Doing her “wifely duty” – Jade

LEAH: Welcome to Good Girls Talk About Sex. I’m sex educator and sexual communication coach Leah Carey and this is a place to share conversations with all sorts of women about their experience of sexuality. These are unfiltered conversations between adult women talking about sex. If anything about the previous sentence offends you, turn back now! And if you’re looking for a trigger warning, you’re not going to get it from me. I believe that you are stronger than the trauma you have experienced. I have faith in your ability to deal with things that upset you. Sound good? Let’s start the show!

[MUSIC]

LEAH: Today, we’ll meet Jade, a 51 year old cisgender female who describes herself as white, bisexual, monogamous, in a relationship, and the mother of two children who are still living at home. She’s had two miscarriages and still gets a regular period. She describes her body as slender.

Agreeing to be a guest on this show demonstrates a special kind of courage, the courage to be vulnerable and as honest as you know how to be in that moment. That’s why I love it so much when listeners contact me and say they’d like to do an interview. Jade did exactly that. For me, there is no greater confirmation for the work that I’m doing than hearing that people who are listening want to be a part of it. So, if you’re listening and thinking you’d like to do an interview with me, please go to leahcarey.com/guest. I’d love to talk with you.

And now, I’m so pleased to introduce Jade!

Thank you so much for being with me. You are a listener to this show who let me know that you wanted to be interviewed and as you know that is my favorite thing. So thank you so much for being here today.

JADE: You’re very welcome. I am excited.

LEAH: Awesome. So let’s start where we always start. What is your first memory of sexual pleasure?

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: I was about 10 years old and it was summer time. I was on a swim team in my neighborhood and in the club house in the girls’ locker room, there was a sauna. I was the last one to leave and I don’t know what gave me this idea.

And it wasn’t even on. It was just a dark, empty room and I remember laying down on the floor. There was a little window so I had a little bit of light. And I had a crush on a boy at school and it was my first sexual fantasy basically. My 10 year old version of a  sexual fantasy, I pictured him in the room with me, kneeling, facing me while I was laying on my back and I had my swimsuit. And in my mind, he was clothed. He was dressed.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: And it was the most very simple. There was no talking in what I was imagining. He touched me gently somewhere on my body and it wasn’t even necessarily what we would l think now as adults as sexual touch, but there was just this warm feeling throughout my whole body. And I remember feeling aroused and wanting him to touch me in whatever I thought of that time at my young age as a sexual touch. I’m not even sure what that was.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: And I remember thinking, “I hope no one sees me in here because this is so strange. I’m laying on the floor in the sauna all by myself.”

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: But yeah, that’s my first memory of sexual pleasure.

LEAH: So it was just laying on the floor. You weren’t masturbating or touching yourself?

JADE: No, I wasn’t touching myself.

LEAH: Wow.

JADE: I was just completely still.

LEAH: What an interesting and such a clear memory.

JADE: Yeah, I know and I hadn’t thought of that in a very long time until I started listening to your podcast and hearing you ask everyone, “What is your memory of your first sexual experience?” And that’s what it is.

LEAH: Wow, those sort of I don’t want to say romantic fantasies but the fantasies that involved someone touching you, at what point did that bridge to you recognizing that there were parts of your body that you could touch and feel pleasure?

JADE: Oh my Gosh. Well, we’d have to jump a number of years ahead, transition to my first memory of masturbating. My father would recommend books to me as a kid. Some of them were famous books. Some he had read. And when I was probably about 13, so maybe 8^th grade, he gave me The Clan of the Cave Bear. Do you remember that book?

LEAH: Oh my God! Not only do I remember it. That was the first book I masturbated to.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: Oh my God! That’s amazing.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: I think I have literally maybe told this story to a couple of people over the years like lovers or my ex-husband. I can’t even remember. So there’s a scene in the book where the main character Ayla, I think is her name, meets the handsome and also injured human. That’s her same type of human in the evolutionary scale. So she’s been raised by the Cro-Magnons, I’m not even sure if I’m saying that right.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: So she tends to his wounds and they have this chemistry. And they kind of fall for each other and there’s this incredible passionate sex scene that I can’t remember now because I’m 51 and I was 13 when I read that.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: But it really turned me and I remember I was in my bedroom and no one had ever talked to me about masturbation, not for girls. Maybe I knew that boys touched their penises and masturbated and I might have known that. But I had zero memory of any exposure through other books or movies. I don’t have any sisters. I wasn’t really close to other girlfriends for many years as a child so I didn’t have girlfriends I was talking to about masturbation or sex or anything. But I had this large teddy bear. I straddled the teddy bear on my bed and just pressed my sex parts against the teddy bear, kind of thrusting and moving and I had an orgasm.

