When my partner is sad, he wilts like a plant. I can sometimes tell he’s sad, despite him putting in his best efforts to try and make me think he’s fine, and for a long time I struggled with knowing how to cheer him up. The kind words and reassurances and ‘I love you’s that usually work on me have very little effect on him. But I think I’ve cracked it now – the closest I can come to a ‘cheat code’ for love. His ‘love language’: cuddles.

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How good are you at taking a compliment? Be honest, now: do you take them on board and ponder them until you genuinely understand what the person complimenting you means? Or do you tend to let them get filtered out through the hodgepodge of insecurities that you’ve accumulated over the years? I am rubbish at taking a compliment, but occasionally I get flashes of what the world might look like if I could properly take them on board.

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Recently the fantastic writer @CoffeeandKink was chatting on Twitter about the ethics of age gap relationships, and I asked her if she’d be up for elaborating on her ideas in a guest blog. I’m really chuffed that she said yes! As well as writing her own amazing sex blog, she’s also guest blogged for me here before about orgasm denial, and she freelances on a number of different topics. Today she’s here to explain what ethical factors should be considered in age gap relationships…

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One of the strange things about my current relationship – as opposed to any other I’ve been in – is that I’ve forgotten how to get rejected. I know, right? Poor me. Please crack out the smallest violin you own and play a concerto in ‘Woe is GOTN.’ Rejection – and specifically sexual rejection – is something I used to have a lot of practise in. I knew how to take a ‘no’, and greet it with a shrug and a cuddle. I knew how to take ‘seriously? Now? AGAIN?’ and absorb it into my thick, thick skin, so it couldn’t pierce through to the soft bit inside me that – whisper it – needed sex to feel loved.

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“This is perhaps the closest I’ve got to one of my own ideas: that of a sex duvet made from soft and strokeable fabric that vocally rumbles as it is touched and that curls around me as I sink into it. My sex robot will be changeable at a whim: perhaps one day a bed made of breasts; another day, a series of vibrating and moving penises that talk dirty to me. Maybe sometimes both. Because that’s the joy of adaptable, personalisable sex robots that aren’t human, that aren’t gendered – they can just be what feels good at a particular time.” – Kate Devlin, Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots

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