legitimate collaborators for a sex-related product. How can I scope out who actually sees real value in the project? I am seeking a better strategy. I don’t want to be naive nor manipulative.

If it’s a bad idea, fine. I want to know that. What I don’t want is false encouragement driven by unrelated motivations.

I still believe in the technical feasibility of this approach, the scientific insights it could enable, and the human interconnection and intimacy it could encourage. A lot of the groundwork is already in place. I would like this work to continue, but at this point, I could use a sign that it should.

You can reach me at pleasure.researcher@proton.me.

Earlier this year, my husband exercised a veto for the first time. I was very surprised, mostly because I thought our relationship didn’t have vetoes!

In the Bay Area poly scene, vetoes are often seen in a negative light. The prevailing wisdom goes like this: because you love your partner and want them to be as happy as possible, you should work through any negative emotions (for example: jealousy) rather than standing in the way.

Vetoes represent a failure of this project. A sudden ending leads to painful heartbreak in the secondary relationship. Notably, it can also create resentment that then leads to breakup or divorce in the primary relationship. Having now experienced this sudden stop in a relationship before it could run its natural course, it feels like a sort of emotional premature climax. It’s not a great feeling.

The Veto as Last Resort

But I don’t actually think the poly veto is bad.

Here’s why: a veto is a symptom, not a cause of a major misalignment between two people.

Assuming you’ve internalized this culture around vetoes being bad and understand the full gravity of doing it, your only reason for pushing the big red button is if your primary relationship is truly in danger.

Now, veto as the default whenever anyone is uncomfortable is a different story. If it’s used frequently, that should be a warning sign. Perhaps one of the people in the primary couple likes the idea of being poly in theory but in practice is too jealous or not ready for it. Maybe their communication skills are sufficiently bad that they can’t talk about discomfort sooner, until it escalates to the point of “this must end immediately.” Those are all red flags.

**But why extend that same judgment to infrequent vetoes used as last resort?**

A veto used as a last resort is an attempt to get a couple back into alignment and save a relationship.

I think we should be able to see the value in encouraging people to work things out and try to save a meaningful, long-term relationship, even while acknowledging that it comes at the cost of pain to the people in the secondary relationship.

The Default State

If we’re being truly honest with ourselves, an organic form of vetoing already happens all of the time!

A veto is an explicit “They said no to this relationship continuing.” But in reality what often happens in garden style poly is that a partner notices the new person doesn’t vibe with their partner(s) or friends and gently de-escalates in favor of group harmony in the polycule or extended social circle. Conflict isn’t fun and most people reallocate their energy to people that aren’t in conflict with their closest loved ones, whether they do it super consciously or not. This process happens passively and routinely, in most polycules that I know.

The veto only becomes explicit when this normal, subtle way of vetoing via social diffusion breaks down. Let’s say your long-term partner is uncomfortable with someone new and you barrel forward anyway. Either someone is hiding their discomfort and doesn’t feel safe communicating it, which points to ongoing communication issues, or someone is actively choosing to ignore their partner’s pain and discomfort.

Why would you get more serious with someone who has the potential to destabilize the most important relationship in your life? Why would you do something that is causing so much pain to your primary partner?

As you can see, in these situations, there are probably other things going on that the people in the primary partnership need to work on, to re-stabilize their core relationship. In that situation, it makes A LOT of sense for them to focus back on repairing things with each other.

And in a way, as painful as it may be at the moment, this is a kindness to others who are involved or may want to be involved with either of them.

Most people don’t want to get caught in the middle of two people’s nasty breakup. This happened to me last year when I was interested in someone and his girlfriend let me know that things were rocky and unstable. The situation was very messy, even though I backed out before much happened, and I don’t recommend it at all.

Some people say “It’s a red flag and I wouldn’t date a couple that has an official veto process.” But I think that while frequent vetoes are a major red flag, lack of acknowledgment of true priorities is just as bad.

The Incident Process & Realignment

How does this repair and realignment process actually work?

When my husband and I realized we were out of alignment with our current life goals and focuses, we realized that we needed external assistance with addressing some of our issues. We signed up for a couples retreat run by a couples therapist in Napa that had 4 couples there for 4 days, going through an intense course on rebuilding intimacy.

We learned how to make bids for intimacy rather than defaulting to asking each other for sex. And most importantly, we learned the steps to an effective “repair conversation.” These are conversations where the person who is most triggered speaks, the other repeats it, provides empathy, and owns what they can without any counter-criticism. And then you switch.

It may sound simple, but repeating this process and going through any lingering pieces of resentment that had built over the years, was very effective in helping us get back on track. We needed quite a bit of intense focus and time & emotional energy to focus on our relationship and provide the urgent, emergency repairs to it.

Overall, the incident process was successful and I am happy with the results of the veto. The other guy is still my friend and is happy with the outcome too!

Honesty Over Ideology

I’ve written before about people who are politically poly and view polyamory as a fight for justice and a way of living your values in opposition to “Society”. For these people, it’s important to talk using the language of equality and minimizing power dynamics between primary and secondary relationships.

I hate to say this, but in a majority of cases I’ve seen, this just looks like couples maintaining strong primary couple privilege while being in denial and fairly hypocritical about it. I would go further and say that if you marry someone, live with them, have kids with them, and deeply love them, then there will always be a power dynamic where you privilege them over others … and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing!

Stability in long-term relationships is really healthy for both the adults and children involved.

Of course, any secondary partner should be treated with utmost respect, dignity, and concern for their wellbeing. But the idea that they would be of equal importance with a spouse is absurd to me, unless you’ve actively negotiated a throuple or other type of dynamic and every single person involved is enthusiastically on board.

I’m not making generalized statements about every single type of ENM - there are many varieties and different ways to do this. I’m just speaking to my personal experience of being married to one primary partner, and also remembering what it was like to date back when I was everyone’s secondary partner and didn’t have my own primary partner.

The Cost of Dishonesty

I remember dating one guy named John who lived on a boat in Berkeley. I would ask “where could this go?” And he would respond, “I believe in non-hierarchical poly… We should feel it out and not restrict anything. I can’t see the future and for all I know this could lead to living together with kids, you never know.” The thing is though, in practice, he had a de facto primary but just refused to admit it due to his socialist leaning politics! He consistently prioritized her over me, both for conflicting events and in terms of allocation of emotional energy, but he would not admit that there was any kind of hierarchy.

This kind of dishonesty does real damage.

I have another friend, Marcus, who had been in a happy non-hierarchical poly relationship with his girlfriend Elena for about a decade. They lived together but everyone was truly very poly. They met another couple and all four of them hit it off with each other, becoming an extended polycule. This worked well for a year or so, until Elena and the other guy, Joe, started talking about having kids together. She felt her biological clock ticking and he wanted kids but Marcus didn’t. No problem, right? This is a poly engineering problem and surely she can have kids with the new guy while preserving the existing long term relationship, right??

Marcus was a little nervous but wanted to be fully in support of her. He asked her about what the future would look like and Elena kept reassuring him that nothing would change and their relationship would remain mostly the same. She was lying to herself.

My husband and I saw it like a slow motion train wreck. We have kids so we understand what a time commitment and emotional re-wiring of the brain they are. Despite Marcus being extremely patient and sweet and not asking for much at all, just to keep a semi-regular date with her, she broke up with him as soon as the baby was born.

She could have saved him a lot of pain and suffering by admitting that she was leaving him to have kids with someone else, which is obviously what happened, instead of pretending to be a passive receptor of the circumstances happening around her. I have seen this happen multiple times in my friend group.

Conclusion

I’m fine with people practicing truly non-hierarchical poly. I’m fine with people doing something extremely hierarchical or even swinging. What I’m not okay with is people saying they’re not doing the thing they’re very much doing. People who for ideological reasons hurt people because they claim that they aren’t or won’t privilege the relationship they are obviously prioritizing.

The veto, understood correctly, is part of this honesty. It’s an acknowledgment that some relationships have priority, and that when those relationships are genuinely threatened, there needs to be a mechanism to address it.

The alternative is confusion, false promises, and ultimately more pain.

If you’re married, live together, share finances, have kids, and have built a life with someone over a decade (or some combination of these escalations), pretending that a six-month casual relationship could ever hold equal weight isn’t healthy. It’s denial, dressed up in the language of progressive values, and it ends up hurting the very people it claims to protect.

The veto isn’t the problem. The problem is dishonesty about what we’re actually doing and what our relationships actually mean to us.

I’m a saved video game type of friend. If I’ve ever been in love with you, I probably still am. If you made me laugh, if I thought you were brilliant, if the core of who you are hasn’t changed, then the next time I see you, it’ll be like no time passed at all.

When I first started thinking about this topic, I told my friend Paloma that I had a very slow rate of friendship decay and asked what she thought. “Oh sure, I’m the opposite kind,” she said. “If I don’t see someone for a few weeks, the feelings of connection fade quickly. I need to see my friends on a weekly basis to stay in connection and keep caring about them.” I didn’t see her for a few weeks after that. Now it’s been a couple of months, so I’m pretty sure I no longer exist to her.

There’s a judgment trap here that cuts both ways. Fast-decay people can seem flaky or shallow to slow-decay folks. Why don’t those connections stick? Conversely, slow-decay people can seem distant or neglectful to fast-decay folks. Why don’t they care enough to stay in touch? Both types might unfairly judge the other for having different needs around connection.

