Dating and relationships have a number of highs and lows, especially when we add dating apps and a pandemic into the mix. For this reason, it can be reassuring to hear someone else laugh at a bad date or to joke about the unwritten laws of dating apps and sliding into DMs. Here are three podcasts to make you laugh at the cringe parts, whilst also unpicking some fundamental questions regarding love, sex, and dating.
1. Shallon Lester’s ‘Girl on Top’
For 30 minutes a YouTuber, Shallon Lester pursues the role of your dating agony aunt. Every episode she answers three to four anonymous questions submitted from her website, from using dating apps for the first time to long-distance relationships. Shallon uses a lifetime of dating experience to help with your dating predicaments. However, unlike your average agony aunt, she takes things a little further.
Much like her YouTube videos, she responds to her user’s conundrums with deeper-rooted questions and takes less of a hand-holding approach than other agony aunt figures might do. Rather than answering questions at the surface level, Shallon does not shy away from real talk and unpacks how experiences of love and attention you received as a child will inform patterns of behaviour well into adolescence and adulthood. It is also worth mentioning that Shallon additionally explores questions regarding problematic family and friendship dynamics, such as cutting off a toxic friend or dealing with family that you politically disagree with.
If you find yourself needing guidance on setting boundaries, the reasons why you probably need to raise your standards and the red flags of toxicity, then this is the podcast for you.
2. Come Curious’ ‘F**ks Given’
This award-winning podcast sees sex-positive Youtubers and influencers Come Curious (Florence and Reed) opening the taboo conversations about sex with a special guest in a 30-45 minute episode. On their mission to get everyone talking more about sex, they open each episode with their trademark welcome to all the ‘curious f**kers’ before unpacking the anecdotes from a weekly guest. Each episode is shaped around four fixed questions about the sex lives of their guests: the first f**k, the last f**k, the worst f**k and the f**k that made them, whilst talking about the average and comical ones in-between.
It’s important to note that despite their mission to undo years of work to keep conversations about sex a forbidden taboo, Florence and Reed simultaneously talk about issues of sex and relationship that affect both men and women that are not just heteronormative. Recent episodes have seen the girls talking about erectile dysfunction, the psychology of heartbreak and polyamory. The success of their podcast has meant that the girls have diversified to add the occasional special episode, including informative advice from sex therapists and astrological healers.
These girls hit the perfect note of comedy, vulnerability, and information, so you feel like you’re chiming in on a conversation with your mates rather than listening to a podcast on your morning commute. This is the perfect podcast for relatable laughs about the awkward moments of sex whilst making up for the ways your year six sex education fell short of expectation.
3. Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson’s ‘Guys We F****d’
In this critically acclaimed podcast, stand-up comedians Fisher and Hutchinson are on a mission to reverse the way society looks at female sexuality, identifying their show as the ‘anti-slut-shaming podcast.’ Their weekly bitesize episodes of 10-12 minutes begin with a warm ‘hey what up f****ers’ before quickly unpacking deeper-rooted questions about the patriarchal dynamics of dating that often go overlooked.
Don’t be fooled by the quick-witted titles of their episodes, from first dates to plastic surgery, these girls will succinctly leave you rethinking norms and conventions about female sexuality that you never considered problematic. However, as stand-up comedians, these girls strike a perfect balance between information and irony. Giving equal attention to the funnier moments as well as the serious ones – from unpacking why we may be drawn to toxic relationships, how to respond when your friend is in an abusive relationship to your first experience with oral sex and the support system you can find in ‘slutty’ friends.
Despite the short duration time of each episode, Fisher and Hutchinson make the perfect podcast for satirical commentary on the weird and comical moments of sex and dating in equal measure.