By Erin Alexander Everyone loves talking about red flags in other people. We send screenshots to friends. We analyze texts. We diagnose strangers on dating apps with the confidence of a panel of therapists. What we rarely do is ask: What if I’m the red flag in someone else’s story? A sexologist I know once told me that most destructive dating behaviors stem from dysregulation, attachment panic, and unprocessed shame. It's fear dressed up as intensity. This makes them incredib

A lot of men move through the world undertouched. Not “in a sad way”, just in a modern way. Touch gets funneled into two narrow lanes: quick social gestures (handshakes, back pats), and sex. Everything in between gets awkward, risky, or coded as something it’s not. That leaves a gap: sensual touch , the kind of slow, soothing contact that builds calm, closeness, and body confidence. Hugging, cuddling, shoulder squeezes, scalp rubs, a long back massage, fingertip tracing, ches

We got this email (details lightly edited for privacy): “My girlfriend and I have been together five years. Early on we were having sex all the time. Then we settled into a couple times a week. She used to be multi-orgasmic. During the pandemic our intimacy fell off. Then she started having hot flashes and said she felt different ‘down there.’ She had a hysterectomy years ago but still has her ovaries. We’ve worked on the relationship and things are better—she says she’s happ

We got this one in our email this week (edited for privacy, but the core is the same): “I’m about 3.5 inches hard. I’ve heard women don’t care about size, but that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve had women laugh, ask ‘is it in?’ and straight-up tell me they can’t date me because I’m too small.I feel crushed. Part of me wants to give up on dating women completely.” First: that’s brutal. Not “awkward,” not “a misunderstanding.” Cruel. And it makes sense that your confidence to

By Erin Alexander When this couple first landed in my inbox , they weren’t coming to me for “regular couples therapy.” They already had that. They’d been in marriage counseling for a couple of months, using a structured method to work through infidelity. She was also in individual therapy because of a trauma history, and she had a medical team managing chronic pain. They came to me for something more specific: they wanted to explore a female-led relationship (FLR), and they w

Every culture has a sex legend. In the English-speaking internet, one of the most persistent is the “Singapore Kiss” (also known as the Singapore Grip or pompoir ). It pops up in locker-room talk as an exotic, half-mystical “skill” that allegedly creates sensations from another world. But like most legends, the story is messy, and the name is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. The Complicated Backstory The phrase likely resurfaced in pop culture thanks to J.G. Farrell’s nove