We get a lot of our stories from our listener inbox. You tell us about things you're going through that spark new ideas for us, or you react to questions that we put out. Like right now, you are sending us love stories that's started by a chance meeting in real life, not by online dating. We've asked you to tell us how you sized someone up without a profile to guide you.

If you have one of these stories, you can send it to us in an email or record a voice memo and send it to us at death sex money at slate.com.

And when we ask you these kinds of big open questions, our hope is that will inspire you to reach out with a particular specific story that's about something a lot of us have gone through in some way.

What we don't actively try to do with our stories and questions is to scold you or to trigger you to blow up your life.

But we do get notes about how our show has affected

decisions you've made. One memorable example is from 2019 when we got an email in our inbox

with the subject line, Sugar Babies cost me $8,000 and my marriage. It was from a listener to our show who said that a previous

episode we'd made about sex work had inspired him to check out the website seeking arrangements

and to start paying for sex. We called this listener, Ethan. He was married and his wife found

out and they were in the process of divorcing. And he wanted to talk to us about the experience.

So we called him and made an episode about it.

I was a little bit intrigued after listening to the DSM podcast.

And so I went on and started looking around and started talking you know, talking with people here and there.

And there was one person that, you know, that we seemed to click online. And so, and so, yeah,

we met up and, you know, walked around in a park for a little while and then went back to my place.

Did you have sex?

Yeah.

That interview stuck with me, because on the one hand, Ethan wanted to confess and talk about what had happened.

But as we talked, it became clear that he hadn't really faced the consequences of all his decisions,

not about hiring sex workers necessarily,

but about lying to his now ex-wife and then blaming her and also kind of blaming our podcast

for making him do it. It's been five years since he and I talked, and I recently reached back out

...