It’s a huge stressor for a lot of people, especially when they desire to try something new and fear social scrutiny.

Fret not!

Some of the allegedly “taboo” sex acts society judges and frowns on, really are good for your relationship and mental health according to science.

The three most judged, misunderstood and frowned on sexual acts are; BDSM, one-night stand/casual sex and open-relationships and polyamory.

1. BDSM

The practice of BDSM has always carried with it a certain amount of social stigma, but ever since 50 Shades Of Grey it has found more acceptance in the mainstream and a lot of more folks are talking about BDSM.

Contrary to popular belief, kinky sex is good for you says science.

A study documented in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, found that people, who enjoy bondage, the snap of the whip, ropes or the clink of chains, and other kinks may actually be more psychologically healthy than those who don’t.

In this study, 902 BDSM aficionados, and 434 non-kinky people were surveyed on their personalities, overall well-being, attachment style, and sensitivity to rejection. Curiously, practitioners of BDSM scored significantly higher on these mental health tests then their ‘vanilla’ counterparts.

The results revealed that on a basic level, BDSM practitioners are no more troubled than the general population.

In fact they were more conscientious, more open to new experiences, more outgoing, more aware of their sexual desires, and they didn’t feel the need to hide anything from their partners. Bottling up emotions of any kind, including sexual ones, takes a huge toll on mental health, so it only makes

sense that kinky people would have better mental health than those who are potentially sexually frustrated.

Obviously, BDSM is not for everyone, however, it is nice that science is bringing down the stigma that has been associated with BDSM for so long.

2. Casual Sex

Casual sex has always been around but it has become more popular with the advent of apps and sites that allow for easy hookups. Until now casual sex has been viewed in a negative light, some going so far as to say that casual sex destroys the fabric of society and is morally corrupting, with some talk on casual sex damaging self esteem.

A new study published in Archives of Sexual Behaviour resulted in some new findings. This study looked at 371 college students for 9 months and was conducted by researchers at NYU and Cornell University. Those students who admitted to sleeping around reported better general well-being, lower stress levels, and higher self-esteem compared to those who follow the relationship-sex-only rule. Who would have known that being promiscuous could make you happy and be so good for you?

Now, one thing to keep in mind is that casual sex only makes you a happy if you do it for the right reasons. If you’re having sex with any random that crosses your way because you want to rebound after a horrible breakup, or to numb your lack of self-worth, you’re going to end up feeling worse about yourself, so don’t do it. If you’re sleeping around because you’re always horny and are out to just have fun, then go for it.

Below is an interesting video exploring the debate on ‘Is casual sex unhealthy?’

3. Open relationships and polyamory.

Most people frown on polyamory and open relationships mostly because they don’t understand them but little do they know that these couples in these types of relationships are happier and more fulfilled.

One of the secret to a happy relationship is good communication, which is where a lot of traditional couples fall short. To enjoy an open relationship or polyamory you need to express, communicate and hear each others needs, desires, fears and boundaries to successfully live a fulfilling non-traditional relationship.

There you go. Life is only fully lived when you have done things that fall away from the ‘norm’. It’s good for your health.

original post on Maxim

Do you agree with science on this? Let us know below.

Speaking about her 17 year marriage in a candid conversation with Sirius XM radio host Howard Stern, the actor also admitted she got married too young at the age of 25 — and advises her kids against it.

“Heck yeah! No, don’t do it,” she said.

“It did work out, but let me tell you: It worked out in a way that thank God I had a husband who’s a gangster partner. Taking that road from 25 to 44.

“Here’s the deal, Howard. You’ve gotta trust who you’re with. And at the end of the day, right, I’m not here to be anybody’s watcher. I’m not his watcher. He’s a grown man.”

The 43-year-old then gave her key piece of advice for making her marriage work.

“Here’s what I trust: The man that Will is … is a man of integrity. He’s got all the freedom in the world,” she said.
“As long as Will can look himself in the mirror and be okay — I’m good.

“Here’s what’s real: I’m not the kind of woman that believes a man is not going to be attracted to another woman.”

Source: news.com.au

Have you ever played in an open relationship? Would you like to? Let us know below!

She was even happier to learn that she had that hard-to-find thing with both Matt and Rachel — chemistry. They talked about life and love and learned that they had the same ideas when it came to dating.

“I was really excited to meet people that felt the same way,” she says of her ongoing relationship with the married couple, both 34-year-old self-employed artists, who declined to use their last names because of privacy reasons.

Ezzo, also an artist, is polyamorous. Loosely speaking, she seriously dates more than one person at a time, and has an emotional, as well as a sexual connection, with her partners.

She sees Matt and Rachel separately and together, and also occasionally dates other people.

