Music, and moving to music, is an expression of love, of course, but it’s more than that. Music taught me about love. I knew heartbreak before I felt it. I knew greater joy than a suburban Midwest kid with a dead mom ought to know, not just from lyrics, but from melody.

I used to wish I could create it, but the extent of my musical ability is playing Summertime on the harmonica. So, to explore my love of “love music,” and to (hopefully) delight you, dear readers, I’ve written this post: an analysis of the lessons the corny but lovable yacht rock classic “Escape — The Piña Colada Song” teaches us.3

The English-American author, playwright, composer, and singer-songwriter David Goldstein, known by the stage name Rupert Holmes, gifted us this one-hit-wonder in 1979. It couldn’t have been born in any other time, as I’ll explore in a forthcoming interview with my husband about masculinity, being a ‘good man,’ and Boomer wife-hating humor. But before we get deep, we’ll get superfiscial…

Here are the 9 lessons “Escape” infused in a young me, enjoying Kool 108, the Minneapolis Oldies station, to my dad’s dismay:

Women are often dissatisfied before their male partners

The song is about a male narrator’s extramarital fantasy. But the original person seeking the titular Escape turns out to be the narrator’s wife.

This is statistically true! Women initiate 2/3 of divorces. If you’re not feeling satisfied in your relationship, your partner likely already is, too — so don’t blame them. Perhaps address it together?

Know yourself well enough to write a personal ad

We’re all writing Tinder bios with boring-ass identity labels; meanwhile, Rupert gave us the blueprint for a truly evocative self-description in his lyrics.

Do you know yourself well enough to express in 150 characters what you’re really looking for in a lover, and a life lived with said lover? If you don’t, how do you expect to find them?

Figure out what you need. Then ask for it!

You’re probably taking your lover for granted

In life, as it is in long-term relationships, it is far too easy to sit and fester on your own dissatisfaction, as the narrator of “Escape” did, rather than to wonder how your partner might be feeling.

In fact, the inward fixation might be the exact reason you’re not feeling satisfied. When’s the last time you looked at your partner with fresh eyes? I call this my Stranger Spouse meditation. Stop the narratives you tell yourself about your lover for a moment. Notice “the curve of her face,” as Rupert sings, without attaching it to previous memories.

Getting tired of things that once excited you is normal

It’s not a crisis to feel tired of your routine, or your partner. It’s definitively normal. Humans crave new energy.

The question is — what are you going to do about it? Run away from everything you once loved, or find a way to spark excitement within?

“Falling into the same old dull routines” means you’re not communicating

It may be common to grow monotonous, but it doesn’t have to happen. To get ahead of this slump that the narrator of “Escape” found himself in, why not just proactively communicate with your partner?

Monotony and monogamy are a personal problem, not a relationship problem — are you making your life spicy for yourself or nah? Go dance in the fucking rain!

Role-Play is useful!

Last but certainly not least, Rupert likely didn’t experience this whole charade in his marriage. But he took the time to imagine it. To make art from it. I think that’s hot as fuck.

Imagine if you did that in your relationship. You sat and thought through a scenario where you two grew tired of eachother — what would happen? Now, imagine you enacted that with your lover. Isn’t that sexy?

This track is a product of its time, but I do find timelessness to its story. I love when music can remind me to savor life and the people I adore. What song does that for you?

I would never take you for granted 😘 Thank you for your readership and support (through likes, comments, shares, and, of course, your funds)! You’re keeping Happy Endings coming and coming…

Every Monday I share a post about contemporary love through the lens of my work in sex tech, and my born-again monogamous marriage (as a mother of two!). Once per month, this post is extra intimate, and I paywall it to add a bit of privacy for the innocent. (The last one was about rewarding my husband with “a milking” after he did some dirty house DIY projects.) Every other Thursday (or sometimes Friday, as happened last week) I share a post with sex and relationship advice. (The last one was on how to get hot when you’re not feeling hot.)

I wrote on Monday about fucking ugly people. It was a provocative title to make a point about how culturally influenced status symbols and beauty standards influence sexual attraction. I believe what makes you horny should be more carnal than cerebral. I want my pleasure devoid of propaganda. But regardless of the legitimacy of our individual definitions of ‘ugliness,’ these mental connotations can block our bodies. Or more simply, when I feel ‘ugly,’ it’s harder to get horny.

It’s a double bummer! When I feel down about myself, the best antidote is a great fucking orgasm to set me straight again about what’s really important. Feeling good, which of course can come from feeling good about yourself physically, also doesn’t have to…

So how do I do it — like literally have sex (cause masturbating isn’t as much of an intellectual challenge, is it?) — when I’m not feeling hot? Well, let me tell you.

I promise I’d never suggest a corny thing like turning the lights off and lighting candles (although it does work), and I’d never frame this as an emotional exercise to remind yourself of the ~goddess you are~ cause that’s not my style of sex blog.

My personal tip to bump uglies when I’m feeling ugly is to pretend I’m not going to. Let me explain…

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As a fellow woman with standards, who prefers her man ‘good,’ yet once had a seriously specific romantic type which proved to be detrimental to my love life, I feel called to call these women longing for a “Man in Finance” out (from this moment further, these women will be called MiFLs — Man in Finance Longers — not to be confused with MILFs, my piece on MILFs published last week).

See, I feel it is necessary for the exact reason I find it so excruciatingly embarrassing to witness. I empathize! But I managed to find my way past my love-life-limiting ‘good man’ container, which isn’t actually a ‘type’ but a cultural conditioning, and find genuine love. So to call you MiFLs out, I will confess something I’ve previously only considered writing about under a pseudonym. I underwent a self-imposed reverse-brainwashing to unlearn cultural influences of attractiveness. Or, in clickbaity, incendiary language, I pursued, dated, and fucked people I found ugly in some way, shape, or form, in order to challenge my understanding of ugliness. I believe you MiFLs should learn this lesson too, even if secondhand, so I will share. The long story.

It all started with my fear of dying. A mom’s death will do that to you — make you think you’re avoiding death by living ‘right.’ If she could die at 32, I could, too. So I would do no wrong. Be a good girl. Excel while I had the opportunity. But around the time I realized that ‘right’ — which to a suburban Midwesterner with a high GPA, meant attending the pre-med program I’d gotten a scholarship to, but wouldn’t spit me out into the ‘real world,’ where inevitably all living would occur — would mean I wasted 32 years stuck in academic training grounds, I wondered; Why would I follow someone else’s idea of right, when that would mean wasting my life living someone else’s ideal? Besides, I couldn’t even get an immunization with my eyes open.

So I started asking myself what I really, in my gut of guts, wanted. The answers — as little school as possible, a life where I could earn enough to live with as little stress as possible, and if I was even luckier, a job where I could help spread fun or love — undoubtedly made life feel good. GOOD — key word — meaning, right for me.

I found the inquisition into my true desires useful. So I kept at it. The small questions: Did I actually dislike tomatoes? No, it turns out. I’d just been having shitty ones. The hard ones: Did I actually want to live in Minnesota forever like my family had for a century? No, I just wasn’t brave enough to leave. And the bigger ones: Did I actually want a traditional relationship at all?

Which brings me to the decisions bolder than abandoning a doctorate’s student loans…

My first technical relationship started in college. I did what I thought I was supposed to do: commit to the elusive President of the service fraternity after discovering he was interested in me. I was a freshman who wanted to kiss everyone and yet, as if Newton’s law applied to a good girl’s commitment to the college sweetheart who took their virginity, I persisted. My college boyfriend and I dated for three monogamous years. Once the right circumstances arose for a clean, amicable separation, I formed a cozy friendship with a married couple within the week. I was 21, and felt infinitely more like myself. Exiting a box I knew I didn’t fit within was expansive and, perhaps, addicting. Certainly, it was good.

Then, the self-inquisitions became a reflex. Whenever I defiantly proclaimed, Oh, I’d never, I found myself forcing myself to experience whatever it was I believed was unsuited to me. Almost like how a naughty kid wants what they cannot have, but I was doing it to myself, to confront self-limiting biases because I knew that life was often better beyond the presumptions.

After I laughed a, Oh never, in response to considering a pixie cut, chopping my shoulder-length hair became compulsory. I’d always thought a tall woman like myself required lengthy, voluminous hair to complement her frame, but was that really something I thought? Proving I wasn’t constraining myself within a culturally imposed container usually led me to realize I was, indeed, sitting tight in a box. Pixie cuts are hot on tall women.

