Meg-john And Justin

Saying I love you (this was meant to be out a couple of weeks ago but between us we've been ill/injured. Sorry about that) In the lead up to Valentine’s day, on the podcast we discuss saying ‘I love you’ and how it can be done consensually. In wider culture it’s generally assumed that if somebody feels love they should say ‘I love you’ without thought of the potential impact, it’s regarded as a bigger deal than expressing other feelings towards somebody, there is pressure to say it by a certain point in a relationship, it’s seen as romantic to surprise somebody with these words (e.g. in an anonymous Valentine), and if one person says it the other person is expected to say it back. None of this is very consensual to ourselves or others. We might think of love more as an action than a feeling - as bell hooks suggests - and instead of focusing on naming the feeling we could consider what might demonstrate love most to a person. If they don’t reciprocate that feeling then this may be more about what we don’t

This time on the podcast we discussed ‘what’s love?’ and not just as an excuse to revisit eighties/nineties classic tunes. With Valentine’s approaching what do we mean by love, and why might we celebrate it (or not)? First of all we talked about love being biopsychosocial - not just about ‘chemistry’. Biological processes involved in the feeling of love are inextricably linked to the social messages that we’ve received about what it means to be in love and what it should feel like, and our psychological experiences through life which leave us with templates and scripts for how love plays out for us. Learning to love in particular ways will mean that we experience the physical feelings of love in certain ways (e.g. as exciting, or overpowering, or transcendent, or scarily out of control), and it will also set up our bodies and brains to respond in certain ways (moving towards, or away from, those feelings, for example). We explored how cultural messages encourage us to allow ourselves fall into love and go f

We had a chat about New Year's Resolutions today and recorded it. Advice for you here about how you can relate to changes and resolutions that might be a bit kinder and more useful to you. By the way, come and take part in a workshop with us at the Barbican on Thursday 17th Jan. https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2019/event/modern-couples-make-your-own-relationship-rules

Coming out at Christmas, or telling friends and family big news about us at holiday or other important times.

Hello dear listener. We had a chat with Dr Rachel O'Neil (@DrRachelONeil on twitter) about her book 'Seduction. Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy' which you can buy here http://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509521555 So we chatted about what the seduction industry is, why it's not seduction 'communities', what it is that this industry offers (and doesn't offer men)and why men are attracted to it. We also had a broader chat about masculinity, the idea of seduction, neoliberalism, romantic and sexual entreprenueriship. We ended with some advice for people who might be seduced into the seduction industry. Do have a listen and if you like the show please tell your friends, like us and subscribe to us. You might also want to buy some of our publications which you can see at megjohnandjustin.com/publications

Over the summer we recorded a nice chat with the lovely people at Whistledown Productions for a documentary about consent on Radio 4. Presented by Jameela Jalil the New Age of Consent was about consent, sex and relationships post #MeToo and you can hear it here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bh4361 (we're mostly in this second episode). The kind folk at Whistledown let us have the full audio of that interview so here it is. We think it will be a nice podcast for people who haven't heard us chatting before, particularly around consent and having more enjoyable sex. So do share it with people who you'd like to hear it.

We had a look around the Modern Couples exhibition at the Barbican https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2018/event/modern-couples-art-intimacy-and-the-avant-garde which is all about the relationship between art, avant garde and relationship models. We went round it to chat about the relationships and considered just how radical they were and what we can learn about this for ourselves. Here’s the blurb from the exhibition: “Explore modern art and modern love; Modern Couples reveals how relationships can become a playground for creativity. Featuring the biggest names in Modern Art, Modern Couples explores creative relationships, across painting, sculpture, photography, design and literature. Meet the artist couples that forged new ways of making art and of living and loving. The exhibition illuminates these creative and personal relationships, from the obsessional and fleeting to the life-long.” It’s £16 and it’s on till 27th January 2019 and if you’re interested in relationship diversity and/or avant garde a

This time we explored the theme of relationship diversity, that is the range of different styles of relationships that exist. People often think about diversity when it comes to sexuality - and increasingly gender - but assume there’s only one or two ways of doing diversity. We could see relationship diversity on a number of different dimensions. For example, there’s diversity in terms of where we’re at on a spectrum from monogamy to non-monogamy, and there’s diversity in terms of whether we prioritise certain kinds of relationships over others (like romantic ones) or whether we see diverse kinds of relationships as equally important in our lives. It’s also important to remember that there’s just as much diversity under the umbrella of monogamy as there is under non-monogamy. For example, under monogamy comes serial and lifelong monogamy, monogamish relationships. Under non-monogamy come open relationships, polyamory of various forms, and secret infidelities. We might put dating, hook-ups, and friends-with-

This week we answer a question from a listener. "My sex therapist is talking about solo sex as part of our work - but I only want to do things with my partner." Here our response and whether we should be having solo sex. You can see our summary blog about this at our website https://megjohnandjustin.com/sex/sex-therapist-talking-solo-sex-i-want-partnered-sex/

More about this episode at our blog https://megjohnandjustin.com/writing-our-own-scripts

