The words, defined.

Aftercare

The attention and support partners give each other after intimacy or a scene — physical comfort, reassurance, and checking in.

Attachment styles

Patterns in how a person seeks and responds to closeness in relationships — usually grouped as secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized.

BDSM

An umbrella term for a set of consent-based practices built around power exchange, sensation, and negotiated roles between adults.

Bondage

The consensual practice of restricting a willing partner's movement — with rope, cuffs, or other restraints — as a form of trust, play, and connection.

Boundaries

The limits you set around your body, time, emotions, and attention so a relationship stays comfortable and consensual for everyone in it.

Check-in

A short, intentional conversation where partners share how they're feeling about the relationship and surface anything that needs attention.

Compersion

The warm, positive feeling some people get from seeing a partner happy with someone else — often described as the opposite of jealousy.

Consent

A clear, freely given, informed, and reversible yes to a specific activity — the foundation of any healthy intimate experience.

Demisexual

A sexual orientation where a person feels sexual attraction only after forming a strong emotional bond — closeness comes first, attraction follows.

Dominant and submissive (D/s)

A consensual dynamic where one partner leads and the other yields, by mutual agreement and always negotiated in advance.

ENM (ethical non-monogamy)

Ethical non-monogamy: relationship styles where partners agree, openly and honestly, to have more than one romantic or intimate connection.

Fluid Bonding

An agreement between partners to stop using barrier protection with each other, made after honest conversations about health, testing, and risk.

Hard limit

A hard limit is a firm, non-negotiable boundary — something you will not do, try, or have done to you, no matter the situation. In kink and intimacy generally, naming your hard limits up front is one of the clearest, kindest ways to keep play safe, consensual, and trusting.

Hard Limits and Soft Limits

In kink and BDSM, a hard limit is a firm boundary that is never crossed; a soft limit is a maybe — approached slowly, with care and check-ins.

Impact Play

A consensual kink practice where one partner delivers rhythmic, sensation-focused contact to the other's body, negotiated in advance.

Kitchen table polyamory

A style of polyamory where everyone in a relationship network is comfortable enough to sit around the same kitchen table — partners and metamours who actually know and get along with each other.

Libido

Libido is your overall level of sexual desire — how much interest or drive you feel for intimacy, which naturally rises and falls over time.

Libido mismatch

When two partners naturally want intimacy at different frequencies or intensities — a common, workable difference rather than a sign that something is wrong.

Love Languages

The idea that people prefer to give and receive care in different ways — words, time, touch, gifts, or helpful acts.

Metamour

Your partner's other partner — the person you're connected to through someone you both love.

New Relationship Energy (NRE)

The intense rush of excitement, focus, and infatuation that colors the early stage of a new connection.

Polyamory

The practice of maintaining more than one loving, intimate relationship at a time, with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved.

Praise Kink

An arousal or emotional response to receiving genuine praise, encouragement, or approval from a partner.

Queerplatonic relationship

A committed, intentional partnership that doesn't fit the usual boxes of friendship or romance — defined by the people in it rather than a script.

Relationship Anarchy

A relationship philosophy that rejects fixed hierarchies and rules, letting each connection define itself through ongoing consent and communication.

Responsive Desire

Responsive desire is the kind of wanting that shows up after connection begins, rather than out of the blue. For many couples, understanding it removes years of unnecessary worry about mismatched libidos.

Safeword

A pre-agreed word or signal that instantly pauses or stops a scene, no explanation needed.

Sensate focus

A structured set of touch exercises, developed by sex therapists, that takes the pressure off "performing" and helps couples reconnect through slow, attentive, non-goal-oriented touch.

Sensation Play

Consensually exploring the body's sense of touch — temperature, texture, and pressure — to heighten or vary physical feeling.

Sex-positive

A shame-free outlook that treats consensual adult intimacy as a healthy, normal part of life — centered on consent, honesty, and respect for personal choice.

Sexual compatibility

How well two partners' desires, pace, boundaries, and communication fit together — less a fixed score than something you build and re-negotiate over time.

Soft Limit

A soft limit is something you're hesitant about but might be open to under the right conditions — a "maybe," not a flat "no." Naming your soft limits clearly is one of the most useful things you can do for a trusting, consent-first dynamic.

Solo polyamory

Solo polyamory: practicing multiple honest, consensual relationships while keeping your independence — no single "primary" partner you merge your life around.

Subspace

Subspace is the altered, trance-like mental state a submissive partner can enter during intense BDSM play.

Switch

A switch is someone who moves between dominant and submissive roles rather than staying fixed in one.

Vanilla

In sex and relationships, "vanilla" describes conventional intimacy without kink or BDSM — a neutral descriptor, not a judgment.