There can be a real mismatch when people with different average rates of decay try to become friends or when they try to date. What happens when a slow-decay person falls in love with a fast-decay person? How do you navigate this in romantic relationships, family, or work partnerships?

There’s nothing wrong with Paloma’s approach, but it’s at odds with mine. To me, building relationships with people who expect friendship to decay quickly feels like an exhausting and frustrating task. I travel frequently for both work and pleasure, I have a busy career, and I have kids. The idea of looking away for a second and then looking back to find that I still care about someone, but they don’t care about me anymore, is devastating. I’d rather focus my deeper connections on people who are more forgiving of large gaps between catching up. In dating, I’m explicit about mostly looking for comet partners.

So I’ve learned to seek out other saved video game people. For a concentrated burst of upfront effort and minimal ongoing maintenance, you get the ongoing benefit of appreciating each other for decades. You can maximize deep connection while minimizing maintenance effort. You reconnect when it makes sense, and the save file is still there.

How do we choose where to allocate our time?

A friend reading an early draft of this article told me he doesn’t think about friendship decay rates when deciding whom to see. He just spends time with people he enjoys and likes. Fair enough. That’s probably how most people operate.

I don’t think most people consciously consider decay rates when making social decisions. Instead, I think this phenomenon operates passively in the background, quietly sorting us over time. People gravitate toward others who match their natural rhythm. Those who need consistent, regular contact tend to find each other and cluster together. Meanwhile, the saved-game friends breathe a sigh of relief when they finally reconnect, and they go out of their way to nurture these rare, resilient bonds.

There are exceptions, of course, but I’ve noticed a pattern: people who thrive on ongoing connection tend to have many close friends in geographical proximity. Saved-game people, on the other hand, are often a bit weirder, a bit quirkier and their friends are scattered across the globe. Think of the quirky souls who found each other on the internet and now sustain those friendships mostly online, wishing geography were kinder.

Modern technology complicates this further. Does liking someone’s Instagram posts count as maintenance? What about annual ‘happy birthday’ texts? For some fast-decay people, these digital breadcrumbs might be enough to keep the connection alive. For slow-decay people, they might feel performative or hollow. I recommend explicitly asking your friends and/or lovers how much and what kind of interaction they need to stay close over time.

Measuring Decay Rates

I mentioned before that individuals tend to have an average rate of decay, but the “decay rate” isn’t just about someone’s personal tendencies. It’s also a property of the particular dynamic between the two of you and how it was established.

Some friendships have more durable foundations, and I’ve noticed patterns around this, which include:

Going through adversity together or being there for someone while they’re going through something hard. Hard hikes and escape rooms, studying for stressful exams together, grieving the death of a mutual friend, visiting a friend in the hospital after a car accident, being supportive during someone’s divorce.

Core values that align in ways that feel rare. Sharing edgy views like extropian ideals or being poly/kinky, paired with responsive listening and strong validation, full acceptance of you.

Shared worldview. Same moral direction and life goals.

Transformational moments. Going to burning man, taking drugs together, having a religious experience, co-creating something, being part of an intense mission together.

Key idea: Something that comes up across many of these mechanisms of deep bonding is strong mutual admiration and acceptance. But more than that, there’s a sense that this human being is uniquely valuable to you. They’re not just an awesome person or a good friend. They’re classified in your brain as this specific human.

These relationships have slow decay rates because they’re anchored in things that don’t easily change. You can go six months or ten years without seeing each other, and when you do, that feeling is still there.

Other friendships are built on more circumstantial ground:

Proximity-based connections. Roommates, coworkers, or neighbors.

Shared hobbies or activities. Weekly tennis class, book clubs.

Life circumstances that overlap. New moms groups, college dorms.

These naturally have faster decay rates. When the circumstances shift (you move, change jobs, develop new interests), the closeness fades more quickly.

There’s an old phrase: friends are with you for a reason, a season, or forever. I think this speaks to varying rates of decay for different types of dynamics pretty well.

None of this is to say that circumstantial friendships are worthless. Some of my most joyful memories involve people I met briefly and never saw again. There’s beauty in transient connection.

There’s also something uncomfortable in naming this. Everyone is replaceable and yet no one is replaceable, depending on how nihilistic you’re feeling on any given day.

Disconnection

I had an unsettling moment recently. I was sitting in a room full of people at a religious event, making small talk, when suddenly I realized: ten years from now, there’s less than a 1% chance I’ll still be in contact with anyone in this room.

We didn’t really know each other, not in any meaningful sense. We were only in the same place because of circumstantial proximity. It felt genuinely destabilizing and almost dissociative, like I was losing my grip on what was real.

Why was I spending my limited time and energy on this? What am I doing here?

I realized that I need deeper connections than that to stay grounded, and since then I’ve reduced the number of large events I go to, in favor of smaller hangouts and phone calls with closer friends.

Shoutout to my lovely friend Standard Deviant for making this illustrative diagram for me:

The Effort Paradox

There’s a tradeoff: fast-decay friendships require constant maintenance but feel lower-stakes. You text regularly, grab coffee weekly, stay updated on the mundane details of each other’s lives. It’s high-frequency but each interaction is relatively light.

Slow-decay friendships require intense upfront investment but less ongoing maintenance. You need those transformational moments that contain deep mutual recognition. Once that foundation is built, you can go months or years with minimal contact and pick right back up.

Different people have different amounts of emotional bandwidth. Neither approach is better. They’re just different resource allocation strategies.

Why This Matters for My Relationships

I spend most of the year in a city with very few poly people, so I think a lot about how to maintain the connections that matter to me, long-distance and over time. I can meet someone in another city, fall in love, not see them for six months, and still be deeply and happily in love when we reunite. But how do I check that they’re still feeling the same way about me?

There’s no way to guarantee their feelings won’t fade, but I like to stay aware of what’s happening in those connections, so I’ve started explicitly asking people whether they’re saved video game types before we get deeply involved. It’s not a dealbreaker if they’re not, but it helps me understand what kind of relationship we can realistically build, and what kind of maintenance it will require.

Knowing Your Rate

So how do you figure out your own decay rate? Here are some tells:

You might be fast-decay if:

• You think “out of sight, out of mind” accurately describes relationships

• You need to “catch up” regularly to feel connected to someone’s life

• You think good friends should check in without being asked

• You’ve said “we used to be so close” about someone you haven’t seen in 6 months

You might be slow-decay if:

• You assume your close friends still love you even if you haven’t spoken in a year

• You think “if the friendship is real, it can handle distance”

• You’d rather have one deep 4-hour conversation than ten casual coffee dates

• You feel smothered when someone needs frequent reassurance

Whether you’re someone who needs weekly check-ins to feel connected or someone who can go years between conversations without losing the thread, neither approach is wrong. The key is recognizing your pattern, seeking out people whose tendencies align with yours, and being honest about what kind of maintenance your relationships need. When you understand yourself better, you can make more intentional choices about where to invest your finite time and energy.

I don’t celebrate Christmas (because I’m Jewish), so instead of writing a Christmas wishlist, I’ll write one for Slutcon 2. Here’s what would fulfill my wildest fantasies...

1. A Romance Novel Workshop

While we were at Slutcon, I started chatting with the organizers about wanting a workshop centered around romance novels and erotica. I’m responsible for the book-sluts section of the Slutstack discord and very proud of this contribution. I’m a HUGE reader of sexy romance :)

I was thinking of something like Costco for romance novel subgenres, where people get little tastes and samples that help them figure out what they like and respond to. Chesed, Pandora, and Aella also talked about romance novels on the latest Slutstack podcast. They mentioned a workshop where the guys act like protagonists from romance novels, which also sounds like fun.

Regardless of the exact shape this event takes, I know the PERFECT person to lead it.

Three times this year I have flown to Denver just to visit what I think is hands down the best romance novel bookstore in the USA: The Spicy Librarian. Its owner, Sydney Ivey, would be the perfect curator for any event that has anything to do with romance novels. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of every single romance novel I’ve ever heard of. If you say something like “any chance you know any Hades/Persephone romance that’s 4 peppers spicy hot,” she will actually have the perfect book for you. True story. (Scarlett St. Clair’s A Touch of Darkness for those who are curious.)

She frequently does author book signings in the store, so many of my romance novels are signed to me, which adds a special touch as well.

I would trust her to come up with and moderate a truly amazing workshop that uses romance novels to help people understand their own desires.

2. Strip Chess

I’m hugely obsessed with chess. I was trained by a grandmaster as a kid and play daily as a form of testing and improving my focus. I was chatting with the other flirt girls from Slutcon, and one of them suggested strip chess as a fun activity to do at Slutcon next year!

Hell yes.

I was later chatting with a friend who asked whether certain pieces would correspond to certain pieces of clothing. Perhaps pawns are socks, rooks are shirts? I don’t know, but it would be fun to figure this out.

Also, I matched on a dating app this week with a professional chess player. Now the universe seems to be screaming “CHESS AT SLUTCON!” at me from every direction.

A friend suggested that this chess player could do a blindfolded simul game. This involves one chess player playing a dozen people at once (maybe blindfolded?) while everyone watches this magnificent display of strip chess. Spectators very welcome. This is still in the ideation phase.

3. Exploring the Romantic Self

Slutcon was very focused on exploring the sexual self i.e. figuring out your sexual desires, and tweaking your body language or behavior to be more hot and appealing to others. That makes a lot of sense! And also... something that would be really interesting would be to add an element of how to explore your romantic self.

