Sex Talks With Emma-Louise Boynton - Finding love after divorce; the highs and lows of motherhood and changing the law on flexible working with Anna Whitehouse aka Mother Pukka

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

For this live recording of the podcast, which took place at the London Edition hotel, Emma sits down with broadcaster, writer and campaigner, Anna Whitehouse, otherwise known as Mother Pukka. Anna is the Sunday Times best-selling author of Parenting the Sh*t out of Life, Where’s My Happy Ending? and Underbelly and in 2015 she started the platform Mother Pukka to share the trials and tribulations of parenthood and beyond. She also hosts the podcast Dirty Mother Pukka with her best friend Polly. In this episode, Anna speaks candidly about finding love again after her recent divorce; the extraordinary and ordinary experience of motherhood ('both things can be true at once'); the success of her campaign to change the law on Flexible working; her greatest lesson in love and, of course, and how to give the 'perfect' handjob.... *Apologies in advance for the sound quality in this episode, there were tech issues on the night that were beyond our control. If you'd like to attend a live recording of the podcast, follow up on Insta @emmalouiseboynton and subscribe to the Sex Talks Substack here to keep up-to-date on upcoming shows.

Hello and welcome to the Sex Talks podcast with me, your host Emma Louise Boynton. Sex Talks exists to engender more honest, open and vulnerable discussions around typically taboo topics, like sex and relationships, gender inequality, and the role technology is playing and changing the way we date, love and fuck. Our relationship to sex tells us so much about who we are and how we show up in the world, which is why I think it's a topic we ought to talk about with a little more nuance and a lot more curiosity. So each week I'm joined by a new guest whose expertise on the topic I'd really like to mine

and do well just that. From writers, authors and therapists to actors, musicians and founders, we'll hear from a glorious array of humans about the stuff that gets the heart of what it means to be human. If you want to join the conversation outside of the podcast, sign up to my newsletter via the link in the show notes or come along to a live recording of the podcast at the London Edition Hotel.

Okay, I hope you enjoy the show. There's only one in ten flexible working requests go-to-for-men versus five in ten for women. But the bulk of childcare still is strapped to female shoulders. In this live recording of the Sex Sports podcast, which took place at my favourite, the London Edition Hotel. I sat down with the brilliant Anna Whitehouse, otherwise known as Motherpucker. Anna is Sunday Times best-selling author of Parenting the Shit Out of Life, Where's My Happy Ending, and Underbelly. She's also a broadcaster, and in 2015, she started the platform Motherpucker to share the trials and tribulations of parenthood and beyond. She hosts a brilliant podcast called Dirty Motherpucker with her best friend Polly, who also came to the event and became my new best friend.

She's also the founder of the Flex Feel campaign, which we begin the conversation discussing. I just wanted to say before we start, I interviewed Anna a few years ago with my previous company her hustle, and she was at a very different time in her life. She was going through a really rough period, which was something she spoke about with her usual candor on stage. To get to interview her some three or so years later, when she has, as she described in the podcast, rebuilt herself almost entirely, was a real privilege. She was positively glowing. During our conversation, Anna described falling in love the first time around in her mid-20s with the idea of marriage, with the idea of the life she thought she should have, that she thought she should

want. At 42, following a divorce and following what she describes as some of the toughest years of her life, she is engaged again, but this time she's not marrying the concept of marriage, but rather the person. Speaking to Anna reminded me that there is no one linear trajectory we should all be following in life. No one right or wrong way of designing your life. Getting married young, having kids, building a beautiful home, these things don't automatically guarantee happiness, nor the sort of permanence and forever stability we often equate them to. That's not to say these things can't make you happy, just that they aren't the only roots to happiness. I'm 31 and suddenly all my friends are getting married and having babies. Sometimes I find myself feeling a bubbling

sense of panic because I'm worried I'm being left behind. But Anna reminded me that we're all on a different path and we're all doing things in our own time and on our own terms. I have other priorities right now, you know? Society can make us feel like we have a finite amount of time in which to achieve certain things and that for women especially, we have a shelf life. We expire at 40. Evidently, that is far from the truth. At 42, Anna has rebuilt herself into a version of herself. She really bloody likes. She made me realise your 40s can really just be another new beginning. So, I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.

