So, Burdo, on this warm summer evening, I thought I'd kick back with my best friend, you, by the way, and answer some questions from the listeners and we just have a relaxing time. What do you say, Burdo?

Let's relax. Let's kick kick it back.

This is the Psychology and Seattle podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kirk Honda. I'm a therapist and I'm also a professor.

My name is Umberto Casañeda and I tune out of tune banjos.

Anonymous upper tier patron says, is it okay to fantasize about other people in a relationship when you're in a relationship?

I am, I am very happy in a long term, stable, healthy, loving relationship. We have been together for years and I'm so happy with him.

I'm a heterosexual and a relationship with a guy lately. I've had shifts in my libido where I feel like it has skyrocketed from where it was over the past few years.

What is throwing me off so much is that I started having these strange random overly sexual urges towards other men, including a close friend of my partner.

I don't know what this means exactly and I'm feeling confused.

I would never cheat on my partner and love and and my love and attraction to him has never dwindled, but I can't seem to shake this urge to be with other sexually as a snorkel.

I don't think I'm polyamorous and I don't know what's going on.

I was hoping you could shed some light if you've ever heard of this before or helped me to not feel so abnormal.

Birdo, what do you think?

Hey, that's my story. That's my life story.

So look, obviously this is not the same for everyone. People vary dramatically.

In my case, yeah, I feel attraction constantly to, you know, women and what I have found for myself is that the key is not letting your thoughts get obsessive.

I think that's true with so many things, not just this topic, but in general, a lot of things are I feel okay to think about to maybe even dream about a bit.

I have found just from personal experience that when I start obsessing about things, even sometimes things that seem innocuous or like not harmful, it tends to lead to problems as an example of one of those.

I've talked about my addictions in the past with shopping and compulsions like that, but you know, I've had some of that that I remember, for example, when I was buying a lot of music equipment, I would go online and like look at this one piece of equipment all the time and being like, oh, I really want it.

I really want it and I'm like, I shouldn't buy it so expensive, but then I keep looking at online and like drooling and rereading all the little specs and things and I think back to that.

And I'm like, well, I think that that impulse of like, I better check in on this again. I wasn't monitoring or I wasn't kind of checking back in with myself and asking like, what is driving this? What do you think this will do for you?

Like, what is this? Well, have you ever had problems with sexual obsession?

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