June 2020. It is now illegal under UK lockdown laws for couples living apart to have sex indoors – so English newspaper headlines this week have highlighted. It’s also illegal to have your Gran round for dinner (unless it’s a barbecue in the garden), or the vicar for a cup of tea in your front […]
Tag: consent culture
Consent in a pandemic – 2
It’s been a week since I first wrote on this and the world has been changing fast… UK supermarkets are now empty of pasta, bread, cereal, eggs, flour, potatoes, rice, loo roll, hand santizer and other essentials. And today, the schools close, not for Easter, but for… we’re not sure how long. All my work […]
Consent in a pandemic
Isolation is hard. Human beings are social animals – we need contact and connection for our physical and mental well-being… and loneliness is a killer, albeit less obvious than a virus. My good friend (let’s call her Vera, the cactus) was pleased by advice to stop close physical contact like hugging, kissing and shaking hands […]
Commitment
The fairytale always ends with living happily ever after. It’s beautiful of course, yet it is still an ending… and I don’t want my story to end… our story… It begins when we meet and fall in love, and it doesn’t stop there. What happens when the story finishes? When the happy couple kiss and […]
12 things to understand about polyamory
I was asked by a journalist yesterday what one thing I would tell someone who was considering exploring polyamory. In the blur of the interview I’m not entirely sure what I said, so I thought about it a lot afterwards… and started a list. Here it is. 12 things I’d have liked to understand at […]
Falling In Love
“Oh, Fred, I’ve been so foolish. I’ve fallen in love. I’m an ordinary woman. I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people”. I can hear those words in my head, as uttered by Celia Johnson in the movie classic ‘Brief Encounter’ – a beautiful tale of forbidden love. And nobody can prepare […]
Step change
Building consent culture isn’t easy. It involves people and communication and boundaries – and there’s a lot to navigate, especially when you consider that the prevailing cultural paradigm is one of entitlement. Entitlement culture is part of us all – it’s the context in which we were socialised, and it’s how we’ve learned to navigate […]
It is what it is
“So they’re your main partner, then?” “Which is the most important relationship?” “If you really love them you put them first” These are words I frequently hear from my monogamous friends when we’re talking about my non-monogamous relationships. The script tells us that that humans should be part of a couple – one, romantic/sexual relationship/partnership. My friends can accept that […]
Asking for it
If you’re looking for love, or sex, or romance, or connection, how do you go about it? That initial connection can be elusive. We can’t all just stand around on steam train platforms like Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in the film Brief Encounter, hoping that a little bit of coal smut will land in […]
3 little words
“I love you” – the 3 little words you’re supposed to long to hear, or wait to say… words that can change lives forever… words imbued with such importance and meaning that poets, musicians, academics, philosophers have been exploring and debating their meaning for centuries… so what would I know? I asked my friends, what […]