Oh, it is so lovely to see her at Welcome to Sex Talk. Hi. It is so lovely to have you here. Such an exciting week, because congratulations, because just this week, the flexible working bill has passed into law. Meaning that all workers will be given a legal right to request flexible working from day one of working at the company. You have been worked on this campaign since 2015. Nine years later and I mean, what a huge success.

How do you feel? Do you know what? Nackard. Like, and that's too exhausted. And I think there's something quite depressing that takes nine years to change something so basic. You should be celebrating, but it's more of a sort of exhausted slump and looking in the eyes of all the MPs who didn't listen to you at the beginning for years and years and years. Then a pandemic happened. Then everyone was like, oh God, we're going to have to get on board with this.

Does it galvanize you? Does it kind of put you off for wanting to change anything else because it takes so long? No, because I mean, I became like a really accidental activist. You know when you're sort of looking around and you're like, why is no one talking about this? Why is no one talking about the fact that the minute you have a baby, There's just this expectation that you sort of disappear from the workforce or there's an expectation even from your partner that he carries on working and you exit the building stage right. Like it was not even what the government was doing or systemic failures. It was just our own submission in those moments that freaked me out.

And I actually think that's often kind of the most insidious way in which patriarchy and gender equality continues. It's in the baked in assumptions that we just continue to abide by all of us, men and women, unconsciously, this kind of script that we play out, that we've somehow kind of embedded in our unconscious, that then determines how we act and suddenly we're like, wait, whoa, I didn't want this. And it's been interesting to watch my sister and her wife navigate trying to have a baby versus me and my ex. There was this expectation almost, unspoken, unconscious within my... four walls a man still as a bacon woman cooks it and in my sister's relationship it was just like there was bacon everywhere and it was just you never

could sort it out could and put it on the table if you can and it was just like equal sorry for any vegans in the room it was just yeah I think it just felt like this expectation that the minute sperm hits over step back and that was it the sort of mutterings and I'm sure there are lots of people in this room it's either happened to or they've even done it, and I'll put my hand up that I have, that when you go on maternity leave, how often did you hear from your employer to the person covering you, she's probably not coming back? I think there's all these, like, tiny punctuation points of discrimination. It's not the overt stuff that worried me. It was the whisperings,

the hushes, the quiet sort of assumptions. That was where I found the biggest sort of frustration. That was where I started piping up. take us back to that period in which, you've been living in the Netherlands, which is a very different system to the one we have here, much more progressive in terms of its child care system in terms of how, I guess, it treats gender equality issues more broadly. You've been living in the Netherlands, move back to the UK to be confronted by our pretty fucked up system when it comes to child care. So you had one child there and then came back and had a second ticket. I've had one child in Amsterdam and one in London. And that difference, tell us what, what's the kind of, I guess,

that catalyst that prompted you to think, whoa, there's something has to change. In Holland, to give you context, when you have a baby on the equivalent of the NHS, you get what's called a cram zorg, which is a maternity nurse, who lives with you alongside you for 10 days. This is someone who takes away the stress of your mother-in-law or your mother coming in and going, what I did in 1969 was somebody who has an innate understanding of the postnatal mind body, someone who steps back when she needs to, isn't there to chit-chat with you or bring lasagna that she wants massive accolades for having bought.

It is somebody who is there to go, you know, the reason one tit's bigger than the other is because maybe you're not feeding properly in this way and I'll help you. The reason the Dutch invest in somebody for 10 days being with you is because that stops years later, women like me, which I did have to do on the second time round, reaching for anxiety meds, antidepressants. It stops you from absolutely breaking down because you haven't had that wrap around support when you're your most vulnerable and there's no hardly saying that. I remember my cramsel coming over to me and saying, I have just checked out your Instagram and I saw that you really like a banana and strawberry smoothie so I just made you one. And I was like to literally

cry. Take me to 12 hours after giving birth in Homerton Hospital London. Literally, haven't been stitched up, wheeled out, like stitches everywhere, fanny hanging out. It was just like a sledgehammer had been taken to me. And I think, again, if I hadn't experienced the Dutch system, I don't think I would have challenged the UK system. So you stick with the status quo. I went, no, no, no, no. I have experienced this very differently. I went back to work. In Holland, they do not allow any parent to come back full-time.

