My sex education came from Judy Blume – Evelin

Dr. Evelin Dacker is a sex-positive physician in Oregon and the CEO of Sex Positive Portland. She shares her own history with sexuality in this emotional episode.
Good Girls Talk About Sex
Good Girls Talk About Sex
My sex education came from Judy Blume – Evelin
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In this episode of Good Girls Talk About Sex, we talk with Dr. Evelin Dacker, a cisgender half-Mexican, half-Jewish polyamorous woman who is 53 years old.

Evelin is a sex-positive physician in Eugene, Oregon and the CEO of Sex Positive Portland, an organization dedicated to understanding and exploring all aspects of human sexuality. She is also the creator of the STARS Talk, a format for talking about your sexuality and preferences so that we can ALL have more satisfying sexual encounters with both current and new partners.

In this episode we talk about

  • Evelin’s history with masturbation from the time she was a baby
  • Judy Blume’s books as sex education
  • How the ability to self-pleasure replaced a desire for sex as a teenager
  • Learning compersion
  • Distinguishing between open relationships and cheating
  • The relationship Evelin defines as “primary”
  • Meeting her spouse on a beach in Thailand
  • What is NRE? (Hint: New Relationship Energy)
  • The mismatches in the relationship with her spouse
  • The effects of being married to an alcoholic
  • How the story of their meeting kept her marriage together
  • The terrible side effects Evelin experienced with birth control pills
  • The distinction between moving sexual energy and sensual energy while having sex
  • Yucking her yum
  • The answer Evelin knew but didn’t want to know: she didn’t feel safe
  • The discovery that saved Evelin’s soul: Roller Derby
  • The re-emergence of Evelin’s bisexuality
  • Sober vs. dry drunk
  • Getting turned on by seeing someone flirting with her spouse
  • Becoming an-orgasmic and looking forward to menopause
  • Opening the relationship
  • Meeting a soulmate that supported Evelin through deep sexual healing
  • The end of her marriage
  • Taking oral sex class – four times!
  • Discovering polyamory
  • The evolution of the relationship with her spouse now that they are no longer married
  • The Quick Five

Resources

Full episode text

LEAH: Hi, I’m Leah Carey and this is Good Girls Talk About Sex. This is a place to share conversations with all sorts of women about their experience of sexuality. Before we get started, I want to tell you this. 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 the things that upset you. Sound good? Let’s start the show!

[MUSIC]

LEAH: In today’s episode, we’ll meet Evelin Dacker, a 53 year old cisgender woman who describes herself as half-Mexican and half-Jewish, bisexual, biromantic, and polyamorous. Evelin is a physician in Salem, Oregon and she’s the CEO of Sex Positive Portland, an organization dedicated to understanding and exploring all aspects of human sexuality.

Today’s episode is a little different because in addition to sharing her personal story, Evelin also explain the STARS conversation, a formula she created to help all of us talk about sex. This information is so important that rather than doing a Patreon episode, I’m releasing a bonus episode for all listeners. Look for the STARS episode in your feed immediately following this one.

Now the sound quality of this week’s interview is not perfect but it’s because rather than sitting in a studio, Evelin invited me into her home. She and I sat on the floor of her bedroom and chatted so throughout this recording, you’ll hear the sounds of daily life, cats climbing on laps, planes flying overhead, etc. I am so pleased to introduce Evelin!

I’m so excited to be talking to you today. You are the CEO of this organization that has become intensely important to me over the last six months, Sex Positive Portland, and I’m so grateful to you for the work that you do both with Sex Positive Portland and being a sex positive physician, so thank you for being with me today.

EVELIN: Oh, you’re welcome.

LEAH: So I know a bunch about the things that you teach, but I know very little about who you are personally, so I’m really excited to learn from you what your story has been. So the place that I start with everyone I interview is what is your first memory of sexual desire?

EVELIN: Wow, I think I must have been between 6 and 10 but I didn’t know what I was having was sexual desire. I have always masturbated ever since I was a baby and so to me, that energy was always just a

part of who I was. And I think I remember identifying it in relationship to another person between the age of 6 and 10. I think it had to do with a sitcom or a TV show that I remember feeling attracted to some woman on the show and then that kind of fed into this thing that I did, which I didn’t have a name for, for many years.

LEAH: So when you say you masturbated even as a baby, I’m curious how you discovered it. But I’m also curious like did you masturbate to something that you would now call an orgasm?

