Hello and welcome to how to the show where listeners write to us with their most personal questions,

and then we find the perfect person to give us advice. I'm Carvel Wallace. And I'm Courtney

Martin. It's funny, by the time we put an episode out, the team and I have spent a considerable

amount of time, either with the listener or actively working on helping them solve a problem.

So we get kind of invested, you know. But the episode often ends with them getting the advice and just going back into the world to try it. Every once in a while we'll get an update. But more often than that, like this situation is like not cut and dry. You can't really give an update. You can't be like, oh I did learn how to trust myself

like it's a little bit more squishy than that

and so a lot of times we're just left not cut and dry. You can't really give an update. You can't be like, oh, I did learn how to trust

myself. Like, it's a little bit more squishy than that. And so a lot of times we're just left wondering, like, did this actually work? And this is why it's exciting to hear that you're actually going to sit down with a listener and talk about their experience. That's right. So last winter, we published an episode called How to Lose Your Virginity at 43.

Obviously, I myself, and I'm sure a lot of listeners, got highly invested in this one. Yes. Elizabeth, the listener for that episode, emailed us an update. I could not resist sitting down with her in debriefing. I'm so excited to hear this. So what we're going to do right now is we're going to

hear that conversation. And then after that, we're going to dip into the mailbag and place

some advice that you guys sent us. And we're going to get to all of it right after this break. Elizabeth, you were on the show back earlier this year, and your note was one of the best ones we've seen.

Can you remind listeners of your original question?

So the subject line was How to lose my virginity in my 40s. And my situation is I grew up Mormon, I've been Mormon

my entire life, and there are strict rules about having sex outside of marriage. And I never

got married. So I got to 43 and had not had

sex. And I left the Mormon church at the end of last year. So now that I didn't have those rules,

I was trying to figure out how to go about as a middle-aged woman to be dating with the intent of having sex and how to bring that up,

how to have those conversations, what to do, what to expect, that sort of thing.

You were on with Nicole Hardy, who also left the LDS Church for a number of reasons,

but one of them was her experience as a non-married woman and the expectation of celibacy.

What was your biggest takeaway from Nicole? I thought she was so fabulous.

She was wonderful. And I read her book since, and it's a delight. I did take some of what she

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