Anyone? They protect you. Family first, business, second. So I was kind of confronted by coming back to a system that was quite simply, I think, and there's no dramatization in this, set up for women specifically mothers to fail. And that was where mother-pucker, how pucker came from? It was just like, enough. I mean, I was completely horrible. terrified delving into the staff before this interview that a third of women don't return to work after having a baby because childcare costs in this country are so astronomical. It's always like well if I'm going to go back to work I have to make it financially viable and it's like actually know that cost needs to be split

between your partner in that but yeah ultimately I had that mindset and I was paying to go to work and I was feeling like I'm leaving my daughter crying for mommy in the mornings I then cry on the commuting I'm detached, I'm not quite there, I've still got separation anxiety, lingering post-natal depression, zero I'm understanding within the working world of the undulations of female biology. And I felt so alone in that and ultimately financially defunct. And I can't just ask, I guess you've alluded to kind of the insidious ways in which these baked assumptions around gender roles end up playing out in relationships, even when overtly you're a feminist, you're a career woman.

It doesn't seem like you're playing out very traditional gender roles. And yet, nonetheless, you've described how the burden of childcare, the costs associated, tend often to fall on women's shoulders, even in otherwise seemingly equitable relationships. Why do you think that is? I think there is such a sense, and this is often coming from businesses, that it's somehow emasculating for men to look after their children. There is nothing more masculine than looking after and raising your own child. Nothing.

And I think that there's only one in ten flexible working requests go through for men versus five and ten for women. But the bulk of childcare still is strapped to female shoulders. I went on a press trip a couple of years ago with a New York Times journalist. She was sat next to me and we're in Stockholm and she was looking around. She's like, what's with all these male nannies everywhere? It's so weird. And I was like, their dad's parenting.

this is what equality looks like and I think it's almost weirdly patronising in Stockholm because they call them the latte cupers and I'm like that's like it's like the yummy mummies versus the latte puppers it's like no let's just all just crack on as parents as parents like instead of maternity leave parental leave start speaking like that

I was shopped earlier to read it's just as a mother's experience a 60% drop in earnings compared to fathers in a decade following the birth of their first child which then over like long periods of time means that women have smaller pension balances, for example. So the kind of ripple effect we see when in those early, those kind of fundamental early years, we don't have a sufficient provision of childcare. It's huge and is long term. Now you wrote a piece a little while ago for The Independent. You wrote,

motherhood is hard, it's the best thing I've ever done, but at times also the worst. It's the happiest. It's the happiest I've ever been. At times, also the saddest. It's the most broken I've ever felt and also the most complete. It is extraordinary. and ordinary. When you are in the parental realm, it's like exorcism almost, like an exorcism of pain and trauma directed at your partner and you're both questioning, mind, body, fanny and soul, and wondering if you'll ever have sex again

and wondering who each other are. And then it's like you both look at that child smiling at you for the first time. It's a parental paradox, you know, you are crying and laughing in the same, five minutes. I was in my flat in Amsterdam and I was shushing to the point like the white substance had built up in the corner of my mouth like shushing this baby wasn't shushing and I heard this group of young girls come back from a night out and one of them was about to go off with a guy and it was like this it was like a brick away from my former life and I was like can I just put this somewhere and join

you guys with this It's really hard and then I got on Instagram and it was just the time when all the Californian surfers were uploading and they're all in their like rungs goddess like glory and I was in this kind of whole of my own like morning and grieving and I think I made peace with that early doors like I said to Polly my co-host the other day we both met our partners when we were 24 at 42 we've come through the other side of it I would say and I know I've got scars all over me, C-section scars, tattoos. The worst one was a lord quote when I was right in the middle of like divorce. It's time we danced with the truth.

And I look at it every day and I'm like, oh god that's slightly equivalent of getting a quote from Dawson's Creek you described there again in such of kind of miserable detail that I guess that complete, that high and that low, that complete high and low of motherhood.