“One of the wonderful aspects of polyamory is that you do get different things from different partners, both emotionally and physically,” says Ezzo, who is in what’s known as a “triad” with Matt and Rachel.

“There are three very different dynamics, all of which are personally valuable.”

And while the arrangement may seem unusual, Ezzo insists it’s really no different than run-of-the-mill monogamy. Communication and compromise are key — for instance, when it comes to picking a flick to watch for the evening.

“They have very different styles in movies,” says Ezzo, who splits her time between New York and Boston, where she is going to school for photography at the Art Institute of Boston. “When I’m with Rachel we might [watch] a silly, fun ’80s movie, but I won’t do that silly ’80s movie with Matt. He likes strange horror flicks.”

Luckily, she says, “I like both of those things.”

Ezzo is part of a growing movement of people who are practicing consensual non-monogamy — or, in plain English, open relationships.

According to Gette Levy of Open Love NY, a local support group with more than 1,000 members, the organization has seen a steady increase in membership since forming in 2009.

“Dating has changed over the past 50 years,” says Levy. “Many adults of all ages are finding that monogamy does not suit them and is no longer a fiscal and social requirement.”

Shortly after she started seeing Matt and Rachel, Ezzo met her future husband.

“I had told him [about my lifestyle] on our first date,” she says. “He was excited to explore it.”

Her open marriage eventually fizzled for reasons not related to polyamory, but her relationship with Matt and Rachel is still going strong.

“I’ve always inherently had this notion of or had this blurred line between friendship and lovers … to me there is a huge overlap. It’s easier for me to simultaneously love multiple people,” says Ezzo.

“As a bi-sexual person, choosing is not necessarily something that I personally like to do,” she adds.

Pop-culture is having a poly moment too: TV shows like “Sister Wives” (Sundays on TLC) and “Polyamory: Married & Dating” (Thursdays on Showtime) are giving people a glimpse into the complicated sex lives of multi-partnered couples.

“The interest and the visibility around open relationships has just skyrocketed,” says sexpert Tristan Taormino, who wrote a book about the subject, “Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships.”

“We’re having these discussions in really mainstream media that just weren’t even possible two years ago,” adds Taormino, who points out that her book actually sold more copies last year than it did during its 2008 debut.

Open relationships are becoming so common that when singer Robin Thicke gripped Lana Scolaro’s barely covered butt at a VMA afterparty at 1OAK last month, his indiscretion reportedly didn’t get him into trouble with his actress wife Paula Patton.

“We’ve done just about everything,” Thicke said of his unconventional relationship to Howard Stern in July. Still, he stopped short of saying he and his wife were in an open marriage: “Out of respect for her, we just won’t answer that one.”

Will and Jada Smith, Mo’Nique, Tilda Swinton and even Dolly Parton and her husband have all been rumored to be in open relationships too.

But perhaps the lifestyle’s most visible celebrity moment came in January 2012, when Marianne Gingrich told ABC News that her ex-husband, the politician Newt Gingrich, had asked for an “open marriage” while having an affair with his soon-to-be third wife Callista. (Newt Gingrich has given several extensive denials regarding his ex-wife’s claims.)

It’s not just horny men with insecure wives looking the other way who are in non-monogamous relationships — often, women are the ones who instigate the practice.

Several studies by sex researchers in Germany and in the University of Wisconsin have shown that it is often women who become bored romantically after several years in a monogamous relationship.

Violet, a New York City higher education teacher, 49, would only speak to The Post under a pseudonym. (She says her friends know about her life style but some of her adult students might be shocked.)

“The way I describe it on my dating profile is about the best I can do: I just didn’t get the memo about not dating,” she says.

Violet’s love life is the stuff of telenovelas: She has been in a marriage with a man for 10 years. Her husband has a girlfriend of three years. Violet is also dating a man and a woman who date each other but, unlike Ezzo, she only sees each person in the couple separately, never together. And she goes on dates outside of her regular relationships.

In a twist, her husband’s family knows about his girlfriend and the trio often go to family functions together.

Violet focuses on her two other partners when her husband is traveling; when he is home, “I will usually spend maybe one or two nights with somebody else.” Her husband’s long-term girlfriend lives out of state, she explains, so he’ll go spend a week with her at a time.

“It all comes out in the wash,” she says.

Violet, for whom sex is a “big priority,” prefers three lovers because the arrangement “keeps me from becoming a burden on any single one of them.”

“There is crazy, wild sex and lots of it, and that’s important to me, but it’s not all there is to my love affairs — not by a long shot,” says Violet.

Unexpectedly, the biggest difficulty people in non-monogamous relationships encounter isn’t jealousy, but something way less dramatic.

“Time is the real thing,” says Taormino, who is in an open marriage herself.