Then there were the acquired tastes. (I told you this was the long story!) Those tomatoes. Even Brussels sprouts. Coffee. Beer. All things I once thought I wouldn’t like, but with enough exposure, they’ve undoubtedly improved my years with simple pleasures. But the heirloom tomato lobby and beer distribution mafia wanted me to like their products. Someone was spending significant sums to sell me on a coffee drinker’s lifestyle. Society, too, sold me on the concept of a stable, monogamous heterosexual relationship. Society functioned more effectively with families as a backbone, so naturally we’d be indoctrinated to prioritize settling down. All these realizations made me wonder which lifestyles I wasn’t considering as restrictive, which nobody would benefit from pointing out to me…

At 25, I noticed one such box. One bigger and more opaque than the indoctrination of monogamous love.

Before the names of my past lovers completed the 17 syllables of a haiku, I saw similarities between them. Despite crossing genders, they could all have been in a lineup for a crime committed by an ethnically ambiguous Mick Jagger. We’re told it’s common to have a ‘type’, that perhaps I just liked lanky leaders with asymmetrical smiles and a recreational drug habit. But after a number of unsatisfactory affairs, something in me wagered that perhaps I’d learned this Mick type. That what attracted me to these lovers was not some innate undeniable truth. That the ‘rockstar’ was just as ridiculous to fancy on as the ‘finance bro.’

So I set out to test my hypothesis. I began a quest to understand why I was attracted to whom I was attracted to, and more importantly, why I wasn’t attracted to whom I wasn’t attracted to.

But first, more importantly, who was I? And what did I think of myself? I thought I was good. I was tall. My hair was thick and dark. My body hair was sparse and fair. I was not necessarily large, but I often wore that size. I liked going out and having fun, but really, in my heart, I was fairly straitlaced. A recovering good girl, afraid to break the rules, and compelled to do so for the same reason. I was looking for a rockstar to make breaking convention a give-in. And physically, I held the idea that someone shaped like me needed someone with a full head of hair and the height and build that made me look at least balanced, if not small. Deep down, it seemed, I was looking for a partner all because I wanted to feel small, and not have to choose to defy convention of my own volition.

I know. It’s embarrassing to admit. It makes me wonder why these MiFLs are looking for MiFs? And I wonder what they would learn about themselves if they did what I had:

Since I wanted someone with sexy, disheveled, full hair, I forced myself to appreciate bald men, and worse, men who weren’t confident enough to be bald, and hid their bald spots under hats and behind ponytails. After exposure therapy, I found this judgment to be utterly ridiculous.

Since I had age biases and body-shape biases, I humored men without heroine chic bodies.

Since I wanted someone who was tall, and righteously felt it was justified given my height, I forced myself not to ignore shorter guys. And fucking hell, this was the definition of self-limiting beliefs and cultural indoctrination. Shorter guys made me feel more pleasure and aliveness than fulfilling the longing to be fucked standing from behind while on relevé.

It’s not like it’s revolutionary! It’s intentionally breaking down my idea of ‘good’ from the bullshit culture teaches us. The revolutionary part was what I learned from it all.

What does ‘a good man’ even mean? The way it’s used, you’d think it was prescriptive. That we all know exactly what good means. That a good man makes large sums of money, is inches taller than their female counterpart, and has a BMI between dad bod and athletic. But when I hear a list of superficial characteristics describing ‘good’ I think, what do you really care about? Keeping up appearances, or that real, true, feeling of unique goodness?

Isn’t the whole idea of a one-size-fits-all definition of good, not GOOD?

See, we follow clothing trends we see other people wear. We dream of traveling to places we saw other people enjoy. We post carousels with the right spread of attractive selfies, scenescapes, and object-life-context to maximize likes. And we also let others’ approval guide who we sleep with and date. No wonder so many find the whole charade embarrassing. We’re too focused on what people think rather than how we ourselves feel.

It is human nature to seek belonging, of course. But I’m worried about us Longers. Because by focusing on our partners' approval ratings, we’re being good girls instead of trying to feel GOOD. Our bodies and spirits won’t suit the same apparel. And they also won’t suit the same prescriptive suitor. We’re wasting our love lives, living someone else’s ideal. We’re offloading the uncomfortable act of self-inquiry and, in the process, avoiding fulfilling our dream life by looking to love someone who embodies it.

What I was really wanting wasn’t to be chosen, romantically, by someone with rockstar energy. It was, as corny as it is to admit, to have rockstar energy myself. Once I acknowledged that this dream rockstar partner was a figment of my externalized desires, I realized that nobody who’s looking for a partner who makes them feel small will ever be the best version of themselves. I stopped looking for tall, lanky Micks. And I found what was right for me.

At 27, I met a man who I married at 28. He does have a bit of Mick about him. His teeth arouse the fuck out of me. But his wide shoulders are far from waifish. His energy is punk. In public, he’s a creative who garners fame. In private, he’s my sexual entertainment director. He even gives me butterflies when I’m tired and moody. He cooks. He’s a good dad. I’m lucky as fuck. But if I hadn’t undergone my exposure therapy, I might’ve missed the chance. Mostly because he’s nearly two inches shorter than me, and (when we met) had a ponytail covering his bald spot. Gasp.

That shorter guy with a bald spot gives me the best orgasms of my life, and we’re monogamous despite me being a relationship anarchist when we met. Which is, in a way, the moral of this story. It is ok to have a type. You might indeed get what you want, but it won’t be just like what you thought you wanted. Which sounds an awful lot like a quote from my guy Mick.

Some MiFLs might already have actualized their genuine, uninfluenced self-image and argue, I’m already the catch; I don’t want to compromise. And I hear you; more power to you. But then I say, maybe a relationship isn’t good for you. It’s cliché, but true — it takes compromise to make the good ones work.

Some MiFLs might say, Sure, but why? And I don’t blame you. It’s easiest to not question. To assume your interests are like everyone else’s. This comes naturally to us good girls. Even the progressive ones, and the ambitious ones. Even those who challenge norms in their art, their taste, their politics, still might not question their sexuality and their erotic preferences. And that’s the dangerous part…

Some women are done dating, period, because they think they can’t find what they want, so why try? I, too, assumed that my lack of excitement for my college boyfriend meant that perhaps a heteromonogamous relationship was just not something I could be passionate about. That if this guy that so many others crushed on didn’t satisfy me, perhaps I wasn’t supposed to do the whole relationship thing at all. You see? Our limiting beliefs create new beliefs, and the system will go on until you notice.

And plus, as reminds us, our media monopolies and the multi-billion-dollar beauty industry aren’t going to make more money if we all stop upholding the supposed attractive prerequisites they preach.

So, I say, try questioning your type. Expand your erotic palate. I had to gag on a few Brussels to appreciate the cruciferous delicacy. The discomfort of choking on sprouts brings numerous bodily benefits, including a taste for something good for you.

If you don’t try new varieties of tomatoes, how can you even know what attraction, what lust, what satiated hunger really feels like?

Plus, shorter men live longer.1

I love that you tuned in to my weekly provocation on contemporary love. I hope it’s given you more love to reflect on. Thank you for being here.

Remember, every Monday I share a post like this — discussing love and sex in culture and my marriage — which is almost always free, except for once per month when I share an extra-sexy true story from my marriage (like this one on getting massaged while I suck him). And every other Thursday I share a Praxxxis post — a how-to style guide from my experience working in sextech and being a general relationship-having love-lover (like this one on 8 ways to ride a face).

Over the last few years, the atmosphere’s been shifting.

There’s a MILF fever.

“Mother’s I’d Like to Fuck” are topping the charts. And I think this harvest says a lot about society right now. But first, the proof…

Searches for fuckable mothers have climbed the search ranks five years running, peaking now as the second most-sought category in the country1. Six years ago, it wasn’t in the top 5. While we watched this unfold through Pornhub’s reports, I saw it personally at MakeLoveNotPorn. More and more creators were sharing sex videos of their fertility journeys, fucking to progress labor, and navigating postpartum intimacy. And more conventional MILF’s — which in porn-speak rarely means new mothers, but mature women — were submitting, nests newly empty, exploring menopausal sexuality, and expanding their long-term relationships.