LEAH: Yeah. That is amazing because that book stands in my memory. I remember the scene that you’re talking about but that’s not actually the one that was for me.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: It’s funny. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this. So, I went to a class a year or two ago where they talked about how our fantasies as children are often indicators to the things that will excite us as adults. And that was finally an answer for me about something that I have wondered about for a long time because the scene in The Clan of the Cave Bear that did it for me was closer to the beginning when she was still living with the tribe of Cro-Magnons and they had a “signal” where the man gave the signal and the woman was supposed to submit.

And there was a man who gave her the signal and she didn’t want to but she did anyway. And it was a power dynamic thing that now I would look at, and first of all, it was non-consensual, but also there was a sort of a Dominant Submissive aspect to the whole thing that I found really exciting. And now I’m like, “Oh, that makes a little bit of sense.” While the Dominant Submissive is not a huge part of my active sex life, it is a huge part of my fantasy. That’s so funny that we had the same book.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: Yeah, and I remember that scene as well and the signal and the character that gave her the signal. Part of it was that she was shocked because she was considered ugly in that group. She didn’t look like them. She was the outsider, the black sheep. And so she was shocked when he gave her the signal because she was assuming the men in the tribe would just be interested in the other women. But he did it because he didn’t like her and he was hostile towards her.

LEAH: Wow.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Wow that just blows my mind.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: So let’s get back to you and your sex life. At what point did you move from masturbation to engaging with another person?

JADE: So when I was 14, I was a freshman in high school and I started dating. Well, I’m going to call him a young man, he was a senior and he was 17. And I’m not surprised at that age and time of my life that I strongly shifted my focus to having a boyfriend because we had moved around a lot as a kid and I really struggled to make friends.

And I went to a teeny, teeny, tiny 8^th grade. It was a K-8. I had 25 kids in my class and I was only there that one year and so they were all friends and bonded for many years and I was the outsider. So then when we transitioned to high school taking the bus into the larger town near us to a huge high school of 3000 students, I didn’t have any close friends. I was unconnected.

And so maybe a month into the school year, I noticed this young man and I approached him and started talking to him. And we started dating and he basically became the center of my life. Besides school, I was still a really good student and I had my family, but socially he was my world and that was the first relationship. We dated for 3 years until I was a senior and about maybe 3 months into that relationship, I remember thinking, “Well, we love each other and we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together.” Because that’s what I had decided or was assuming and so that means we’re going to have sex. That just goes together. That’s just part of it.

And I think there was also a somewhat unconscious assumption that that’s what boys want. If you’re going to date a boy seriously long term, they’re going to expect sex and you should do that. That’s just normal. But I was raised in a Catholic family. My mother was raised Catholic and by 14 I knew that sex outside of marriage was a sin.

And I had a girlfriend at that time, not a close girlfriend but she was my age and my class. And she was also dating a guy a few years older and I remember she and I started talking about this experience and we did kind of ask each other like, “Are you going to have sex with him?” And we went to the school library, got a Bible from the school book shelf and went to the index under sex or sexual intercourse or something, read a few different short pieces in the Bible. And one of them had something about, “If you have sex with someone and then get married, it’s okay. So you don’t have to be married as long as you have sex as long as you marry the person you’re having sex with. It’s cool.” And so we were like, “Oh, good. We found our answer.”

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: We were so relieved that we had this religious permission because we had find this tiny little sentence at the Bible in school and so she and I never talked about it again. We kind of just went our merry way and she was off dating her older boyfriend and I was dating mine.

And I remember we would walk to his house after school, not every day, but sometimes and his mom let us go into his bedroom. She wanted him to crack his door a couple of inches, but he had a bookshelf right there, which completely blocked anyone’s view. So as long as we were quiet, no one really knew what we were doing. And he reassured me. He’s like, “Oh, my mom’s not going to walk in. Don’t worry about it.” So we would make out in his bed and eventually the clothes started coming off and I’m sure that was the first place that we had sex.

LEAH: Did you look forward to those times of being sexual with him?