Knowing what you know now, would you do it all again? 100%. A hundred percent. My two little girls are the best thing I have ever done. The last thing I've ever made. And I think the saddest thing, weirdly, is coming back to where we began with this talk, is I never fought for myself in the way that I fought for them. So the only reason I launched Flex Appeal was because I used.

I could not bear raising those two little girls to work hard in their ABCs, their GCSEs, like we all have. To get to your degree level, maybe, if that's what you choose, to get that first job where you feel like a CEO, because you've got a phone and a laptop, and you're just like living. And to get to that blockade of motherhood, I never thought for myself. I was submissive in that cycle and that expectation, but I categorically, when I started fighting, was for them. that mother's rage. You think 40 is going to be this kind of like right off zone. And, you know, anyone looking in, and I've had a few people question, if I was okay, tattoos, divorce, you know, all of these are like hallmarks of some midlife crisis.

And in packaging, it's full midlife opportunity. We are totally taking back who we are, because we didn't know who we were when we started off. Well, there is a moment. You are literally handed. this baby without a roadmap. Like, you think of everything else, every other moment in your life, there's some kind of manual. And you set off on that road hurtling down the M25 effectively with a child that you are not told how it works. You're in the underbelly of the internet and there's 5,000 other parents like fleary eye looking like something out of rent and stimpie. My baby's not sleeping. Is you okay? I'm not good. And you know, it's, it is lonely and it's

hard, but yes, you have a sledgehammer taken to you. You have a sledge hammer taken to your relationship, to your body, to your mind, but like I would say, and I never thought I would see the other side of it, I pieced myself back together with, it was almost like those shards of glass were scattered everywhere, and I was definitely more exhausted, more broken, but good God, I was more robust. And actually what you find on the other side is you come back to yourself, but in a very different form. And I think everybody had made me feel that 40 was, you know, was somehow over. It's actually just the beginning. You mentioned at the start of this interview that you'd met your partner, your ex-partner Matt, in your mid-20s, and you're now in your early

40s and you've kind of completed that journey together. You're married for 17 years and you're now divorced. So first I'd like to say congratulations for a 17-year marriage. I mean Alan De Botton talks about this. We put too much of an onus on longevity being the mark of the success and relationships when actually it should be the quality of the relationship in the during that time in which you were together that is the mark of success. So a 17-year marriage with two kids seems to me like a huge success. It was a chapter. A huge chapter. A great chapter. How did you and Matt navigate or decide having built, having worked together, built business together, create a family a home, that it was time to end that chapter?

Well, we wrote the book ominously titled, Where's My Happy Ending? And actually, it was probably one of the healthiest things we've done, and it helped me reflect on a lot of things. So there might be a lot of people in this room who aren't at Divorce Central, but also aren't at happily ever after Disney film. There's a lot of grey, because the minute you may be, potentially, not everyone gets married, say I do. You're like, great, brigalia, you know, got a dress, look great, nice photos. And then this

gaping chasm of like 50 years opens up. But there's no seismic like fanfare for navigating post-neutral depression for getting through five miscarriages and not falling apart. These punctuation points of long-term relationships, they are hard, you lose each other, do you fancy each other along the way, your postpartum body, C-section scars, you fall apart, then that person falls apart. And, you know, I don't think anyone really talks about that bit. And I will never forget what the octogenarian sex blogger

Joyce Williams told me. Other than that when you want to shag post 80, you need two things in your arsenal. One is the IKEA step of the doggy. Wow. She was like, hey, you're not going on all fours at that age. She's like, I really suggest that you put some kind of like sheep skin support on the bottom rung just for your knees. She's got all these things.

And the second thing was, yeah, an IKEA sheepskin rug just for anything that involves anything that's not the bed. Because again, the knees, you know, they need support. I think good advice for all of us, actually. But she said something that sat with me, but actually, I'm actually. unfortunately didn't really stand in my relationship. I think it might in others who are in this cranes, this juncture of, is this it? Like, well, you're literally looking at each other.

Well, maybe not. You're staring at your fucking phone at Netflix going, is this it? Where you're just exhausted by parenthood, by work, by redundancy, by pandemic, by it so much, by Mother and Nor that's like chirping away over here, the weight of it all.