Outside of the adult landscape, my social feeds told a ‘safer’ version of the same story. Creators wiped tears, knowing their children would be teased for having a hot mom. The influencer gained hundreds of thousands of followers dispensing “MILF etiquette.” traced the etymology of the acronym here on Substack.

The oldest archetype, the mother, is a trend. Mothers are desirable. Not just tolerated. Wanted, and exhibiting her own want, openly and at scale. The MILF is having a moment, and a feminist reclamation.

In those same five years, I became a mom of two boys. My midriff gained a cesarean scar shaped like a Ren and Stimpy smile. My husband wiped poop off me as my second-born landed onto our Nordic Knots rug, tearing my taint. I nursed them, then weaned them. My boobs turned to empty skin. And I was having the best sex of my life. Using my body to its limits made my pre-maternal over-intellectualized intercourse and stifled-sneeze orgasms feel foolish. As I learned to care for my children, I started caring for myself. Parenting with my partner brought us closer. My body created; it wanted to create more; it wanted and wanted more. Motherhood rocked my world, erotically. I started writing about our sex on Substack. It turned out people liked a sexy mom blog. Because people liked MILFs.

Seriously. Imagine this with me. One of the most-visited websites on Earth, billions of views a month, reporting that the majority want mothers, in rising volume, five years and counting. Isn’t that incredible?

As Bennett found, this MILF forecast dates back to teenage lifeguards in upstate New York rating the hot moms at the lake. Then it migrated into humor magazines and linguistic papers on the ways we insult women, and finally to big screens in American Pie, where the teenage boy fantasy supplanted itself in my subconscious. I never wanted to be the teenage heartthrob. I wanted to be Stacy’s mom. To have it “going on” — the pool, the confidence, autonomy, and comfort within my sexuality in spite of an ageist, misogynist culture. And it seems like I’m not alone. Jennifer Coolidge as Stifler’s mom, and the aforementioned mother of Stacy imprinted the hot-mom lifestyle on all of us ‘80s and ‘90s babies who are now childrearing and refusing to shrink into a desexualized cliché, choosing instead to reclaim the trope. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

For most of the history that’s shaped us, a woman’s sexual life and her maternal life were sequential. Her desirability ended when she reproduced. The mommy milker fetish was niche. The Madonna and the whore weren’t two women, but one woman’s two sequential phases. But that partition is dissolving. The mother’s eroticism is no longer confined to taboo or parody. Mothers, and the society searching for MILFs, are dissolving the trope as old as our Current Era. Moms needn’t be virginal. Mothers are a sex symbol.

If I treated this almanac as augury, I’d make grand claims. A shift this size isn’t just the fermented impact of American Pie. Nor is it cyclical fashion like bellbottom jeans. MILF fever is a dramatic response to absurd times.

Consider what else developed in these same five years. Society was diagnosed as sexless. The birth rate plummeted. The Surgeon General proclaimed both our stress and loneliness levels were an epidemic. We stopped dancing. Our literal Mother Earth is suffering. And global authoritarianism dressed domination up as fatherly protection, despite consorting with (or being) abusers. We, the populous, grew anxious. We craved nurturing. So starved of care, we sexualized it.

Which brings me back to Amanda Fowler, the “MILF etiquette” influencer. She and her husband became parents before their frontal lobes were fully developed. By the porn definition, she isn’t ‘mature’ — thus, she barely qualifies as a MILF. But to me, Amanda is proof this fever isn’t about older women; it’s about a population looking to be mothered. Amanda became a mother across these same years as me, looked at the state of the States and the care it didn’t extend to its people, mothers included, and decided to extend that care to herself first. She describes embodying a MILF as becoming the person she herself is turned on by. She honors her own eroticism so as not to be miserable, and teaches other women to do the same. To refuse the selfless-mother script. To stop doing things the way it’s always been done, because look where that got us.

That, in our sex-lite, porn-heavy, un-horny moment, is subversive. The MILF fever isn’t fundamentally about sex. It’s about a woman turning her maternal care back toward herself, and a culture which is starved for care that recognizes a mother’s self-possession as the most desirable thing available. When mothers come, we tend our own soil first. Whether that healing truly spreads to everyone witnessing it or reading about it online, I can’t say for sure. But based on the comments I get on Happy Endings, I believe it does.

The real Farmer’s Almanac fed a population by telling it when to sow and when to reap. I offer this reading of the adult website tea leaves in the same spirit. The population is hungry for MILFs. This trend, which contradicts longterm beauty standards and expectations for aging, shows us our historic conception of reaping and sowing is over. Desirability is ageless. Care — for yourself, and for each other — is hot right now. And even though mothers have always been the ones to want for others, now their wanting is what is wanted.

Happy Endings is how I spread love, in a care-starved world, by sharing stories from my marriage, and points of view on love in culture.

Every Monday I share a hot take or hot tale for free, except once per month it’s extra-explicit for paid subscribers (like this latest one about ‘milking’ my husband), and every other Thursday I share tips on how to expand your own intimate life (like this one on laughter sex) for paid subscribers.

I once saw a story about a dad dropping their kid off at their boyfriend/girlfriend’s house with a nugget of timely wisdom: “If you’re not laughing during sex, you’re not doing it right.”

It’s a precious point: to not be self-serious, and remember sex is all about connecting, feeling good, and having fun. But I’m no comedian, so if my dad had said that to me, sex would’ve been more pressure.

My husband, Joe, says I’m not conventionally funny. Humor exists to make people more comfortable with bad things, by subverting expectations. Or so Joe taught me. He thinks that my natural instinct to preemptively solve problems causes me to put jokes inside of a wrapper — protecting the humor from landing to anyone other than myself. But last week, I made him do one of those full-teeth, jaw-dropping laughs while we were starting to get intimate. And, God, it felt good. The successful joke, the shared laughter, and the orgasm.

I love all types of sex: Serious Sex, Emotional Sex, Intense Sex, Angry Sex (which in this relationship is usually an act, to be honest, because I prefer to verbally dissect bad feelings and then have Relief Sex (“please never leave me”)), but that dad wasn’t wrong. Laughter Sex is hot. Like an emotional towel-wringing. Like everyone is even more naked — their soul (and teeth) are just as bared as their skin.

So this week, my assignment for you is have laughter sex, whether with yourself, or a lover. Make your gut convulse from giggles before it clenches from pleasure.

Here are five jumping-off points to make that happen…

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Joe was slumped in a lawn chair. His eyes were fixed on nothing. His hand was in a C-shape, lightly grasping the cold Miller High Life I’d gotten him from our brother-in-law’s birthday party cooler.

“Baby,” I said, leaning toward him from my woven-nylon camp chair, squeaking the aluminum hinges.

He looked at me, face too tired to express.

“I will rub your shoulders tonight, and then I will milk you.”

“Milk me?!” he said much too loudly. I didn’t mean for the whole party to know. His face finally showed a reaction — surprise.

He’d worked hard that day, doing what every DIY home renovator we know proclaims as the worst of the worst — peeling popcorn off a ceiling. When I asked how he felt on the drive to my sisters, he said, “I’m utterly shattered.” Then he pointed from the base of his skull to his shoulder blade and said, “This kills.”

I’d gotten the long end of the stick. The project was my wish, but his plan. He told me, “Just keep the kids out of the house.” We’d been so far out of the house that we wound up playing basketball outside of a brewery with my dad and his sisters. It was not tiring. It was rejuvenating.

That night, at home, a half dozen High Life’s in Joe, and our kids in bed, I said, “Are you ready to be milked?”

“I guess,” he said, with a laugh. He looked timid and curious.

I started by rubbing jojoba oil in the same places he’d pointed to earlier. The base of his skull, his neck, the tops and blades of his shoulders. He moaned, and I kissed his forehead.

Then I laid a towel down for his oily body, and guided him to recline.

His penis was already hard, but I wanted it exceptionally so. So I brought my lips around his tip, looped my tongue around him, and sucked. Then, with three tablespoons of Good Clean lube in my hand, I gave him a two-handed hand-job.

“Is this the milking?” he said.

