This week Rebekah and Tink answer a listener question from someone looking for a way to end a relationship skillfully and kindly, especially after the vibe may have communicated long-term intent.  We engage in some healthy debate about starting breakup conversations over text, and whether we have a responsibility to inform the person we are planning to break up of our general intent before inviting them on a hang to discuss same.  We discuss the absolute pressure cooker of dating in the 30s for folks interested in carrying children, and turn to some vintage Flight of the Conchords for wisdom on right-sizing what we feel we owe to a romantic interest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iSlPoQm2XY  

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This episode was originally released in March 2025, however Gillian basically just posted it wrong and it landed in people's feeds weird and as such it got missed by many.  We are off from recording for one more week as summer chaos winds up, but we wanted to re-release this so folks can have a chance to figure out how to repair once cheating has occurred!  If you haven't listened to Cheating Part 1 yet (from earlier in March 2025) you may want to start there.  Fun fact: Cheating Part 2 was also the first appearance of our "Listener Question" jingle, an editing wizardry surprise even for us from our awesome producer Amar Ibrahim!

Rebekah and Gillian come back to finish the conversation on cheating, with the important element of how they have seen couples successfully repair after infidelity.  Personal responsibility and accountability, as well as distress tolerance seem to be the superpowers used by partners we have seen be successful in learning from, healing from, and growing together after betrayal.  We talk about needing to be perfect in front of a partner, and unprocessed shame in general, as both a risk factor for cheating in the first place, and a block to repairing afterward.  We also discuss some reasonably unhinged strategies for burning through shame in your day-to-day to make your relationship more betrayal-proof and to make repair more possible.  

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Tink and Gilly are *back!* For now.  We actually will be away once more next week because summer is nuts but THIS WEEK we discuss codependent dynamics in relationships and what to do about them.  If codependency can be defined as needing the next person to be ok before we can be ok, where does it come from?  What might be we be afraid of that can make it so hard to tolerate any distance or discomfort in relationships?  On the way we discuss possums in the freezer and tarps in the gazebo, we review for the gazillionth time some of Gillian's accounts of teenagers having been mean to her in the 1990s, and we identify some killer ways to separate love from codependency. 

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In this week's episode, Tink and Gilly catch up on relationship experiences present and past.  Gilly shares her love for the relational freedom anthem of 2025, Lambrini Girls' song Cuntology 101, and an accidental listening party for two that she recently hosted on a dinner date.  We field a listener question on Micro-Breakups, or what we call the particular confusion and non-specific ache when relationships end a couple of months in, right when we might have started getting cozy and settling in.  We talk about how to grieve the hopes you had perhaps *just* started allowing yourself to have, how to stay cunty (discerning, accountable to yourself) even when you are trying to encourage a relationship in its early stages, and how to handle the intensity of a common desire to quickly find a replacement person on which to place budding swoony feelings post Micro-Breakup.

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Today's episode addresses a listener question on how to consider what kink might have to offer them, particularly after a shame-based history around sex from a strict religious upbringing.  We bring in shrinky topics like staying within a "window of tolerance" (maybe a tiny bit edgy but very close to the sphere of what feels safe and familiar at first) when expanding after the constriction of a traumatic experience, while also defining some of the basics of what is often considered the realm of kink for those who might be interested but may not have much context.  We also talk about shame in general, and how kink can be a powerful way to interrogate shame-based narratives around sex that have been loaded on so many of us over the course of our upbringings.

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In this week's episode, we catch each other and you the listeners up on our travels over the last few weeks, including an exploration of the high concentration of ex-partners cluttering the grocery stores of the great state of Vermont.  We also respond to a listener question about struggles to balance friendship and relationships, and skepticism or withdrawal from friends that can then occur when we get into a new relationship.  Tink and Gillian analyze why they themselves have in their youth past lost themselves in relationships and abandoned friendships, only to come crawling back without acknowledgement once in a breakup crisis and needing the support of friends again (not cool, baby Gilly and Tink).  Some ideas are provided as far as how to come back from this type of pattern once it is broken later in life and find ways to integrate friends and lovers in healthy ways.

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We are both on vacation this week, so we took our cues from you, our listeners!  Before we got our producer and started recording for real, we spent about a year meeting each week, recording our conversations like wierdos, and honing in on what we wanted the podcast to be about.  One such conversation in the summer of 2024 generated some of the clips that have been most popular on our instagram account, and have caused y'all to ask us "Hey, where is the episode with this conversation in it??" Fair enough, friends, so we had our producer do his best with the amateur audio quality, and we hope you will enjoy our unsupervised ramblings on topics such as:

A question from a friend regarding why (and if) non-monogamous dynamics are more common in queer versus hetero setups

Where Rebekah and Gillian were both at a year ago in their understanding of themselves on the monogamy to nonmonogamy spectrum

Rebekah and Gillians’ individual and intersecting experiences of coming to understand their own queerness 

We hope you enjoy and we can't wait to be back at it next week!