EVELIN: Yes. I don’t think I ever necessarily discovered it. I think it was probably something that just was innate honestly. I’ve seen other children do this and other female children do this, so it’s kind of like self-soothing behavior that I had that I just did.

And I did go to orgasm, I had no awareness of what I was doing nor did I even have a name for it until I was about 12 or 13 years old. But I knew that what I was doing was something bad because I was hit for it and told not to do it. And one of my most traumatic memories was when I was in 2nd grade, I think I was doing it in the classroom and I was told not to by the teacher and I listened. But then I was called to the principal’s office and my mother and the counselor and the teacher and the principal were all there and they all were telling me this was something you could do in private but you shouldn’t do it in public.

And I had no idea what I was doing. Nobody ever said anything about what I was doing and when my mother caught me, she would hit me and tell me what I was doing was bad. But again, I didn’t know what exactly I was doing so I ended up just taking it to my bedroom and to my own private space at night and I didn’t find out about what I was actually doing until I read this Judy Blume book.

LEAH: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. EVELIN: No, it wasn’t that book.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Because that was where I figured it out. [LAUGHTER]

EVELIN: No, it was in the book Deenie. LEAH: Okay.

EVELIN: Which was about a girl with scoliosis and she had to wear a back brace. And she discovered masturbation in I think she was in the bathtub and my mind was blown. My mind was blown by that it was like all of a sudden, there was a word to it.

All of my sex education came from Judy Blume. Yeah, she was my first sex positive role model. And I actually think because of masturbation and I didn’t know what I was doing was orgasming either until I

was 16 and I had a boyfriend and he was fingering me. And then I came and he’s like, “Whoa, you do that really quickly.” And I’m like, “Oh, okay, that’s what I’m doing.”

[LAUGHTER]

EVELIN: So I still hadn’t had it quite put together but I have a feeling that because I was able to self- satisfy and self-pleasure, I didn’t have this need for a partner for a long time. And I didn’t have this need to have sex until I was almost close to 20 when I had sex. And even if I had a boyfriend for 2 and a half years in high school, we never did anything because I didn’t really feel like I had to.

LEAH: And was he okay with that?

EVELIN: It’s funny, he just dated other people. I’d find condoms in his room and I’d be like, “Oh, okay.” And I’m kind of funny because I think at that point, I felt very Catholic too, so I wanted to wait until I was married, and he respected that. So using that, it felt fine and if he was going to be with other people, I was okay with it.

LEAH: So you were kind of having an open relationship without ever realizing that that’s what it was? EVELIN: I think I’ve had open relationships in almost every single one of my relationships except for my

marriage.

And I taught myself compersion at a very young age too. I think I was like 14 or 15 when I taught myself compersion two ways. One because I had this incredible crush on this boy who I just like totally was crushing out on and he ended up finding another girlfriend. And instead of being upset, I just decided I was going to be super happy that he was happy with this other girl, so it made me happy to see him happy. And then when all my girlfriends, when you’re that age, your girlfriends are everything and when they started having boyfriends, instead of being jealous of them having boyfriends, I was just like, “No, they’re happy so I’m going to be happy for them.”

So I kind of taught myself how to deal with my jealousy by becoming compersive. I first fell in love with somebody when I was 20 and he was my first sexual relationship. And I thought, “Oh, this is going to be the person I marry.” Because this is the story that I have in my head and it’s perfect.

But of course, it only lasted one summer. He cheated on me, ended up in another relationship, and I was kind of heartbroken. And I was away in college and at that point I was like, “Wow, why couldn’t we just still be together? And he could be with her all the time and when I come home from college, then we could see each other.” But anyway, that model just didn’t exist in my world.

LEAH: Well, it’s interesting because you used the word cheating. EVELIN: Which is because he didn’t tell me what he did. [LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Yeah, so if he had told you, it could have potentially ended differently?

EVELIN: Uh-huh, all the time. And what’s interesting is that him and I continued a sexual relationship for the next 10 years until I met my husband and he would have girlfriends and we would have sex together.

I never felt bad about the fact that he had girlfriends because I wasn’t involved with anybody where I was ever monogamous. I just didn’t have relationships that way. My primary relationship was with school and everything I did. I’m always one of those people who had a really big life outside of my relationships. So I would travel. I would be in school and then my relationships would kind of have to fit into that. So I never felt like, “Oh, you have to be just with me.”