JADE: That is such a good question. I mean when I think about the relationship I’m in now and how much I look forward with having sex with my partner.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: I think about it almost every day and I’m turned on all day long if I know I’m going to see him that night. I mean there, it’s almost nothing. I don’t remember any of that kind of arousal between seeing him or leading up to seeing that first boyfriend.

LEAH: Yeah, so what about the second boyfriend? What made that so much better for you?

JADE: I have such vivid memories of our first kiss because it was after school. I was living with my dad that year and he provided me with a car. So I drove him home and we did this funny there where I walked him to the door, and then he walked me back to my car, and we couldn’t stop talking. We didn’t want to say goodbye, and then I walked him back to the door, and then he walked me back to the car.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: We’re just trying to say goodbye for like 30 minutes and then finally we kissed each other. And it was magical. It was a fun, romantic, exciting first kiss. And we had another amazing kiss in this totally empty football field with the wind blowing our hair and I remember we had to be creative and sneaky. We were teenagers.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: So we probably had sex in the car a couple of times, sex in the bedroom when his parents weren’t home. We had sex in the living room of his house once when no one was at home. That was kind of intense and risky because someone could have walked in at any moment. And so that was really my first truly passionate sex that I had. That was actually only 6 months because I went away to college. And that was sad because I really liked him, loved him, we were close. He was a year younger than I was and had another year of high school and I was moving away to college.

So in college, I had some casual sex with a couple of guys and then my next boyfriend in a class. The main thing I remember about our sexual dynamic is that there were many times where I was not very sexual. I just wanted affection and to be held and to cuddle and I know that women in your interviews have talked about this. And I would tell him that, “Oh, I just want to cuddle I don’t want to have sex right now.” I don’t know if I could call this coercive but he knew how to touch me gently, and slowly to turn me on, and so we had some cuddle time, and then there would be some caressing, maybe some kissing and I would then become aroused and then I would want to have sex with him.

And it happened enough times that I knew it was intentional on his part so that bothered me and yet it was just kind of in this gray area, poor boundaries for both of us and not super healthy, not super ideal. He wasn’t being super respectful, but I was also getting some of my needs met at the same time for that emotional closeness and affection. And the transition was uncomfortable because some part of me realized I was being manipulated but then once I was turned on, I enjoyed the sex with him. So it was awkward but tolerable.

LEAH: I think that’s a really fine line and you’re right. This is a really common story. And I think there’s a fine line between coercion and as you just called it manipulation because it’s not like you were saying no. You weren’t being pressured into something you didn’t want but you’re being led down a path to what he wanted. Did he do something illegal?

JADE: No.

LEAH: No, he didn’t.

JADE: Exactly.

LEAH: But did he do something that was overstepping boundaries? Yeah, he did.

JADE: Right. It was selfish

LEAH: And it’s not to say that you didn’t get something out of it and we bare responsibility for our actions and it was also not totally on the up and out.

JADE: Right. I knew there was an unhealthy dynamic.

[MUSIC]

LEAH: I want to invite you to imagine for a moment what your ideal sex life looks and feels like.

Who are you with?
What type of sex do you have together?
How do you feel while touching them?
How does your body feel when they touch you?
Or … would you like to have LESS sex than you’re currently having?

If you don’t know, or if that vision of your ideal doesn’t look at all like what’s currently going on in your bedroom, I can help.

With personalized sex and intimacy coaching, we’ll explore where you are, where you want to be, and the steps to help you get there.  There are no right or wrong answers, just the answers that work FOR YOU.

I understand that exploring your sexuality and all that goes with it – your body image, your belief in your lovability, and more – can be terrifying.  Believe me, I sat in the middle of that fire for decades. I know how painful it is.  But I also stepped out the other side, stronger, more confident, and more certain of my own lovability and desirability. You can do the same.

I work with couples and one-on-one – whether you’ve never explored your sexual desires before, or you want to explore things you’ve never done before like BDSM or non-monogamy, or if you and your partner need some help figuring out how to communicate together about sex.

I am queer, kinky, and poly friendly.

I want you to have a deeply fulfilling intimate life, and together we can help you get there.

For more information and to schedule your free Discovery Call, visit www.leahcarey.com/coaching. A new client recently said that before her Discovery Call she was extremely nervous, but that I made the experience feel easy and comfortable.

Book your free Discovery Call today at www.leahcarey.com/coaching.

[MUSIC]

LEAH: I know that you got married and had some kids so that was the sex like inside of your marriage?

