advice

I wish that I could give you one simple, short and objective answer for what love is, but unfortunately, I can’t. That’s a question people have been asking for probably as long as there have been people, and as of yet, while there have been millions of answers, I don’t think anyone has arrived at…

Jack, Thanks for sending in your question! Although you’ve asked about the lifespan of sperm outside your body (and anyone else’s), I would like to spend a little time addressing your fear of touching your sperm, too. That’s a really important concern, because I want you to be able to be happy and…

As we go through childhood and our teens, our boundaries tend to change. It’s typical for young people growing up to want increasing privacy and also to have an expanding personal space bubble: to want your family and other people close to you to support you feeling like your body is absolutely your…

Y’all need to remember that when anyone is doing the things that can cause pregnancy, pregnancy is always a possibility. In other words: are you having direct genital-to-genital contact with someone who has a different kind of reproductive system than you do? If so, pregnancy is possible. How…

Congratulations on starting college and on your great new relationship with a guy who means a lot and treats you well! This is an exciting time in many ways, and I’m glad to hear that you’re interested in waiting on getting sexual until you both feel ready for it. It sounds like you just started…

As anyone who works in sex education or sexuality can tell you, when it comes to the questions people ask us, variations on the theme of “Am I normal?” reign supreme. I just spent a half hour going through our advice question queue, doing a search on each page for the word “normal.” At the moment…

Your boyfriend sounds awesome. And how quickly he ejaculates right now really doesn’t have to present any problems if neither of you treat it like a problem. Just so you know, a lot of sex educators and therapists have big problems with the term and concept of “premature ejaculation” (PE) as it’s…

I don’t think it’s very realistic to expect most of us to feel the exact same way, or “equally,” about all men, all women or all people whose gender is outside of that binary. I’m not even sure, I have to say, what feeling “equally” about people, period, would be. People are so radically different…

The first thing I want to mention here is that I’m not sure there is such a thing as “a normal teenager”! Seriously, each individual is different, with different needs and desires, and so there is no one way to be in the world. The best we can do is make decisions that are well-informed and that…

What it sounds like, to me, is that whatever it is you’ve been doing sexually just isn’t something you feel okay with yet or good about right now. I get that it feels good at the time, but when I talk about sex feeling good, any kind of sexual activities at all, what I mean is sex feeling good…