A card game consisting of intimate questions and wildcards, We’re Not Really Strangers aims to deepen your existing relationships and create new ones.
No1 •
Colloquial Intercourse
There is something unbelievably sensual about taking the time to sit down and share your deepest questions and ruminative thoughts in a conversation with another person. Conversations are a delicate interplay between two (or more) people, and any conversationalist knows how difficult and potentially frightening it can be to create an atmosphere where conversation partners feel safe enough to let their guard down.
A conversation can feel as intimate as physical touch, as those involved attempt to reach proximity to, and perhaps intertwine, their personal stories, deepest interpretations, unspoken biases and inmost experiences. Perhaps this is why the word ‘intercourse’ in the English language means both communication or dealings between individuals and physical sexual contact.
There has been a recent shift, both online and offline, towards more heightened forms of inten-tional conversation through questionnaires and conversation prompts. You might consider it superficial to think that card games containing questions can help create such an atmosphere, but the popularity and wide range of prompt cards available today show otherwise. The We’re Not Really Strangers card game, for example, facilitates different depths of conversation through questions that can be organised as you please – ranging from prompts that feel like a first suggestive stroke down your arm to those undoubtedly moving towards your most intimate parts.
We’re Not Really Strangers is not the only intentional conversation game around at the moment. No Small Talk and Actually Curious are other popular card games available. Many attribute the rising trend of similar ‘deep conversation starters,’ ‘questions for couples to reconnect’ and ‘hot-seat questions’ among millennials on social media platforms in 2024 to the lingering effects of pandemic isolation and the need for more honest and deeper connections. According to behavioural scientist Evelyn Gosnell, who researched party conversations while creating the conversation card game No Small Talk, conversation prompts don’t simply provide topics for conversationalists to use but also help prevent conversations from lingering in polite small talk. Priya Parker, in her 2018 book The Art of Gathering, emphasises the host’s important role in intentionally creating such structured gatherings that unite people around a shared experience instead of gathering them in a room without purpose. In the case of an intimate conversation, We’re Not Really Strangers does exactly that.
It was in the midst of such an exchange, guided by the tender questions of We’re Not Really Strangers, that I personally found connections with a person that shaped into something more profound. As we navigated through layers of curiosity and vulnerability, the cards became the serendipitous bridge that brought my most intimate thoughts and those of another person together. The game served as a direct script, and written narrative arc, leading our still secretive curiosities towards each other’s thoughts – but perhaps there are more examples close to such written connections to be found beyond card game conversation prompts.
Softspot (2021) contains three copies of the same book so that you can keep one and gift the rest as you wish, inviting you to share your reading experience with others.
No2 •
Visceral Writings
I’m likely not the only person who knows couples, friends or lovers who fell in love (or, better said, made love) through reading a similar story or suggesting to someone a book to read. Excuse my being
a total ‘sapiosexual’ (meaning: a person whose sexual attraction largely or primarily depends on intellectual intercourse) here, but the thought of feeding a loved one words that excite me, enhance me, and bring my brain to a level of arousal that is similar to an orgasm makes me giddy. Perhaps the act of reading a similar book or text while not physically together has a similar effect on such intimacy and closeness. It could be that on an intrinsic level it connects those of us with similar experiences – to the time our carers would read to us aloud as a child, often before bedtime. Perhaps there is a sense of security and closeness in reading a story together that, in adulthood, could turn into a craving for someone’s thoughts.
The publication design of Softspot, a collaborative editing and exchange process between design studio OK-RM and curator James Taylor-Foster, recharged these thoughts for me. Softspot was launched in 2021, shortly after most of the world came out of lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, and was imagined as a container for the near and the close, featuring a patchwork of prose, verse and visual work that oscillates between the subjective and the objective. For the writers, it is an exercise in understanding how ‘words can be written – and how they can be held in a hand.’ After ordering the publication, it arrived in a bright yellow folder, holding not one but three copies. It encouraged me not to read alone, but to share the intimate thoughts and musings in the publication with friends, family and loved ones. What if every intimately written piece were produced in sets of three? How many words could then be turned into the gentle stroking of another’s brain, into the penetration of some-one’s mind?
Ulufer Çelik and Alaa Abu Asad’s I Love It When Translation Can Be Found to Agree With Our Weird Desires (2020) compiles identical words used in both of their mother tongues – Turkish and Palestinian Arabic – demonstrating the unique power of words in bringing people closer together.