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I’ve been coming lately:

• From an engraved 24kt gold vibrator while imagining where I wanted my husband to lick me

• From a new, travel-friendly cerulean wand while watching two women grind on each other on my phone

• From my husband’s tongue, lips, and fingers on a navy leather daybed

• And his cock, in missionary

I’ve been swimming lately:

• Paddling pools without room to paddle

• Pools so full of chlorine that my swimsuit faded faster than my skin burned

• Shallow lakes’ surface algae stuck between my bikini bottoms and butt cheeks, kicking quickly past the seaweed

• Deep lake, cold, no seaweed in reach

I’ve been sucking dick lately:

• While wearing jean shorts, my backside to a mirror

• Covered in mosquito bites, behind a cabin, under the stars

• With my hands tied with silk-cotton blend rope

• On video, looking into my own eyes more than his

I’ve been crying lately:

• Gratitude — friends, help, thoughtfulness

• Love — sweet words, warm cuddles, comfort, safety

• Stress — packing, planning, timing

• Bliss — lake breezes, kid laughter, a glass of wine

• Overwhelm — hormones, hangovers, misunderstandings

• Exhaustion, relief — a long drive is over, we’re all home safe

• Guilt, disappointment — my kid’s beloved stuffed pigeon, left behind

I’ve been working lately:

• Making Instagram reels about asshole licking, facial cumming, and the general appeal of real world sex videos

• Planning and analyzing, for MakeLoveNotPorn’s growth

• Editing my debut novel, and responding to an interested agent (singular (for now))

• Writing for you, and, well, me:

  • Forthcoming Essays: one about attraction and ugliness, one about when individuals in a couple “just want different things,” and one about the cultural dominance of MILFs. And perhaps I’ll just fuck around and post a yet-unpublished piece I was paid to write: an essay about the psychosexuality of authoritarianism and, ultimately, whether bullying is sexy.

  • Recent Pieces: a plea to preoccupied women, and how I meditate when I want to re-prioritize my eroticism.

I’ve been seeing lately:

• Two dragonflies having sex

• Two wasps having sex

• Two flies having sex

• A red cardinal

• So many loons

I’ve been dancing lately:

• To La Vie en Rose by Grace Jones, or as my husband calls it, our family song

I’ve been buying lately:

• Ginger and turmeric shots

• Short-sleeve cotton-cashmere knit pullover

• Ice cream from MN Dairy Lab, Jeni’s, Sebastian Joe’s, Dream Creamery

• Red nail polish (for my toes)

• A second-hand dress from the Substack chat of ’s The Molehill

• The privilege of supporting my friend’s anthology, which you too can support.

I’ve been reflecting lately:

• It’s been two years since I started this publication. I have published every Monday and some Thursdays for 25 months. It’s a lot of work. It’s been fulfilling. Also, a lot. I plan to keep at it, for you, and for me.

• Being a salary-working parent of two small babes, in a relationship, with artistic pursuits and ‘side hustles’ is not for the weak. And sometimes I do feel weak. But mostly, I don’t.

• Generational inheritance

• Is goal setting and the pursuit of vision even possible when living in the present? Is living in the present even possible for a person balancing so many people’s needs, wants, and safety?

• Why do I expect balance to be a fixed state?

• Is pitching worth it at all when I get a yes from a major publication, they pay me $500, but the piece is still unpublished, losing relevance with every month that’s passed (nearly six, now)?

• Have I reflected too much? Mightn’t it be better to simply let awareness simmer subconsciously, letting my gut land on the answer and guide me in each moment?

I’ve been reading lately:

• Milk Fed by (if you haven’t, you have to read this book)

• An encyclopedia of butterflies

• An encyclopedia of birds

• So many Substacks — your notes, your posts, I prefer your presence in my inbox to most anything else

I’ve been wanting lately:

• Answers I can’t have

• Breaks I don’t give myself

• Less time on my phone

• Two weeks of clean air and sub-80 degree weather

• And to hear from you:

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I’ve been listening to lately:

• Herb Alpert

• Funkadelic

• My eldest son’s latest favorite song, Toxic by Britney

Happy Endings is a ‘peep show’ — an intimate look into my relationship, which would otherwise be concealed behind the heteromonogamous privacy curtain.

I publish a free story from my marriage, or an essay on contemporary love, every Monday. Once per month, I paywall an extra-juicy one that I’d like to keep slightly more private. Every other Thursday, I share advice that I’ve found useful in my sex and romantic life, in my paid Praxxxis series.

I like to think all subscribers can count on a weekly reminder to prioritize love in their lives, but my paid subscribers get even more Happy Endings.

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When is the last time the woman dearest to you came? Little stifled sneeze orgasms don’t count.

Even though sex is of great significance to me (I’ve built my career around it), I still have months where I come, then think, fuck it’s been too long.

On Monday, I published a piece about this phenomenon — women who are so preoccupied with their family, their career, their worries or ambitions that they start to think sexual pleasure simply isn’t for them, or at least, forget to prioritize it. I called this woman the Lost Body Woman.

Today, I am sharing seven steps to guide the Lost Body Woman back to herself.

It’s not easy to get un-lost. Staying lost — stuck outside of your own body — is favored by physics. Worse yet, we craft identities around being lost; I’m just not interested, we say when our partners ask if we’d like to come. When fear-based fixations or run of the mill life-crises distract us from our bodily sensations, coming back to ourselves in order to come is easier said than done. You might wonder why bother? The why is, well, a philosophical question about the purpose of life that I’ll write about another day.

But if you love someone — be it yourself or your wife — you’d hate to see whole segments-of-seasons evaporate without them taking time to feel blissed.

I want you to feel blissed. Everyone ought to — even, or especially, when shit’s all over the fan.

For the people who know somewhere deep down, that they want to reconnect with themselves, I’ve written a guide that works for me. I’m a type A mom with Midwestern work ethic, sense of externalized responsibility, and semi-toxic Millennial ambition — aka the perfect convergence for the sort of bodily disconnection that makes a happily married person see themselves in ’s divorce novel1.

If you are, or love, a Lost Body Woman, (help her) follow these steps to come again:

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I’m Abigail, a mom of two boys, a meditation enthusiast, cocksucking feminist, born-again monogamist, sextech leader, and lingerie collector. This week, I’m writing from Minneapolis.

There’s a woman on my mind.

She’s a part of me. She’s a part of many people I know. You might be her. You might be married to her. Her most chronic archetype just wrote an anonymous sexposé in Playboy that fell through my Instagram feed propelled by serendipity and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, because, as I say, she’s been on my mind.

She’s a woman who doesn’t orgasm often. Maybe once per month. Maybe less. And the reason isn’t because of intentional celibacy, health issues, asexuality, or ideology, exactly. It’s because she’s busy. She’s prioritized everything but herself. Her pleasure isn’t important.

If this is you, I’m writing to you.

Perhaps your deprioritization of climax is because you’re absorbed in the machinations of modern feminine life. Achieving expectations and gliding through the rat race at the expense of your self connection. I bet your challenging career is pretty damn balanced, the texts from your friends and family are responded to within reasonable timelines, you schedule and attend (without rescheduling) the recurring appointments required for your health and societally expected appearance. Perhaps you’re self-sufficient — thriving (attemptedly) without requiring a partner. Sometimes you’re the woman who does everything for everyone, including maintenance sex at an interval as to not cause a disturbance to your life.

Life, here, is defined as everything outside of yourself — what others see, others admire, others need.

I’m guessing masturbation is rote. Partnered sex is choreographed from learned successive actions plus a dash of externally inspired dynamism to not fall into a trap. You’re always steps ahead of traps. Because you’re always thinking ahead. Never here, never now. You’re lost above the now — in your mind, so much so, you’ve nearly lost connection to your body.

I call this woman a Lost Body Woman.

Lost, here, is defined as being missing from one’s own bodily sensations, disconnected, without an easy way back.

The Lost Body Woman knows something is missing, but she’s looking in the wrong place. Like Alice down the rabbit hole. Wonderland is societal expectations, someone else’s interests, or the fear-based ambitions you accepted as an identity long ago, and kept trundling toward, not questioning your trajectory. Alice’s tree, her real world, is the capacity to be present in your body enough to listen to your gut, and let arousal rise.

The Lost Body Woman is not a difficult image to conjure. She is all over our culture. But we can’t blame tropes and screenwriters. We could blame our bodies, as women’s hormones albeit push us toward self-sacrifice. Our bodies aren’t always easy to be present in. When modern strife and expectation are mixed in, the striving to fulfill all the dutiful checkboxes is no surprise.