This week on the podcast we discussed whether self-care was a relationship responsibility and - if so - how we go about doing it. We started with the fact that self-care is very challenging in our current world. It’s either put forward as quite a banal form of pampering which doesn’t require any self-reflection, or it’s put forward as ‘self-improvement’ which suggests that you need to perfect yourself and give yourself a hard time unless you’re doing all the different forms of self-care on top of everything else. We think of self-care more as Audre Lorde spoke of it - as a political act that’s essential, both for surviving these tough times, and for ensuring that we’re part of the solution not part of the problem. In relation to our close intimate relationships, practising self-care is often seen as selfish. Like it would be better to give all of ourselves to our close people and not need to look after ourselves. We talk about how this approach can lead to burn-out, resentment, and having nothing left to o

Content note. We chat about different kinds of pain and also talk a little bit about injury and trauma. This podcast is all about pain and sex, with a focus on how to ensure that sex isn’t painful in ways that you don’t want it to be. We’ll do a future episode about how to bring pain or strong sensations into sex if that is something you want to do.

Here we chat about how we might go about enjoying penis in vagina sex more. Which is a bit of a radical departure for us, so we hope you find it useful. Listen to this in tandem with the Enjoy Non-Genital Sex https://soundcloud.com/megjohnjustin/enjoy-non-genital-sex and you'll be on to a winner. Also our Being Present For Sex video which we mention is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oYaDYX8LCo

Trans and the GRA This week we spent the podcast talking about trans and the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) given that this is in the news so much at the moment. More details (and links) at https://www.megjohnandjustin.com

This week on the podcast we tackled the issue of jealousy in answer to the following question… Is jealousy healthy in a relationship? Or else, is the absence of jealousy unhealthy or even possible? If it is, how do we get there? If it's not, what do we do to manage it? And how do we know whether it comes more from us or the behaviour of other person? Head over to megjohnandjustin.com to read our blog to accompany this episode. MJ&J x

Cosmopolitan x Instagram created #AskMeThisNotThis campaign, which was created in collaboration with influential LGBTQ+ figures and explores the outdated and often offensive questions they’re sick of being asked. We were asked to record one of our podcasts at their final event. We thought it might be a nice thing to do for Pride Month so we did (we didn’t get paid, though we did have a couple of very tasty bento boxes). On the panel were Sade Giliberti - Gilberti is a South African TV presenter and works to raise awareness of LGBTQ issues: https://www.instagram.com/onesadie/ Hannah Winterbourne - In 2013, Hannah came out as a transgender woman and became the highest ranking transgender soldier within the British Army. As part of the Army LGBT Forum, she became the Army's Transgender Representative where she has responsibility to advise Senior Army commanders on transgender policy: https://www.instagram.com/hannahw253/ Jessica Kellgren Fozard - Jessica Kellgren-Fozard is a disabled, gay YouTuber who

Here we chat with Alex Iantaffi our mate, who now hosts the wonderful podcast Gender Stories. You can search for this through the usual podcast platforms. He can also be found at http://genderstories.buzzsprout.com/ and on the twitters https://twitter.com/GenderStories and also on the instagrams as GenderStories. It's a long one, but we didn't want to break it up because of plugging references (you'll hear).

In the podcast this week we talked around a topic that a listener had emailed in about: the wisdom of getting back together with somebody you’ve broken up with. They rightly pointed out that a lot of relationship advice says this is never a good idea, but that there are plenty of circumstances where it could work pretty well, for example if your needs and desires have become more compatible or if you’ve done some work on yourself in the meantime to bring you to a different place.

Staying with feelings in relationships In the last podcast we ended with a point about how it’s always okay for people to have the feelings they have, and that it’s important to cultivate the ability to stay with other people’s feelings: whether that be our friends, partners, or other people in our lives. Staying with feelings is an idea MJ has written a lot about including this zine which goes through the reasons why it is important to learn to stay with our own feelings, and how we might go about it. Juz has also written about the important of staying with feelings when supporting people in our lives. Generally if we can stay with feelings - or ourselves or another person - those feelings can be experienced and expressed and move through us. If we can’t stay with feelings then we often layer more feelings on top of the existing feelings as we try to eradicate or repress them, e.g. guilt about feeling sad, then worry about feeling guilty, then frustration about how anxious we feel. Trying to deny or get a

Changing relationship agreements over time We were inspired to do this podcast by a Dan Savage podcast where Dan suggested that a non-monogamous person starting a relationship with a monogamous person could always try a monogamous agreement for a while and then shift to a non-monogamous one. We liked the ideas of seeing monogamy to non-monogamy as a spectrum that people could move around on over time. This is very much how we see it ourselves - check out our zine for more on this. The rules or agreements that we make in our relationships can and should be constantly shifting, not something we lock into place forever. This is because both individuals and relationships change over time in all kinds of ways. More on this in MJ’s book Rewriting the Rules. In the podcast we unpack two key ideas in relation to this: It’s okay for rules to change over time We should let others know if the rules are likely to change 1. It’s okay for rules to change For example there are many reasons that we might decide that we h