You! Yes, you! You should go to relationship counselling! OK, maybe not ALL of you, but most of my traffic comes from search so the majority of you are reading this because you googled ‘relationship counselling’, wondering if it was something you should try. Maybe you have worries about relationship counselling and you’d like me to assuage them. Maybe you’re just curious about what goes on behind the counsellor’s door. Or perhaps you’re already convinced that you want to do it, but you need (or your partner needs) that final nudge before you take the plunge. If that’s what you’re after, I’m here for you. Here are five valuable things I got from relationship counselling.

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For a while I’ve been contemplating a series of blog posts in which I argue, essentially, with myself. Taking on some of the bad arguments or terrible opinions I had years ago, which still exist on these pages for everyone to see. Every time my autotweet widget spits out something from the archive, I cringe in anticipation of what my past self said, ready to be embarrassed today by what I said five years ago. I’m not alone in this: we’ve all said things in the past that we don’t agree with today. And we all have to consider how we deal with embarrassing stuff when confronted by it, years later. Should we edit old blogs that we no longer agree with?

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Yesterday some poor soul wrote in to the Guardian to ask why his girlfriend masturbates after sex. His assumption was that it was because she was ‘insatiable’, and the agony aunt explained that perhaps she just fancied a second orgasm, or wanted to pleasure herself without the potential anxiety or pressure of doing it in front of him. My answer is a lot more sweary and pretty NSFW, but here goes: maybe the sex made her really, really horny.

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Every year I try to write something about how Valentine’s Day is mostly a bundle of gendered expectation and obligation wrapped in a parcel of guilt. That doesn’t stop it being fun for some people (and nor should it), but hopefully it does help people who feel shit about the whole thing to feel a little less shit and a little more like it doesn’t really matter. But I’m a sex blogger, so if I don’t write anything about Valentine’s Day I’ll get letters. So, as a compromise I’ve written a guide to things you can buy as Valentine’s Day gifts for yourself. Hoard them, enjoy them, publicly propose to them if you want to, just don’t give them to anyone else: there are other gift guides for that.