Here’s the problem: even if you master the art of being sexy and creating mutually satisfying sexual experiences, you might still struggle to find a romantic relationship. I have a guy friend who gets laid VERY easily (100+ bodycount) but can’t seem to find a relationship. Or if he finds one, the sexual compatibility piece is always missing. I also have a female friend who flirts effortlessly when she’s not that into a guy, but completely freezes up when she actually likes someone, which only seems to happen once or twice every 5 years. No amount of flirting practice of the type we did at Slutcon will help either of them. They already flirt really, really well and are both very hot. Trust me. I have flirted with both of them extensively ;) But there are other things besides how to be hot that can make it harder to find a relationship.

The issue is that sexual attraction and romantic attraction can operate on completely different axes.

We know this from the existence of asexual people who fall deeply in love, and aromantic people who love sex. But most of us fall somewhere in between these extremes, and we don’t really understand where. I wish it were normalized to ask someone on a first date - How intertwined are your romantic and sexual tendencies? But most people would be confused by the question and probably wouldn’t have a good answer. And “how easily do you develop romantic feelings” is an awkward thing to ask on a first date. I know this because I’ve been asking it before every hookup lately, in an effort to protect my badly bruised heart.

For me, romantic and sexual feelings are ANNOYINGLY completely intertwined. I can’t even get wet without starting to feel romantic stuff stir in my chest. And once that process starts, I fall in love very easily. I can also fall for multiple people at once. It’s a huge flaw in my code that I fall so easily, a terrible bug. If it weren’t the case, I could have so much more fun, awesome, kinky sex without all these emotional complications.

Yes, I’m mad at myself.

But then I talk to my friends who have the opposite problem. Some struggle to fall in love even when they desperately want to. One of them dated a girl for a year and wanted to fall in love with her but the feelings never came. He hasn’t fallen in love in over 7 years and feels time pressure to get married before he turns 40. I think this is like a dial for some people, where some people develop romantic feelings very easily and for others it’s very hard. Some people seem to be able to turn this off if they see an incompatibility. But I have never been able to adjust my dial, even when I have put effort into doing so my not thinking about them, etc. I wish it were a dial we could adjust, but at least for me, I’m not aware of any way to change these tendencies at the moment.

Others find it easy to get laid, but when they finally develop romantic feelings for someone, the dynamic shifts and the relationship seems to fall apart. Some people can fall in love with a casual partner as my husband did with me, while, for others, the romantic aspect never materializes if it started out casual. For them, it’s not just the person and their compatibility but also the dynamic from the beginning that can impact how this develops. Each configuration comes with its own challenges.

So here’s what I’m proposing: a workshop on understanding your own romantic-sexual axis. Where do you fall on the spectrum? How do you recognize your patterns? Can you learn to separate these feelings, or are they fundamentally linked for you? And once you understand how you’re wired, how do you communicate and navigate relationships with that self-knowledge?

4. Wishing I Had Invited My Husband

I regret not inviting my husband. I wasn’t sure if I could get him a ticket but in retrospect I really wish I had pushed for this and spent the weekend with him there. He is already very hot and confident so he’s not the target audience, but I think he has a very strong sense for analyzing people’s dynamics and is one of the most open and least judgmental people I’ve ever met. There are also certain workshops like bondage meditation that I wanted to do but only with him. I hope the dates work out and he can be my date next year.

5. The Gentle Close

A workshop on how to gently close off a casual encounter and make sure both people are ok and it’s complete before they move on.

This is a big skill that many people don’t have, and I think it should be top of mind for next year. We talk so much about consent and communication at the beginning of encounters, but the endings deserve just as much care and attention.

That’s my wishlist… What’s yours? ;)

How do I feel after SlutCon? Overwhelmingly happy and safe. Secondary is horny. But primarily intensely relaxed and comfortable with myself and with others.

This is not what you’d expect from a sex conference, is it? The cultural narrative says sexuality should make us nervous, vulnerable, exposed. That talking openly about desire means walking into a minefield of judgment and performance anxiety. But that’s not what happened at all.

To me, SlutCon felt like a celebration of being human. More specifically, it was a celebration of people’s inherent goodness. The operating premise seemed to be: sex is good, humans are good, desire is good. The event was framed as a love letter from women to men. It felt wholesome, even, which feels very on-brand for an event organized by Pandora & Chesed, Aella, and crew.

Learning to Be a Better Flirtee

I’m speaking only for myself here. I’ve read others’ writeups of SlutCon and some people had mixed experiences. But as someone who participated primarily as a flirtee, the event gave me something I didn’t know I needed: permission to recalibrate how I respond to other people’s desire.

I learned to give feedback more kindly, with empathy. And to do so in a way that didn’t push the person away but created more intimacy. No to this, but maybe let’s do this? It’s such a simple framework, but I’d never quite internalized it before.

Other flirt girls who are strong people pleasers needed help with giving any negative feedback. I needed the opposite. I learned to recalibrate and be less harsh, less brutal, more kind. I’d made the mental switch from delivering feedback with anger to delivering it with compassion, but my behavior hadn’t caught up. I needed practice to train this muscle.

Understanding the Fear of Failure

A lot of men experience flirting with women as risky because if she finds him hot, it’s welcome, but if she doesn’t, there’s an underlying edge of “how dare you”. That double bind (be bold, but also don’t be creepy) creates a horrible fear of failure.

Being on both sides of this at SlutCon made me aware of times when I felt shame about wanting to flirt with other girls. The internalized judgment I carried about my own desires, made worse by experiences like my homophobic, straight roommate in college being upset about sharing a room with me even though I did not find her attractive in any way.

At one point, I was doing my volunteer shift at the check-in table with a female friend of mine and we were talking with another guy. She said she wanted me to flirt with her because she enjoyed it, even though she was straight. So I winked and said, “She flirts well for a straight girl,” and watched her blush hard.

To give him some context, I explained, “She was the only straight girl at my birthday party this year and I flirted with her so hard.” I paused and she giggled.

I continued, “That was actually the last time I flirted with a woman because after that I decided it was too much work and men are so much easier!”

The guy talking to us raised his eyebrows and waggled them. He grinned at her and stated, “So … you’re contagiously straight.”

My friend blushed again, so prettily, and said, “Oh no, don’t tell anyone that or I’ll get disinvited from all the parties!” Laughter all around.

This was such a joyful and light moment. It did make me think - If I felt that much shame about wanting to flirt with women without even specifically wanting anything more, imagine how much worse it must be for people who fear punishment for trying to flirt at all.

SlutCon removed that threat. In this container, you won’t be punished for trying to flirt. That safety allowed me to experiment with a new mindset: being responsible for the connection. Rooting for them. Being more encouraging. In dance, the lead and follow share responsibility for what happens between them. SlutCon taught me the same is true for flirting and for sex.

Nerd Love: The Erotics of Curiosity

After Slutcon, one of my friends and I were chatting about our experiences. We both really liked the emphasis on learning and skill building at Slutcon. To quote her:

This has always been true for me (and for many of my friends). Learning is hot. And skills can be learned. Curiosity is a deeply undervalued quality.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since. There’s something deeply attractive about someone who approaches sex and connection the way they’d approach any other complex skill worth mastering: with genuine curiosity, willingness to receive feedback, and commitment to improvement.

The nerd approach to sexuality removes so much performance anxiety because it reframes everything as an experiment. You’re not supposed to already know everything. You’re supposed to be figuring it out together, calibrating in real time, treating each person and each connection as a unique puzzle that you get to solve collaboratively.

There’s also something about the nerd mindset that makes rejection less personal. If you’re experimenting and someone says no, you’re not failing - you’re gathering data.

One of my friends says that good dates are about asking really good questions. My dates with him were some of my favorites in my life, so I think he has a point. The best connections I had at SlutCon followed this pattern too. Not people performing confidence but rather people genuinely curious about what would create mutual pleasure.

What About the Micro-Loves and Micro-Heartbreaks?

I’ve seen people write about the emotional roller coaster of SlutCon - the micro-loves and micro-heartbreaks, the intensity of fleeting connection. There’s nothing wrong with those experiences. But I think chasing them can be painful, especially if you’re prone to limerence addiction, as I am.

At Slutcon, I found someone to fusion dance with me. We’d been chatting a bit and made plans to dance a few hours later. To my surprise, he went and found me at the allotted time and even set up a speaker. (Competence is hot.)

The music seemed to fade into background noise. I was aware of every point where our bodies touched - his thigh between mine as we turned, his hand spanning my ribcage, the way he firmly gripped my arm and put my hands onto his hips. My breathing changed. I felt heat spreading through my body.

We must have danced for fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. When the songs ended and we finally stepped apart, I was flushed and slightly dizzy. He was breathing hard, his pupils dilated. We stood there for a moment, just looking at each other, before he smiled and I said, “Thank you for the dance.”

I texted my friend afterwards to say I had a dance so sexy I was worried it could have gotten me pregnant. I think I orgasmed. I felt very flushed afterwards and he was breathing heavily as well. I’m not sure at what point it no longer counts as just dancing.

But then a few days he texted me saying I missed the best part of the weekend - the evening with all of the fucking - which felt hurtful. Maybe I’m sensitive but maybe he could have been more aware. After all, my favorite part of the entire event had been my dance with him.

