Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Dan Savage On: How to Handle Disappointment in Your Relationships, How to Get Better at Sex, and Why a 'Couple' is an Illusion

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

Dan Savage has been writing the popular sex-advice column Savage Love for over thirty years. He also hosts the Savage Lovecast and is the author of numerous books. In 2010 Dan and his husband founded the It Gets Better Project, which was designed to give hope to LGBTQ kids. It was seen all over the world–and won an Emmy. In this episode we talk about:How to handle disappointment and jealousyHow to get better at sexWhy so many couples lose their spark and what to do about itHow to date in the era of appsWhy it’s so hard for straight couples to talk about sexDan’s contention that the idea of a ‘couple’ is an illusionRelated Episodes:Lori Brotto on mindful sexDevon and Craig Hase on how not to be a hot messMyisha Battle on love, sex, dating, and relationship mythsSign up for Dan Harris’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan Harris on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular Episodes For tickets to Dan Harris: Celebrating 10 Years of 10% Happier at Symphony Space: click hereFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/dan-savage-723See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello my fellow suffering beings. How we doing? Around Valentine's Day, as you all know, we tend to celebrate the romantic ideal. Roses, chocolates, expensive dinners, little babies firing arrows at unsuspecting people. You get the picture. But anybody who's actually been in a relationship knows that it's often less than ideal. Today we're gonna talk to the renowned

and sometimes controversial sex and relationships columnist Dan Savage about lots of thorny issues, how to handle disappointment, how to handle jealousy, why so many couples lose their spark and what to do about it, how to date in the era of apps, why it's so hard for straight couples to talk about sex, he says, and his contention that the idea of a couple is an illusion anyway. Dan Savage has been writing the popular sex advice column Savage Love for over 30 years. He also hosts the Savage Love cast and is the author of many, many books. In 2010, Dan and his husband founded the It Gets Better project,

which was designed to give hope to LGBTQ kids and has been seen all over the world and won an Emmy. I found Dan to be very funny and very wise. Heads up though that parts of this conversation are a little bit graphic if you've got children around your muffs. Just to say we're doing a bunch of relationship themed programming in the run up to Valentine's Day. If you missed Monday's episode, which is a little bit more science-based with doctors

Julie and John Gottman, go check that out. Dan Savage, though, is coming right up. Maybe you've stayed in an Airbnb before and thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. Could be as simple as starting with a spare room or your whole place when you're away. You could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it I personally love Airbnb's my friend Glenn and I just rented an Airbnb in Fort Lauderdale

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how much at airbnb.ca. When you visit Audible, there are endless ways to ignite your imagination. With over 750,000 titles, including bestsellers, there's a listen for every type of listener. One of my favorite types of audiobook is a memoir read by the author, so I'm currently enjoying Walking in My Joy in These Streets, written and narrated by the one and only Jennifer Lewis. Discover all the best in audiobooks, podcasts, and originals, featuring authentic Canadian voices and celebrity talent. You might want to try some new Audible Canadian originals like The Downloaded, a sci-fi adventure

featuring Brendan Fraser and Luke Kirby, or Mistletoe Murders 2, a cozy mystery featuring Kobe Smulders. A first listen is waiting for you when you start your free trial at audible.ca. on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment, on board and onshore, and every Viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children and no casinos. Discover more at Viking.com. Dan Savage, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, it's great to be here. It's a good get for us. Appreciate your time. It's a good got for me. I'm really excited to talk to you. When people go deep on a specific subject, I'm always curious about why. So you've gone obviously quite deep on sex and relationships. Why? Well, you know, I'm gay and growing up gay, you do become as Edmund White once said about all young gay men, they're philosophers because they have to look at themselves and think, why me, why this, why am I not like my peers or my siblings or why am I not the person I was expected to think deeply about that. And when I was, you know, 13, 14, 15 and gay, there wasn't an internet. There wasn't a place you could go to do a deep dive on any topic. And there wasn't a lot of information out there that was easily available. And so,

you know, I would look at my brothers and think I'm really different than they are. My brother gets penthouse for the pictures and playboy for the pictures and I'm reading the articles. Why? And sex was what made me not like my peers, like my family. And so I had to really think about what sex was, what sex meant, and what sex was gonna be in my life. It's just like, you know, people of color

think more deeply about race because it sets them apart in a white majority country. People who are women, although women are the majority, think more deeply about sex and gender than men typically think about those issues. What sets you apart, what makes you different, what paints a bullseye on your back in some cases is the thing that you wind up having to think about.

And how did you get into the business of, I get how you started thinking about it, that all makes perfect sense. How did you get into the business of, I get how you started thinking about it, that all makes perfect sense. How did you get into the business of writing and talking about it so extensively? By accident. I met somebody who was about to start a newspaper in Seattle called The Stranger and I said to him, you should have an advice column because everybody reads those. You see the Q&A format, you can't not read it.

And he said, that is excellent advice. Why don't you write the advice column? And it sounds so disingenuous, 33 years and so many hundreds of columns later. But I wasn't angling for the gig. I was just a fan of the genre. I grew up reading Anne Landers and dear Abby Xavier Hollander asked the madam her column in penthouse magazine that my brother's got for the pictures, and I read the articles, read her, and we joked. It was like 1990, and we started joking about how odd it would be for a gay man in a straight newspaper to give sex advice to straight people, and sort of turn that on its head, and the joke,

I was just gonna do it for six months a year as a joke, and I would treat straight people and straight relationships with the same contempt that so many straight advice columnists had always treated gay people and gay relationships with, just to turn it on its head. And straight people in print had never really been treated like that before with that kind of, you know, you being held with tongs and, oh, you're poor mother,

she must have been devastated. And, you know, that's sick and sinful thing you do, but here's some advice. Now stop bothering me, which is kind of how gay people ask questions and the Playboy advisor or Anne Landers, you know, when I was a little kid would be treated and straight people loved it.

And I started getting real questions right away. And yeah, it turned into an actual advice column sort of under my feet. And I wound up stumbling into a career or calling that I think I had been training for all my life by being such a fan of the advice column format, that genre, it wasn't an accident that somebody said I've started a newspaper

and I was like, God, you gotta have have an advice column. And this was, you know, 30 plus years ago before the New York Times had 24 different advice columns before Slate had hundreds of different advice columns. The genre then was sort of low brow and tabloid to have an advice column. Now, you know, advice columns are everywhere in their eyebrow in the ethicist in the New York Times, Roxanne Gay writing a workplace advice column in the New York Times. But then it was sort of a little skeezy and that was my specialty.

And I think, you know, being gay, when I first started writing the advice column, it had always been my experience as a young gay man that my straight friends would come to me for advice about sex. Because like my straight female friends, I slept with men and like my straight male friends, I was a man who was sleeping with men, which is what their girlfriends were doing and sleeping with them. And I think straight people kind of intuited, have always intuited something that's kind of true. Gay people know more about sex than they do. have always intuited, it's something that's kind of true. Gay people know more about sex than they do because we think about it because it sets us apart.

