The Dark Desires is written by two people: Miera and Rahul. We were friends for years before we were anything else — the kind of friends who talk about everything, including the things most people carefully avoid talking about. Somewhere in the middle of all that talking, we fell in love. That was eight years ago; we’ve been married for five of them. This site is what came out of those conversations.
Why we started this
Because good sex advice is astonishingly hard to find, and neither of us had anyone to ask.
We grew up where sex was something you learned about by accident — from friends who knew less than you did, from porn that was never meant to be instructional, from articles that had clearly been written by someone who had never done the thing they were describing. When we went looking online as adults, it wasn’t much better. Recycled listicles. Slideshows wrapped around advertising. Clinical writing so bloodless it forgot that bodies belong to people. Or the opposite: performance dressed up as technique, written for an audience rather than a partner.
What was missing was the thing we’d found for ourselves, slowly and awkwardly and with a lot of laughing: that this is a skill, that it improves with attention and honesty, and that almost everything difficult about it gets easier once you can say it out loud.
So we started writing it down. Not as experts handing down instruction, but as two people who figured some things out and got tired of watching everyone else start from zero. The goal has never been complicated: to take something entirely natural and make it a little less shameful, a little better understood, and a great deal more enjoyable.
Who writes what
Miera writes most of what you’ll find on female pleasure and orgasm, foreplay and seduction, and the tantric and Eastern practices we’ve spent the longest time with. She also writes the fiction.
Rahul writes most of the male pleasure and performance material and a good deal of the work on positions and variety — the pieces that need answering from the other side of the bed.
Everything else — kink and fantasy, relationships and confidence — we argue our way through together. We edit each other, which mostly means one of us reading a draft aloud and the other one saying that has never once happened to me. It’s a good system.
We should be direct about what qualifies us, because it isn’t a certificate. We are not doctors, therapists, or certified sex educators, and we have never claimed to be. What we have is eight years of paying close attention to each other, a lot of reading, a fair number of mistakes, and a willingness to write honestly about all three. For most of what’s on this site, that’s the right qualification. For some of it, it isn’t — and we’d rather tell you which is which.
Miera and Rahul are pen names, and we don’t publish photographs of ourselves. Writing this way about our own bedroom costs something if it follows you to work, and we’d rather keep writing honestly than keep our real names attached to it. That’s the one thing on this page that isn’t literal. Everything else is.
How we write
- Experience first. If we’re describing a technique, at least one of us has practised it. When we’re writing about something outside our own experience, we say so in the piece rather than pretending otherwise.
- We read widely. Where research exists on a question — arousal, desire, anatomy, the mechanics of orgasm — we go and read it rather than repeating what other blogs claim it says.
- We revise. Posts here get rewritten when we learn something better. An older article isn’t left to rot just because it ranks.
- We correct mistakes. If we get something wrong and you tell us, we’ll fix it and we won’t quietly pretend it was always that way.
- Nothing here is bought. There are no affiliate links on this site. No product placements, no sponsored posts, no commission on anything we mention. If we recommend something, it’s because it worked for us — and if that ever changes, this paragraph will change first.
What we are not
We are not medical professionals, and nothing on this site is medical advice.
Some of what we write touches on health — erectile difficulty, premature ejaculation, prostate play, infection risk. We’ve written those pieces as carefully as we know how, but they are starting points for understanding your body, not diagnoses of it. Please see a doctor about pain during sex, bleeding, unexplained changes in function or desire, any symptom that might be a sexually transmitted infection, contraception, or anything to do with fertility or pregnancy. If sex is causing you distress rather than difficulty, a therapist is worth more than any article we could write, including this one.
Nobody sensible would take a stranger’s word over a doctor’s. We’d rather say that out loud than let a good ranking imply otherwise.
About the stories
The erotic stories on this site are fiction. Where one is written in the first person, the narrator is a character and not a diary entry — please don’t read them as reportage about our lives. Every character in them is an adult, and everything that happens between them happens by choice.
The one rule
Everything we write assumes enthusiastic, informed consent between adults, every time, and freely withdrawn the moment anyone wants to withdraw it. That isn’t a legal disclaimer we’ve bolted to the bottom of the page. It’s the thing that makes all the rest of it work. Pressure ruins sex long before it becomes anything worse, and no technique on this site will survive a partner who doesn’t want to be there.
This site is for adults, and it is explicit throughout. If you’re under 18, this isn’t for you yet.
Say hello
We read everything that comes in. If you’ve got a question, a disagreement, a correction, or something you wish someone had explained to you years ago and nobody did — write to us. Requests for what to cover next are genuinely welcome; a fair amount of what’s on this site exists because a reader asked.
You can also find us on Instagram and Pinterest. Rahul is mr_dd on FetLife, where he’s been part of the kink community far longer than this site has existed.
— Miera & Rahul