I debated letting him know he had mildly hurt my feelings and ultimately decided against it. It was a little painful that he felt the need to rank his next night with the previous one where we had danced together but not painful enough that it was worth texting him about it. He’d categorized our dance as foreplay for something else, while for me it had been the thing itself, complete and perfect as it was.

I was thinking about how potent dancing is in general for connection. A friend who used to be a fusion dancer once told me that developing a new intense crush every two weeks wasn’t healthy for him. He had to step back from that world. I understand that pull. The intensity feels electric. I’ve been wondering for myself whether this can be done in a healthy way, in moderation, or whether chasing the dance high and chasing limerence is inherently unhealthy.

What I appreciated about SlutCon was that it honored the full arc of connection. It’s okay to have a moment of true connection and nothing more, but it feels cheapened if it’s not given the proper beginning, middle, and gentle end for closure. I was sad reading some people’s accounts where a hookup ended abruptly without this gentle goodbye, and I feel sad for myself in my moment of micro-heartbreak as well.

The Wholesomeness of It All

I keep coming back to that feeling: overwhelmingly happy and safe. Intensely relaxed and comfortable with myself and with others.

To me, SlutCon felt like a celebration of people’s inherent goodness. And maybe that’s the reason it worked so well. When you operate from the premise that sex is good, humans are good, desire is good, magic happens.

One of the most liberating (and occasionally frustrating) aspects of polyamory is that there’s no standard script to follow. Unlike monogamous relationships, which come with a well-worn cultural playbook (dating, exclusivity, meeting the parents, moving in, marriage), polyamorous relationships require you to write your own rules. This becomes especially apparent if/when you want to deepen a connection and signal greater commitment aka the relationship escalator.

When Escalation Isn’t the Goal

Before diving in, let me be clear: not every relationship needs to escalate, and that’s perfectly fine. I have several sexting buddies where our dynamic exists in a happy equilibrium. The connection brings me joy exactly as it is, with no desire for “more.” Not everything needs to grow into something else.

But what about when you do want to escalate? When you want to signal deeper commitment or intertwine your lives more closely with someone?

Beyond Words: The Power of Actions

The first answer is obvious: communicate. Use your words, express your feelings, state your desires. This is foundational and important.

But communication alone isn’t always enough. Actions speak louder than words, and sometimes we need tangible ways to demonstrate and embody the escalation we’re seeking. So I turned to my friends and asked:

How do you actually escalate a polyamorous relationship?

The responses ranged from profound to playful. One friend looked me dead in the eye and said, with complete seriousness: “Butt stuff.” Her boyfriend, who was sitting next to her at the dinner table, said, “I think it’s when you become their personal IT person”. They are a truly adorable couple.

The Spectrum of Escalation

Not all escalation markers carry the same weight or the same level of social agreement about their significance.

At one end of the spectrum are nearly universal escalation markers. Having kids together is the prime example. Raising children well demands enormous amounts of time, money, and effort. We all have limited resources, and this is a substantial investment. (For more thoughts about this see my previous article about poly saturation. Link: https://vortexgoddess.substack.com/p/how-many-people-can-you-love ) Not one of my parent friends correctly estimated the impact of having children on their lives. It turned out to be so much more work than anyone expected. For this reason, having kids represents a major escalation.

Similarly, having a wedding or commitment ceremony carries enormous weight. Since you can only be legally married to one person and it’s often very expensive financially and socially to get married and/or divorced, this remains one of the most significant escalations in polyamorous contexts. It is still possible to do a commitment ceremony without getting legally married but again it carries a lot of cultural weight. The whole point of this is how serious it is.

At the other end lies territory where there’s little consensus. Having a song or restaurant that’s “just yours” might feel deeply meaningful to some and trivial to others. Some people view condom use as highly significant; others don’t give it much thought.

Here’s the key: the less consensus there is about a marker’s significance, the more you need to communicate to make your intentions clear. When everyone agrees something is a big deal, you can rely on shared understanding. But when you’re operating in the low-consensus zone, you have to do the work of coordinating meaning with your partner. Otherwise, what feels like a profound gesture to you might barely register to them or vice versa.

Fluid Bonding: A Personal Choice

For me, one of the most significant forms of escalation involves fluid bonding i.e. choosing to have unprotected sex. I’ve only ever done this with one person: my husband.

When I reflect on why I use condoms with other partners, I’ve realized it’s not primarily about health concerns. The statistical risk of contracting an STI is relatively low with proper precautions and testing. Rather, I intentionally reserve this experience as a way to escalate intimacy and intensity in a relationship.

This is my choice, and I want to emphasize that. When I hear that someone new has unprotected sex with multiple partners, I try not to judge them. They’re making different but totally valid choices. But my approach tends toward emotional escalation, and I need certain experiences to remain uncommon so they can serve that purpose.

Navigating Asymmetrical Meanings

My partner’s experience with fluid bonding is completely different from mine. He’s fluid bonded with many more people and treats it fairly casually. For him, it’s not inherently loaded with meaning. But here’s what makes it work: he still thinks it’s sweet and special that I only do it with him. He recognizes what it means to me, even though it doesn’t carry the same weight for him. That recognition and acknowledgment of my gesture’s significance is what allows this escalation to feel meaningful rather than dismissed.

This asymmetry is incredibly common in polyamory, and how you handle it can make or break the gesture. When something matters deeply to you but barely registers for your partner, you need language that honors both realities without dismissing either person’s experience.

Here are some ways to talk about asymmetrical escalation that build intimacy:

“I know meeting my parents might not be as big a deal to you as it is to me, but it would really mean a lot to me if you came. I’d love for them to meet someone who’s important to me.”

“Hey, I wanted to check in about me saying ‘I love you.’ I know you might not be ready to say it back, and that’s totally okay. I just wanted you to know how I feel, with no pressure or expectation.”

“I realize giving you a key might seem practical to you, but for me it feels like a meaningful step. I wanted you to know what it represents to me, even if it doesn’t carry the same weight for you.”

The key is acknowledging the difference without demanding your partner feel the same way. You’re sharing your internal experience, not insisting they adopt it.

It’s also worth noting: if your partner genuinely doesn’t care about something you’ve imbued with meaning, over time you might start to care about it less too. That’s natural. Meaning is partially constructed through shared recognition. At the same time, you don’t want your feelings dismissed at the moment. There’s a world of difference between a partner saying “That’s sweet that this matters to you, even though it’s not a big deal to me” versus “You’re making a big deal out of nothing.” The first acknowledges your experience; the second invalidates it.

The Poly Escalation Menu

Here are some additional escalation markers from my friends and from my primary relationship:

Practical/Logistical Integration:

• Sharing a calendar or scheduling system

• Being listed as an emergency contact

• Having a dedicated drawer/closet space at their place

• Giving a set of keys to their apartment

• Having standing weekly/monthly date nights

• Sharing pet care responsibilities

Social Recognition:

• Being introduced as “partner” vs. “friend” in public

• Attending their work functions

• Meeting family or being someone’s wedding date

• Linking social media accounts (Fetlife allows multiple romantic partners to be listen whereas Facebook does not)

• Being included in group chats with their friends/other partners

Emotional Intimacy:

• Saying “I love you”

• Engaging in deeper emotional vulnerability (sometimes verging on “trauma dumping”)

• Long-term future planning conversations

• Having a pet name

Physical/Sexual Intimacy:

• Taking intentional 1:1 trips together

• Having overnights

• Exchanging nudes (particularly face-inclusive ones)

• Offering or accepting a collar (in kink dynamics, collaring is often analogous to engagement or marriage, a formal recognition of a committed D/s or power exchange relationship)

Are we missing any? I would love to hear from my readers. Please add more poly escalations in the comments below and tell us how you do it.

Novelty As Escalation Tactic

Some people use new kinks and novelty as a way to build intimacy and mark escalation with a partner. The “first time we tried this together” becomes a bonding experience, a shared exploration that feels unique to that relationship. But here’s the catch: once you’ve done a particular kink with a previous partner, it loses some of that novelty factor.

To maintain kink exploration as an escalation tool, you have to keep learning and trying new things to always have something fresh to discover together. And this is where things can get genuinely absurd.

You start with the basics - maybe some light bondage, a blindfold, some spanking. Sweet, intimate, exciting. But then you’re dating someone new a year later, and those are off the table as “special firsts.” So you move to rope play. Then impact play with different implements. Then maybe some wax play or temperature play. Before you know it, you’re three relationships deep and thinking, “Well, I guess we could try suspension bondage in a sensory deprivation tank while reciting poetry in Old Norse?”

So I will give a word of caution. The kink escalation treadmill can genuinely start to feel like a very weird game of sexual bingo where you’re just checking off increasingly obscure boxes. At a certain point, you’re not chasing intimacy. You’re chasing novelty for its own sake, and that’s a fundamentally different thing.

A Few Observations

Looking at this list and my own experiences, I’ve noticed several patterns:

1. Escalation tactics lose power with overuse. If you say “I love you” to everyone you date after three weeks, or give keys to all your partners immediately, these gestures stop feeling special. And most people want to feel special and to know that what you share together is important in some way.

2. Context is everything. What counts as escalation is highly personal, varying not just between individuals but between specific relationships. Introducing someone to your family might be huge for one person and casual for another. Sharing a hotel room overnight might be deeply intimate in one dynamic and perfectly ordinary in another, depending on the relationship’s particular history and the people involved.

3. You have to choose your own markers. This is perhaps the most challenging and most freeing aspect of polyamorous escalation. Without a cultural script telling you what “comes next,” you have to be intentional about what intimacy means to you, what gestures carry weight, and how you want to build deeper connection.

