For her new podcast The Good Sex Project, host and creator Melody Thomas interviewed dozens of New Zealanders about the most intimate parts of their lives.

Woven together with insights from international experts, Thomas aims to uncover the answer to three questions: What is good sex? What’s a good relationship? And how do we find them? Here, she shares a list of five things she’s learned.

‍1. A lot of New Zealanders are having average sex, and don’t know how to change that

In fact, a lot of them have no idea that sex is even meant to feel good, physically and emotionally! So many people shared stories of hook-ups that left them feeling empty or used, or where they suffered through pain and discomfort because they felt they had to “see it through”. 

These stories were overwhelmingly from women, but not exclusively – a couple of men talked about feeling pressure to perform, or be a “stallion”, that resulted in having sex they didn’t really want to have. 

Sexual empowerment and sex positivity (which is basically the idea that sex is a natural and healthy part of our lives) have brought us so far, but a lot of people still aren’t sure how to take the theory and make it real in practice: How to advocate for what they want inside a sexual situation (presuming they even know what they want!), and what to do when things start going in a direction they don’t like. Despite really great growth in our understanding of consent, and the way gendered dynamics impact heterosex especially, a lot of people still find it much easier to access a “yes” than a “no”, or a “maybe” or a “not yet”. This is something I’d like to see change. 

2. It can be incredibly difficult to spot the warning signs of a toxic or abusive relationship

If only it were as simple as green flags and red flags, so much hurt could be avoided. But because of the ways we’ve been taught to think about love, some red flags start out looking green. 

Take love bombing. Love bombing is excessive attention, admiration and affection, often at the very early stages of a relationship. And it can look and feel like a romantic comedy, as if this person is just so into you that they’re going above and beyond. They might say things like “I’ve never met somebody like you before” or “I can’t stop thinking about you”, and that gives your brain a dopamine hit that feels really good, and which you want to return to over and over.

But in this case, it’s not real affection. It’s a manipulation technique. The purpose of love bombing is to make you feel dependent on the person dishing out the goods, as well as obligated to them (as in, “I can’t ditch them, they’re so into me”).

Once a person is hooked, a love bomber will often switch tack, withdrawing the love and affection once so readily offered. This ‘hot and cold’ treatment can be both confusing and addictive to their target, who becomes overly focused on getting things back to the “good” place the relationship was at the beginning. There’s some great advice on how to avoid that kind of situation in Episode 5 (out June 15).

3. “Gay people are better at sex than straight people” ‍

Super famous gay American author and podcaster Dan Savage told me this one, and he wasn’t talking about sweet sex moves (or not just that, anyway). He reckons it’s because when queer people get to consent, “it's the beginning of the conversation, [whereas] when straight people get to consent it's the end of the conversation.”

Basically, when it comes to heterosex, there’s an assumed script. An order of business which goes something like: kissing, hand stuff, maybe mouth stuff, penetration, he comes (maybe she does, if she’s lucky!), then sex is done. 

When it comes to queer sex, you can’t rely on any one script. Savage uses the example of two men hooking up for the first time: “You can't default to anal intercourse. Even if you could, who is going to be doing the penetrating, and who is going to be penetrated has to be negotiated.”

So a lot of queer hookups start with what Savage calls the four magic words: “What are you into?”

“If there's anything that straight people should steal from gay people, it's ‘What are you into?’,” he says.

So! Heterosex havers, give it a go: Ask the question. Listen to the answer. And have an answer of your own ready to go.

4. When it comes to relationships: most of us have no clue 

Our relationships are some of the most important things in our lives, with the greatest power to make us miserable or ecstatic (likely both), and we’re given so few tools for how to navigate them. 

Nobody teaches us how to argue, how to deal with jealousy and insecurity, how to communicate our needs and desires, how to avoid or overcome infidelity. Disney films left it at “happily ever after”, rom coms taught us that all sorts of problematic behaviours are romantic (remember in The Notebook when Noah asks Allie to dance and she rejects him… so he HANGS OFF A FERRIS WHEEL threatening to let go unless she’ll agree to go out with him?!).

A good number of people didn’t have super healthy, communicative, respectful relationships modelled to them by their parents, and were taught nothing about healthy relationships in school.

At best you might have been told something vague about how you’ll know “when it’s right” or how relationships are “hard”, but often what’s “right” isn’t at all obvious, and how are you meant to know the difference between the hard stuff you’re meant to work through, and the stuff that’s so hard you’d be best to call it quits?

And what about sex? Are long term relationships where good sex goes to die? Or is it possible to keep a ‘spark’ alive even after decades together? You can pay thousands of dollars to a therapist to figure this stuff out, or you can listen to the podcast for free. Up to you 😜. 

5. You can’t love somebody else until you love yourself. Kind of

Actually, a lot of people fall in love with someone else well before they reach a place of self-love. Falling in love with other people is easy! But without a solid foundation of self-love, self-worth and self-acceptance, a lot of people fall into negative (and sometimes toxic or abusive) relationship patterns, and will find themselves drawn to those same dynamics over and over again. 

If you can work to build up your sense of self-worth, the bar for how you expect to be treated by others will naturally be high, because you set that expectation with how you treat yourself. 

If you can work to undo just some of the misogyny, homophobia, ableism and body hatred you’ve internalised through growing up in this capitalist, pre-climate collapse, patriarchal hellscape, you can access untapped resources of empathy and self-compassion, which allow for both individual growth as well as space for the people around you to flourish. 

If you can work to be content with yourself in moments of stillness, when nobody else is validating your existence, you might just end up in what Australian activist and author Clementine Ford told me was the best relationship of her life: “And it is one that will last me forever, because I'm in a relationship with my best friend. And that is me.”

The Good Sex Project is out now via Stuff.co.nz, and on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all other major podcast platforms. The Good Sex Project was made by Popsock Media, with the support of NZ On Air.