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This week Tink and Gillian answer a listener question on the pressure on tops (those who tend to lead, or "do" the action in sexual engagement while bottoms might tend to submit to, allow or receive the action) to perform sexually, and how to handle it in relationships when a top is simply too pooped.  Or depressed.  Or understandably overwhelmed.  By the terrifying times.  We are all living in.  But especially those of us who don't fit the cookie-cutter societal expectation. 

In this episode we cover: ADHD-specific clothing destruction tactics, fighting the helplessness and dissociation that unhealthy power structures in our society would otherwise use to control us, having compassion and communication for and with ourselves and our partners when unmet safety needs in this scary world are overriding the parts of our brain that would otherwise govern leisure, connection and sex, and radical community care and interdependence as a path back to claiming desire and pleasure as part of our human experience.  NBD.

Resources:

5 Calls App

https://5calls.org/

Info on protesting safely

https://phr.org/our-work/resources/preparing-for-protecting-against-and-treating-tear-gas-and-other-chemical-irritant-exposure-a-protesters-guide/?ms=FY25_Evergreen_SearchAd_GoogleGrant&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=Google&utm_term=Grant&utm_campaign=FY25_Grant&CID=701f40000018pCMAAY&ms=FY20_SEM_GoogleGrant&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=2076860150&gbraid=0AAAAADg6PAyEpBgoTXui277i1J__1NIjC&gclid=CjwKCAjwsZPDBhBWEiwADuO6y8LG9Twen7s_8igEAZrjx1awZy-wjXHxsMe60ArP3u89ghqgAT1aehoCQ2EQAvD_BwE

Melancholic depression as "anger turned inward"

https://neurolaunch.com/depression-is-anger-turned-inward/

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This week Gillian and Tink answer a listener question about how to navigate disclosing things like mental health diagnoses, trauma histories, health information, or anything else that we might feel shame about or might give a partner pause.  We discuss considerations of whose business is what based on potential impact at different stages of dating, as well as how to think about sharing what we know about the "care and feeding" of ourselves and our nervous systems, as early as we feel we might really like someone, not out of owing or altruism but actually out of a selfish desire to weed out partners who might not be as cool, knowledgeable and compassionate about or lived experience as we ultimately deserve.

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Today's show answers a listener question specific to how monogamous coupled-up folks can best prepare for, talk about and have fun with threesomes!  We discuss how common this fantasy is, and how important it is to actually start at the level of fantasy when bringing new ideas into the sexual repertoire, including some fun role-play to try before a real third person ever enters the mix.  We also discuss how to set healthful and ethical expectations going into a threesome, as well as how to avoid being a dreaded "unicorn hunter" or a coupled-up duo forgetting about the three dimensional humanity of whatever hottie you are inviting in to play with you and your main squeeze.  We also talk about how to process and debrief after a threesome, for maximum happiness, safety and personal growth.

Tink in particular was full of helpful information today and these were the resources discussed:

1. The Jealousy workbook: Exercises and Insights for Managing Open Relationships by Kathy Labriola

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-jealousy-workbook-exercises-and-insights-for-managing-open-relationships-kathy-labriola/10876982?ean=9780937609637&utm_source=google&utm_medium=pmax&utm_campaign=gift_cards&utm_content=6443417794&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=16235479093&gbraid=0AAAAACfld41q1efegyTL4pBV4g2U6xsUZ&gclid=CjwKCAjwx8nCBhAwEiwA_z__018LQcrfM4JdAJyy-oBfpNYjRoLcHDx9RwT1JGhozy0nnMQdJOT1fBoCJhEQAvD_BwE

2. Polysecure by Jessica Fern

https://bookshop.org/p/books/polysecure-attachment-trauma-and-consensual-nonmonogamy-jessica-fern/14490932?ean=9781944934989&next=t

3. The anxious person's guide to non monogamy: Your guide to open relationships, polyamory and letting go by Lola Phoenix

4. Uber lube

https://uberlube.com/blogs/news/choosing-a-correct-lubricant?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22667438048&gbraid=0AAAAA-HHDPj3cpWDVceBt4Mdzo7_QZd5E&gclid=CjwKCAjwx8nCBhAwEiwA_z__051YvQ4Rdqcl1pPKcWiIrRMOhdL2XKyF00Pgv6FykMmNr9ETU1CDERoC1bkQAvD_BwE

5. Ethical porn sites

https://lustery.com/

https://www.bellesa.co/

6. Dipsea stories

https://www.dipseastories.com/

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