Writing Your Own Story

The absence of a default relationship escalator in polyamory is both a challenge and a gift. It requires more thought, more communication, and more creativity. You can’t just follow the path everyone else has walked. You have to look at each relationship with its unique combination of people, histories, needs, and desires and ask: What would deepen this connection? What would be meaningful here?

It’s more work than following a script. But it also means every escalation you choose is genuinely intentional, tailored to the relationship you’re actually building rather than the one society says you should have.

And sometimes, as my friend wisely noted, it really might just be butt stuff.

Do you know someone once they've been inside you, moving inside you as you gaze into each other's eyes? So close that you can see the patterns in their iris, memorizing that detail for later, since that might be the last time you're ever that close to them? What about when they whisper their deepest secrets, fears, and dreams, things they don't normally tell anybody, even if you only see them once or twice? Is that knowing?

At dance festivals, there are people I've danced with for literally decades. In some cases, I don't know their first or last name, only the nickname they use for dancing. I know their bodies, how they tend towards certain types of movement, how they feel. We've held each other, breathed together, our bodies learning and getting comfortable together, a deep biological understanding. But I don't even know their names.

Meanwhile, I have people I've seen every week for the past five years, playing tennis together, attending the same synagogue, sharing small talk about work and family. I know their biographical details: job titles, partners' names, children's ages, pets' breeds. Yet I don't feel I know them at all.

So what is knowing, really? Look around you. How deeply do you actually know the people in your life?

Grokking

My favorite book as a child was Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, and it shaped how I think about connection from an early age. The Martian concept of "grokking", to understand so thoroughly that you become part of what you're observing, has been my north star for relationships ever since.

This is what I've always been searching for: that profound, intuitive connection where understanding becomes embodied, where knowing someone isn't just about collecting facts but about drinking them in until they become part of you.

Neuroscience research on long-term couples shows they literally store information in each other's brains for later recollection, a phenomenon called "transactive memory." Partners become external hard drives for each other's consciousness, each responsible for remembering different domains of their shared life.

When one partner dies, the survivor doesn't just grieve the loss of companionship; they agonize over the missing pieces of their own cognitive system. They've lost access to entire networks of memory and knowledge that resided in their partner's mind.

The Paradox of Intimacy

One reason I have sex is that I crave deeper connection, and physical intimacy often provides the fastest pathway to something approaching this. In those vulnerable moments, and especially in the conversations before and after, people reveal themselves. "It's so easy to talk to you," they often say, surprised by their own openness. Their bodies tell stories too: the way tension melts from their shoulders, how their breathing changes, the direction in which they lean their bodies, and the timbre of their voices.

I’ll ask the same question as before: Who do you feel you know better, the jogging partner you've run with consistently for a decade, or the friend with benefits who opened up to you a handful of times in ways they never would with anyone else?

Which of these friendships is more likely to last if you move cities or change political affiliations? Which connections are of convenience, due to shared job or geographical proximity, and which ones will span continents and continue throughout your life?

And does it go both ways? Is grokking always mutual? Can you grok someone who doesn't grok you back?

The Deepest Knowing

Of course, it's not an either-or proposition. My husband knows me better than anyone because he represents both experiences. We've shared a decade of daily life together, but we also went through that intense "tell me all your secrets" process of discovery. He knows my darkest corners; I know his. We love each other not despite these revelations, but because of them.

People tend to show different sides of themselves in different contexts, and by being along for the ride, he has seen me in dozens of different countries and various work and social contexts. My husband has witnessed the most facets of me. He was there to buy me my first suit for my first corporate job, there to calm me down when I had a traumatic c-section, there to celebrate when I landed my first consulting client, and for all of the ups and downs and in between. Some people only see me at work, some people only see me at synagogue, some people only see me at dance festivals. Only he has seen it all.

With him, I've come closest to true grok.

The Danger of Assumptions

The greatest threat to long-term relationships isn't conflict, it's assumption. People change and grow (and if they don't, they're probably too boring for my friendship anyway). When you stop approaching your partner with curiosity, when you assume you already know everything there is to know, you risk drifting into parallel lives rather than an interconnected one.

The challenge becomes: How do you maintain that hungry curiosity and desire for understanding that existed at the beginning? How do you continue truly seeing someone you wake up next to every day?

Are you grateful for their presence? Do you start every day by saying “thank you for being my partner. I’m so happy we get to spend another day together”?

I Stay Poly

My approach may not be popular with everyone, but it works for me: I keep dating. I stay polyamorous. Heinlein's book planted this seed early, the idea that love and understanding aren't finite resources, that grokking one person more deeply can actually enhance your ability to grok others.

Building new connections is like exercising a muscle of genuine curiosity, of seeing someone clearly, of staying open to surprise and discovery. When I practice this muscle with new people, attempting to grok them in their uniqueness, it reminds me how to flex it with my long-term partner.

I can see my husband as though for the first time while simultaneously drawing on a decade of shared experience. It's a different kind of understanding, both fresh and deepened by history.

Having children helps with this a bit too, since these small humans are constantly changing and evolving. You can never get too comfortable! You look away for a second and they’ve totally transformed again.

A Wish for You

I feel genuinely sad for people who haven't experienced this particular way of being known and loved. There's something profound about being completely seen and understood to this degree.

I hope someone groks you in this way. I hope you grok them too.

People are often confused when they find out I have severe sensory issues. Wait, you? The one who writes about sex constantly? The one who goes to tango festivals and dances with hundreds of people to loud music? How does that even work?

I asked my husband if my sensory issues are really that noticeable, and he laughed. "Are you kidding me?" he said, adding:

They are, apparently, quite obvious to anyone who lives with me. But my hypersensitivity and my hypersexuality aren't opposites. They're two sides of the same coin.

Sex Nerd

It's actually pretty common for neurodivergent people to get obsessed with sex. For me and many of my sex blogger friends, sexuality became a special interest, something to dissect, analyze, and overthink in the most delightful way possible. I've spent decades thinking about sex, kink, and polyamory, which is exactly why I had so many thoughts to share when I started writing this year.

This analytical approach doesn't make the physical experience less intense. It makes it more so. When you combine that deep intellectual fascination with an overly sensitive nervous system, you get someone who can completely lose themselves in physical sensation while also being endlessly curious about how it all works.

Living in an Amplified World

I get overwhelmed to the point of total disorientation if there's too much ambient noise. I wear noise-canceling headphones constantly, or earplugs when those feel like too much. When I'm tired or stressed, my skin hurts (not metaphorically, but actual physical pain from touch). I've built so many accommodations into my life that sometimes I'll look around and realize how much more I have to do just to exist comfortably than most people.

But here's what's fun: I'm also a supertaster. I taste complexity in flavors that most people miss entirely, which is why I fly around the world chasing Michelin-starred restaurants.

And just like I'm a supertaster, I'm also what I call a "superfeeler." The same wiring that makes scratchy fabrics feel like torture makes good touch absolutely incredible. Many sexual partners have told me they've never been with someone so responsive. Often my hips will move without conscious thought, as I get completely lost in sensation. “So responsive, just…wanton”, they’ll say as they look at me after fucking me all afternoon.

I feel incredibly grateful for this sensitivity, actually. Even with all the daily challenges, I wouldn't trade it.

If You Want to Fuck Me, Here's What You Need to Know

Everyone's sensory profile is different, so you have to actually ask people how theirs works and then listen to the answer. But here's mine:

Pick your venues carefully: If you want me to be present and turned on, I need to be in the right headspace first. That loud, chaotic bar? That's not going to work. A quiet restaurant where I can actually hear you talk, or a dance event I've been to before and feel safe at is your best bet.

Texture matters more than you think: I care deeply about how fabrics feel, what your sheets are like, how soft your skin is, the fluffiness of your pillows. I think I once kept sleeping with a guy because of how soft his sheets were, and I married my husband partially because of his especially soft skin.

I shower a lot: When my skin is hurting, a five-minute hot shower completely resets everything. I use this liberally. Some days I'll shower four or five times just to recalibrate.

I'm always cold: This is huge for me. I need to be warm to relax enough for good sex. Some of my best early dates with my husband were hot tub dates - rent-by-the-hour places where we could get naked immediately and the hot water helped both of us manage our sensory stuff, similarly to the shower thing. Hot tub dates are some of my favorite dates.

No fragrances, please: I will get instantly nauseous and have to leave. No perfume, no cologne, no body spray. Don't smell strongly of weed or cigarettes either.

I Need to Be Taken Care Of

A huge part of my sexuality is being taken care of, and it's directly connected to my sensory issues. (#princess) I need a partner who notices when I'm getting cold, or overwhelmed, or uncomfortable, and who actively helps me feel better. This is a prerequisite for me being able to enjoy sex.

If you can't tell when I'm shivering and offer me a warm blanket, or notice when I'm getting overstimulated in a restaurant and suggest we leave, then you're not going to be good at reading my body during sex either.

I'm not ashamed of needing this level of care. My nervous system requires more maintenance than most people's, and I need partners who see taking care of me as part of the fun, not a burden. At one point Professor Calm told me, “You’re like a ferrari. It takes a lot of extra maintenance and is in the shop often, but it’s worth it.”

Sex helps regulate me as well - I listen to sexy music to calm down when I’m overwhelmed, leaving me frequently in an aroused state - which then requires sexual relief. I’ve written before that sexuality as a soothing mechanism is probably why I’m so damn hypersexual and constantly want sex.