And all of my relationships when I was in my 20s, they weren’t closed. We didn’t necessarily use the word monogamous and non-monogamous. I feel like I took a 24-year detour into heteronormativity kind of, 22 years of that monogamous.

So when I met my spouse, I was 27 just about to finish medical school. It was a couple of months away and I was at this point in my life where it was like, “Oh, okay, settling down sounds like I’m ready. I’m kind of done with all the hard work and I have residency and then I get a job and life goes on.” And I never imagined myself meeting anybody though, I always thought I was too out there. I was the weird one in medical school.

[LAUGHTER]

EVELIN: I was the rebel even then. I was the one who would go to class kind of wearing booty shorts and thigh high boots.

[LAUGHTER]

EVELIN: And I was always quite my rebellious and just wanting to get out of that mold of what you’re supposed to be like has always been strong with me. So most American men were just super intimidated by me. A lot of my partners were European. I had some female partners as well but they were outside of the medical community. Yeah, if somebody was to be voted the least likely to get married and have children and settle down into mainstream America, I would have been voted that person.

[LAUGHTER]

EVELIN: And then I met my spouse on a beach in Thailand when I was just starting a rotation. I was doing a rotation in Thailand and he seemed to be exactly everything that I ever imagined I wanted a partner to be.

He was literary. He was smart. He was funny. He was European. And he was handsome, bisexual, what else? He wanted to be a writer at that time. His passion was to be a novelist and I was like, “This is

perfect. I’ll work. You can be the novelist and you can stay at home with the kids if we have them and we’ve have this perfect good life.”

And so within 4 days of meeting, we decided that he was going to move from Australia, which is where he was living, to come to the United States. And I had no idea where I was going to be, where my residency was going to be, and we were going to start a life together.

LEAH: Wow.

EVELIN: And we were in love. We were like in big N.R.E. right? LEAH: Yeah, some people won’t know that.

EVELIN: Oh, new relationship energy, crushing, infatuation, that yummy oxytocin kind of goes into our system and clouds everything. We were madly in love, enough to move from Australia to the United States.

And we had this one experience. I went to Australia to visit him and we went to this dinner party and I was kind of flirting with this man and this woman. And there was this energy there and there was this energy there between the four of us, and I kind of remember picking up on that energy, and being like, “Oh my God.”

And then David and I went home. And we were like, “Whoa, wow, maybe something could have happened.” And I think both of us really regret not flowing with that because if something happened, that might have changed, there were so many different areas in the beginning where the entire course of our relationship might have been changed. And this is one of them.

And I remember being excited by that idea but didn’t know how to navigate it in a new relationship with somebody. So we went to a kink club together and he was like, “Yeah, this is totally not my thing.” So that kind of closed down that book, that page in our future. He had a really hard time with my bisexuality. It very much threatened him, and I think that his monogamous mind made it very difficult for him to deal with my bisexuality, so that closed that down.

And unfortunately, there were a couple of things that happened in the beginning of our relationship that really set the tone. One is that he’s an alcoholic and being married to an alcoholic is kind of like living in a dream world where you know something is wrong, but everything around you tells you that it’s not wrong. So I accepted a lot of bullshit that comes along with being married to an alcoholic which includes gaslighting, raging, unpredictability, emotional abuse, sometimes physical abuse.

Because I wanted to maintain a status of our fantasy and we had like the best falling in love and what I used to call our inception story. Our inception story was so powerful that it kept us together for 20 something years. The illusion of who we were together. All of our friends bought into it. Our kids bought into it like this beautiful story of how we met, and how we came together. And yet, there was always another person involved and it was alcohol. And I knew it and I always struggled with that.

The other thing that happened is that I went on birth control pills when I met him, and I’ve never been on them before. I never needed to be. And it changed my hormones so I had a lot of vaginal pain with sex. And so I was on birth control pills for almost my entire residency so about 3 years of our relationship and I had terrible pain with sex for 3 years and instead of seeing a doctor or being curious about it or trying to find other ways of sexual expression around it, I just put up with it.

And so I was a resident who hardly slept, who was stressed, who was married to a man who had just left his entire life and friends and everything he knew from Australia to come to live with me, who was a drinker, and I had vaginal pain. So the very beginning of our relationship was really problematic but we stayed together because we had this belief that we were soulmates and we were meant to be. And I went off birth control pills and all my pain went away and then I got pregnant and had my kids. And so then, we started that chapter of our life of raising children together, and I never felt sexually compatible with him ever.

