{"id":524310,"date":"2026-04-11T01:00:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T01:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/524310\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T01:00:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T01:00:13","slug":"snowboarding-sex-and-tacos-psychology-today-united-kingdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/524310\/","title":{"rendered":"Snowboarding, Sex, and Tacos | Psychology Today United Kingdom"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re lucky if we have even one friend who really knows us. I mean, truly knows us\u2014our history, our wiring, the things we don\u2019t always say out loud.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m even more grateful<\/a> that I have a friend like that\u2026 who\u2019s also willing to play around like we\u2019re kids.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what I\u2019ve found in my friendship<\/a> with John Kim, aka “The Angry Therapist.”<\/p>\n

We share a lot of overlapping terrain: immigrant parents, childhood<\/a> trauma<\/a>, Asian shame<\/a>. We\u2019ve also walked through some valleys together\u2014heartbreak, divorce<\/a>, and leaving previous careers (me as a journalist, him as a screenwriter) to become therapists in our own ways.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t see each other often anymore. He lives in Costa Rica. I\u2019m in Seattle. Life has moved forward\u2014remarriages, one child each, work that feels like a calling. But when we\u2019re together, something clicks that\u2019s hard to explain.<\/p>\n

On a recent snowboarding trip, most of our conversations looked exactly how you\u2019d expect from guys. Talking about the bad tacos we just ate, the great weather and snow conditions, random jokes, and reminiscing about our past. It was light, easy, superficial. But somewhere between runs, the conversation shifted\u2014almost without us noticing.<\/p>\n

We started talking about our marriages. About both the satisfaction and dissatisfaction with our sex<\/a> lives with our wives. Childhood trauma, not in a way to blame our parents, but more to help explain where we are in our lives and how we can be better for our own children. We also talked about our parents’ trauma and sacrifices, knowing we could never understand what it took to have no leisure time while working menial jobs so we could have a better future in America. And then just as naturally, we\u2019d shift back again to joking about each other. <\/p>\n

There was no awkwardness. No sense that we went \u201ctoo deep.\u201d Just an unspoken understanding that all spaces are welcome. At one point, I told him we co-regulate each other. Another way to think of it is how women who live together sometimes find their menstrual cycles syncing. It\u2019s kind of like that.<\/p>\n

When we’re around each other, our nervous systems are at ease. We both feel calm\u2014but also energized. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s this idea that men struggle with depth in friendships\u2014that we stay on the surface and avoid vulnerability. And there’s a lot of truth in that because it’s hard to find men willing to go there. But it doesn’t have to look the same as women in deep relationships, such as my wife’s dinners with her girlfriends, which take several hours. It doesn\u2019t need to be long, drawn-out conversations. It can come in moments and short bursts. A few honest sentences exchanged can be enough.<\/p>\n

For myself, it’s a chairlift, a shared run, a few honest sentences, and back again. Conversations that flow from the superficial to the substance. And a friendship that can hold it all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We\u2019re lucky if we have even one friend who really knows us. I mean, truly knows us\u2014our history,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":524311,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-524310","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/524311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}