The thing about me is that I need accommodations and understanding, yes, but I also experience pleasure and connection with an intensity that feels like a superpower. For those who are willing to put in the work, I believe the payoff is worth it.

For most of my adult life, I was that woman: genuinely shocked when men showed interest in me. "Wait, he was flirting with me this whole time?"

This female obliviousness trope is everywhere in popular culture, from You've Got Mail to Pride and Prejudice. We consume these stories without question, accepting that of course she doesn't realize he's interested, even when it's painfully obvious to everyone else.

It wasn't until my husband and friends called out this pattern that I realized what I'd been doing.

How It Works: The Mechanics

A man's body language would clearly signal interest, for example: sustained eye contact, insisting I borrow his jacket, and subtle visual scanning. But my internal monologue would immediately dismiss it: "There's no way he's interested, or something would have already happened. He’s just being nice…"

I would mentally convince myself romantic interest was impossible while continuing to flirt, maintaining this self-deception until his interest became undeniably explicit.

As Honest Friend described it to me: "In my experience with you, it is predominantly passive unawareness. You aren't actively creating excuses to be insecure about, you just passively presume. It is similar to humility. Think Belle from Beauty and the Beast - beautiful but unaware."

The Strategic Benefits

Power exchange. For those into power dynamics, the tension of unacknowledged attraction building until it's irresistible can be incredibly erotic. As someone who enjoys being pursued, I find this dynamic incredibly sexy, though I recognize it's not for everyone.

Defensive coping mechanism. When you regularly receive male attention, consciously processing and responding to every interaction becomes socially and emotionally exhausting. Performed obliviousness serves as a psychological buffer, allowing you to navigate daily interactions without constant decision-making about how to respond to interest.

Building genuine friendships with men. My friend Ivy pointed out another benefit: this approach allows you to develop authentic friendships with men without the immediate pressure of romantic expectations.

It's a screening mechanism. In addition to slowing things down and creating more friends in your community, this also helps attractive women effectively screen for men who demonstrate genuine interest rather than expecting instant gratification. A man who's truly interested in you will put in the effort to figure you out, rather than giving up at the first sign of ambiguity. This filters out men who are just looking for easy conquest and selects for those who see you as worth the investment of time and emotional energy.

Recently, I was chatting about this with my friend Wes about this and he had a take that was a bit of a variation on these:

I want to make an important note/distinction here: I'm not claiming everyone is into me or wants to fuck me. But by doing this mind game, I'm simply making men work to communicate their interest in ways that cut through my performed obliviousness.

Women who receive frequent attention have the luxury of making men work to communicate their interest clearly. As one friend astutely observed: "If you're an attractive woman, you have tons of offers and need to filter. Seeming cool puts the ball in the other person's court and leaves men to demonstrate their courtship skills."

This creates a fundamental asymmetry. Women who don't receive constant attention can't afford to ignore potential interest. There's simply less attention to filter in the first place. Meanwhile, those who do receive regular attention can use apparent obliviousness as a screening mechanism. We’re not playing the same game.

Maintaining plausible deniability lets horny brain play. When you convince yourself romantic stakes don't exist, it creates freedom for what researcher Aella calls "horny brain" to operate. See link to Aella’s post here:

Knowingless

Good At Sex: Inside Her Are Two Brains

Many women don’t have one brain, but two: Ladybrain and Horneebrain…

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a year ago · 241 likes · 11 comments · Aella

Ladybrain is risk-assessing, but horny brain? Horny brain just wants to lean in closer, make eye contact a beat too long, touch his arm while laughing.

You can engage in subtle physical flirting (the kind of subconscious body language driven by true attraction) while maintaining the safety of plausible deniability. This allows genuine chemistry to build without the interference of overthinking.

Testing social skills. There's a practical justification for this dynamic: it's an excellent filter for men with better social skills who can accurately read interest despite your performance of obliviousness.

As my friend Professor Calm said:

Think about it. If a man can't pick up on the subtle signals you're giving while playing oblivious, what does that say about his social intelligence? Can he read a room? Will he notice when you're upset without you having to spell it out? Can he navigate the complex social dynamics that come with being in a relationship with an attractive woman who gets attention from other men?

Men who are deterred by apparent disinterest might lack the confidence, patience, and social calibration that make for good partners. The ones who can see through the performance and continue pursuing appropriately, without being creepy or aggressive, are demonstrating valuable relationship skills.

Importantly, this skill is totally learnable:

This dynamic actually encourages men to develop better social awareness. Those who rise to meet the challenge of reading nuanced social cues often become more skilled communicators overall.

The Risks

Self-deception - Like any psychological strategy, this one has serious downsides. The biggest risk is that the performance becomes too convincing, even to yourself. This is what Jane Austen captured so perfectly in Emma: the danger of being too clever with your own social maneuvering. You can lose sight of reality and make suboptimal decisions based on your manufactured biases.

Missing genuine connections. I was prioritizing men who made sexual interest immediately clear (hookup-focused) over those genuinely interested in getting to know me (relationship-focused). I optimized for attraction to my body without checking if they actually liked me.

Safety concerns - There's also a darker risk to this self-deception: When obliviousness is so practiced you believe it, you can't assess escalating situations with men who get angry about being "friendzoned."

Feeling Seen

After recognizing this pattern in myself, I realized I had been deprioritizing men who weren't being pushy or obvious but were genuinely interested in building friendships and getting to know me. Meanwhile, I was gravitating toward those who made their sexual interest immediately clear - men who wanted hookups rather than relationships.

I had been so focused on maintaining plausible deniability around sexual interest that I'd missed opportunities for genuine but slower-developing romantic connections. I was also optimizing for men being attracted to my body without sufficiently checking whether they actually liked me.

My friend Alex Cross in Berlin put it perfectly:

If you want deeper connection, it makes sense not to respond to surface-level attraction but rather to wait until you have more data, until you see that someone is really trying to understand who you are as a person.

My new dating strategy is to just try to make friends and really get to know people. If there’s a flirty or sexy vibe, it can always be explored a year or two into the friendship. Like my husband likes to say - The real getting lucky is making a true friend. There’s no need to rush.

If I want a hookup, I can get one anytime, but they rarely translate into serious relationships. I just got weirdly lucky with my husband (a hookup that turned into a marriage) and didn’t realize that that’s not how it usually works!

Conscious Choices

Once I recognized the pattern, breaking the unconscious habit wasn't difficult. Now I force myself to acknowledge when someone's body language indicates interest instead of automatically entering self-deception mode, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything about it. I just notice and then proceed with whatever I was doing before.

The key insight is understanding the difference between conscious strategy and unconscious self-limitation. Choosing to play it cool to select for certain partner qualities? That's a reasonable approach. Automatically dismissing all signs of interest because you've trained yourself not to see them? That limits your agency and can create problematic situations.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather to deploy obliviousness strategically when it serves my interests, rather than being caught off-guard by my own oblivion.

I have a confession that makes me uncomfortable: despite doing everything "right" (ie perfect grades and test scores, varsity tennis, playing violin semi-professionally, Ivy League education, graduate degree in a technical field), most of my career success stems from the mentorship and opportunities I gained through romantic relationships with accomplished older men.

This wasn't a calculated strategy. It happened organically because I'm genuinely attracted to accomplished, intellectually curious partners who love sharing knowledge. But the career benefits have been undeniable, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

How It Started

My first serious relationship was with a computer science post-doc I often refer to in my blog as Professor Calm. What started as a recurring weekly date became something much more valuable: emotional stability during my high-stress undergraduate years and exposure to high-level intellectual discourse I couldn't get elsewhere.

I have vivid memories of post-sex conversations where he'd explain complex economic principles or recommend books about software engineering. His love language was sharing ideas, and I discovered mine was too.

The emotional support kept me grounded during a period when depression nearly derailed my education. The intellectual stimulation expanded my worldview in ways my formal coursework never did. He remains one of my closest friends, and I'm grateful for both aspects of what he brought to my life.

Since I was poly, I dated a variety of physics, math, and computer science grad students as well throughout my undergrad years and learned a lot about these fields through them. With most of them, I have remained close friends and occasionally run into them professionally.

The Acceleration Effect

When I met my now-husband, a successful post-exit, serial entrepreneur, the pattern continued but intensified. His explanations of niche technical topics inspired me to take computer science courses to better engage with his work. I pushed myself to be able to keep up in technical conversations at dinner parties with famous founders & VCs that I attended as his date. When I pursued my MBA, he provided a reality check: "This is mostly idiotic. Do a startup instead. Think of it as a free Silicon Valley MBA where only your pride gets bruised."

But the real transformation came when I entered corporate life. My husband didn't just offer emotional support; he provided strategic coaching that fundamentally changed how I approached my career. He role-played and helped me practice conversations with executives, think like a CEO rather than a new graduate, and identify core business issues worth escalating to the C-suite.

The results were immediate and dramatic. Instead of spending years learning to navigate corporate politics and identify high-impact problems, I was working on issues that typically take decades to encounter. He would coach me saying things like “The only way to cut through politics is with power. Who has the power to make that decision?” I received the highest performance ratings in every evaluation I ever had in that job, as a direct result of approaching my role with a strategic perspective I never could have developed alone.