And she said, I just want you to know that right now what you're going, through when children are between one and let's say 15 it's still hard after that it's a long time so like 15 year chasm it's going to be hard and it's circumstantial so really be kind to yourself in that relationship and she said cling on my lovelies because it's really beautiful on the other side and it sat with me that even though it didn't work out for me I do think that if I did it again and had a baby again and went through that I wouldn't like really flat so flage so much about why we're not in this like you know picture postcard romantic

sexual like perfect storm of joy I'd actually sit in the circumstantial the situational and recognize that I think having children is one of the hardest things for any relationship so you know yes enjoy that wedding but good god like the minute that baby learns it's going to change things and it's neither of your fault that's the real I do. When you say that it tests a relationship more than anything, what do you think was critical in the years that you were together and raising children for you to both two, things that you had to do or to kind of be in order to sustain that relationship? Something I wish I'd done, and that's not to say I wish I'd done it to stay with my ex, but I wish I'd done it more for me

and I wish maybe this for other people in the room, was I interviewed Derek West, UK's longest serving fisherman, which I didn't expect it. You know when you interviewed like romance novelist, Alan de Boton, like these revered names in the world of relationships? And I interviewed this Welk fisherman

who has been married for 70 years. And I found him and I was my last interview and I went in a bit sort of, I don't really know what we're going to get out of this, but let's have a chat. And he sat down next to me and he said, do you know why June and I have been together for so long? And I was like, no, Derek, do tell me. And he's offering up all kinds of mollusks and things while we were chatting.

And he said, it's because, like, each of you, when you're in a partnership, you put everything on that person. Look at the Clinton's cards. You're my one and only. To death do us part. How threatening does that sound? Jesus Christ. Like, like, poor.

The pressure on that person is all-consuming and it's really claustrophobic. So he said when I'm out at sea and I fall overboard, it isn't June who's saving me. It's the young lads on all the boats nearby who haul me up onto my ship or my boat. He's like, when I block myself out my house, it's Norman from next door who helps me. When I haven't got the cash down a local coi, it's Jane who lends me the money and says, pay me back next week it's community and he said if we don't have community if we're not looking up from our phones if we aren't connecting with other people that one person you're expecting them to what raise a baby with you being like really funny amazing in bed like a

constant slew of really unfair expectations and the final thing he said is the thing that's categorically kept me together with my wife is every morning we wake up and I you say to myself, be together today with June and don't take the rest for granted. Like the minute you take somebody for granted, you have actually lost them. And the minute you're not looking at what your wife is doing, maybe your partner, she's breastfeeding that baby, day and night, and you're just thinking, I've got to get to work today. Self-consume, thinking of your thing, both of you need to try and think of what the other is doing in that day. Don't take them for granted. He said, that's it.

And I think that's really beautiful advice, and I didn't take it. But I think that feels also such particularly beautiful advice now, because I think we're in an age, because of social media, in such an overly analytical age when it comes to relationships. The red flags, the green fly, what is your future plan with someone? What is your five-year plan? What is your 10-year plan? What does this person look like in your future? The person with your baby daddy? They earn enough money.

Oh, I mean, welcome to my brain. Which is why dating is horrid. Is this your bio? This is... The list. The bullet points and then fingering. I'm actually... I'm a basic bit.

I actually... You can satiate me in that one way and then we're good. You're like, I just want vigorous fingering. I just want vigorous fingering. And, you know, maybe a pension pot that's big enough for two because right now I'm self-employed

and let's just say that pension pot's not like it's too good. So tell us. Having found love... Again, I love... You found love... On the dating apps, pretty down quickly. Tell me, were the traits that you were looking for

when you were looking for love a second time around, you were scrolling the apps, different to what you were looking for the first time around, back in your 8-20s when you made a first partner? Yeah, I think I can sum it up in a very simple way is that I was in love with marriage, not the person, which is a very hard thing to say. And I think we are kind of preconditioned,

And I think back then, do you think that the Holy Grail is a man picked me? But I felt like if I was validated by marriage, if I was validated by a man, if I was validated by my ovaries working, having a baby, if I was validated by all that, somehow it would fill the cracks and the voids of that little girl that maybe didn't feel worthy. And I think when I say a sledgehammer was taken to me through child birth and divorce, I re-piece myself, along with my very best friend, Polly. I probably fell in love with myself through her. She kept mirroring, so I'm going to get really upset. She kept mirroring back to me, like, the good bits about me. It was initially in a really broken form.