LEAH: Wow. Even once the vaginal pain went away?

EVELIN: Uh-huh. Even I can kind of remember when we first had sex like it was really great at first but I

was like, “Really, what? You really fuck differently from what I’m used to.” [LAUGHTER]

EVELIN: And I really missed what I was used to. And my spouse is a handsome, tall, kind of masculine presenting male and all my male partners had a lot more feminine energy to them. And I would say they’re more sensual lovers than more sexual lovers if that’s the best way I could do it. And I was married to someone who was a very sexual lover.

LEAH: When you say that do you mean sort of like going straight for the intercourse?

EVELIN: No, not even that. No, just the way the intercourse happened. It was more like sexual energy moving versus sensual energy moving and my preferred style is much more of a sensual energy moving. So slower, continual, getting into a rhythm with a person and really staying in that rhythm with someone versus kind of like changing rhythms depending on what they’re needing. And so I just never really felt resonant with him and compatible with him sexually and I didn’t like sex. It always was something I had to do.

LEAH: You are now, these years later, like the godmother for the rest of us of talk about sex and talk about all of the things about sex, and what you like, and what you don’t like, but it’s so interesting to hear you talk about this period when it sounds like you weren’t really connecting.

EVELIN: One of the problems with my communication with him was that I would tell him things and he would forget them.

LEAH: Oh god, I’ve been in that relationship.

EVELIN: Right? I would say, “When you go down on me that doesn’t really work, can we try something else?” And he would try something else and I’d be like, “Okay, okay.” But then the next time he would just go back to doing his own thing and he would yuck my yum a lot. I think my yum threatened him so he would yuck my yum.

LEAH: Again, can you explain what that means?

EVELIN: That just means something that I wanted to do or sounded interesting, he would be like, “Ugh,

no.”

He sees himself as very progressive and not having issues. He had a lot of issues. He did not want to witness my children being born from my vagina because she was scared that would change the way he saw my vagina. But he was very angry and hostile towards me and hurt by my denying sex to him because I never had a libido. I never really was interested in intercourse and he would use porn a lot but then his use of porn would make me not want to be interested in him and he would say he had to use it because I wasn’t interested in him.

I know what was wrong with us and I always knew it was like that question that you don’t want to know the answer to but you know the answer to but you don’t want to hear what the answer is. I always knew the answer to our problems, but I didn’t want to hear it until it was screaming so loud, I had no choice. And the answer to it was I was never safe.

I just wanted so badly to fit in and to believe that I could be married to somebody who loved me and to be able to raise kids and be successful and to raise kids within a context of a marriage and to live in a really nice place and have a business and be able to travel and just live the life we had and be as mainstream as possible. I wanted it so badly that I was willing to compromise who I was as a human for that. And so I lived in a relationship that was abusive, that was not safe, that I wasn’t seen or heard or my values weren’t honored, and it took a lot to get out of it.

[MUSIC]

LEAH: Interviews for this podcast often run at least a half hour longer than what we can include in an episode. Want to listen to the full unedited interviews? Become a community supporter at Patreon by visiting patreon.com/goodgirlstalkaboutsex. There are a bunch of cool extras there plus you’ll be supporting open and honest conversations about female sexuality. If you enjoy these conversations, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It will help more people find the show and don’t forget to tell your friends!

[MUSIC]

EVELIN: As I entered my 40s, I recognize that my sexuality was going to leave me someday. I could see this happening with all my menopausal patients and I was like, “Oh my god, this is really scary.” And then, I discovered something. I discovered roller derby.

[LAUGHTER]

EVELIN: There’s a thing like, “Roller derby saves your soul.”

LEAH: Okay.

EVELIN: There’s actually a song like “Roller derby saved my soul.” And in a way, it did, and I read about roller derby in The New York Times, and that legitimizes it.

[LAUGHTER]

EVELIN: Because if you read something in The New York Times and it has to be okay for a middle class physician to get involved in. But I was like, “Oh my god, this is perfect. I love roller skating. It’s all with women. You get to dress up. You get to have a pseudonym. You get to be something else than you are in your normal life and it looks like so much fun!”