And gay people are having the kind of sex that straight people have 99.99% of the time, which is, I'm not saying anal, I'm saying recreational. When I was a kid, there was this roaring debate culturally. There was a culture war that pitted recreational sex against procreational sex. Procreational sex was okay, recreational sex was not okay. Social conservatives now are trying to return us to those days, I think, a little bit with the coming war on birth control. But gay people

only have recreational sex. All of our sex is for pleasure, which is what most straight sex is for. Straight people once or twice, 21 times, maybe if they're the Duggers, try to make a baby. Most of the time when straight people are having sex, they're just trying to have a good and pleasurable, mutually pleasurable, hopefully experience. And yeah, that's the only kind of experience gay people have with sex. And so it made sense to me at a certain point that, yeah, like it kind of

snapped into place. This is why even when I was 18 and just came out of the closet, I had straight friends coming to me for sex advice. So did you feel confident that you were giving good advice right away or did that take years or has it never actually happened? I've always thought of the column is and now the Savage Lovecast, my podcast that I've been doing for 17 years, I've always thought of it as a conversation I'm having with my friends in a bar about our sex lives after we've had a drink or two. One of the things that set Savage Love apart when the column first launched was I let people use and print the language that they used when they were talking about sex with their

friends, that you didn't have to in a question in my column and I didn't have to in my answers, kind of switch into kind of a medical or psychological Sanskrit that we used the euphemisms, the jokes, the colorful language that people actually used. And now I can't remember your question. I'm just sort of lost in the weeds. When, if ever you started feeling confident that you knew what you were talking about? Oh, it's always been a dialogue. Like, I learned things from my readers all the time and from my listeners all the time.

Things come up. New things are being discussed. When I first heard of asexuality about, I don't know, 10, 12, 15 years ago, I was like, no way, you've got to be kidding. I didn't believe it. Now, in dialogue with my readers who are asexual, talking to sex researchers like Dr. Laurie Proto

has done extensive research in asexuality at the University of British Columbia, I believe it. But I was incredulous at first. I didn't buy it. Now I've bought it. And that was something, yeah, I didn't know. I'm constantly learning. I know more about menopause than I think most men ever do. And certainly no gay man has

ever really needed to do. When I first wrote about the clitoris, I put it in the wrong place. There was no, you know, Google, I couldn't double check. Yeah, it's not on the soft palate. That's just where mine is. Yeah, I'm not gonna weigh in on that. I will say that Lori Brotto has been on this show and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. She's excellent. After 33 years, so many of the ideas that you and terms that you've come up with have made their way into common parlance.

One of them is monogamish. It might be self-explanatory, but nonetheless, can you explain it? I coined monogamish, it might be self-explanatory, but nonetheless, can you explain it? I coined monogamish, initially described my relationship with my husband. We were monogamous for many years, and then we opened our relationship. And when you're gay and you say you're in an open relationship,

people assume you have a lot of sex with a lot of partners, and that really wasn't what we were doing. We were mostly monogamous. And occasionally, there might be an outside sexual experience or, you know, a threesome. But it was very rare. And so it felt like we were more monogamous than not. And so monogamish. And I began to use that expression in my column, in reference to relationships like ours that were either mostly monogamous or people in the relationship, even if they were monogamous, acknowledged that there was some squish around the edges where there was desire for other people. There were fantasies sometimes about other people. There was in some monogamous relationships

a willingness on both parties' parts to acknowledge what I like to call the zone of erotic autonomy, that your partner is a separate individual erotically with their own erotic imagination, their own fantasies and their own internal life that doesn't, when it comes to sex, exclusively revolve around you, even if they're physically only sexually intimate with you, even if they are monogamous and you're monogamous, the brain goes where it goes. And so a lot of people began to use monogamish to refer to what were technically monogamous relationships,

but other people used it in the way that I was using it initially to understand or talk about my own relationship with my husband, which was mostly monogamous at the time. How do you and your husband deal with jealousy? Because as coming from a very, I guess the term would be heteronormative relationship myself, where we are monogamous, no H, I struggle to imagine how we would handle the jealousy.

Do you feel jealousy in your relationship, even though you are monogamous? Yeah, most people who are monogamous sometimes experience jealousy. I don't want to be, you know, blasé to the fact that if your partner is actually having sex with other people, you might occasionally feel perhaps a

more acute form of jealousy, or more intense and immediate jealousy. Certainly you do, but it's not like jealousy isn't an emotion that monogamous people have to deal with. A lot of people who are in open relationships or who are not in open relationships and think about open relationships regard jealousy as somehow a disqualifier that your capacity to feel jealousy means that a non monogamous relationship wouldn't be right for you, or you can't imagine how it would work for anybody. Jealousy in the

context of an open or monogamous relationship sometimes means that you need to check in or you need some reassurance that you're feeling insecure. Maybe your partner is being thoughtless or taking you for granted in some way or making assumptions about what's permissible or impermissible that aren't true, and you need to communicate more. What's great about monogamy, and I'm

one of those open poly people who is willing to acknowledge that there are advantages to monogamy. For a lot of people, there's more emotional security, there's certainly more safety from sexually transmitted infections, there's paternal security, you're not going to get anybody else pregnant. You're not gonna get pregnant by somebody else.

So I'm willing to acknowledge what's superior about monogamy, at least in theory. Like a lot of people think they're in monogamous relationships and find out at some point that they actually weren't in a monogamous relationship. And now I've lost my place again. This is the problem with these questions about monogamy. It's just like, it's such a,

you start peeling the layers off this onion and you can forget which layer you're on at some point. Jealousy is something you experience in open relationships. It's usually a sign that you need to communicate more. Oh, that's one of the things, that's the point of trying to make about monogamy. We all know what it is. It's very clean and clear. Two people in a monogamous relationship don't have sex with anybody else but each other. Sometimes two people in a monogamous relationship don't have sex with

each other or anybody else, which can be a problem. Sexlessness, boredom in monogamous relationships can be a real problem. In an open relationship or monogamous relationship, problem. In an open relationship or monogamous relationship, it's much more complicated. It's really what the couple decides to do or evolves toward doing. Terry and I now describe ourselves not as monogamous, but as poly. We were monogamous, then we were open, now we're poly. And that wasn't like one day we said, okay, we're going to move into polyamory. It was that at a certain point, you're like, well, we actually have these long-term relationships with other people. And we have to acknowledge that these are concurrent romantic relationships and not discreet encounters outside of our primary relationship. And so now we're poly. Right. So you and your husband live in Seattle. We are talking though, I'm in Miami giving a talk and you are in a European country. I won't name just for privacy reasons for

you, even though you didn't ask me to do it. I'm just guessing that that would be helpful. But you're with your boyfriend on a different continent. So like, I get that that's part of a polyamorous relationship. You have multiple relationships and I'm like How does that go down with your husband? um It goes down. I'm not going to touch that one. You didn't touch my soft palate joke and I'm not going to talk about going down with my husband I didn't mean that I didn't

I know I know um You there was there was a malice of forethought with a soft palate. Yeah, that actually was. That was a dirty joke. I tried to slip into your show. We'll see if it survives the edit. No, no, it will survive. We're pro dirty jokes here. Terry and I have been together almost 30 years. It is true of a lot of people in open or poly relationships that there was a long period of monogamy or sexual exclusivity or even emotional exclusivity of not sexual exclusivity at the beginning. And then the longer you're together

and the more secure you are in your relationship, the more your relationship could evolve and change over time. And what works for us now, in our almost into our fourth decade, wouldn't have worked for us in our first decade. And we didn't do or attempt or even want to do in our first decade. But this works for us now.

