In this episode of The Desire Lab, Caroline and Andrea explore the physiology and psychology of orgasm, including why orgasms feel different across people, across our lifetimes, and even from one sexual encounter to the next. They unpack the cultural myths surrounding clitoral and penetrative orgasms, the expectations placed on women and men, and the shame that can arise when our bodies don't perform the way we think they're supposed to.

We have a complicated relationship with the honeymoon period. We romanticize it as the most intoxicating, magical, passionately-in-love time of our lives, and then we dismiss it as infatuation, projection, or a chemically induced delusion that has little to do with real love. Somehow, we believe it's both the realest love and the fakest love. And we're absolutely convinced it has an expiration date.

Monogamy is so deeply embedded in our understanding of romantic relationships that most of us encounter it as the default rather than a choice. We date, fall in love, commit, and, somewhere along the way, sexual and romantic exclusivity become part of the deal. But where did that deal come from? In this episode, we take the conversation about infidelity from Episode 009 one step further and ask a bigger question: is monogamy actually natural for humans, and does it matter if it is? We explore evolutionary theories of romantic love, pair bonding, paternal care, and oxytocin, while remaining appropriately suspicious of research that begins with heteronormative assumptions and then works backwards to explain why it exists.

Infidelity looms large in relationships, even when it has never happened. We imagine it as the ultimate betrayal, the rupture from which a relationship may never recover. But affairs, cheating, emotional infidelity, and other forms of betrayal are more complicated than a simple division between the person who did something wrong and the person who was hurt. In this episode, we enter the messy territory of infidelity and ask what actually happens to a relationship when trust is broken.