So I was like, “I really want to roller derby.” And there wasn’t a team here in Salem so I ended up, I was just like, “Oh, I would love to go up to Portland but it’s too much of a commute with little kids and blah, blah, blah.” But they started a team in Salem.

So I remember being on a hike with my husband, I’m like, “So they’re going to do this team. I’m going to join.” And he’s like, “I don’t approve of it. I feel like it’s too below me. It’s too crass.” I think that’s what he said. “It’s too crass for you. I don’t like the idea of you doing it.” And I’m like, “You know I don’t care what you think. I’m going to do this. I need to.”

And it was the first time as an adult that I walked into something and I was like, “These are my people.” I mean it was so powerful for me to just be with a bunch of women of all sizes, colors, shapes, physical ability, and just be like, “We’re going to come here. We’re going to skate. We’re going to wear booty shorts and fishnets and we’re going to have fun.”

And in the beginning of the roller derby team, it was more about fun than about competition so I just loved it. And all of a sudden I was around a lot of women and there was lots of sexual energy and I was like my bisexuality wanted to come back alive. So the parties, women would be smooching on each other and I did say in my agreements with my husband. The only agreement that I said about monogamy was that I was allowed to kiss other people. I told him, “I never wanted to not be able to kiss somebody else.”

LEAH: You had set that up at the very beginning?

EVELIN: At the very beginning. That’s the only thing I asked for and never up until this point did I do anything about that. So there was this one woman in particular that I really liked and she was a lesbian who was in a relationship with another woman. And so we talked about like having something and I was like, “Oh yes, I really need this.”

And I talked to my spouse about it and he’s like, “Sure, okay.” But one day, I was here talking on the phone with her because she had just come from a mission to Haiti. He caught me talking on the phone with her and he was like, “Okay, I am vetoing it. You can’t be friends with her. You can have sex with her but you can’t talk to her. You can’t be friends with her. You can no longer talk with her. You need to stop being Facebook friends with her. You can’t see her ever again.”

And so I was like, “Whoa, but women, we kind of have relationships.” And I tried to explain that to him and he just didn’t get it. He’s like, “It’s okay for you to have sex but that’s it.” And so, he vetoed it, and I, being the good wife, listened to it and followed him and really struggled, really, really wanted to have sex with another woman.

And I went on Ashley Madison. I was doing a lot of conferences around this time to learn about functional medicine. I was going to these functional medicine conferences and I was like, “Oh, this is perfect because I’m going to be gone. I can just go and meet somebody and have sex with them. It can happen and then I can come home and I can feel better.” And so, I kind of went online to Ashley Madison where one goes to have relationships to have affairs, and I met somebody, and we had been talking and I was like really, really excited, and it was like looking like a big thing, and then I was totally stood up.

[LAUGHTER]

EVELIN: I was totally catfished. It was probably somebody who was sending me fake pictures and all this stuff. And I was devastated. I was really like, “Okay, this is just not meant to happen and it’s just not going to happen and that’s fine. I’m just going to go back to being monogamous.” Not that I really did anything anyway and just being with my husband. And that was around 2010, 2011-ish, and then we had a really rough year. He had been drinking very badly and then he went a year being sober.

LEAH: Was he actually sober or was he like a dry drunk at that point? EVELIN: What does that mean?

LEAH: So my dad was an alcoholic and he spent some time being like, “I’m going to prove to you that I can be sober so that you’ll get off my fucking back.”

EVELIN: Yes, yes. That’s what he was. LEAH: That’s the dry drunk.

EVELIN: Right. So he’s that and he’d go through periods of doing shit like that because “he was not an alcoholic.”

LEAH: Of course not.

EVELIN: “I had the problem. I was the only person who had a problem with his drinking. He didn’t have a problem with his drinking.”

LEAH: I’m familiar with those conversations.

EVELIN: Yeah, so we have this thing happen. We were out in Taos and we went into a store. And this woman who was at the store totally started flirting with him and it totally turned me on. I was like, “Oh my God, that’s so hot.” And I didn’t really tell him things when it turned me on because he usually like yucks my yum and it was very hard for me to communicate with him when I was like turned on in general but I was like so turned on.

I was like, “Oh my God, that’s so hot. I love that.” And he immediately angry at me and just started yelling at me saying how can I just not love him and find him attractive for who he is? Why does it have to take somebody else doing this? And he does so much for me. And it devastated me, I mean it totally devastated me to the point where I shut down sexually altogether. I became anorgasmic. I lost everything.