At times, I am this woman. You might be her, too. Some of you will be in love with her, noticing the way she ignores her own sexual satisfaction, maybe you question her, but she simply says she’s just not interested today. Sometimes that’s true, but sometimes that’s the easy way out — to stay lost, and believe that’s where you belong. Seeing Wonderland as the real world is a compelling narrative to more than just a woman.

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That anonymous Playboy writer certainly wouldn’t have defined herself as lost before she came, from the guidance of someone called the O-Man. She thought she was too busy. She’d so manufactured her understanding of life around what other’s saw — her bylines, her figure — that she couldn’t even see sex as appealing. She’d pushed away the experience, and when obliged, stayed in her mind, imaging nonsexual things entirely, until the sex itself passed.

It pains me to see a woman lost, uninterested in pleasure. Because even though being lost is understandable — life will lead us away from our body, our minds will lead us away from our body — remaining lost is a choice made from pain and fear. This sexposé writer’s dismissal of her own pleasure was so engrained, it became righteous. Pain and fear kept her from coming, and tricked her into believing that’s where she belonged.

I write about sex, work for a sex video website, am viciously aware of the pleasure-void of martyrdom, and I still fall into self-dismissing identities on occasion. I want to be a great mother. I want to be a great wife. I want to be a great friend, a great employee, a great daughter. And with the impossible tasks on my shoulders, clouded by stress, I forget I’m in Wonderland, seeking perfectionist fantasies, forgetting to just sit at the roots of the Oak in my backyard and feel my body.

I wanted to write a plea to this woman because, as I said, she’s been on my mind. Because sometimes the only way I can remind myself to prioritize myself, is to think of you.

So I write to you, to the Playboy writer, to myself. I say: I understand. Pretending you’re a machine might be convenient, but that’s not who you are. You’re a human. With a body. Which, as the Playboy writer realized, will one day stop working. So before then, instead of chasing off death, fixating on work that makes you immortal or the health metrics/appearance that suggests you’re forever young, just stop. You lost yourself. Come back. Come, period. Then come again.

This Thursday, paid subscribers will get my advice on how to come back from the Lost Body state, including how supportive partners of these preoccupied woman can aid the bodily reconnection process, as a part of my every other week Praxxxis series.

Did you read my husband’s analysis of my red, green, and weird flags during our courtship? Or my report card on how his woo’ing characteristics have fared after the years of our marraige?

So I asked my husband what he found both compelling and concerning about me while we were dating.

My Compelling Characteristics

My husband, Joe, says there's only one must-have characteristic he’s looking for in a mate (romantic, but also broadly applicable). Besides the “obvious stuff,” he says, “like sexual compatibility,” he wonders, “does this person have an internal world?”

1) I have an internal world

My hobbies (dance) and interests (ergonomic footwear) and the way I’d fixate on un-cool things (like on “min-maxing” my Civilization after he introduced me to the PlayStation game), demonstrated that there was something going on in my head beyond trends and other people’s ideas.

2) I had unique taste

Relatedly, he says he liked how I had a unique taste and aesthetic. My design perspective didn’t fit a specific style. If Joe had to define it, he’d call it “sexy art teacher.” I wore a vintage silk leopard-print skirt set with Chacos one day, and clogs, embroidered crop trousers plus a knit wrap top, the metallic of a nipple ring shining through the merino, the next. I guess this was new to him?

3) I liked to idylly pass time

Joe says I was, and am, up for doing things that aren’t necessarily exciting or even good. We had our best times just standing in a pub for hours, grocery shopping, or seeing gigs that one of us thought was shit. This wasn’t to gauge my maintenance levels, but what he liked was that I “didn’t need premium aspirational activities that other people thought were good.”

4) I wasn’t trying to impress him, play games with him, or actualize anything through him

My sweetheart (clearly) didn’t want a lover who expected or exhibited performance signals like trips to festivals for the sake of photo ops. As he says, “[I like] unvarnished people who accept unvarnished people. Life’s too short to spend time with people who are doing what you think everyone else wants to see.” So naturally, he was set at ease that I wasn’t bothered that he wasn’t trying to impress me, and that it didn’t feel like I was trying to impress him either. There was no game playing. No “push and pull,” as he feels is boring. “Playing hard to get only works for people who have an emotional issue.”

“Does this mean you thought I was a chill girl?” I asked. “Well, kind of,” he said. “It was no pressure.” He liked how I wasn’t in a rush to define our relationship because of some baseless expectation of societal timing. This, he says, is when someone tries to actualize their dreams through their partner. And the astute readers will know he has a problem with people who use people, and that despite the lack of pressure, we did commit very legally and bloodily quite quickly.

My Concerning Characteristics

Unlike the short list of characteristics Joe looked for, the traits he didn’t want were plenty:

• He didn’t want someone who performed an aesthetic/lifestyle/interest for the benefit of perception instead of putting their real selves out there. Or expected him to perform for perception.

• He didn’t want someone who saw themselves as a prize — as if their association would increase their social stock — as it implied they believed a relationship served outwardly.

• He couldn’t date someone who obsessed over cleanliness. Sanitizer in general was a turn-off.

• No picky eaters.

• No litterers.

• No illiterates.

• No small bums.

• No one prejudiced — about anything. (Any big generalized assumptions, even things like “couldn’t watch sci-fi” or “sports suck” or “wouldn’t sew” was a No. He didn’t like people who closed themselves off from things for stupid reasons.)

I do like to tell him he’s lucky to have me, but otherwise, I fit his list. Yet the following characteristics he hadn’t considered previously gave him pause about me as a romantic partner.

1) I once said I was an immoral person

Joe and I can’t exactly remember the details, but we both remember it happening. When I asked him what was a potential “red flag” about me, he came right out the gates with this one, so it obviously left an impression. What I remember is we were having a long-winded debate in which he asked me whether I was a moral person. I might’ve had a few beers, or maybe I was just uneducated, but with hindsight I know that my saying “If you had to categorize me, I’d probably have to be lumped immoral,” wasn’t what I really meant. I was picturing myself slipping a few extra pieces of candy while pretending to the children around me that we were only allowed a piece for finding a red car, while he was imagining someone with no morals. I might have a few potentially questionable morals (without a candy-dispersion oversight committee, and in circumstances without any true suffering, I might extort candies I purchased under the guise of fair distribution), but I’m not immoral.

2) I had some questionable friends

After a few months together, I invited him to join me in Mexico City for an intervention. It was a memorable experience. He seemed shockingly smitten despite being confronted with information yet to be shared and the general messiness of my past. I didn’t realize it actually made him pause, as shortly thereafter we began not not trying to conceive. I have a soft spot for those who are working through shit, and I have no shame about it! Given it’s the first I heard of it, I don’t think he does either.

3) I had emotional reactions to our ideological differences

I once invited him to dinner with my landlord, a conventionally successful musician and friend, and my friend, a struggling artist. The two men disagreed with the two women about the net effect of social media for artists. His perspective made me upset. I stomped my feet the next day listening to Beyoncé’s “Hold Up” and took a solo trip to the coast to showcase my independence. If this gave him pause, the few pints of lager he had with his friends that evening sure pressed play again, because as I took a bath after reading Henry Miller, he texted me, “I know you don’t need me to, but I want to take care of you.” I forgave him. Then I learned to hate the idea, not the person.

4) I didn’t play my part in chivalrous gender relations

It really cracked me up to learn my husband questioned my wifely eligibility because I was somehow obvious to his English mores. I was “rushing about and not waiting for [Joe] to open a door or order at a cafe.” I guess my love was waiting for me to hand my dance card over by standing back and letting him take the lead. He wanted to be a gentleman, but I was too much of an American millennial to notice. Joe worried that my rushing was some character flaw, but in the end he realized it was only my self-reliance trauma response, lol.

My Peculiar Characteristics

As a bonus, Joe offered these “odd flags,” as he says. They were neither red nor green, but notable curiosities that he pondered while we courted.

1) I was unable to cook

He was bewildered by my saying that I lived on RX Bars and two-ingredient salads.

2) I drank from jars

I drank water from an olive jar, and he found that peculiar.

3) I had a bizarre sense of humor

It’s “entirely idiosyncratic,” he says. “It exists only for you.” Which to me is just fine, but to a man from the land of banter, it was surprising.

