Ari Tuckman on Fidelity, Sex and Digital Toys – Smart Sex, Smart Love with Dr. Joe Kort

This week’s guest on Smart Sex, Smart Love, is psychologist and Certified Sex Therapist, Ari Tuckman. Ari and Joe delve deeper into what monogamy means for couples when it comes to sex and digital toys, and exactly what the notion of a ‘fidelity agreement’ means. Why should couples have conversations about what is and isn’t acceptable behavior in their relationship? How do fidelity needs evolve over time? And, how tight do fidelity agreements need to be for partners to feel secure? Ari also shares his knowledge of how couples can effectively tech up their sex life with digital sex toys, and how toys like the Fleshlight can cause controversy as well as pleasure. How do these digital sex toys impact relationships? Ari and Joe have all the sex tech cyber erotic answers you’ve been dying to download!

Joe:                                        Welcome to Smart Sex, Smart Love. Today we're going to be talking to a therapist Ari Tuckman on fidelity, sex and digital toys. Ari Tuckman PsyD, CST, is a psychologist and Certified Sex Therapist in private practice in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Ari also is an expert speaker on digital sex toys and fidelity agreements. He works with adults who have ADHD and it led to an interest in how ADHD impacts relationships, including a couple's sex life, which then led to post graduate sex therapy training. He's given more than 350 presentations across America and in nine countries. His fourth book and latest book is ADHD After Dark: Better Sex Life, Better Relationship. That will be out this August 2019. Welcome Ari.

Ari Tuckman:                      Thanks for having me. It's always fun to hang out with Joe.

Joe:                                        Very fun to hang out with you too. Thanks for agreeing to do this. So I thought we could start if you don't mind with ... So much of your work is about ADHD, which I want the listeners to understand as well. But how did you then move to doing work with the digital sex toys and fidelity agreements?

Ari Tuckman:                      Sure. So yeah, I've been doing work with ADHD primarily adults of ADHD, and I've done a lot of writing and speaking on that for 20 years now. What has been happening over the last five or ten years for me was getting more and more interested in not only how does ADHD and the clients I work with all day, how does it affect their daily productivity, whether that's students at school or adults at work, but also how it affects their relationships and the dynamics that develop when one partner in a couple has ADHD and then probably one partner doesn't.

Since, obviously, a lot of our happiness in life, a lot of our meaning, a lot of our purpose has to do with our relationships with others, primarily our romantic partner but also friends and co-workers and colleagues and neighbors, this social aspect ... this relationship aspect just became more and more interesting to me. I'd always been kind of interested in sex therapy, but I never really found my angle in so to speak. Then this became my angle. That this is important and those of us who work with ADHD are not really diving into it. It's almost like there were two worlds. There's the world of ADHD and then there's the world of couples therapy and then sex therapy and I wanted to bring them together. That's what I did in this new book that's coming out.

Joe:                                        I think it's so timely because so many of my couples that come to my office fight over this kind of thing. It's problematic and have conflict over it. It challenges fidelity agreements. So that's my first question to you is, could you explain to the audience what is fidelity in a committed relationship?

Ari Tuckman:                      Sure. So fidelity basically means do we do what is expected of us? Do we follow the ground rules so to speak in the relationship?