So how is it for my husband that I have a boyfriend? It's fine for my husband that I have a boyfriend. He has a boyfriend too. And his boyfriend lives with us in Seattle, lives in our house. So kind of polyamory that some people call and I hate to sound like a lot of poly people out there can be boring and hectoring about it or seem pedantic about it. But it's a kind of poly called kitchen table polyamory. I sometimes trip up and call it kitchen sink polyamory, like everything in the kitchen sink, where you know, I spend time with my husband and his boyfriend and we hang out and have meals

together and talk and we have a relationship also. It's a different kind of relationship. There's not a lot of terms for it, you know, your husband's boyfriend and your boyfriend, you know, you have a boyfriend too. And it's just about kind of making space and early in a relationship and we were parents, early in a relationship, there's not a lot of space in a marriage for other people. The longer you're together, I think there's sometimes more space, more bandwidth, more capacity for other people. And it certainly keeps things interesting. with more capacity for other people. And it certainly keeps things interesting. You know, Terry and I have been together 30 years.

We have an adult child. A lot of couples in our position are both just kind of like looking at each other across the dining room table, wondering who's gonna die first. Terry and I have a lot to talk about. And sometimes there's conflict. There's conflict in all relationships. But sometimes there's conflict in ours.

There's a lot of things that we had to tensely negotiate. But yeah, right now I'm in Europe with my boyfriend in a very small country. So if you named it, somebody could probably find me. It wouldn't be too hard. And Terry's at home and I'll be home soon and with Terry and his boyfriend. So if you're at home on a Friday night,

it's the three of you and they're in another room having sex. That does not make you jealous. That does not make me jealous. No, that does not make me jealous. I'm not sure I'm convinced. If it's Friday night, you know, you have a husband and you I have a relationship with my husband's boyfriend. We're very close. Like we live together for six, seven years now. If it was Friday night and they just went off on their own to do whatever and didn't make plans with me or include me, I would be annoyed and upset and jealous.

Not about the sex, but about being taken for granted, about how inconsiderate that was. It's Friday night. It was a long week. I want to hang out with my husband, or maybe my husband's boyfriend. We're going to go to a movie or go out to dinner. We're going to do something. You're not just going to ditch me. So I would be jealous if they ditched me and didn't include me. That doesn't mean they have to have sex with me. That doesn't mean they can't have sex. They can and they do. It just means they can't be thoughtless about when.

Is it your view that, and I realize that a lot of these questions are making me seem hopelessly out of touch and I just want to own that. But is it your view that this model can be ported over to straight couples pretty seamlessly? I think it's a little trickier for straight couples, for a lot of reasons. I think it's easier for gay men to be in open relationships

than it is for straight couples to be in open relationships. That said, there are a lot of straight people out there who are practicing non-monogamy, who are in open or polyamorous relationships, and it has burst the dam of San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, where there were a lot of straight people who were open or poly. More and more straight people are adopting at least monogamish as a potential relationship model for them, recognizing that, you know, what works at a certain point, stage in a relationship, isn't what'll work entirely for the life of a relationship,

and that you can be monogamous or not be monogamous and evolve together as a couple, or, you know, in our case, a quad over time. But, you know, it's scarier sometimes for women who fear abandonment, sexual jealousy. There's a lot of, I think, hundreds, thousands of years of the cultural impact of patriarchy and misogyny that can make non-monogamy harder for women often. That said, there are studies that show that, you know, there's a lot of sexless relationships out there and there's a lot of women who experience low desire and that can have a negative impact

on a relationship. And often what people in sexless opposite sex marriages are facing is a kind of boredom. And while I don't think nonmonogamy can be adopted by everyone, nor should it be adopted by everyone. There are certain people out there who are nonmonogamous can be adopted by everyone, nor should it be adopted by everyone. There are certain people out there who are nonmonogamous, who due to monogamous people, what monogamous people always did to nonmonogamous people,

which was point to finger and say, you're doing it wrong and our way is better. And I don't think that's true. When Terry and I were monogamous, that was the right way at that time for us in our relationship. This is now the right way for us at this time in our relationship. And so there are people out there who are monogamous and it is absolutely

the right thing for them at this time. And that time may last for the rest of their married lives or the rest of their lives together. But there are a lot of people out there who are bored and sexual boredom and dysfunction in a relationship can really be, it can be a cancer, it can grow on a relationship and kill it. How do you control for that boredom? This comes up in the column all the time. Like it's the age old question that sex advice columnists and regular advice columnists get. How do you get the spark back? And people look at their relationships and think something died. And what they don't recognize is at the beginning of the relationship, when you had just met

or we're just getting to know each other, the adventure was effortless. You were the adventure they were on, they were the adventure you were on. After you're together a decade, you're going to probably be bored. Like that sense of adventurousness, the courtes, the, the cortisone, the stress hormone, but also the adrenaline that's kind of drained out of the relationship. And then people look at the relationship, they go, there's something wrong with the relationship. And it's just actually the circumstances. And if there's

anything that people who want to have successful monogamous relationships that are resilient and go the distance can learn from non-monogamous people is how to combat that boredom. Easier perhaps and more obvious for how non-monogamous people can combat that boredom. But a couple that's been together a long time and are monogamous and want to maintain that monogamous relationship rather than faulting each other for the fact that it doesn't feel so sexy anymore and it doesn't feel like an adventure anymore, or faulting the relationship.

They just have to recognize that they can get that sense of adventurous sort of connection, that spark back, but it's not a default anymore. You're not the adventure they're on anymore, they're not the adventure you're on anymore. If you want to feel that sense of adventure and possibility, again, you have to link arms and go on an adventure together.

You have to create excitement for each other, whereas at the beginning, you were excitement for each other. What do you recommend to people who feel like they're in a relationship where they still love each other but they're bored and they wanna stay monogamous and they wanna add that spark back in? What are the tactics you recommend? The first and sometimes the hardest thing for people to do is admit their board to say

that out loud to your partner. If you're bored, your partner's probably bored. And then what do you do about it? The problem with saying that out loud is often that it sounds like an accusation. I'm bored, therefore you're failing me somehow sexually. It really helps diffuse that bomb if what you're saying when you say you're bored, therefore, you're failing me somehow sexually. It really helps diffuse that bomb with what you're saying when you say you're bored. If you back it up with, that's not anything you did.

It's not a failure on your part or my part. It's just chronology. It's just time together. This was inevitable. And so what do we do now? It can be as simple as, you know, breaking out of your sexual routines, getting out of the house, breaking out of your sexual routines, getting

out of the house, getting out of the bed, surprising each other again. I've recommended to people who are still attracted to each other and still interested in sex. Not everybody, not every marriage has to have sex in it at all for it to be happy, healthy, and fulfilling for both partners. One of the things I talk about all the time, and I think we need to talk about more, are successful companionate relationships and companionate marriages. If neither person is having sex or much interested in sex and neither person is miserable or discontent, there's no problem in that marriage or that relationship. If one person is unhappy, there's going to be problem in that relationship.