Couldn't look at her, couldn't hear it, refused to, felt uncomfortable, almost like stop it. saying these things until one day I really did start to let it in and I did the same back to her and it started with us both sitting in our darkness two years ago and looking at each other and I went to save her that night because I was worried about her I really went in like almost her white her night in shining armour and actually what she did was save me and we sat together we went do you know what everyone lords romantic love the tonic love is where it begins and we We, I would say, even though we were together, we fell in love with each other fully, and I will never leave her.

But it started there with feminine love, female love, friendship, and I don't think I would have been ready to meet my partner, Ollie, without the love of my friend Holly, ironically. Holly and Ollie, I think my 24-year-old self would never have found my current partner, because she didn't really know what she was looking for. at 42, divorced two kids, having been categorically fucked over by the workplace or daring to have children, I had an understanding of who I was. I pieced myself back together again. When Ollie came into my life, I had given up, actually. I had some bad experiences, and I think men have had the same, too. I mean, I turned up to Weather Spoon's Day, which was red flags of my first world. and it was this really hot guy who was meant to be there and suddenly this 72 year old

turned around and went all right love and I was like Jesus Christ of course I should have seen that coming on a very I don't think of course you should have seen that coming I think none of us have seen that coming I bring polling go oh my god what is wrong with these people and I think the hardest one was it's a more serious note it's important to say these things is I went on a date with somebody who was very abrasive quite soon. Like I felt distinctly uncomfortable, sweaty palms. It takes a lot for me to feel uncomfortable. I am somebody who will make everyone feel comfortable in a room. That's where I go to. And this person spoke so abrasively to waitress and it was red flag after red flag. And I didn't feel comfortable

saying I'm leaving. I had to just walk out. He then harassed me on phone. calls, got his friends to phone me. And that's the point where I went to Polly, again, coming back to the Platonic Love, the safety, the catch-all. We went to the police, you know. So it wasn't some joking Tinder horror story. It was really a significant thing, and I'm not alone in that. So at that juncture, I stepped away from finding anyone,

finding love. I actually felt genuinely happy. We talk about happy endings. Like, my happiness began there was with my best friend, my two girls' purpose, which was to change the law on flexible working. I was healthy. I was fit. I fell in love with that.

And I think in that moment, weirdly, my now boyfriend, he was messaging me and I was about to delete hinge, but he wasn't messaging me, this is a real anomaly, with a dick pick, with, like, I love your tits, or, like, it was, I'm really impressed with what you do. I've never had that. I've never had anyone go beyond like how you look or like you know I want to do this about the other two the lowest comments guy in normal conversation and then suddenly he was like I want to punch a hole in your pantyhose my dick did you know how he spelt hole W-H-O-L-E and I was like I can't be here and I eventually went okay one last one last one off the row of the dice and I messaged back and I ghosted him for a week which was really shit because I said you want to meet for lunch and he was like yes I'm available Monday Tuesday

Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday and I was like oh big keen which is what how ridiculous is that as women that we're just like too nice too nice and I couldn't stop thinking about him I could not stop thinking about him and I accidentally called him without meaning to I was trying to save his number in my phone in case of like if I come back to a place where I do feel like men can come back in my life. And I absolutely called him, he called me back, and the rest is history, and we are engaged. I'm now not marrying the concept of marriage, I'm marrying the past. With that in mind, and with everyone's to mind, and with everyone's to mind,