When it came time for my next opportunity, he didn't just provide encouragement. He made some calls and opened doors. Yes, I had to demonstrate my qualifications and competence in interviews, but he got me in the room with decision-makers I never would have met otherwise. He also helped me negotiate my pay, resulting in about double the salary that I would have asked for. And it was approved.

The Uncomfortable Math

Let's be honest about what this means: I've had free access to coaching from someone who charges over $1,000 per hour, regular guidance from an experienced entrepreneur, and introductions to networks that would have taken me years to build independently. My husband's mentorship has accelerated my career by roughly a decade.

While my classmates work as junior staff at companies, I regularly attend events with founders of those same companies and brainstorm with them about thorny problems they’re thinking about. If I needed a meeting with top-tier venture capitalists, I could arrange it through existing relationships. I operate in a completely different professional ecosystem than I would have accessed on merit alone.

The Gender Mentorship Divide

Still, I need to acknowledge the crucial role female mentors have played in my career. My first corporate job came through a Moms in Tech network, which gave me my initial foothold in the industry. I've benefited from countless conversations with accomplished women who offered advice, emotional support, and perspective on navigating male-dominated fields.

Female mentorship has been invaluable for understanding workplace dynamics, dealing with imposter syndrome and people pleasing tendencies, and seeing examples of women who've succeeded in tech and business. These relationships provided something my male mentors couldn't: proof that someone who looked like me could make it, and guidance on the unique challenges women face in these industries.

But if I'm being completely honest about measurable career impact, the male mentorship through romantic relationships has been much greater. This isn't because men are better mentors or because I value their guidance more. It's about access, time investment, and structural realities.

The women who mentored me were incredibly generous, but they were sharing limited time across many mentees while managing their own demanding careers. Our interactions, while meaningful, were typically brief coffee meetings or occasional phone calls. In contrast, my romantic partners were invested in my success in a more comprehensive way. We spent hundreds of hours together. They had intimate knowledge of my goals and challenges, and they were motivated to see me succeed.

This creates an uncomfortable truth: the most impactful mentorship in my career has come from men I was romantically involved with, not because they're inherently better mentors, but because we spent so much more time together.

Navigating the Contradiction

This reality creates cognitive dissonance. But I'm a feminist! I have Audre Lorde quotes tattooed on my skin and read "The Feminine Mystique" in eighth grade. I've consumed dozens of books on corporate leadership and women's advancement.

But I'm also a pragmatist. When I see opportunities that can advance my goals, I take them. When people offer to mentor me, open doors, or share their expertise, I accept gratefully and work to reciprocate value.

The alternative, which would be to reject these advantages in service of some idealized version of "doing it alone", strikes me as self-defeating.

If your ideals prevent you from making smart decisions, perhaps they need re-examining.

On Loving Men and Being Grateful

In the worlds I navigate (technology, entrepreneurship, venture capital), working closely with accomplished men isn't just common: it's essential. Here's what I've learned: loving men - truly appreciating them, learning from them, and building genuine partnerships with them - has been one of the most powerful forces in my career and life.

This might sound controversial in our current moment, but I'm deeply grateful to the men who have invested in my success. Not because I couldn't have made it without them, but because their guidance, networks, and belief in my potential accelerated my trajectory in ways I never could have achieved alone.

There's something beautiful about men who want to see you win. Who share their hard-earned knowledge freely. Who open doors and then cheer you on as you walk through them. The men in my life didn't feel threatened by my ambition; they were energized by it.

I've noticed that women who position themselves as adversaries to men often struggle to access the very networks and mentorship that could accelerate their careers. Meanwhile, women who build genuine, mutually beneficial relationships with accomplished men, whether romantic, professional, or platonic, tend to rise faster.

This doesn't mean being deferential or sacrificing your own goals. It means recognizing that in most industries, men still hold significant power and influence. You can spend your energy fighting that reality, or you can learn to navigate it strategically while building authentic relationships.

I could have rejected the mentorship, coaching, and opportunities that came through my relationships. I could have insisted on "doing it alone" to maintain some purist version of feminist independence. But that would have meant sacrificing tangible career advancement for abstract principles.

I’ve enthusiastically taken every opportunity presented to me, and I’m tired of the shame, so I'm just going to own it as part of my story from now on. I’ve worked hard to get to where I am, and I’m also deeply grateful to all of the men, past and present, who have helped me get here.

One of my favorite memories from the Vibegala party I went to a few months ago was sitting in a hot tub naked with a group of people playing a silly game called Hotseat where everyone gets a turn answering a bunch of personal questions.

I asked one of my favorite questions, “When was the last time you cried and why?” and got an interesting response. “We had just gotten back together after breaking up and it was very intense for me. I started crying during sex from sheer joy.”

I was thinking about this later and thinking about how few times in my life I’ve cried during sex. I think that crying during sex is probably one of the most underrated sexual experiences.

This isn’t surprising - many people list that sex feels better for them when there’s a strong emotional connection. And strong emotional intensity can lead to unexpected crying.

One of my exes used to say “crying is a sign that you’ve healed enough to let it go”. I’m not sure I believe this, but it is an interesting reframing. From that perspective the crying is a release of some kind, from the built up intensity of the moment.

Of course it’s also a very difficult one to have this happen intentionally. I've never heard of someone trying to force it and I don’t think you can, but when it happens it tends to be very memorable for both people.

I went and talked to a few other friends of mine (mostly men) and there was a consistent number of responses from men talking about how powerful and moving the experience was. One guy said “It was painful, cathartic, and memorable. I remember it clearly 18 years later”. Another said, “I’ve only cried during sex once but it was one of the most intense, vulnerable moments I’ve had”.

Sex is mostly psychological, and I’m drawn to the different emotional landscapes that can be explored. What intense emotions can we feel? What can we learn about ourselves? Try to feel an emotion so complex you don’t have the words to describe it.

Look for a connection so intense that you can’t help but cry.

I have what I call a "competence kink." I'm magnetically drawn to people who aren't just good at what they do. They're exceptional. We're talking top-of-their-field, Fields Medal-winning, revolutionizing-entire-industries level of achievement. I'm a sucker for brilliance, relentless work ethic, high agency, and genuinely original thinking.

But here's the cruel irony: the very qualities that make these people so attractive also make them largely unavailable for the kind of deep connection I crave.

The Unavailability Paradox

Think about it logically. If you're dedicating 10+ hours a day to mastering your craft or building something groundbreaking, what's left for dating? These hyper-achievers have done the math. The probability that any given first date leads to a meaningful long-term relationship is statistically low. So why spend precious hours on dinner conversation when you could be coding, researching, or iterating toward your next breakthrough?

Most of these brilliant people operate at 50% or greater work intensity, and their "downtime" is often equally intense. Picture the full-time technical CEO who plays semi-professional chess on weekends, or the research scientist training for ultramarathons. Even their hobbies demand excellence.

The Relationship Calculus

I wrote recently about polysaturation, the point where someone has maxed out their relationship capacity. Well, most of these overachievers are effectively "monosaturated," but not in the traditional sense. They're monogamous with their work. Their startup is their primary relationship. They haven't carved out the time, attention, or emotional bandwidth to explore deep romantic connections.

The few who do attempt polyamory typically manage space for one or two serious relationships alongside their professional obsessions, but that's their absolute limit. There's simply no bandwidth for more.

My Own Contradiction

I'm also a high achiever, but I've reached a stage in my life where I consciously chose to rebalance. I decided to invest significant energy and time in relationships (with my husband, children, friends, and community). This shift has been rewarding, but it means I can only admire these brilliant workaholics from afar, knowing they're fundamentally emotionally unavailable.

Love is a Losing Game

Love is, objectively speaking, a terrible investment. It's a gamble where the odds are stacked against you. Most romantic pursuits simply don't work out. When you analyze the data on dating success rates, devoting substantial time and effort to finding love appears almost irrational.

I deeply understand why so many brilliant, busy people approach dating passively at best. They swipe occasionally, maintain a dating profile, maybe go on a few dates a year, but they're not really trying. This is how exceptional people end up single well into their forties, not from lack of interest or opportunity, but from pure time economics.

The Exception That Proves the Rule

A few months ago, I was having breakfast in San Francisco with a friend I was occasionally sleeping with (the person who inspired my essay about one-sided feelings). He's exactly this type: monogamous, brilliant, completely consumed by his startup.

"I've been getting some inbound interest through my 'date me' doc," he mentioned casually, "but I'm not actually going on dates. I'm so swamped with the company that I don't even have a free evening."

Curious, I tested the waters: "So if I was in New York and wanted to see you for a night, would you not have time for me?"

He smiled with that familiar, coy expression and simply uttered: "Some things are worth making time for…"

Tango is pure euphoria - an unfiltered joy that courses through every fiber of my being. I have never experienced ecstasy in such a distilled form. Sometimes I'm grateful this is my drug of choice. Other times I wonder if it might be easier to score cocaine than to chase the elusive dance high that haunts my dreams and pulls me back to the milonga, night after night.

Fellow dancers understand immediately when I try to articulate this feeling. Non-dancers never do. They can't comprehend how three minutes of movement can create such profound experiences, sometimes to the point of transformation.

The Anatomy of a Step

What exactly is this feeling? Is it flow state? Partly, yes, that dissolution of self where time becomes fluid and movement feels effortless. There's a flirtation energy too (very scientific term, I know). Sometimes it carries an undercurrent of sensuality, though not always.