Often it's the case that both people are unhappy and they want to get back to it. And I've said to those people who aren't happy being in the companionate relationship, who want to get back to it, agree to have sex once this week, just once. Sometimes sex advice people say every day this week, makes it too much like one more thing you got to get done. Once this week, not in your too much like one more thing you got to get done. Once this week, not in your house, not in your bed, and one person has to initiate. And then, you know, you're at work and your wife walks into your office. Well, it means you're going to get late at work,

and that's going to be risky and dangerous. And adrenaline and cortisone are going to flood your system as you try to find, I don't know, a far off conference room where you won't get caught or a single seat or bathroom that has a lock and or a hallway stairwell. You're going to have to, you're going to have to take a risk and risk taking is what makes sex so exciting at the beginning of a relationship. You don't know this person. They don't know you. You don't know if they're safe or dangerous. And yet

you're getting completely undressed with them and taking a chance on them. And what you, to bring that spark back when you've been together a long time, you need to take that chance with them. You need to have sexual adventures together. Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense to bring back the adventure if that spirit has fizzled. And people just don't see that, they just take it for granted. Like this felt so adventurous at the beginning and it doesn't anymore,

something's wrong with the relationship. No, actually the longer you're together, it's a good sign when that sense of adventure dissipates, because what has been replaced with is something that's really of equal value, stability, intimacy, familiarity, comfort, regularity, dependability, constancy. These are wonderful compensations for the draining away of that sense of adventure that is just present at the beginning that you have to manipulate the relationship to bring back after that first five, ten years.

Coming up, Dan Savage talks about why it's so hard for straight couples to talk about sex, his contention that a couple is an illusion anyway, the importance of disappointment in long-term relationships and his very popular acronym GGG. What does that mean? Hi, I'm Anna. And I'm Emily. We're the hosts of Wanderies podcast Terribly Famous, a show where we bring you outrageous true stories about our most famous celebrities.

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The challenge kicks off on February 5th. One of the things I've heard you talk about is, have gotten good at talking about sex. Whereas straight couples, you might have to talk about it on the first time, but then you stop talking about it. And there's a utility, and it can bring you back to the adventure if you're doing more talking about it. Can you, I don't know if I'm summing you up well here, but can you expand on that?

Well, the thing I say to bait people, straight people, straight audiences, is that gay people are better at sex than straight people are. And it's not because we're magic, it's not because we're unicorns, it's because we have to communicate. And straight people can avoid communicating about sex.

When an opposite sex couple get to yes, they get to consent to sexual activity that first time, that's usually the end of the conversation because PIV, penis and vagina, sex is the default setting, it's where it's headed, maybe there'll be a little bit before play, but that's where we're going. And there's nothing left to discuss. When two men go to bed together for the first time and they get to, yes, it's the beginning of the conversation because who's going to do what to who at that moment can't be assumed. Even if anal intercourse is on the menu and it isn't always for gay sex, that's one of the things that straight people could learn from gay people about sex is we have very broad definitions of sex.

A lot of things count. The numbers of times I've talked to straight guys who I've said, like straight friends, did you get laid this weekend? They're going, no, I just got a blow job. I'm like, well, in gay land, that's getting laid. But in straight land, that's a tragic consolation prize, I guess, and not sex. I don't know what if I would call it tragic. Well, that's sometimes how people act about it. Like, this was my lovely parting

gift instead of sex. Like, that's sex and that can be great sex. But we have to keep... Everybody acknowledges, like every mainstream marital counselor acknowledges that good communication brings you closer together as a couple and can improve your sex life. Gay people don't communicate more with each other about sex because we want to, we do it because we have to. Straight people don't have to and often don't. Some straight people do,

but straight people can avoid that conversation that gay people can't avoid. I don't know if you saw there was Netflix had a really dumb gay rom-com called Red, White and Royal Blue and it was about a gay relationship between the son of the American president and member of the royal family, the prince, and they were two men and they're gonna have intercourse for the first time. And it was one of the things this movie got right about gay sex was one of them said, well, who's gonna, what are we gonna,

they got to yes and then they kept talking and negotiating about what was gonna happen. If straight people could learn to do just that, I call it the four magic words that begin every gay encounter. What are you into? Question mark. When I was asked that question when I was 1817 18, and just beginning to have sex with gay men, like me, it was so empowering, because I was being

asked what I wanted, what I was willing to do, what I felt comfortable doing. And I could rule anything in or anything out at that moment. Straight people don't ask each other that question when they have sex. What are you into? What do you want? What do you want to do? What are you comfortable with?

And it sometimes blows straight guy's minds when I talk about the four magic words, what are you into? And often when you ask that question, what you hear from the other guy is, well, I'm not into anal. Something like 30% of gay men aren't into anal intercourse at all. And this person has just said yes to sex, but then they've ruled out anal intercourse. Imagine if you're a straight guy and you asked a woman, what are you into? And she said, I'm not into vaginal. The straight guy would think, well, I guess you don't want to have sex at all.

Right? Because isn't vaginalasional intercourse, straight sex. And sure it is, but lots of other things can be straight sex too. One of my horses I get up on is I want people to have as broad a definition of sex as possible, because you'll have more sex and you'll have a more interesting sex life and a more fulfilling sex life. And as narrow a definition of cheating as possible, because then you're less likely to get cheated on. And, you know, one of the things I, if I hope this isn't too dirty for your show, but I'm always telling straight guys, if every time you said yes to sex, if every time you consented, you got fucked in the ass, you would

probably not say yes as often as you would otherwise. If every time a woman says yes to sex, she's saying yes to being penetrated, yes to being on the receiving end of PIV sex, that is going to disincentivize saying yes as often as she might otherwise. If sometimes she could say yes to sex but not being penetrated. If sometimes saying yes to sex meant mutual masturbation or meant oral sex, mutual oral sex, not just her performing oral sex, or fantasy play, or vertage,

or any of the other million, billion things that I think count as sex that a lot of straight people, men and women, think aren't sex. So just get in the habit of asking these four magic words with a question mark. What are you into? What do you want?

Get to yes and keep talking. That's why gay people have more sex and are better at sex than straight people are. I mean, you can't be a gay person if you haven't opened your mouth and said something, right? You have to say say I'm gay, at least to yourself before you download the app or walk into the gay bar. If you've come out to your family and friends, you've had to say it. And then communicating with your sex partner or your

boyfriend about what it is that you want or who it is that you are isn't as scary. Straight people are often terrified about having conversations about who they are, what they want, what their expectations are for fear of rejection. And if you're a gay person and you're 18 years old and you're out to your family, you have stared rejection down. You are not afraid of it.