Just cheat to cheat, as you can't help to do, hearing that story. What are the things you look around and see people over-emphasising when it comes to love and dating, which you think, God, I know better now. I think the whole playing a cool thing, like I don't like cool people, I like warm people. I think Brené Brown says that we start at age 10. As girls, not boys, we start age 10 conforming and distorting and contorting towards what the male gaze needs and I really wish actually I had sat with my silly goofy silly silly playful little self and gone to like other boys like hey you goofy silly

one over there come play with me as opposed to hey I am a vision for you to look at I am performing I am wearing the lingerie that the world tells me to wear to feel sexy the really interesting thing is is that how I feel now in this relationship is I've read my body the minute I met Ollie my central nervous system can't that is all I will ever read I was not anxious I was not stressed I suddenly came home came home to myself and every time I'm with him I can be my most chaotic playful giddy ridiculous self and I wish I hadn't lost that in myself as a girl I'm really sad the 10-year-old I was, took 32 years to come back into herself.

And throughout this conversation, you've mentioned your caesarean scars. I was listening to a podcast of yours earlier on, and you talked specifically about the relationship to your body after having children and your relationship to your caesarean scars and what they meant to you, and how that relationship has changed to being with your new partner and how he made you feel with regards to those scars. Can you just tell us a little bit about that? I was the age group where we grew up with Moore Magazine, Bliss, Glammer Magazine. I think the irony of glamour at the moment completely going in on the new Bridget Jones film is pretty flipping ironic, considering they were the magazine that was telling us all to BSI Zero.

And Bridget Jones was quite simply explaining and expressing what we all felt, which was not good enough. that if you had, you know, boobs were falling out of a bustier, it was somehow ugly. But if you had scars, if you had cellulite, you were somehow not worthy. And I, like I said, when my central nervous system calmed, when I met my new partner, something in me anchored. And I started seeing any imperfection, actually. And it was from me. It wasn't actually. I think I needed to feel it before expecting that from someone. else, but they were just badges of honour. It was just a complete acknowledgement that that slightly jaggedy, barbed wire scar of motherhood is so beautiful. I describe it to my girls when

they were younger. They would ask, like, what is that? And I'd say, that's my line. That's my line where you came out of. Just saying that, like those words, you came out of that line. Did it come to me easily feeling that, no. And that came from, again, like coming back to sisterhood, womanhood, friendship, came from feeling comfortable with my best friend, came from loving and feeling loved inside, that suddenly the outside conformed and sort of formed together with the inside. Something happened, and that I wasn't needing that validation. And I think we are the generation that is unlearning, unburdening ourselves and our children, boys and girls. This isn't just about little girls. From those expectations and that I need to say to him as much

as he says to me, you are great. I love how you made me feel in that moment. I appreciate you. I don't take you for granted today or tomorrow. I really, really love that. We think about women as being the victims of our broken sex culture and think of men as only ever being perpetrators of bad sex and as you just articulated so beautifully there that is so far from the truth it's a very specific type of sex that we learn and I think as you just said we then go into the bedroom they always assuming the other person has their shit together and they're all like you know kooky and confident fab and you're there being like what do I do how I look it took me so long to work out that I'm sapio-sexual

Safe or sexual is where you need to be emotionally connected to someone to come. And so for years I was like, oh okay, well I'm just not having an orgasm, it's just how I'm programmed. And actually what I needed was to feel safe, secure, heard, listen to, sat with, health physically. And I then got a chance of coming. I didn't realise that until 42 and it's a real thing. So One Night Stand categorically, not for me. We'd never really

work, we'd never be able to come through that. So I think understanding the different undulations of our sexuality and how we get turned on, again, how have I come to this at 42? And I think anybody who is struggling to

have an orgasm do look up saco-sexuality because it's very real. Like I, and this is really frustrating maybe for any part of them is ever with me but I could need a good eight hours of like chit chat and emotional downloading like how are now how are you I am a safe you sexual too particularly for women context is so important and I think as you say it's that feeling of being safe and allow your nervous system to

relax and for me conversation is that's like the gate that's the key that allows me then to go into this realm in which I actually feel able to be present with somebody and then you feel present you feel more relaxed and then suddenly like i mainly come in the mornings like if we meet you for first time as the evening in case you want to know anna um i'm here for it evening i'm you know i'm nervous i'm like thinking things to say i want to be funny on me charming and i'm like you know a little bit buffened up even if we've had a long bath together i'm a little bit buttoned up the next morning i am wild honestly i have the best orgasms of my life that was a little kind of manual for anyone who's listening who i can sometimes