Ezzo’s partner Matt agrees: “The biggest misconception people have about open relationships is that it’s a nonstop party. We only have 24 hours in a day and most of that is taken up with work, sleep and responsibilities to the home and each other. To see someone else takes a lot of planning. We live by the calendar more than the bedroom.”

Another misconception? That there are no rules.

But when an open relationship involves long-term emotional connections with multiple partners, there are frequently more, not fewer, rules.

The marriage contract of the San Diego family featured in “Polyamory: Married & Dating” is nearly five pages long. Posted online, it has extremely specific codes of conduct ranging from when to talk about relationship problems (“No relationship processing after 9:30.”) to guidelines around dates (“Do not postpone or cancel a date with one partner to see someone else.”).

Even with all the complications of having multiple relationships, proponents believe it’s better than the alternative.

“I feel like monogamy sets us up to fail in so many ways….that this one person is going to meet all of our needs — emotional, sexual, physical, spiritual, financial, physical — and that’s impossible,” says Taormino.

“I think polyamorous people acknowledge that up front.”
Violet agrees — and counsels her female friends who are going through the trials of dating in New York to be more open-minded.

“They would go on a first date and they would hold some guy up to this ridiculous standard and I would tell them, ‘Look, just have fun. Date a bunch of people. Don’t have these expectations.’ ”

Looking to break free of monotonous monogamy?

Here’s a key to some of the most popular open-relationship styles. And remember, all are consensual — cheating is not kosher!

Open relationship: Umbrella term for any consensual non-monogamous relationship

Polygamy: Think “Big Love.” One spouse, many wives. Illegal.

Monogamish: Don’t-ask-don’t-tell sanctioned cheating in a monogamous relationship

Polyamory: Having a loving relationship — emotional and physical — with multiple people

Swinging: Hook-ups with no-strings attached

Have you ever been in an open relationship? How has it worked for you? Are you curious to try it? Let us know below!

Source: nypost.com

THE Hill-Thompsons* are like any other young family expecting their first baby.

They’re buying maternity clobber on eBay, weeping during ultrasounds and giggling when the malapropistic midwife leading their prenatal classes advises them to gouge their birth companions carefully.

There is, however, one thing about the Hill-Thompsons that makes them a little unusual: there are three of them.

Mari (a 33-year-old student doing her second degree), Sara (a 32-year-old uni lecturer) and David (a 35-year-old IT geek) have been a sexually monogamous, three-way unit for six years.

They are not religious, they’re not cult members and they’re not even that into group sex.

They just happened to all fall in love with each other at roughly the same time.

For the most part, the Brisbane trio have kept the details of their polyamorous private life to themselves. But they are slowly coming out of the closet now Mari is eight months up the duff. Sara is also hoping to conceive in the not-too-distant future.

Telling people about their super-sized relationship is complicated by a lack of unloaded language options. Threesome sounds too sexy and there is no triplicate version of the word couple.

“Usually we just tell people there are three of us,” Mari says. “But polyfidelitous might be the best technical term.”

Polyamory, also known as ethical non-monogamy, is billed by many activists as the new gay; the next sexual revolution. It’s separate from swinging, in that (as the Latin root suggests) emotion is involved. Its also very different to religious polygamy such as that portrayed on the HBO TV show Big Love.

In short: more than two people, more than just sex, God optional.

Books, blogs and academic research into the practice are all rising, as is the predictable outrage from traditionalists and even from some non-traditionalists who say the trend muddies the gay marriage debate.

While a common joke is that the complexities of poly relationships leave little time for activism, in Canada on Monday the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association will begin fighting for group marriage rights in that nation’s supreme court.

“What they plan to say,” the Vancouver Sun has written, “is that polyamory is a more highly evolved form of family-conjugal relationship that is beneficial to all of its participants; the way of the future, if you will.”

The CPAA contends that at least two million Canadians live in polyamorous relationships, many belonging to what is known as the friends with benefits category.

It’s hard to know the number of polyamorists in Australia because for some reason the question isn’t asked on the census. There is, however, at least one in Britain.

Actress Tilda Swinton, 50, shares a house with playwright John Byrne, the 70-year-old father of her twins. Her other companion is 32-year-old Sandro Kopp, an artist she met while filming The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Kopp had a small role as a centaur.

“The arrangement is just so sane,’ Swinton has said. “John and I live here with our children, and Sandro is sometimes here with us, and we travel the world together. We are all a family.”

Byrne agrees, saying of Kopp: “We all love him dearly.”

Given the ubiquity of cheating spouses (there are now commercial websites devoted to facilitating marital infidelity), it seems grossly hypocritical to judge those who are open and ethical about having more than one lover.

But Mari, Sara and David endure way more than their fair share of rude and weird reactions. Their jog-as-a-family neighbours won’t wave back to them and Sara’s mum thinks she is some kind of insatiable, nymphomaniac adulteress.