You've confronted it. You use the word terrified. That just kind of just brings me back to Minagamish for a second because I'm not sure we fully exhausted that. If people in Managa-Mos relationships are toying with the idea of Managa Mish, I do want to go back to the terror around jealousy. I think I can just project a little viewpoint that if it was Friday night and I'm taking care of our son and my wife's out partying and I know to a near certainty

that she's having sex with somebody, that's gonna be a hard night for me to sleep. So... Then monogamous wouldn't be right for you. Okay, well, I'm not saying, I don't think it is right for me, but I do think there are other people who are wondering whether it's right for them,

but this is the hang up. And then maybe it's not right for them either or I do think there are other people who are wondering whether it's right for them, but this is the hang up. And then maybe it's not right for them either or not right at this time. One of the things you read about heterosexual swinging, organized heterosexual swinging events, and it's a cliche about couples who've gotten into swinging, mate swapping, key parties, all those cliches from the ice storm, that terrific movie, kind of apply. But there's an organized heterosexual swingers movement. I've attended giant swingers events, straight ones at hotels to write about them. You would be surprised at the numbers of people who I've met there who are Republicans and from Texas. And it's not just something for crunchy

granola types in San Francisco who go to Burning Man and party with Grover Norquist. But most couples, it's a truism of organized heterosexual swinging that most of these couples are older, and so their children are grown or more independent, and that relay race of mutual dependence and stress early in the relationship has dissipated and lessened. And so it's not that if your wife was out with somebody else partying, that you were stuck at home taking care of the kids, you might be out with somebody else partying too, or your wife and you together might be at one of these giant hotel takeovers in Dallas partying together. That's not, it sounds like I'm suggesting that this is something that everybody should do. Or if everybody could just like, I reject the idea

that if everybody was just open minded enough, everyone would be non monogamous. I don't think that's true. I think monogamy works for a lot of people. I think companion at relationships that are often sexless work for a lot of people. Certainly a lot of people. I think companionate relationships that are often sexless work for a lot of people. Certainly a lot of people are in those kinds of relationships, but we don't want people that monogamy doesn't work for to make monogamous commitments they can't keep, because that's a disaster for the person in that relationship who could keep the monogamous commitment. We want people to know that non-monogamy, openness,

polyamorous relationships are valid choices and can be lasting relationships and good and committed relationships so that people who can't do monogamy stop trying and stop wasting of the time, you know, people who can. I was, I tried to be monogamous to my first relationship and I couldn't do it. And I thought I was a terrible person. And then I realized I wasn't failing monogamy, monogamy was failing me. And when I stopped trying to do this thing, I couldn't really do the quality of my relationships improved. And one of the things I've often heard is I'll have the conversation with somebody who will say to me after hearing the rough outline of how Terry and I live and what our relationships are like,

I could never do what you and Terry do because I value commitment too highly. All of my marriages were monogamous. And I look at them and I'm like, all right. So what you were committed to was monogamy, not any of the people that you married. Exactly. And I guess that you married. Exactly. And I guess that's valid.

I don't think a relationship has to end in a funeral home for it to have been a success. People can have starter marriages, there's a book about it, and then move on to new relationships. And if you're able to be in each other's lives and think well of each other after a marriage ends or relationship ends, I think you can count that relationship of success. But for me to have people tell me over and over again that they couldn't be in an open relationship because they value commitment too highly, when I am still with my husband of 30 years, I'm with him differently than other people are with their husbands of 30 years or 30 minutes. But we're still together. We are committed to each other. We are not committed to sexual exclusivity. I think it's personally, I think it's really healthy

that these assumptions are being reexamined on the level of the culture. And I think this is happening in many aspects of the culture, but I think it's great that we're reexamining monogamy as a default setting because as you have said,, re-examining monogamy as a default setting, because as you have said, and I love this quote, monogamy is literally the only thing humans attempt where perfection is the only metric of success. And that is not me, I'm not saying that to people who want monogamy to try to talk them out of monogamy. I want people to be realistic about

what that means and have realistic expectations of their monogamous relationships. So if or when their monogamous relationship falls short of their expectations, it can survive. You know, Sean White is the world's greatest snowboarder. Sean White falls down on a mountain and gets up and he's still the world's greatest snowboarder. white falls down on a mountain and gets up and he's still the world's greatest snowboarder. Somebody finds out after 60 years of marriage that their spouse cheated once and they tell themselves they never loved me and our marriage was a lie. Not my spouse loved me and fell down one time and so therefore it was really good at monogamy. If you're with somebody for 50 years and they cheated on you twice, they were really good at monogamy, not bad at monogamy. And I don't say that to people who are in monogamous relationships to make them paranoid or to talk them into

being in open relationships. I say that so that when infidelity happens, when there's that betrayal in a monogamous relationship. That relationship can endure it, withstand it, survive. We talk about monogamy, I've said a million times, the way we talk about virginity. You're monogamous until you have sex with somebody else. You popped your monogamy hymen and it's over, not monogamous. We should talk about monogamy the way we talk about sobriety.

You can fall off the wagon and then sober the fuck back up. And me saying that to people in monogamous relationships is me trying to do them the favor of if or when they confront, you know, there's an affair that they can see past it to a point where they can still be in that monogamous point where they can still be in that monogamous enough, mostly monogamous, nearly perfectly monogamous relationship for another two decades. You were on recently with Ezra Klein, who I like and respect a lot on his podcast. And you said something that really struck me as a kind of idea. You said a couple is an idea.

A couple is something two individuals agreed to pretend to be together. And I say that's Buddhist because in Buddhism we talk a lot about the sin illusion that we're all walking around pretending to be something much more substantial than we actually are. And I love the idea of scaling that up to a couple. A couple is a myth that two people create together. It's a story that two people tell

each other most intimately, and then two people turn and face the world and tell the world about who they are to each other and what they mean. And you can revise that story, you can rewrite that story, you can edit that story, you can edit that story. You know, every story, things get left out, right? Or it's not a story, it's just data pouring out at you. And I think that's true of couples. And what you said about, we are a story that that's a tentative Buddhism that makes total intuitive sense, like our concept of self, who we believe ourselves to be, I always think of that Vonnegut line, we are who we pretend to be. We are who

we pretend to be to each other. And what can be I think a nobling about a long term relationship is, you know, there's the person that you pretend to be when you meet your partner, your best self, you put your best foot forward, and then you wind up in a long-term relationship with this person, and then they see you for who you really are. They see behind the facade, the Potemkin village, they get a look behind and they love you still, and they pay you the honor of pretending you are the Potemkin village version

of yourself that you pretended to be when you met. And then you kind of have to live up to that better version of yourself. And they do too. They have to live up to that Potemkin version of themselves. And in that process of living up to the story you told, I think you can become closer to being that better version of yourself.

And that's the struggle in a, I think all long-term relationships is, on the one hand, your partner lied to you and misrepresented themselves at the beginning of the relationship and you know it and you've come to see it. And what are you gonna do with that? Are you gonna take the compliment, embed it in the lie that they told

because they wanted to be with you and they wanted to be this better version of themselves? Or are you gonna be angry that they aren't perfect, that they aren't who they pretended to be? Or are you gonna help them come closer to becoming who they pretended to be? Which is, I think, a long-term relationship is. I'm a better person for the decades I've spent with Terry trying to be the person I pretended

to be the night I met Terry. I've been very influenced in this regard by a guy named Michael Vincent Miller, who is a couples counselor with me and my wife. And also he's written, he wrote a book called Intimate Terrorism, which he often hastens to add was written before 9-11, so it was a little bit less provocative. I mean, he's working on a new book, and when that book is finished, we'll have him back on.

But he talks a lot about the value of disappointment in long-term relationships. That is a moment that every couple will go through, where you are disappointed, where you feel you've bought a bill of goods, and what is gonna happen then what is going to happen then? What is going to happen then? You're going to love, forgive, and go on. Terry and I, you know, we've come, we've screamed divorce in each other's faces. We've had knockdown,

drag out arguments. We were in couples counseling for a year about five, six years ago. And what we arrived at was, we're gonna love, support and leave each other or we're gonna love, support and let each other. And we chose love, support and let. And I am, Terry is a different person now than he was when we met, a different person now than he was, you know, the first 15 years we were together.

