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Too many of us are struggling with our sex and love lives. Much of that suffering is due to people being in the wrong relationship type for them or not knowing how to navigate their chosen type well.

For thousands of years, we had only one real relationship option available to most of us: strict lifelong monogamy. But, over the last few decades, technological, medical, and sociocultural changes have opened up many more options than ever before: monogamish, swinging, open relationships, polyamory, non-hierarchical polyamory, solo poly, singledom, celibacy, and relationship anarchy, to name a few.

Yet without proper guidance on making sense of these options and choosing the right one for us, we often make poor decisions and hurt ourselves and our loved ones in the process. In this talk/workshop/training, we look at an overview of all the components that go into designing your dream love life.

We’ll provide you with a clear, concise Map of the Relationship Landscape (so you know where to go), an accurate Relationship Compass and GPS (so you know the best way to get there), and a comprehensive Relationship Toolkit (so you know how to travel to and live well in these places, maximizing pleasure and minimizing harm for everyone involved).

The issue of consent is fundamentally misunderstood in our world today. A lot of unnecessary trauma and suffering is experienced by people every day because we don’t know how to make sense of or properly navigate this fundamental aspect of human interaction.

Binary black-or-white thinking dominates the discourse. Extreme positions on both sides are drowning out the more moderate voices in the middle; everyone retreats into their own silos, and very few get an opportunity to learn from past mistakes.

In this talk/workshop/training, we break down consent into its two independent components that typically get conflated – internal wantedness and external communication – to tease apart the different ways these two can interact with each other to produce a variety of un/wanted and non/consensual sexual and relational experiences. We apply bidimensional grid thinking to better understand the intricacies between the three zones of consent: green (clearly wanted and communicated), red (clearly unwanted and communicated), and gray (ambivalent wantedness and/or ambiguous communication).

Walk away with more clarity about this complicated topic than you ever thought possible and greater confidence to approach future sexual and relational interactions.

Jealousy, that formidable emotion, often evokes fear and uncertainty in relationships. It prevents people from exploring parts of the relationship landscape they might otherwise be curious about and wreaks havoc on those who boldly but unpreparedly venture out on their journeys. But what if we could not only overcome jealousy but actually transform it into a catalyst for personal and relational growth and fun?

In this insightful talk/workshop/training, we delve into jealousy’s evolutionary and social origins, distinguish it from its cousins like envy and possessiveness, explain individual differences in reactivity to jealousy, and tackle founded and unfounded gender differences in jealousy. We examine jealousy’s positive counterpart: compersion (i.e., positive emotions experienced at a partner’s potential or actual extra-dyadic experience) and apply bidimensional grid thinking to better understand how to harness the power of jealousy and compersion for personal and relationship growth.

In the final portion, we cover three sets of techniques (internal, external, and relational) to manage and downregulate negative emotions while cultivating the positive emotions that arise in the context of extradyadic sex or romance. Walk away with unprecedented clarity about this often gut-wrenching emotion, and confidence that you are far from powerless against it.

Sexual health is crucial to our well-being, and finding the right safer-sex protocol for us is essential for every individual. This is true regardless of our relationship type and is particularly relevant for folks with multiple sexual partners. Unfortunately, sexual health is often taught as an inflexible, one-size-fits-all approach, with a lot of shame and blame assigned to those who fail to conform to this model of extreme risk avoidance.

The LoveSmarter™ approach to sexual health is different and accounts for individual differences in risk-tolerance levels when devising personal and interpersonal safer-sex protocols. In this uniquely informative talk/workshop/training, we review the five steps of the LoveSmarter™ process.

This includes designing your ideal sexual health protocols, getting an accurate understanding of the existing risks (and various risk-reduction strategies available to us), your personal levels of sexual health risk tolerance, putting these all together into your own individual safer-sex protocol, and syncing your preferred protocols with that of your partners.

By the end of our time together, you’ll feel empowered to make informed decisions about your sexual health and confidently negotiate your way to a fulfilling and safe, intimate life.

Infatuation, better known in nonmonogamous circles as New Relationship Energy (NRE), is the early stage of romantic love when intense and often unpredictable emotions hijack our rational brain. Falling in love is one of the most rewarding and exhilarating experiences a human can have. It is also one of the most agonizing experiences when unrequited and one of the most disruptive experiences to an existing relationship when it happens with extradyadic partners.

In this eye-opening talk/workshop/training, we delve into the intricacies of romantic love and how it works, our individual differences in susceptibility to infatuation, and the various strategies at our disposal to either successfully fight or healthily and ethically surrender to infatuation.

Walk away with the knowledge and tools you need to confidently navigate these early stages of love in a way that doesn’t harm you or your existing partners.

While social acceptance of nontraditional sexual and relational choices has grown dramatically over the last few decades, negative stigma and discrimination of anything beyond monogamy are still pervasive in many parts of our culture.

This external judgment, explicitly or implicitly communicated over the course of years and decades, slowly but surely becomes internalized in our minds and hearts as shame and guilt for having the desires that we have or acting on them in any way. This complex of external stigma and internal shame complex can destroy our health and happiness, obstruct our path to self-love, and hinder us from living authentically.

In this empowering talk/workshop/training, we create a safe and supportive environment to address the sources of stigma and shame, understand how they work, assess our different levels of susceptibility to it, and learn strategies to dismantle its power over our lives.

Walk away feeling well-equipped to protect yourself from the sources of stigma and discrimination in your life, free yourself from the shackles of shame, unapologetically embrace your true self, and foster belonging to a community where all forms of love and connection are celebrated.

Casual sex (sex without long-term romantic commitment) generally gets a bad rep. And it certainly can and often does get done in ways that are unhealthy, unethical, not particularly pleasurable, and ultimately harmful for those involved.

But contrary to many people’s beliefs, such negative outcomes are not an inherent feature of casual encounters; they’re a product of how we approach these experiences in our current sociocultural climate. Indeed, research shows that casual sex done right can be a gratifying, fulfilling, and healthy part of the human experience for those who desire it. So, how do we get the potential benefits and avoid the potential harms of casual sex?

Join this informative talk/workshop/training to learn the ten key dos and don’ts of this often misunderstood and unfairly vilified experience. Gain the tools and confidence to start making intelligent decisions about your casual encounters that leave both you and your partners feeling good about your explorations, whether it’s a quick one-night stand with someone you’ll never see again or a years-long ongoing lovership with someone you care about deeply yet don’t want to date romantically.

Sex and gender are some of the most fundamental yet remarkably poorly understood aspects of human existence. Even sexuality-focused academic journals regularly get these two concepts mixed up. This ignorance and confusion fuel the growing extremism and polarization regarding the treatment of gender, gender norms, and gender variance in our society, resulting in serious harm to people of all genders and communities worldwide.

In this unique and thought-provoking talk/workshop/training, we delve into the science and practice of three interrelated yet distinct concepts: biological sex (male, female, intersex), gender identity (man, woman, nonbinary, genderqueer), and gendered personality traits (psychological masculinity and femininity).

Learn how each of these concepts presents on different spectra, how they interact with each other to create our unique gendered experiences, and how we can embrace and harness the power of both the masculine and the feminine, regardless of our sex or gender identity, to cultivate a profound sense of self-awareness and authenticity.