Sometimes tango feels like flying, floating weightless through clouds of music and motion. Other times it's like a euphoric, almost orgasmic rush through my brain, a mental high that rewrites my neural pathways in real time. And then there are the dances where it becomes the only way I can truly feel anything at all.

"Remember," one of my teacher once told me, "the job of the follower is to feel… it's the only time I ever feel." At the time, I didn't fully understand. Now I do.

Tango creates a space where feeling isn't just allowed: it's required, celebrated, refined into art.

The Perfect High

In many ways, tango offers all the intoxication of romantic and sexual connection with virtually none of the risks or consequences. It's pure fantasy made manifest: all the beauty of human connection without the potential for lasting pain.

No risk of STDs, no heartbreak (usually). Just tandas perfectly crafted to deliver this drug in its purest form. Even the traditional structure seems designed for maximum impact: three dances in a row, just enough to almost fall in love but not quite, separating before that potentially dangerous fourth dance that might tip us over the edge. I've heard it said that in Argentina, if you dance a second tanda with someone, they'll expect you to go home with them. Dance at your own risk.

When I'm in the embrace, I become pure love in motion. Every molecule of my body connects to my partner's, to the music, to the floor beneath us. I often find myself radiating joy, smiling with complete abandonment, surrendering to the movement and the moment.

Dancing the Pause

Someone once asked me how to let go more easily, how to connect more deeply with partners in tango and in bdsm or while having sex. My answer was simple: you have to get vulnerable. They didn't like that response.

"But what's the hack?" they pressed.

The hack is this: you have to be willing to get hurt. Vulnerability isn't a technique you can master or a switch you can flip. It's a choice you make, again and again, to open yourself despite the risk.

But here's the beautiful paradox of tango. If you keep the vulnerability contained to the dance floor, you get to experience all those profound feelings without the lasting consequences. You can practice being open, being present, being fully alive within the safety of the milonga's boundaries.

Healing Through Movement

Tango has become my therapeutic practice, like some fictional characters who train and learn combat in a simulation before entering the real world (Altered Carbon is my favorite TV show!) Some days I feel like a character from a science fiction story, too heartbroken to pursue genuine romantic connection, instead focusing on healing through dance.

My own situation carries particular bittersweetness. My former tango teacher didn't just teach me steps. He taught me the fundamental concepts I revisit in every dance, the very language of connection I now speak fluently. That he later broke my heart, and in some ways broke my mind, adds layers of complexity to every embrace.

This isn't the first time I've been given a precious gift laced with poison. But I've learned to slowly build internal antidotes, extracting the beauty while neutralizing the toxicity. I refuse to let someone else's actions steal this magic from me.

The Container of Connection

I still believe deeply in tango's power and beauty. It teaches us to inhabit our bodies fully, to be near another person without expectation or agenda, to practice vulnerability within an intentionally designed container. The embrace becomes a laboratory for connection, a place where we can experiment with intimacy and trust.

Tango asks nothing of us but to be present. Tango remains the most beautiful thing I know…a dance that transforms ordinary people into vessels of pure feeling, if only we're brave enough to let it.

Music that I like to tango to:

https://youtu.be/69_Hv6Rs7Gk?si=7sNZCx-TrcnZtpAF

For the longest time, I was frustrated with myself. While my friends could have great sex and walk away without a backward glance, I kept catching feelings (like a bad cold!) I'd beat myself up for being "too emotional" or "too intense."

I learned to notice the early cues and over communicate to avoid unspoken expectations. I made sure to carefully create distance as I started to notice emotional pain, on either side. But I kept wondering: Why couldn't I just enjoy physical intimacy without my heart getting involved?

This past year was my slut era, a year of sexual reawakening. I was trying to crack the code of casual sex, searching for a way to approach it that felt honest and authentic to who I am. I wanted to figure out how to separate physical pleasure from emotional attachment, convinced that this compartmentalization was a skill I was lacking and needed to master.

But here's what I just realized: I had the causality backwards.

I wasn't catching feelings because of the sex. I was having sex because of the feelings.

This realization has changed how I understand my own desires and patterns. I am capable of having sex (even incredible, mind-blowing sex) without developing deeper romantic feelings afterward.

But if I'm having sex with you, or even just sending you nudes, there's already a pretty high chance that some level of romantic feelings exists. They might be the gentle, warm kind of feelings, or they might be the intense, all-consuming variety. But they're usually there from the start. (Surprise!)

Romance, Meet Desire!

For me, sex is exponentially better when romantic feelings are in the mix. I discovered that without that emotional connection, I don't get as turned on, as excited, or as physically responsive.

This can lead to boredom during sex but also potentially to sex injuries. Turns out trying to have rough sex when you're not that into it can lead to painful cervical bruising, which is not ideal.

My body seems to crave not just physical touch, but emotional intimacy.

I can have sex without romantic feelings, but I don't want to anymore. Why settle for mediocre when I know how incredible it can be with an extra layer of connection?

Beyond Relationships

This doesn't mean I'm suddenly only interested in committed, defined relationships. I've learned that I can have romantic feelings for friends and enjoy physical intimacy with them without needing traditional relationship structures or labels.

What I do need is mutual understanding of what we mean to each other and open communication about our intentions and boundaries. I need attunement to each other's needs and trust that goes both ways, including assuming good will and best intentions. Beyond that, I'm still exploring what other elements feel essential to me.

I'm learning to pay attention to the full spectrum of my needs. I've been trying to please others and ignoring what I really want and need, and I'm trying to listen harder to myself now. Part of that exploration involves sitting with uncertainty and allowing my understanding of my needs to evolve as I gain more experience with this new approach.

I want to feel seen. I want to be known. And I want to be loved. I love others so much, but I think it's time to look for more reciprocity in my connections and lean in deeply into those who can actually love me back. This includes my devoted husband, who has supported me through this entire journey of self-discovery and continues to be a source of deep connection and love in my life.

What's Next

After having my heart broken (twice) in the last year, I tried to have sex without getting hurt again, but I realized that, for me personally, it’s just not worth it that way. My favorite part of these connections is the vulnerability and I no longer want to engage in casual sex without it. Risking getting hurt is core to the experience of connecting with and getting to know another person.

I'm done apologizing for being someone who loves easily and feels deeply. Instead, I'm curious about how to build a life that honors both my sexual desires and my romantic heart.

Maybe the question isn't "How do I have casual sex without catching feelings?" but rather "How do I create space for all kinds of love and intimacy in my life?"

The Mystery

Recently I saw a post showing Google Trends data for "anal fisting" searches, and there is a spike in 2006. The graph looks like a mountain or like a fist, which is hilariously fitting. But why the hell did this happen?

Naturally, I went down a research rabbit hole trying to figure out what could possibly cause such a dramatic data anomaly.

The Regulatory Perfect Storm of 2005-2006

To understand what happened, let’s try to untangle the web of legislative changes that affected adult entertainment in the mid-2000s.

• 2005 DOJ Amendment: Updated Section 2257 record-keeping requirements for adult content, requiring age verification for all models

• Adam Walsh Act (2006): Expanded regulations to include digital images and computer-manipulated content, significantly broadening scope

What followed was a period of legal uncertainty and compliance chaos that lasted years. Adult entertainment companies challenged the 2005 regulations in Free Speech Coalition v. Gonzales, and the plaintiffs obtained a preliminary injunction for some aspects of the regulations, including application of the record-keeping requirements to secondary producers. The final regulations wouldn't be settled until January 20, 2009, with compliance required by March 18, 2009.

During this period of legal limbo from 2005-2009, adult entertainment companies found themselves navigating an incredibly complex compliance landscape. The regulations weren't just about paperwork. They carried serious criminal penalties and the threat of federal inspection at any time.

The Great Content Audit

Picture this: compliance officers at major adult entertainment studios in 2006, armed with massive legal budgets and facing potential criminal liability, going through their entire content libraries with a fine-tooth comb. They were asking: "What content do we have that poses the lowest regulatory risk under these new expanded requirements?"

The answer was extreme fetish content.

Studios realized that categories like anal fisting typically featured performers who were unambiguously adult (well over 25 and clearly mature-looking), making them legally "safer" than mainstream "teen" or "barely legal" content that could trigger regulatory scrutiny.

Meanwhile, expanded record keeping requirements and federal inspection threats created prohibitive compliance costs, forcing smaller specialty producers out of business.

For example: When the FBI launched its anti-obscenity intitiative in 2005, it targeted Insex, pressuring credit card companies to drop their payment processing and cut off their revenue. As Insex put it in their final statement: they were "unwilling to fight a lengthy and expensive court battle only to emerge victorious but bankrupt." In late 2006, Insex ceased producing original content and several of their directors went to work at kink.com. Law matters in the context of enforcement!

When these niche operators disappeared, their audiences consolidated around the few remaining compliant major studios. What had previously been scattered across dozens of small fetish producers suddenly became centralized content that major studios could promote to larger, consolidated audiences. This content that was both legally safer and newly profitable due to reduced competition.

For a short time, there was a spike in this content consumption, but eventually the market became oversaturated and cultural attention moved elsewhere.

Takeaways

The next time you notice a sudden cultural trend or content boom, it might be worth asking: who benefits from this trend? What legal or business incentives might be driving its prominence? And what boring regulatory changes happened in the background?

Sometimes the most fascinating cultural mysteries have the most mundane explanations after all.

I’ll leave you all with one last note: I asked Grok to write a dirty limerick about this, and it said it refused, but then it still produced this. Enjoy!