And I'm, you know, Terry jokes that I'm the exact same person that I never change, but I'm a different person too. And if you can let your partner grow and change, and you can grow and change while still trying to live up to the Potemkin Village versions of yourself you presented the night you met, you can fall in love again with your partner. You can resent them for changing, resent them for being imperfect, or you can fall in love again with your partner. You can resent them for changing, resent them for being imperfect, or you can love them for giving you the opportunity

at some point fall in love with an entirely new person. And how exciting can that be? And if you're in open relationship, also fall in love with entirely new people. Let me ask you about another term you coined that has gotten a lot of uptake in the larger culture, GGG. What does that stand for? Good giving and game, which is what I think people need to be for their sex partners and should expect their sex partners to be for them. That GGG is a two-way boulevard.

their sex partners to be for them, that that GGG is a two-way boulevard. Good in bed takes some time to develop, especially if you've been exposed to way too much in pornography early in life and it shaped your expectations around what sex is. It takes time to get good at it, which can often mean just paying attention to a partner and being responsive and communicative. Giving means sometimes, particularly in a long-term relationship, sometimes you give pleasure, you meet a need without an immediate return, without being pleasureed yourself in that moment. And, you know, as you roll forward in the relationship,

the reciprocity comes. Reciprocity doesn't always come immediately. That's what giving means. Sometimes I'm just meeting my partner's need and not having necessarily my need met in that moment. And game game is the one that sometimes gets me in trouble. Game for anything within reason people when they attack me for GGG usually leave within reason off. It's good giving and game me for GGG usually leave within reason off. It's good giving and game for anything within reason. It's dicey as for me as a gay man to say to women who are socialized to defer

to men prioritize men's needs over their own worry more about pleasing than being pleased that you should meet your partner's needs if you possibly can because women will often be pressured to do things actually they're not comfortable doing or don't want to do or maybe doing to please their partner and then if the relationship goes south or there's not a lot of mutual pleasure or concern, they'll feel hurt or accumulated or degraded by having done. But if we want particularly sexually exclusive relationships to function and be healthy, and last, people have to meet each other's needs. You know, if you want your partner only to have sex

with you for the rest of your life, you, I think, have to meet your partner's to have sex with you for the rest of your life, you'd, I think, have to meet your partner's reasonable sexual needs. And a lot of people have kinks and kinks can't be wished away. Sex is powerful. We talk about sex. One of the things we're told when we're kids is we will grow up one day and have sex. And the reality is we grow up one day and sex has us. We have desires, needs, sexual interests, fantasies, and the more in the context of a committed sexual exclusive relationship, the more of those needs are met fantasies are indulged to realize the happier and more connected and content these people in that couple are going to be. So, you know,

sometimes I get specific and graphic about what I think falls under within reason. If your partner has a foot fetish, letting somebody play with your feet, kiss or lick your feet, what does that deprive you? I don't understand how some people can't go there. Maybe if you're like crazy ticklish, that could be a problem. But if it's just, ew, yuck, that's not normal. You can get over, ew, yuck, that's not normal. With human sexuality, variance is the norm.

And partialism is a common sexual, I don't wanna say affliction, I think it's kind of a superpower. And foot fetishism is a form of partialism. So I've gotten letters, I've gotten calls, my show from people who are like, I broke up with somebody because he had a foot fetishism is a form of partialism. So I've gotten letters, I've gotten calls, my show from people who are like, I broke up with somebody because he had a foot fetish. And I always think, oh my God,

dump the honest foot fetishist who shared that with you and you're gonna marry the dishonest necrophiliac. You're gonna wind up married to somebody who hid, just because of karma, you're gonna wind up married to somebody who hid something actually disqualifying from you. So a fetish like that, a sexual interest like that, I think a person should be able to be up for that, game for that.

More extreme or degrading or physically challenging or taxing things that I'm not going to name, those aren't reasonable expectations. And the internet now exists so that people with really crazy kinks can find each other and date and not, you know, have to necessarily spring these things on potentially vanilla partners. And Amy Muse is a sex researcher at Queens University, and she calls it intimate communal strength. And she literally in her papers, research papers published in peer review journals about intimate

communal strength calls it a her fancy way of saying ggg and there's studies of couples where one person stepped out of their comfort zone to meet a sexual need of their partners and what she found was that was surprising wasn't just that the person who was being indulged felt better about the relationship more cared for felt closer to their partner. But the person who was doing the indulging, the person who was stepping outside their comfort zone to meet that need, also felt those things

about the relationship. They didn't feel degraded, they didn't feel debased, because they were doing something they didn't wanna do, they felt closer. And that's where it gets problematic, GGG, when I'm talking to heterosexual couples, which I almost always am, is I am saying that when it comes to sex sometimes you should do things that you don't want to do or

that you didn't think of or that weren't your idea or that weren't your sexual interest or kink because they're your partners and you should be motivated to meet their reasonable needs. When it comes to sex, people often have this reaction where they go, you know, somebody says, I want to do or I'm interested in or this is who I am erotically and if it's not something that you're interested in or who you aren't erotically, a kind of sex-negative culture encourages you to kind of recoil and say, ooh, yuck. And if you think about it for a minute and instead of saying, oh, no, you just say, oh, and leave the no for now, it may be something that you reacted to negatively not because you

couldn't or shouldn't or wouldn't actually find some way to enjoy something about it might vibe for you. But you recoiled because it was not your thing. It was unfamiliar. And if you can just like not recoil and think about it and sit with it and not shame your partner for sharing who they are and BGGG, which does not mean meet all needs. It does not mean do anything and everything. I also talk about the price of admission that people pay when you enter into a relationship. Sometimes the price of admission is there are things if you wanna be with this person

that just aren't gonna happen for you sexually, sexual interests that you might have to only explore if you're in an exclusive relationship through fantasy or you know, pornography, but you're never gonna actually get to do ever ever again or at all because your partner who you love doesn't want to do these things and isn't comfortable doing these things. And that's a price of mission you're willing to pay to be in this relationship. Okay, then pay it and don't complain about it and accept the relationship. There's a nuance to GGG that sometimes gets left out of the critiques of GGG.

There's a nuance to GGG that sometimes gets left out of the critiques of GGG. Right. So GGG improperly understood could be weaponized against women, but if properly understood within reason clause given the weight it is due, it's good for everybody. It's good for everybody. And reason and what's reasonable within reason is subjective. And you know, one person's, this is reasonable, it's another person's, you've got to be kidding me in no way. And people are entitled to those subjective opinions and experiences and attitudes toward sexual activity. Coming up, Dan talks about how to get good at sex,

how the landscape around sex has changed in the three decades he's been writing, and the unique challenges of sex and dating right now. I'm Afua Hirsch. And I'm Peter Frankipen. And in our new podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we delve into the life of Pablo Picasso. The ultimate giant of modern art, everyone has heard of or seen of Picasso work,

or the Picasso brand on something. But a man with a complicated, difficult, personal side too, that makes us look at his art in a different way. He was a genius and he was very problematic. Follow Legacy Now wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge entire seasons of Legacy ad-free on Amazon Music or by subscribing to Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app.

Hello, I'm Alice Levine and I am one of the hosts of British Scandal. So I want you to imagine that you're being offered £500,000 to introduce someone to your ex. I mean the answer is still no. So you shake hands and agree to do it. But it's all about to get a hell of a lot more complicated because the you in this story is Fergie, the Duchess of York, ex-wife of Prince Andrew and the person who's offered you half a million pounds is an undercover tabloid reporter who's recorded the whole conversation. I want just one more thing, promise, last one. It's all about to appear on the front page of the news of the world.