Now that I’ve gotten the same outside analysis as I’ve given my spouse, it’s reinforced my hunch… All these “red flags” and “green flags” are as useful as a comment section on a clickbait article. They reveal so much more about the one critiquing than they do about the critiqued.

Or as Joe says, “the whole red flags/green flags thing is, in aggregate, really boring and generic.”

Regardless, it was fascinating to hear these reflections from my love, because I find the world through his eyes — his inner world — to be rich and curious. But it’s also reminded me that, as he pointed out, I’m my best when I don’t care what other people think.

How about you? What do you think?

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I’m Abigail — a born-again monogamist, sex-tech marketer, mother of two boys, and writer of Happy Endings, where I reveal the juicy, gory details of my marriage every Monday and every other Thursday. Most of these are free, as I want to spread more love. But paid subscribers get even more:

• My how-to style Praxxxis guides on improving your intimate life every other Thursday,

• And my once-monthly uber-intimate real-life sex stories, like this one about how Joe’s love language is blow jobs.

I’m grateful for your attention — it is, after all, a version of love. It would touch me deeply to hear from you with a heart, comment, or share on this post.

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Have a love-filled week xxx

Since that first summer together when I was charmed by every flag shade, so much has changed. We’ve weathered a global pandemic, moved three times (internationally, nationally, and same zipcode), shouldered an emergency cesarean surgery, a mostly-alone home birth, job changes, and the usual stressors of life.

When I think back to our happy-go-lucky courtship, we seem like different people. So I wondered, were all the things that captivated me about my (hopefully) lifelong lover still present in him?

Here are the green flags that woo’d me and whether my husband still waves them:

He was a sweet drunk

When he got drunk, he was the guy who’d sit smiling from his own thoughts, his legs crossed on his bar stool. He might want to pick up a kebob. But he always just wanted to go home, crawl in bed, and snooze. If I made a move, he’d delightedly follow my lead, but mostly we’d have uber-intimate morning hangover sex. I’d only seen him get non-sweet drunk once. He was angsty over class injustice, and said things like “Fuck em, ya know what I mean? They’re all bastards.” It was still sweet!

And he still is.

Our drunk selves do reveal our inner worlds, don’t they? He’s still just as cheerful, and just as interested in a good night’s sleep. We get fewer kebobs in Brooklyn, but we’ll have a cheeky cheese and biscuits after our rare nights out. With our years, I’ve of course seen him angry, but even in our fights, I know he’s a sweet one.

He planned dates

He baked a plum cake for a park picnic in the middle of a pub crawl. He bought tickets for a gig he thought we’d enjoy in the moment, and as a longer-term introduction to each other’s tastes. I appreciated his initiative and his commitment to what he loved — music, food, and the amble of it all.

He still does, kind of.

He’ll orchestrate an afternoon rock hunt with stops for paints and pint (singular (he’s a responsible parent)), culminating in a craft hour at home with our kids. His ideal amble now includes our offspring, so we plan fewer date-dates, but fortunately for both of us, our ideal ambles are complementary.

He read aloud to me

A seafaring turn-of-the-century tale over coffee, hungover in bed. A random page of a hardcover original McSweeney’s collection over tea before meeting friends at the pub. It was years before the ‘performative male’ meme, so I had no reason not to be dazzled. He did subdued character voices. He paused when pauses were apt. I was charmed every time.

He doesn’t any longer.

The only things he reads aloud to me lately are things he’s written. It’s maybe more sweet. But less romantic. We have fewer of those leisure moments to fill with idle happenings right now, as parents to young ones. We prioritize to save our sanity. But I know one day we’ll find this habit again.

He had his own hobbies and interests

He had a collection of guitar loop pedals that he tinkered with regularly without ever feeling the need to record a track. He got lost in Wikipedia holes. He lifted weights and went to the swimming ponds with his guy friends. He frequented punk shows with his gal friends. He made pasta by hand because it tasted better, but when he had it from a box, he had his preferred brand. He was discerning. He prioritized joy, well-being, and fun for those reasons, not status or some shit.

He still does.

He finally transcribes and publishes some of his creations. But he still enjoys the ephemeral: He’s currently working out the best pizza dough, and he recently perfected the breakfast burrito.

He shared (well recc’d) art culture with me

After our first date, he gave me the recently published Convenience Store Woman. I adored it. He texted me, “‘Venus in Furs’ is so Abigail.” It was an accurate representation. He texted, “This made me think of you,” with the link for “Maria’s Theme” by The Liminanas, and I understood why. It touched me. He suggested we watch La Piscine, and we viewed it side by side on his pink corduroy loveseat. From these recommendations, I knew he knew me, and I knew I wanted to keep knowing him too.

He still does, kind of.

He’s the chooser for 90% of our post-kid bedtime evening viewings. He’s our lingerie shopper. He recently told me I “had to” listen to The Kink Machine, an audiobook by the FT. He was right; I did have to. Our diminished time for leisure and dates has impacted personal explorations, so we send each other fewer things, and when we do, they’re much more functional (sex, work, leisure). I’m sure we’ll spread ourselves more toward the gratuitous (which is never where sex is slotted, lol) soon enough.

—

To me, these were standout characteristics of a compelling mate. There are many more, of course: He had many real friendships. He had a real job and ambition, but he knew how to slack off. He listened. He cared. He wasn’t a poet, but he knew how to express his feelings enough to be vulnerable.

Lucky for me, he’s still the man I fell for, just with a few more gray hairs.

As for my red and green flags, well, I asked him. I’ll share soon. xx

I’m wishing you a love filled week, dear reader. Did you catch my last pieces — the summer erotic reset, or the sex story as demonstration of the hot potential of hetero communication gaps? If something related to this current piece interests you, consider this:

The solstice has passed, and here, in Super El Niño USA, we’re on the eve of a holiday weekend. By every metric of time, it’s time for our next seasonal erotic reset.

My first one made the case that even though ‘tips’ are homogenous BS, everyone (even me) benefits from the occasional jolt to their routines.

For the vitality of my sex life, I’m prioritizing the following four pieces of erotic wisdom as I summer with my family in Minneapolis.

Read more

He grabbed it.

“Grab it harder,” I said. “Jiggle it.”

He did each with progressively more heart but never quite the whole.

“Am I too demanding?”

“No, you’re not demanding.”

I felt relieved.

“But sometimes I just don’t get you.”

That was also a relief to hear, because I didn’t expect it. I was glad to know he understood the lack of understanding.

I felt misunderstood. And I could tell he felt misunderstood. It was always in that order. Because he never went looking for this information the way I did. Then, when I felt it and came to him with my sad feelings, looking for affirmation gracelessly, he got confused. When he was confused, he was not himself.

I could be inconsistent. He was never. I could be irrational. He thought he was never.1 But he could be.

This is what girlfriends are for, I thought to myself on the better days. But some days, I wished he could do it all. He’d never fool himself into thinking that doing it all was possible. But I could.

“This is all connected to the same part of you that burns you out,” he said.

He wasn’t wrong.

“You’re not wrong,” I said.

I had a hard time prioritizing when it meant offloading things I found important. And I expected him to do the same. But to him, that was insanity.

“I look crazy,” I said a few days earlier, looking at a photo he sent me of me holding our kids.

“Well,” he said, with a glance.

I laughed. “You’re saying I’m crazy?”

“Well, I’d be crazy to say you weren’t.”

That’s what inconsistency, and the nonmathematical understanding of what can happen within one hour of human time, looked like to someone reasonable. Good thing he wasn’t stupid enough to believe insanity was a problem in and of itself.

We communicated in different languages sometimes. We could be a trope of gender stereotypes. But it wasn’t all bad — he knew what I wanted. And I knew him. Even if we drove each other mad from time to overly-stretched-time.

I put my shoes on as dinner was served. He set the plates in front of our kids. I kissed their heads.

“Bye mom, I love you!” they said.

Then I left, walked down the sidewalk without headphones in, and found my friends at the end of my journey.

I got home after a few margaritas, some tears, and some laughter. The dinner plates were empty, still sitting where I’d last seen them. The kids were asleep.

My heart felt rosy, my body light. My headphones pumped funk music into my temples.

My husband found me smiling at nothing. Then I pushed him down onto the couch, as I wiggled an unintentional lap dance to the funk music only I could hear.

