So, admittedly, for a show called Death, Sex, and Money,

we don't talk about sex, the physical act, all that much.

When we talk about sex on this show,

we're usually talking about relationships, why they work or why they don't.

Sometimes we're talking about shame or compulsion.

But this episode this week, it is about sex, having a lot of it.

It starts at a sex party where my guest, Romy Holland, had sex with many men, three dozen plus, including one that she first met that night who became her husband and the father of her child.

Romy is part of this sexy scene that's tech industry adjacent in the Bay Area.

This sex party was a birthday party for Romy's friend, Ayla, who's an internet writer and also a self-described rationalist, a person who prioritizes logic over emotion.

Ayla became sort of internet famous, partly for hosting internet surveys about kink and sex.

And for her birthday party, Ayla said she wanted something non-conventional,

a gang-bang party. And Romy, and a few others, organized it. At the party, Romi's job was to

keep the invited guys excited, which also meant having sex with many of them. And to be clear, Romie is not a sex

worker. She was doing this for fun. I first heard about Romney through a local news story in the San

Francisco standard. The headline, When a Gang Bang Becomes a Love Story. It went on, she was a

fluffer who became a mother. Huh, I thought,

here's a fellow Berkeley mom with a different sort of meet-cute story, who also has, I will admit,

a very different sort of sex life than yours truly. And I wanted to know more about that. And after talking with Romy,

I was struck by, while yes, the meeting of her husband happened at an extreme sort of party,

the contours of that meeting are pretty standard in some ways, locking eyes at a party, having

a crush, being worried about rejection.

I was also struck by what came next.

...