“But dammit, we’re not freaks!” Sara says. “We’re not hurting anyone. And we have three earners, three minds to think through situations and now three people to care for a baby.”

The story of how the Hill-Thompsons came to be the Hill-Thompsons is long, complicated and, at times, tragic.

Mari and David are high school sweethearts who have been together for 16 years and married in 1999.

“My only other relationships were crushes on girls in my childhood,” David says. “I had never have thought I would find myself in a permanent three-way relationship until it happened.”

Mari and Sara bonded as friends in the late 90s after Mari was raped. Sara then ended up in an abusive marriage in Colombia before visiting Mari and David in Brisbane in 2004. She and Mari got together within days. Then things progressed.

“David found the term polyamory online,” Mari recalls. “I was really relieved to discover that there were other people who had found they could love more than one person at once.

“Sara had asked me lots of questions that I felt were very scientific: I had just wanted her to say she felt the same, and to kiss me!”

Six years later, negotiating life together still involves tricky logistics and sleep rosters. In the early days, they slept in a queen and a single bed pushed together with a lumpy piece of foam filling the gap and a couple of stitched-together sheets on top. Now they take it turns to sleep in twos, only slumbering altogether (sideways in a king-sized bed) a few times a week (pregnant bellies permitting).

“Our schedule has changed over the years and I am sure it will continue to change,” Mari says. “We also alter the sleeping rotation if anyone is likely to feel particularly lonely sleeping by themselves for whatever reason.”

As for sex, the gang tend to avoid the three musketeers approach in this domain, too.

“It takes a lot of brainpower to think about three people’s sexual pleasure and emotional states at once,” Sara says. “Having to think that hard makes sex difficult.”

Another intriguing aspect of the arrangement is Mari and Sara’s status as committed feminists. It certainly confounds assumptions that they are the hapless members of some sort of harem. After all, while some chauvinist types might think David is fortunate to share his life with two women, others might regard living with two feminists as involving two too many.

Life, meanwhile, goes on.

The triumvirate is attending hypnobirthing classes, negotiating who will stay home and who will work, and reading a book called Psycho Kitty in the hope of making their crazed cat baby-friendly.

And as they count down the days until the birth of little Kate next month, they are convinced that any stigma their daughter faces in the community will be well and truly countered by the 50 per cent increase in the usual loving parenthood quotient she will have at home.

Source: theaustralian.com.au

Polyamory is often misconstrued as a form of swinging but true polyamorists would certainly argue that this is not the case at all. Whereas the focus of swinging is recreational sex between couples who are otherwise in committed, monogamous relationships, the focus of polyamory is developing a deep and committed relationship with more than one person. Also, unlike in an open relationship, a polyamorist does not generally have a primary partner and treats each significant other equally. Polyamory requires an environment of trust and honesty where all parties are fully aware of the existence of the others. For example, if a person cannot attend a social function with both partners, then that person is not in a polyamorous relationship.

So what is the advantage of being in a polyamory relationship over being a swinger or being in an open relationship? Firstly, as mentioned previously, polyamory is not just about sex. For people who have felt that they could have a strong emotional attachment to more than one person, this form of human connection can provide an avenue to spread the love further. In turn, you would have more than one significant other that loves and cares for you which may satisfy the sort of personality that thrives on affection. Whereas swinging and open relationships highlight the physical need for people to play outside the boundary of their otherwise monogamous relationship, polyamory caters to the emotional need, or desire, to accept multiple partners. In a polyamorous relationship, whether sex is had by all parties is immaterial.On the other hand, even the most seasoned swinger would probably balk at the idea of allowing an emotional connection to transpire between his or her partner and another person.

In the world of swinging, anything goes sexually but the slightest hint of misguided intimacy can cause major rifts between couples. Polyamorous couples experience no such problems with intimacy provided all parties are honest with one another. Therefore, perhaps polyamory is the ultimate level of sharing, giving love freely and existing without jealousy.Is polyamory for you though? If you’re currently in a traditional, monogamous relationship and cannot imagine forming an intimate relationship with another person, and allow your partner to do the same, then probably not. While most people can grasp the concept of separating love and sex, and many can happily engage in the swinging lifestyle, polyamory does require a completely different mindset.

Our society does still view monogamy, at least on the emotional level, as being the norm, and indeed some people may perceive polyamory as being too radical or ’hippy’ to contemplate as a mainstream lifestyle choice. In fact though, polyamory is practiced by people from all walks of life. Some may view polyamory as irresponsible and merely an attempt at having your cake and eating it. In fact, being polyamorous requires an extraordinary ability to be selfless, which is probably the main reason why our increasingly ’me’ oriented society can’t readily grasp this concept. It’s certainly food for thought.