JADE: Well, in the beginning it was good. Just two to three months after we got married, we started having problems and started arguing about things. And the tension and conflict in our marriage just continued from that point on. And in the beginning, it was tolerable. I think partly because I had some drama. Before my parents divorced, there was some arguing, it still fell within the range of normal and tolerable to me. And we had just gotten married and had this strong commitment to the relationship and we both definitely wanted to have kids. I wanted to have two kids. I was very clear about that.

And about three years into our marriage, we had our first baby, my daughter. And things got extra hard after that. We loved her and adored her and I’m sure you’ve heard in some of the women you’ve interviewed have spoken about this as well, but having children radically changes your life and dramatically changes your marriage. And dramatically impacts how much time you have to be alone together, whether you’re having a conversation, going to a movie or dinner or having sex, all of the above, you have dramatically less time.

It took quite a while for my body to recover from the vaginal birth. I tore when she was born and was stitched. And I remember about six months after she was born, so completely sleep deprived, exhausted and in certain ways not getting the support and help that I needed from my husband. We tried to have intercourse and it really hurt and so he was very, very sexually frustrated during that time and it was almost kind of desperate. The way he would speak to me about it, he had a desperate tone in his voice and it was kind of begging me to be sexual with him in some way even though if we couldn’t have intercourse, to pleasure him in other ways. And that was just a very, very stressful time.

LEAH: Yeah, were there other ways you could pleasure him without feeling like you were giving away part of yourself?

JADE: I had no interest in sex at that time. I was nursing, and I remember another woman you interviewed about becoming a mom and nursing babies and my breasts were no longer sexual or erogenous for me.

It was all about nursing my baby and that relationship, the bond with my baby was a huge essential to my life. I was an at home mom for almost 2 years and the combination I think of just hormonally what’s going on in my body and the natural instinct to prioritizing this baby as well as all the conflict and tension in my marriage, I had no interest in sex and so anything, any kind of sexual interaction we had probably definitely for the first six months. It’s a little bit of a blur now. Maybe for like a year, I felt obligated and kind of emotionally pressured to have sexual interactions with him. And, of course, I’d internalize the social pressure too that when you’re married as a wife, that’s what you do.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: I got a good download of that just from society even though he never said, “You’re my wife so you have to do this.” I think he would know that’d be horrible and I wouldn’t accept that.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: But I had that within me just from the culture and then there was him just feeling aroused and wanting sex with me and kind of desperate and that just added to my feeling of obligation.

LEAH: Yeah, I’m sorry.

JADE: When I got pregnant with my son 7 years later, and one of my close friends expressed some surprise.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: Like, “Really? I know you’ve been struggling in your marriage for so long, why are you having another child with this man?”

And the answer was that I’d always known I wanted two kids. That was just part of my life plan and he was the spouse. He was the father and it was when my son was about a year old that I told my husband I need to separate. Basically there was so much conflict and so much stress in our marriage, neither of us was happy and I just couldn’t tolerate it anymore. And so I said, “I’m not filing for divorce. I’m not looking for anyone else but my hope for our marriage and our future together is in the trash can right now.”

That was my metaphor. It was a crumpled up piece of paper in the trash can. It was that close to being gone for good. It’s going to be taken out to the curb and be gone for good in a few seconds.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: And that was very shocking, super distressing for him. And we did separate briefly. He moved out so that I could stay in the house with the kids and he stayed with a friend. And part of it is that he was a heavy marijuana user and I’d been asking him to cut back, quit for a very long time and so he did. He quit and he started going to meetings for that and he got some therapy and he made a lot of positive changes.

We were still interacting every day. He was still picking up the kids from school and I did have a really good boundary. That was the first time in my marriage that I had a really clear boundary with him that I would hug him but that was it. And he wanted to kiss me when we would see each other. And I said, “No, I can’t do anything sexual with you right now. I need these boundaries.”

And I was trying to recreate a healthier dynamic where we weren’t so enmeshed. I realized that we were very much enmeshed and I wanted to be two healthy individuals coming together in a healthy relationship and I had an idea for that. Neither of us knew how to do that.

And of course, all of that affected our sexual relationship or the sexual aspect of our relationship and basically a few years after that, he moved back in and things were much better for a while, and then things got really hard again and deteriorated. And I remember a few years, two to three years before I left him. I left the relationship almost two years ago. So about four years ago, I realized that one of his complaints was that I wasn’t playful enough. I wasn’t flirtatious enough. He wanted me to initiate, both with affection and sex with him more. And he had expressed this complaint multiple times over a couple of years.