In the latest season of British Scandal, we take you inside the story of the so called fake shake, the investigative journalist Mazem Amoud, and the series of explosive sting operations he used to con public figures, from Fergie to singer Tleesa and former England football coach Sven Gorin Ericsson. Follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Wondry Plus,

on Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app. Honestly, a million pounds and I still wouldn't introduce you to him. And that's for your sake. Let me go back to the first G, good. You said it takes a while to get good. How does one get good? Practice, practice, practice. Just how you get to kind of get home, right? A human body, a human being is a lot more complicated

than a violin and no one can play the violin the first time they pick one up. But people have this expectation that sex should be spontaneous and natural and instinctive and certain parts of it perhaps are, but the playfulness of it, the intimacy, the slow rolling out, the approach, foreplay, all of these things require some skill, practice,

input, perceptiveness to input. It just takes time. The things that you enjoy, the things that you've seen, often now people see a lot of sex before they have sex that you might wanna do or try, you need to take baby steps and slowly approach them to develop the skill set to actually do the if I don't want to be too exposed to

kind of lingus. I've read a lot about it. I've written a lot about it. Never done it. It's complicated. And it's one woman's preferred style of kind of lingus is very different from another woman's preferred style of kind ofilingus. And you may have, you know, your first female partner and you're performing oral sex at her and it works for her just whatever it is that you busted out whatever moves you had, worked for her and Yatsi you were very lucky. What's likelier is you're going

to have to ask get feedback, take direction, learn what works for her, and then with your next female partner, it might be very different. I think what makes people good is that ability to read somebody's physical cues, which is actually how most people wish sex worked exclusively, but also solicit their verbal input and direction. And if you can get good at that, and doing that in a sexy way, doing that, you know, people are like, Oh, you shouldn't have to

ask for consent at every moment, or instructions at every moment, because that's deeply unsexy. There is a way to actually ask for consent. In the moment, Jinx Monsoon, whose podcast I love, she's a drag performer called Asking for Consent Verbal Foreplay. And asking for direction can be a kind of verbal foreplay, asking for input, which can be as simple as, does this feel good? But people have it in their heads that,

if anybody is using their words during sex that there's something wrong because it should just Happen spontaneously and quote-unquote naturally And it doesn't good sex doesn't let me loop back to something else you said that piqued my interest Partializing is a superpower Kinks are a kind of superpower Partialism, somebody who feels, a man who feels about feet and it's almost always men, men are much more inclined,

some sex difference between men and women to have a fetish like a foot fetish, which is, they feel about feet the way other men feel about breasts. And there's a kind of pro-breasts bias that suggests that feeling about feet the way other men feel about breasts is a kind of sexual misdirection or erotic misdirection and it's been

labeled partialism. The thing that people often don't realize about kinks if they have kinks early in their life is there are wonderful sorting hat. Because of your kinks, because of your unique sexual interests, you will find yourself, if you really explore sexually, if you prioritize sexual compatibility in your relationship, as I believe people should, and people to disastrous consequence often don't. you end up in relationship with as a result of connecting with them sexually are people that you wouldn't have met otherwise, experiences you wouldn't have had, places you wouldn't have gone. If my boyfriend and I didn't have overlapping sexual interests that we established at the beginning of the relationship before we established, you know, emotional compatibility, we would never have met. Like the kink brought us together and it has that power. You mentioned before that you've been attacked over GGG.

I think you've been attacked over lots of stuff and it's just interesting. You've been talking about this most sensitive of issues, sex and intimacy relationships for 33 years. In that time, the culture has changed so much. And so what are your, how do you handle that? How do you handle when, you know, people go back and look at something you said 20 years ago and say, that's out of pocket

now, et cetera, et cetera. It's hard. The internet really distorted the space time continuum. There are columns I wrote 25, 30 years ago that with one Google search, they can be called up and all the ads around the column are from, you know, movies or products that are available now. So it looks like I wrote it today, but I wrote it 30 years ago and a column,

any sort of writing is thinking aloud and your thinking will change and evolve over time. And the outrage Olympics that is the internet and the jockeying for status that goes on on sites like Twitter or X, whatever it is now, it really incentivizes yanking things out of context to generate outrage or disparage someone that you don't care for.

So yeah, things I wrote 30 years ago about male bisexuality or things I wrote 15 years ago when I first heard about asexuality, about asexuality. If they get posted now, removed from context, and there's a link back to my newspaper, it looks like I wrote it today. And I don't know what to do with that. That, you know, used to be when I was a kid, if you wanted to read, you know, Mike Reiko's 20-year-old columns, you had to go to the Chicago Public Library and look them up on microfilm. And then you were like, also seeing ads for 20, 30, 40-year-old movies. And the context clues you got, seeing those old

columns were like, this may not be what he thinks today He wrote this a long time ago and that context clues writers get now on the internet or readers get now on the internet he thinks this right now and nothing's changed and I don't know what you can do about that except push back against it I Get into arguments with people on the internet less so, because I'm less inclined to argue with people who I think are arguing in bad faith on the internet than I used to be. But a lot's changed.

You know, one of the things that, I wanna jump back to something you said at the very beginning, heteronormative lifestyles, the heteronormative lifestyle being opposite sex, married, monogamous kids. We know now that there's nothing hetero necessarily lifestyle being opposite sex, married, monogamous kids, we know now that there's nothing hetero necessarily about the hetero normative lifestyle. Straight people married and had kids

and defaulted to monogamy and gay people didn't do that. Not because gay people weren't capable of raising children or being married because we weren't allowed to. And so that made the lifestyle or the lives that straight people lived look like something gay people couldn't do when it was something we weren't allowed to do. And what you see now is you see a lot of gay people

living the quote unquote heteronormative lifestyle and a lot of straight people living the quote unquote gay lifestyle. I'm old enough to remember, you know, Jerry Falwell Sr, the founder of the moral majority, and one of his paranoid critiques of the gay rights movement and people living openly as gay people, I think has kind of been borne out. One of his concerns was that straight people would see how gay people were living and want that too. Want that kind of hedonism, multiple sexual partners, those kinds of sexual adventures, sex for pleasure. And what you've seen now in the last like 20, 30 years is more and more straight people living like gay people until they're 35, 40, and then marrying and having kids. And gay people living like gay people until they're 35 or 40 and then marrying and sometimes having kids. There's been this great, I think, boom to straight people.

You're probably old enough to remember, as I remember, all the books, plays, movies, articles about the midlife crisis, the great John Updike novels of the 60s plays, movies, articles about the midlife crisis, the great John Updike novels of the 60s and 70s, the midlife crisis afflicted people in their 40s because they woke up at 40 never having lived. And you hear much less about the midlife crisis today because straight people live a little before they settle down. My parents got married at 20 and had four kids by 24 and then divorced in their 40s

and blew their lives up because they had never had a chance to live their lives because they were acting out a script that had been written for them by their parents and their parents' parents going back to the generations. What I think you see now is people, the reason you don't see this, the literature of the midlife crisis or the films and plays about the midlife crisis is people don't have them.