send these episodes out to anyone i'm as a prospect um Anna what things did you know and feel within yourself in your first marriage when you knew it was finished? All you actually really need to think and sit with it deeply is how do you feel overall? And I felt lonely. That was the one word, lonely. The minute the kids are in bed, the minute we had moments together, there was a kind of eerie silence, a disconnect. And I think it was in that moment, in those moments, it was not one explosion, it was not a big bang, it was not an affair, it was that he's not my person, I'm not his person, and it was death by a thousand cuts. And I think we're often told, get out when there's some massive big bang or explosion, there needs to be a reason to get out. and actually it was a series of moments or absences.

It wasn't really what he did, it's what he didn't do. It really wasn't what I did, it's what I didn't do. Here I think because sometimes it can be the hardest way for relationship to come to the end because it's almost much easier if something quite cataclysmic happens. When there is that big explosion, when there is that big kind of turning point, you can fixate just on that one. Often it isn't just that one thing. What do you know now that you wish you could know,

in that kind of in your early 20s when you've started out for this whole journey. I think the best I can describe or explain that is going back to probably my mum and dad who were my blueprint for happiness. I got out of my marriage because I actually couldn't blueprint for my two little girls unhappiness you know like there's so much around just stay together for kids wait till they've got to university and so many of my parents' generation did that to quite a bitter end. The kids leave, empty nested, you're looking at each other going,

I don't know who you, I don't want you to come near me, and what have we got left, you know? But one thing that I actually not wish, I don't want to look back, I only really want to look forward, but one thing I'll carry forward is that I prioritised looks in myself. I prioritised, to be honest,

what glamour magazine was pumping, you know, into the ether, about size zero, about how I should look, about scars being somehow imperfections, etc. I have repackaged all that. But with my relationship, it would be the way my mum and dad are together, where it's not huge love, it's not extravagant love, it's not rose petals on hotel beds, it's not big holidays, it's none of that. It's the beautiful banality of two people witnessing each other's lives. And I think there is something so beautiful in it. Yes, I fell in love with the concept of marriage. I do love, love. I love the thought of two people being together. The thing I love the most, if I think of the reality of love, is my dad, throughout his time

with my mum, and my dad sadly not very well at the moment. And so seeing them in the sickness and health bit has been really beautiful. Even through that, in the hardest bits of the their relationship. My dad will always put a random vegetable in a random place that my mum will find. And it will be, it will range from a heritage carrot in the kettle spout to watermelon on the upper hood to, I think there was a sort of guava once in the hood driving seat that she sat on. And all I will ever hear, my punctuation points of their relationship was, oh, Chris! Oh, Chris, not a watermelon on the oven hood.

And it was that beautiful banality. It was the stuff that doesn't get celebrated. It was my mum stoppiling hundreds of jars of chili pickles around the pandemic, because my dad loves chili pickles. She was devastated if they ran out. My dad always bringing my mum cups of tea despite the fact she really never drinks in. It's always there.

I just, you know, cold and tippered. But it's that beautiful banality of two people bearing witness to each other's lives that I'm still actually wedded to. And so I would celebrate the bits that aren't wedding dresses, regalia, wedding lists and favours. I would celebrate that bit. That's, I think, the happy ending. Witnessing somebody else's life, to me, just feels like the most romantic thing. and to have the honour of having your life witness by someone who says,

I saw it all, the ups and the downs, the beautiful and the ugly, and I loved it all. That to me, oh, my heart just explodes. I don't. I do. Oh, anyone? Anna, what an absolute gourd is going to end on. Thank you so much. That was so beautiful. Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening to today's Sex Talks podcast with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton. If you'd like to attend a live recording of the podcast, check out the Eventbrite link in the show notes, as we have lots of exciting live events coming up. You can also keep up to date with everything coming up at Sex Talks, plus get my sporadic musings, via the Sex Talk substack. I've also popped that link into the show notes. And over on Instagram, where I'm at Emma Louise Boynton. And finally, if you enjoyed the show, please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to this on, as apparently it helps others to find us. Have a glorious day.