“What are you doing?” his lips moved.

“Shhh,” I said, thinking he didn’t have to know, to know.

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As I type this, I have three days of accumulated summer city life on my body. Layers of sweat on my sun-shined shoulders, car (and emotional) exhaust on my neck, park dirt on my shins, and some other dried brown film on my knee from when I kneeled while helping my kid out of a climbing frame. It’s not that I don’t appreciate cleanliness. I do. I love lying with nothing on my body — no clothing and no random brown film — on and under clean sheets, rubbing up against my husband Joe’s clean, hairy body. I just don’t prioritize cleanliness. I don’t require it.

I still feel sexy with dried salt and grains of sand on my scalp. I am capable of arousing myself and feel capable of arousing others with a knotted ponytail. If I held up my arm right now, I’m fairly sure Joe would tongue my unshaved armpit. But my dirt endurance is more than anyone’s approval.

When I fell in love with my husband, he probably had some type of oral bacterial overgrowth. I could taste and smell it when we kissed. He loved to tongue my mouth when I had sweat dew on my upper lip. The first time I remember this filthy make-out was the first morning after I slept over at his place. After we woke, I rubbed my teeth with my finger and his toothpaste. In a park an hour later, I let him French me that way, even though deep kissing wasn’t really my thing. But when his irregularly aligned teeth bonked into mine as his tongue petted the roof of my mouth, it excited me. Maybe it was our exposed insides, or the imperfection and rawness of it all.

The filth got worse when we became parents. We prioritized fucking before cleaning the dried rice from that night’s dinner. I prioritized my children over myself. I showered more infrequently. We had sex just as frequently.

I thought it was relatively harmless, but I’ve had opportunities to learn otherwise. One time, while our eldest child was one or so, my husband fingered me with unclean, unmanicured hands. I got an internal scrape and a yeast infection that lasted for months.

After we recently moved, we had drunk feral sex. His tongue moved from my clit to my ass hole and back so many times that I got, drum roll, a yeast infection. It was hot in the moment, but in the end, it was not.

After this last occurrence, I drew the line on tonguing succession. After the first occurrence, I suggested he stop biting his nails. The filth slowly stopped arousing me, but I hadn’t yet gotten an aversion.

When I was young, someone told me that rubbing soap on my vulva could promote, you guessed it, yeast infections. These post-douche PSAs and the awareness that my bacteria were self-cleaning were my laissez-faire facilities-management origin stories. But it was more than logic, as it was more than water-saving environmentalism.

I’m not righteous about my infrequent bathing. Although I do think that obligatory cleansing borders on indoctrination,1 and the root of shame.2 Technically, the genuinely pure is impure.3 All symbols of purity — the lotuses, lilies, and lambs — are coated in debris, contaminated rain residue, and bee vomit. Greater than any potential filth kink, or filth tolerance kink, is my belief system: I reject the concept of purity so deeply that I subconsciously prefer to be filthy.

I do clean myself. I even find a bath erotic. Joe and I loved visiting the Hampstead ponds and having a natural bath with the ducks and algae that first feral year together. With our current closest bodies of water, the active EPA Superfind Site, the Gowanus Canal, and the East River, I’ve taken to our indoor bath.

Preparing myself with a soak, scrub, and an oiling is a celebration and appreciation of my body. But my body doesn’t need extra celebration. Bolstering my confidence was never more important than pushing away suitors who might have been averse to it. Part of my filthiness is a strategic rejection of purity, to repel those who would require me to shower pre-sex, which I only consider permissible in extenuating circumstances. I knew that type of partner wasn’t compatible with me, so I didn’t accommodate them.

Those courtship days are long gone, and in their place are parenting days. The constant, my filth. Although a change may be near for the same reason as I’m sending this newsletter later than usual.4

Yesterday, I woke up in clean sheets, the three-day brown knee smudge gone, this essay sat without an ending in my Drafts, and a pain throbbed throughout my body. Despite feeling clean, I was rocked by my second stomach bug in a month.

It’s not a coincidence, of course, that we’ve been potty training my youngest during this time. It might be a coincidence that I sucked Joe’s dick three nights in a row (Father’s Day Weekend triple header5), two of which followed him sharing a bath with my two boys. Whether the specific cause of my pain is the bath cock, the traveling yellow toddler potty, or that three-day brown knee smudge, I know the overarching issue is myself.

Many sweaty hours in a bathroom and many more curled around myself in bed provided ample time for reflection. Is it because I didn’t wash the backs of my hands? Is the Trader Joe’s soap not antibacterial? Did I not wipe every part of the potty? Or was it the doorknob? Should I have thrown away all the knickers with accidents? The contemplative pose upon porcelain, in a sweat-wet pajama shirt, also leaves one feeling as asexual as humanly possible. Why did I ever find exposed insides erotic? Do I need to ask Joe to shower before sex? A more horrifying position than the fetal one. Then, I know how to finish today’s essay.

Before I ever met Joe, a friend told me I was “very tidy.” I side-eyed her. She said, “I didn’t say clean.” My face was fresh. I didn’t often shower or shave, but my pubic and armpit hair were in cute, contained little mounds. My kitchen counters were wiped with a natural product that probably wasn’t protecting me as well as it protected the environment. Has my preference for toxin-free products left my home ironically uninhabitable for humans? So many parts of myself have changed since that conversation, but not my state of cleanliness.

I am filthy. It was a sexy thing. It was a belief-system thing. It was a self-protection thing. Now, well, I am not so sure I want it to be a thing. I’d like Edgar Degas’ visions of bathing to supplant the PSAs in my psyche.

Recently, Joe and I started flossing together. It’s sexy watching him prod his gums. Seeing it, I imagine his longevity expanding. Us growing old together. I winced this morning, keeled over on the couch, “I want to grow old with you,” I said. I was thinking about all the ways he took care of my kids and me that morning. I was thinking about how great a partner he was, filth and all.

Filth or not, I want to be the same.

But ask me again when my baby wipes his own butt.

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Thanks to The Cut’s comment section on this piece about Alex Cooper, host of Call Her Daddy, and her pregnancy, I don’t have to wonder. Plenty of people see a woman who celebrated slutty singledom opting into conventional motherhood, and they read it as betrayal. Cooper’s listeners (of which, full disclosure, I am not one) want her to apologize. To repent for leading them down a path she didn’t follow to its end. I find that insane. Let me explain.

If People Didn’t Change, Who Would We Be?

When I knew I was falling in love with my husband, Joe, I was scared. I thought I’d figured out myself, and love. I was comfortable as a relationship anarchist. I didn’t need commitment. I was 27.

The moment before I realized, I was standing at the Clapton Overground platform on my way to get drinks with Joe near London Fields. My boss called. The wind whipped my hair in my face as she said the team would love me to move to New York City. She remembers this call. She said I was aggressive. What I remember was an intense, overwhelming wave of confusion.

Logically, moving to New York for this job was exactly what I wanted. But leaving London meant leaving the person I was about to get pints with for the seventh Friday running. On the phone with my boss, I wasn’t ready to admit this to myself — that I, the woman who loved being single, wanted to do something monogamous. I was so emotionally constipated that instead of saying, “I’m so glad you’d like that, I’d like it too, but I need to think about timing,” I said something more like, “I thought you were fine with me being remote? Are you not fine with me being remote?”

I’ve found it’s common to see betrayal when really what you’re feeling is confusion. I wasn’t ready to admit I wanted something I thought I never would. I wasn’t ready to change. But clinging to what felt comfortable wasn’t who I was either. So a few weeks later, I told Joe I loved him.

One’s Relationship Status Doesn’t Negate Another’s

I loved being single. Being single rocked. As a single woman, I learned who I was. I learned to love myself, and after a lot of practice, I did it very well. So well that when I found someone worth sharing the limited resource of my time with, I discovered that loving myself and loving another person who loved me back was also — key word, also — a great thing.

Being single is no better than being in a relationship. They’re both great choices for different people, or for the same person in different seasons.

When I tell people that I loved being single, it says nothing about my marriage. When I write about how brilliant this relationship feels, it says nothing about how I once felt being single.

The trouble isn’t which relationship status one has, but the contentment one has with their relationship status — or, really, the contentment they have, period.