And I said to him, “Every interaction we have is kind of like foreplay that our only time to be alone in bed together is with the kids downstairs watching the TV show Saturday mornings. All of our interactions during the week leading up to that Saturday morning is our foreplay, so if we’re getting along and it’s relaxed and you’re smiling and we’re affectionate and we both bring good energy into the relationship, then I’m going to be so much interested in having sex with you Saturday morning. And the sex will be better and I probably would initiate more.”

And I remember I was finally able to articulate that to him and my metaphor was sunshine. I said, “Bring me some sunshine and that is anything positive, cheerful, lighthearted, happy, whether you’re thanking me for something or praising me or you’re whistling a cute song while you cook dinner or you’re being a great dad.” I said, “Just bring me some sunshine as much as possible and I know that our sex life will improve.” And I remember feeling so excited that I finally was able to express that to him because I thought I know this guy would be on board with this because he wants these things he’s been asking for for years. And I handed him the magic formula for how to have that and I was really optimistic. I really thought it was going to happen.

And it didn’t happen. He didn’t bring me the sunshine and at one point, I remember saying to him, “I’d rather be single than continue struggling with these same problems that we’ve had for so long.” He agreed and I said, “We need help. I think we each need individual therapy and we need to see a couple’s counselor.” And he agreed, which was kind of shocking because I had asked him a couple times prior to that and he always refused, so that gave me some hope.

We saw a couple’s counselor for a year and a half and it did help a little bit. I could tell that when we had a session that week, our week was better. It was not dramatically better. It was a little bit better. And if for some reason we couldn’t see our therapists on a given week, I could tell the difference between the weeks we had a session and weeks we didn’t. But our relationship was so messy that we didn’t have enough time one hour a week to address everything. We probably needed three sessions a week really to make the kind of progress that I wanted.

So after a year and a half, two things happened. He went out of town for 10 days on business and my life at home with the kids was so much easier. I was relaxed in my own home. I was a better mom. And when he got back, in our therapy session the morning after he returned, I said to him, “Hey, I really love you, I’m committed to this marriage and those 10 days that you were gone were so much easier for me. And I need you to know that. I need you to know that when you were gone I was happy.”

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: And then I slept in our guest room that next week. Things deteriorated really quickly after that and a week later at the next therapy session, he said, “I need to know what’s going on. Do you want a divorce?”

Because we were talking around it, we were dancing around this topic of splitting up without being clear with each other and so he kind of confronted me in therapy. And I said, “Yes, I want a divorce.” And I said it out loud for the first time and that was almost two years ago. And the motivation for leaving was that I was done scraping by emotionally, just barely getting by emotionally. I wanted to thrive. I had hope, I didn’t know how it was going to happen, but I had hope that there was a way that I could actually be truly happy and thrive but it wasn’t going to happen married to that man.

And I just reached my limit and I left and I’m so glad I did. I don’t regret it at all. And all the grieving that I’ve done since then was not grieving for the end of that marriage. It was grieving everything I went through during that marriage, the memories that were coming up and the emotion that was coming up.

And about 6 months after I left him, I started having sexual feelings again. Not with a particular person, but my body started to wake up. I was feeling aroused and I was like, “What is going on?” I was not expecting that at all. No one was flirting with me. I wasn’t thinking about dating. I was just managing. I was just coping, parenting two kids. I had moved twice since I left him and juggling work, household, children, and finances, and I had filed for divorce but our divorce was still not final.

Six months later, I started getting all these sexual feelings and after about a week or two, decided to start dating. And so I created a profile on one of the dating sites and immediately started messaging men through this site. And it was interesting, I wanted to choose my sexual interest in both men and women and that site wouldn’t let me choose. You had to pick either women or men, which really sucked because I was interested in both. But I had only kind of fooled around with women a handful of times, clearly I was primarily attracted to men and so I chose men.

And that first lover, I had two dates, two weekends, but the first time we had sex with each other. He was a very grounded mature warmhearted openhearted caring person and the sex was really good and I broke down sobbing in his arms. And he just held me and that’s when I realized, “Oh, I don’t think I just want sex. I actually think I want an emotional connection as well and to find a partner where I could have that emotional safety and satisfying sexual connection.” So I dated a few men and then found the man I’m with now. And we’ve been together about 14 months.