It's not a common experience anymore because straight people live a little and they live a lot like gay people used to be required to live or only allowed to live in urban areas. Everything gay people did, straight people took and renamed. We had fuck buddies, you have friends with benefits, we had tricks, you have hookups, we were urban people and then along came the young urban professional yuppies that were straight people who were living in urban areas like gay people. We moved to the middle of the city and had these, you know,

sex in the city lives and then straight people began having them too. And it's been wonderful to watch over the last 30 years. So I just wanted to challenge that idea that heteronormative monogamous married kids, there are lots of heteronormative gay people out there. What does that mean then about heteronormativity? And there are lots of, I think, homonormative straight people out there. So what does that mean about homonormativity? That's an excellent point. I do think we've now entered, in my opinion,

I think it's good that straight people are acting more homonormative. I didn't get married until I was 38. And you knew who you were. Yeah, yes. I lived a very gay lifestyle for a long time and it was fun and then I knew who I was. And I got married, I sometimes joke,

I married my second wife. We have a very happy relationship. And but I think the new problem is what, this freedom can be dizzying and we now have what's often referred to as a paradox of choice, especially with, I missed the apps, my singlehood predated the apps, and that seems to the extent that I have any understanding

of it to be dizzying in good ways and bad ways. It is, dizzying in good ways and bad. A lot of people are writing right now about the sex recession. There's a lot of young men and young women who are single or may have never dated, never had sex, never had an intimate relationship. There do seem to be a lot of people out there who are a little paralyzed by the amount of choices. And there is a sense when you get on the apps that there is an

infinite number of potential partners out there. And the original paradox of choice studies send people into supermarkets and told them to pick up a jar of mustard or a jar of jam. And they would go to an aisle and there would be, you know, three jars of mustard to choose from and they would pick one and leave, or they would go to an aisle and there would be 400 different kinds of mustard and they would leave without picking a mustard. And there is something about apps that can make it seem like the aisle with the 400 jars of mustard in it and people will wander up and down that aisle and never pick. And that's the downside of the apps that that's still in some people that paralysis around having too many options.

it's stilling in some people that paralysis around having too many options. The upside of apps, we needed a place as the culture shifted away from it being basically anywhere a woman went, it was a free fire zone and any man who was interested could hit on them at work on the bus and the subway at school in the classroom. We needed places when people enter them, they're saying, you can approach me here, now is the right time. Not okay to hit on anybody at work anymore. It is okay if you get on the apps to approach people in a way that you can't approach them

or shouldn't approach them in other places. The problem with that though is then the people who do approach in those places are usually the people you wouldn't want to approach you. And the people who hang back and wait for an appropriate time or venue to approach you are the people that you might welcome the approach from wherever it came. Is this exposition just because of the paradox of choice or is it also because we are more digitally and physically distanced from one another than we've ever been before?

I think it's multi-causal. I think we're more physically distant from each other. I think our politics is in part driving this. The gender gap around voting is wider than it's ever been. the gender gap around voting is wider than it's ever been. I also think for 5,000 years, women were property. For 5,000 years, sex and relationships for women was a game of musical chairs where they eventually had to take a seat or they didn't exist socially. Women couldn't sign a lease, get a job, get a credit card. And men didn't even hear the music because women were just picking men and taking a seat at some point. Now women are free to have jobs, have credit cards. They're not as dependent on men. They're not as desperate to land a man because they don't need a man to exist professionally, socially, financially the way they used to.

professionally, socially, financially, the way they used to. And I don't think all men have caught up to the new reality that they are in competition and in contention for female attention, female partnership. And given a choice between a man who may feel entitled or a man who's sexist or no man at all, women will pick no man at all. And I think that's a big driver right now of this sex recession at this particular social and cultural moment. You know, these people who argue like that the sexual revolution was a mistake. What is it they want to return us to? They want to return us to a time when men really had this enormous advantage

because women had to find a man to exist socially, financially, professionally. They had to have a husband. And that's not true anymore. And thank God. And I don't want to return to a time where women were marrying under duress. And I don't think most men would want a wife

or a partner who married them under duress. But I think there are some men who are wandering around wondering why it was so easy for their fathers or grandfathers to find a wife or a girlfriend. And it's so much harder for them now. It's such a, it's such a interesting moment in human history. And I would imagine after 33 years of writing about this stuff that right now is probably the trickiest, most interesting point.

It is. It seems to be getting infinitely more complex. So much does. And I think that's part of the appeal. There's no getting out of a podcast without saying his name out loud of figures like Trump is the nationalism, that kind of authoritarianism is simple and life has gotten more complicated. And I think there's this hunger in many people for simple answers from simple people like Donald Trump.

My staff, my team kept saying how much I was going to enjoy this interview and they were right. You are absolutely a pleasure to talk to. Just let me ask my two habitual final questions. One is, is there something I should have asked but failed to ask? Oh my gosh. I always like to talk about urbanism and housing, which no one expects from someone who's been doing what I do for so long. We need to end single family zoning. I wish you'd asked me about single family zoning. The inability of cities to grow, to house the people that cities need to house and welcome the people.

I think it's part of what's driving our political crisis. Calamity right now is that the big urban centers most, and this is a fault of the Democrats. This is a problem that can be laid at the feet of blue cities in big blue states. The cities haven't grown and it's where the jobs are. And part of I think driving our political polarization is fewer people moving to cities where they can get employment, but also then be exposed to large populations

that are much more diverse because we aren't doing that. Cities can't play that role anymore because there isn't enough housing and people are being driven out of the cities. I think that is resulting in more people being politically more conservative than they would have been otherwise when that process was actually working in reverse,

when people migrated from rural areas and small towns to the big city and then got used to different kinds of people and began to see them with their full humanity. And that isn't happening anymore. And so people are more thinly spread and less likely to evolve culturally in the same way that they used to when cities were a draw. And right now cities are repelling people because of their housing policies. Yeah, there's a lot of data to show show from what I can tell that if you're interacting with different kinds of people, that is gonna open your mind.

That is really the most powerful way to get people to open their mind. Absolutely. Second habitual question, final one. Can you just, people, I imagine if they've listened thus far really would love to hear more from you. Where can they find your newsletter, your podcast, your books, where can they go?

Everything that I do can be found at savage.love. My column, Savage Love Still Runs, in a bunch of newspapers, but savage.love is where my column lives. I write Savage Love every week. I write a column called Struggle Session every week where I respond to comments and critiques from readers and listeners. And my podcast, which I've also been doing for a very long time, 17 years, the Savage Love Cast is at Savage.Love, as

are my books and everything else that's me. Dan, such a pleasure. Thank you for making time. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thanks again to Dan Savage, huge pleasure to meet him. By the way, as you may remember, My pleasure. Thank you for having me Thanks again to Dan Savage huge pleasure to meet him by the way as you may remember in that episode I mentioned Laurie Brotto who Researches mindfulness and sex we've put a link to that episode in the show notes as well as some other episodes We've done on sex and relationships Including interviews with Devon and Craig Haza and Myisha Battle.

Thank you for listening. We could not, would not do this without you. Thanks most of all to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davie Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. DJ Kashmir is our senior producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor. Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post production. Kimmy Regler is our

executive producer. Alicia Mackey leads our marketing and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts. Nick Thorburn of Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus and the Wondery App or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. I'm hiring, but where can I find potential candidates? Hundreds of thousands of Canadians with disabilities are ready and eager to work.

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