I mean I’ve already been through so much with him that at that point, it was like this is over. I can’t imagine us, me being sexual. I realized so what I have to look forward to is when I’m menopausal, it’ll be good because I won’t have a sex drive anymore. So I’ll be able to deal with this and this is what it’ll take for me to be married to him. It’s just not having a sex drive because having a sex drive and not being able to do anything with my partner is really difficult and there’s no option.

So then I read the book Mating in Captivity and I was like, “Oh my God, I just read this great book. She talked about this invisible third so maybe if there’s another person I can have a crush on and do something with, maybe open up our relationship, sure, okay. We’re going to open up our relationship.” And so pretty much I made the decision that we were going to open up our relationship and again, I was going to all these conferences. So I had friends in conferences and I started kind of this sexting, texting kind of thing with one of these male friends of mine because before it was only women. Now, it was open to everybody.

LEAH: And had this been communicated with him or were you doing this on your own?

EVELIN: This I communicated with him and there were times in the past where I wasn’t totally communicating with him because I knew that if he knew he would just tell me to stop. And I didn’t want to stop because I was already shutting down so much. But this time, yeah, and I said, “You have to read this book” and he listened to her Ted Talk and he’s like, “Okay, I get it. I know what we’re doing.” That’s it, so he never even read the book.

So we started opening up our relationship and then I started fooling around with my female friends and just everything kind of opened up. And he started drinking again but it was very slow. You know when a person starts back to drinking, they start really slow, and it takes them a while to ramp up. And then in the summer, he was back to where he was, ramped up, it was all my problem, and I started shutting down. And so even though we had opened up, it’s like things weren’t going that great for us.

In September, I met a man and it was again, I wanted just these casual thingamajig because I had my husband. And David was drinking a lot. And I met a man online and it was a lot more than just something casual. It was one of those meeting soulmates that saved my life. It was a really deep relationship and deep on a sexual healing level like we resonated so well sexually. Even to this day, I mean he’s the person that kissed me the most that I felt like, “Oh my God, I can kiss this person forever.” And he had some sexual issues that he was working on too. And so in a way, we just were each other’s healers and it was very deep and we saved each other’s lives.

But my husband was never able to give me space for that and I knew that having that relationship meant losing my marriage and it pretty much did. I so wanted my spouse to be happy for me, to find my sexuality and to heal. And I wasn’t just healing from this marriage and what this marriage did to me, but I was healing from the trauma that my mother gave me for hitting me when I was young and telling me to shut my sexuality down and my spouse was telling me to shut my sexuality down. I mean I was always told to shut my sexuality down. And I had, I totally done it.

And to meet a person who not only sexually resonated with me, but to tell me it’s okay for me to be a powerful woman and he validated my power. He’s like, “No, there’s men who could love that.” And to this day, I still have to remember him saying that because it’s hard for me to believe all the time. And I ended that relationship because I had to, because my spouse couldn’t give me space.

It was just too much, the fighting afterward, the rejection, I would come home, and he would just outright reject me. I was like, “Oh my God, I had such amazing healing and I’m coming home and you’re rejecting me?” He just was so angry that he couldn’t be the person who did that, but he couldn’t. And when I left that relationship, my marriage actually became incredibly abusive like really, really bad, because my spouse just expected me to turn right back and be who I used to be and be with him and I was like, “No, I’m this different person. I have different needs and I need to explore and there’s so much healing I need to do, and I want to stay married. Could you make space for me to grow and heal and be married?” And ultimately he could not do that.

LEAH: Did you have a vision of what marriage could look like?

EVELIN: Before yes, because when I was in my 20s, I remember reading things like Henry & June and watching the BBC series Portrait of a Marriage was just about Vita Sackville-West and her husband and both of them are bisexual, and maybe her husband was gay, and maybe her husband was not even able bodied. And they had outside lovers and they had this big group of literary friends and were in the avant-garde and I was like, “I want that.”

[LAUGHTER]

EVELIN: Yes, that’s what I wanted, but that’s just not what I manifested. And during this time when I opened my marriage and maybe a couple of years from roller derby time actually is when I started my journey into learning about sexuality.