LEAH: That’s wonderful.

JADE: And he’s mature and grounded and very self aware and has really excellent communication skills. And he’s done a ton of therapy over the years so he’s done a lot of work on himself. Also, he had a very active Buddhist practice for a long time, so he gained a lot of serenity and inner peace from that Buddhist practice and self awareness. And he’s also co-parenting with his ex and has a daughter half-time so that was really nice to find someone in a similar phase of life, because I have two kids and I’m co-parenting.

And he’s an excellent listener. He’s very present. He’s very attentive. I feel so safe with him. I feel so emotionally safe with him. And of course, that wasn’t immediately in the beginning, it built over time. Not only is there a very fulfilling meaningful emotional connection, but our sex is amazing. To me that’s the magic formula. Yes, we have great sex, and it’s casual and you’re not in a relationship, and I know that happens, and I had some of that in my life too. But gradually over this time, I’ve been able to be not only vulnerable with him emotionally, but also vulnerable in bed sexually, and that brings us closer and enriches our relationship and enriches our lives.

LEAH: That’s so wonderful.

JADE: He loves my body and is really attracted to me and he tells me I’m sexy and I’m hot and I’m beautiful.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: And I have the body of a 38 year old. And so that has really also transformed basically, I was very repressed for a very long time in my marriage and then went through this kind of sexual revolution and now I’m with a partner where I feel like we’re very well matched in terms of intellect and emotional maturity and very well sexually matched as well.

[MUSIC]

LEAH: Hey friends!

If you love these conversations, I’d love your help to keep them going. There are three ways you can participate: two are free, and one is for listeners who’ve got a few extra dollars each month.

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Now let’s get back to the show.

[MUSIC]

LEAH: Do you have sex during your period?

JADE: Yes. I never did before. For like my whole life, I didn’t. But now with this current partner, he’s just up for anything. He doesn’t care about blood. I just get a bunch of black towels, so he did, he has his own collection of black towels and we just layer underneath us.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Excellent. What’s the approximate number of sex partners you’ve had?

JADE: Oh my Gosh, 20 probably, about 20.

LEAH: Are you generally more active or more passive during lovemaking?

JADE: Well, with my current partner, I would say a lot of it is very mutual and we play around with what I call light BDSM. He likes to blindfold me and bind me and I like that too. It’s fun especially because I feel so safe with him and I have a safe word. I’ve never needed to use it.

LEAH: What’s your favorite part of your body?

JADE: I’m really loving my girl parts right now. I think I’m enjoying sex with my partner so much and I just start recently shaving, the bottom around my labia. I keep my pubic hair in the front on the top. And I just love the soft feeling of my skin and I masturbate multiple times a week.

[LAUGHTER]

JADE: Yeah, I’m just really feeling grateful for my sex parts.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Nice. I love that.

[MUSIC]

LEAH: That’s it for today. If you’re enjoying the show, please take a moment to leave a 5-star rating and review on Apple podcasts or, if you’re using another podcast app, go to www.ratethispodcast.com/goodgirls.

And remember there is a treasure trove of audio extras available FOR FREE at Patreon. Go to www.patreon.com/goodgirlstalkaboutsex. While listening to those extras is free, producing this show is not. If my work is meaningful to you and you have a few dollars to support it each month, I’ll gratefully accept your patronage at Patreon. I donate 10% of all Patreon proceeds to ARC-Southeast, an organization that supports women in the Southeast United States to access reproductive services that are increasingly difficult to obtain.

Find out more and become a community member at www.patreon.com/goodgirlstalkaboutsex.

Show notes and transcripts for this episode are at www.GoodGirlsTalk.com.

Follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube at GoodGirlsTalk for more sex-positive content.

If you have questions or comments about anything you’ve heard on the show, call and leave a message at 720-GOOD-SEX.

Good Girls Talk About Sex is produced by me, Leah Carey, and edited by Gretchen Kilby.

I have additional administrative support from Lara O’Connor and Maria Franco.

Transcripts are produced by Jan Acielo.

Before we go, I want to remind you that the things you may have heard about your sexuality aren’t true. You are worthy. You are desirable. You are not broken.

As your Sex and Intimacy coach, I will guide you in embracing the sexuality that is innately yours, no matter what it looks like. To set up your free Discovery Call, go to www.leahcarey.com/coaching.

Until next time, here’s to your better sex life!

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