Your Relationship Status Says the Least About You

I started Happy Endings partially because I was stunned that a “modern feminist” could feel so satisfied inside a traditional system. I’d expected to find contentment difficult. What I found was the opposite: partnership lifted my life. I don’t want to convince anyone to follow my path, only to show it’s possible. The marriage wasn’t the point. It was the sex, the love, the joy, and the navigating of pain, together. Sluttiness isn’t relegated to singledom. Mothers can be whores, too.

At its bones, Happy Endings is me as my friends have always known me — oversharingly honest, slightly provocative, and a sap for love (of the self, and others). Even when I was in a codependent relationship that should’ve ended earlier. Even when I was in the midst of heartbreak and wishing I wasn’t single. Even when I embraced the solitude.

And when I hear Call Her Daddy acolytes annoyed at the host for “abandoning” everything she applauded, I hear myself on that Overground platform, talking to my boss.

No One Can Tell You Which Relationship Style is Best For You — Not Even Past You

When I’ve felt dissatisfied, I’ve been quicker to feel misled. It’s easier to blame than to make a change.

To deal with dissatisfaction, I’ve learned to investigate it. To look inward for what feels lacking, and find a way to give it to myself.

Sometimes that meant breaking up. Sometimes a therapist. Sometimes getting really obsessed with karaoke, or a haircut, or a new job working for an alternative to conventional porn. Sometimes it meant admitting I loved someone even if it wasn’t logical.

But like most moments that require self-reflection, these decisions (minus karaoke and the haircut) are fucking hard. Knowing what’s best for yourself isn’t quick or painless. It’s a never-ending, ever-unfolding process. It can feel like backsliding when you measure yourself against everyone around you, and it takes even longer when you’re pouring all of yourself into someone who might not be loving you well, because you don’t yet know what that looks like.

It’s far easier to keep doing what you’ve always done. Easier still to swap internal validation for external: to take your cues from someone who seems to have all the answers. A podcaster. A friend. Especially in a world that is increasingly challenging to thrive in.

So when that person makes the human, progressive decision to change, the people following her who are dissatisfied with their own lives feel hurt. The person who helped them outsource their self-acceptance stopped validating their choices. Choices that might be great for them, or not, but nobody but them will ever be able to say.

The last time I was annoyed by someone changing, I threw my own pity party — outside the comments section, thankfully — and then I looked in the mirror and asked myself what I actually needed. Then I forgave myself for not giving it to myself. I didn’t ask for anyone to apologize.

As I won’t be doing myself. My husband thinks I apologize too much as it is (I’m a Minnesotan!), and that piece of advice feels useful to me. And as for Cooper — she said, “Choosing motherhood in my 30s doesn’t erase the right to have enjoyed my 20s.” Who can argue with that?

I love that you love love, too. Thank you for reading, dear person. I will see you again on Monday. In the meantime, drop me a note — tell me your trajectory, or opinion, or perspective on unapologetic versus apologetic behavior:

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I don’t think anyone can argue that the best time to enjoy some face sitting is when you’re in the mood for face sitting. But there is much debate over the best way to enjoy face sitting.

If there’s a wide (or widening) pussy and a horizontally inclined consumer nearby, the following are my recommended face-sitting postures, in unranked order.

Read more

My vagina is the same.

When I’m my horniest, my vulva spreads itself, and I have an urge to spread myself further. I know my lips are parted. I can feel them thickening and dampening. I want to reach my hands back behind my butt and put my fingertips where my vulva reaches my thighs and pull myself more open.

I want a wide pussy.

I want the place between my legs to feel like a black hole with gravity so heavy nothing near can escape. I’m the gatekeeper to a pleasure-obsessed, ever-expanding horizon.

I love my wide pussy.

When I feel wide, my husband says I don’t *feel* wide. I asked him after he made a few confused faces as I described this sensation. He said, “You feel pillowous and juicy.”

When I pressed my husband about what “pillowous” meant, he said, “It’s like the inverse of anal sex.” When I pressed him about what that meant, he said, “Like the opening isn’t tight, but the inside is plumped up and constricted from blood flow.”

I said, “Like warm, firm, slippery pillows are pressing his penis in 360 degrees.”

“Sure,” he said.

Talking about wide pussies feels revolutionary in a thin-preoccupied, loose-pussy shaming society. But that’s not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it because I love a wide pussy.

We could take the obligatory nod at human creation. But that’s not why I’m writing to it either. I love my wide pussy because it feels incredible.

Having a wide on feels incredible.

Thank you, reader. I hope you feel some deep wanting this week that spreads your whole heart wide open.

If you’d like to continue reading Happy Endings, might I suggest these recent pieces:

• a massage during a blowjob leaves us both renewed

• fantasizing about someone new comes in many (secure) forms

• play two sides of a paradigm, sexually: are you the corrupt or the incorruptible?

Or these vaginal pieces:

• actually, really, touching a vulva

• kissing bloody vulvas

• a pussy smorgasboard

But I looked up from my phone. My husband sat there, on the couch, with his legs crossed. His ankles always look so cute with his bunched-up white cotton socks.

I was on the carpet, one knee tucked up by my chin. I stared so long that the blue light went out.

He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. He looked handsome with uncharacteristically grown-out facial hair. His chin had more gray hairs than I’d realized.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he said.

“I love you,” I said. “You look good.”

“I don’t feel it.”

We had that in common.

Receiving is active, I thought. Doing nothing, especially when you’re not feeling good, is tempting. But that would give me less than something. And we both needed something.

I’d written the note in my phone during a post-massage haze a few days after we moved. I’d seen the masseuse, Melissa, for years. On this visit, she’d told me what she’d told me before: how pleasant it was to massage someone who participated in the treatment, who breathed deeply instead of tensing, who pulled attention to the tight spots as her hands did. I’m sure that when I was a baby massage client, I just lay there and took the touch. Or worse, subconsciously clenched and fought the care. But practice makes for understanding, and I understood it was time for another, related technique my husband and I have practiced.

“Do you want to rub my neck and shoulders as I suck your dick?” I said.

“How could I say no?” he said…

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So you don’t have the time to coordinate the physical and emotional logistics of a sexy third-party rendezvous, but you’d like some “more the merrier” erotic excitement? Well, I’ve got a few ideas for you.

We don’t have to add “ish” on a monogamous label to find the prospect of a new entity in our bedroom enticing. Neither do we need an actual entity in the bedroom to enjoy that specific seduction.

Here are three things my husband and I have enjoyed, which I dub “Threesome Lite.” Based on chats with my IRL subscribers (aka friends), I have a hunch this will appeal to at least one of you:

Read more

The first time I was asked to have my vulva kissed, I said, “Oh my gosh! Are you serious? That is so disgusting.” I was wrong about that.

I was also wrong about kissing other parts between my legs. The best oral includes my husband eating my arsehole, but I used to be too squeamish. That fear of dirtiness was evidence that I was living too much in my mind, but it’s so much hotter to live in your dirty body.

I was wrong about Disney adults. I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve the side eyes. We all deserve to consume a well-crafted happy ending.

I once told an ex that “I only do things for two years.” The self-deprecation was accurate, historically, but I was wrong. I mightn’t have been good at commitment before, but I welcomed longevity when it felt right.

Which might be why I didn’t want to move, as I shared last week. But I was wrong about our new apartment. It was the right call. My husband, Joe, was right.

I was wrong about the longer walk to my kids’ school being a problem. Now, a walk through my neighborhood with my family is an obligatory part of my routine, instead of a bonus to fit in.

I was wrong about this apartment’s bathroom being shit. Prioritizing a too-big bathtub at the expense of floor space proves the renovators had better priorities than I. Hopefully, living in this space will teach me to inhabit that excessive self-indulgence in more ways than bathing, which, I can already say, inspires hot sex (with lots of parts kissing).

I am not sorry for being wrong. I find my abject failures comforting. Like how I feel now in this new, beautiful apartment, which I tried to fight against. Some of the best experiences ahead of me, I’m not yet capable of noticing. And, without the help of my lovers, I may never be.

Or as my husband and kids said last night over dinner, “Sometimes everyone is a wally.”

What have you been delightfully wrong about?

P.S. this post is a happy anniversary wish to my friends, and ’s, reading series, Late to the Party! Joe and I celebrated with a packed KGB Bar last week, right before we moved. Click on their Instagram to see a disposable camera photo of us with red eyes.

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