Yeah, I was about 45 when I started taking classes at She Bob because I didn’t like giving oral sex, like they had an oral sex class, and I took it like 4 times because I really wanted to know what I was missing. And I just took every single class I could find on sexuality and I started writing about it on Facebook to all my roller derby friends like, “Hey, I’m going to ask questions about sex.”

And I just really started this exploration and during all of it, so it’s how I started learning who I was. I went to a class that was all about alternative relationships and I learned what polyamory was and I was like, “Oh my God, I’m polyamorous.” That fits me because I have one of my primary relationships is my best friend and I have all these girlfriends that are so important to me. And even though I’m married, they’re all part live relationships. You don’t have to be sexual to have a love relationship. And so when I discovered I was polyamorous, that just killed him. The funny thing is now, he’s so not into being monogamous.

[LAUGHTER]

EVELIN: Yeah. We got separated 3 days after our 22nd marriage anniversary and I don’t regret it. We are friends. We still hang out together. He stopped drinking in 2014 when I was involved in a relationship with this other person. He has not gone back to drinking although I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s recovered because he hasn’t done a lot of work in processing around it. He feels like now that he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t have a problem.

But now that we’re no longer married, I’m able to be who I am, and he could see that, and he could hear the places of trauma. He actually listens now without being defensive about the places where I was really hurt in the marriage. Our marriage had its really amazing moments and I’m very grateful for it and I’m really grateful to be out of it.

I learned so much and I think that’s one reason that I really could empathize with so many women and what they go through in relationships, in long term relationships, because I was there and I understand it. I understand what it’s like to be monogamous for a very long time and I could see how that’s really perfect and works too. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with monogamy as long as it’s something you choose and not something that you just feel like you have to do.

[MUSIC]

LEAH: Before we let Evelin go, let’s do the Quick Five. Five quick questions we’d usually be too polite to ask anyone.

[MUSIC]

LEAH: Favorite sex toy? EVELIN: My hand.

LEAH: Oh, I love that answer.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Hair down there or bare?

EVELIN: Bare.

LEAH: How long have you been doing that?

EVELIN: I got lasered at about 45.

LEAH: Oh, okay. So that’s permanent. That’s not shaving.

EVELIN: Yup.

LEAH: Okay. Your go-to masturbation fantasy?

EVELIN: Usually kind of a nonconsensual encounter of some kind. Usually me being the receiver but sometimes the other way around too.

LEAH: Oh, interesting.

EVELIN: Where I’m seducing somebody.

LEAH: Okay. How much noise do you make during sex?

EVELIN: I’m moderately noisy. Again, it depends on context, but I definitely have a voice. When I was married, I was incredibly silent. I was totally silent. I couldn’t even orgasm. I could orgasm silently without touching myself. I could just do it in my thinking and I can make myself have an orgasm.

LEAH: Wow.

EVELIN: I’m really very, very orgasmic.

LEAH: Oh my goodness.

EVELIN: Because I’ve been doing this since I was a baby. LEAH: Right.

[LAUGHTER]

EVELIN: That’s why I tell people and people are like, “Whoa, I struggle.” It’s like I’ve been doing this since I was a baby.

[LAUGHTER]

EVELIN: I’m like, “I have lots of years behind me, so I’m pretty good at it.”

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Do you have any erogenous zones that aren’t commonly known and other women should try?

EVELIN: Well, my lower back and ass, like touching my ass and my lower back are probably my favorite erogenous zones. That totally gets me off.

[LAUGHTER]

LEAH: Cool, all right. Evelin, thank you so much. This has been amazing and I’m so happy to have had this time with you.

EVELIN: Yay! Thank you. I’m sorry I kind of cried and kind of talked a lot. [LAUGHTER]

LEAH: I’m glad.

[LAUGHTER]

EVELIN: It’s been quite the journey I’ll just say that, but hey what’s life that isn’t a journey?

LEAH: So true.

[MUSIC]

LEAH: Thanks for joining me today on Good Girls Talk About Sex. If you have questions or comments about something you heard or if you’d like to record a voice memo for use in a future episode, send them to leah@goodgirlstalkaboutsex.com. Also let me know if you’d like to be a guest on a future episode. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at IamLeahCarey. Links to any people and resources mentioned in this episode are in the Show Notes.

I’m Leah Carey and I look forward to talking with you again next week. [MUSIC]

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Production credits

Host / Producer / Editor – Leah Carey (email)
Transcripts – Jan Acielo
Music – Nazar Rybak

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