No3 •
Penetrating Mother Tongues
Forming intimate conversations is already complex enough when speaking the same mother tongue or language, but how to go about it once that initial connection is not there? ‘Question: If a man and woman call lovemaking by different names, can they still?’ – writer Noor Naga has grabbed my throat many times with her prose, disarming questions, and the utter confusion she brings in her dark novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English (2022). Noor’s narrative builds up in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, where an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. Both remain nameless throughout most of the book. The woman is a ‘nostalgic daughter of immigrants’ and ‘returns’ to a country she’s never been to before, teaching English while barely speaking Arabic. The man, a former photographer of the revolution, is trying to grapple with his current existence in the largest city of Egypt – never having the opportunity to leave nor speak English fluently. They fall in love, with limited tools to communicate, and the novel enters a whirlwind of both characters searching for each other, for the selves they want to become through the other, and for the opinions both have on each other. Naga’s words confuse me as she moves through both characters’ biases towards each other, their inherited cultural perspectives, and their need for each other’s mouths as they grapple with their inability to connect through their mother tongues. The novel left me speechless as I considered the intimacy in the languages we speak, the sharing of languages and eventually coming to terms with the impossibility of full translation and understanding.
The project I Love It When Translation Can Be Found to Agree With Our Weird Desires (2020) by Ulufer Çelik and Alaa Abu Asad captures a similar sentiment in a grapple for emotional explorations through mother tongues. The two artist friends, through the sharing of words in their mother tongues – Turkish and Palestinian Arabic – engage in a unique activity to become closer. ‘It is a process that can last for good – as long as our friendship lives. We spend time together uttering words that are held in common and draw them, discovering whether they carry the same meaning, are slightly different, or are false friends.’ As I flip through the tiny publication that comes with the project, I feel like I am taking a walk through the conversations Ulufer and Alaa had about words that appear in both their mother tongues and dancing with the relations between such words. Every drawing is an attempt to bridge the two close friends’ understandings of the world while at the same time coming to terms with the intimacy of never fully reaching the languages the person you love carries with them.
In one of her podcast episodes for the series Where Should We Begin?, well-known relationship therapist Esther Perel encounters two lovers who speak English to each other but hold different mother tongues. Perel explains how for bicultural couples sometimes it can help to fight in your mother tongue, knowing full well that the other cannot understand. She shows us how it is common to ask ourselves in which languages we speak to ourselves or which languages we speak in our dreams; but how often do we ask ourselves in which languages we fight, or for that matter make love?
Reshaping the mythical themes of Beauty and the Beast with a seductive flare, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017) follows Elisa, a mute woman who finds herself falling in love with a humanoid aquatic creature.
No4 •
Non-verbal Heart-to-Heart
Although Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film The Shape of Water was received with some controversy due to accusations of plagiarism of a 1969 play called Let Me Hear You Whisper, the narrative, whether created in 1969 or 2017, throws me back and forth between trying to understand communication as intercourse and physical intimacy through non-verbal communication.
For me, The Shape of Water presents a complex exploration of these topics through the unlikely bond between Elisa, a cleaner who only communicates via sign language, and an amphibious creature held captive in the laboratory where she works. Set in Baltimore in 1962, Elisa’s solitary daily routine includes boiling eggs and masturbating in the bath while doing so. Interviews with Del Toro highlight how the link between Elisa’s dreams of water and her use of water to boil eggs and to masturbate is inherently connected to her curiosity for the creature.
When Elisa first encounters the creature, she offers him the eggs she boiled while masturbating, a gesture that transcends their initial silence. The eggs become a shared language over time, with ‘egg’ being the first word she teaches him in sign language. Throughout the film, their bond is forged not through spoken language but through small, meaningful acts that convey deep emotional resonance. The daily offering of eggs becomes a silent conversation, a way for Elisa to express her desire.
There is far more to the film than just this single narrative arc, but I often think back to this simple act of sharing eggs between the two characters. I think of how the egg delicately transforms from a symbol of Elisa’s most intimate moments as she touches herself in her bathtub into a language for connection and a profound ritual of lovemaking between her and the amphibious creature.
In an industry that often lacks truthful representations of sex, Swedish erotic film director Erika Lust focuses on portraying female pleasure and relatable characters in her work, creating the platform XConfessions where anonymous confessions are turned into porn movies.
No5 •
Crow-Sourced Erotics
Masturbation is never truly performed alone, is it? Either our imagination helps connect sexual memories with others through our current moment of desire, or we ask for external support from a range of formal and DIY pornography directors, actors and writers. Personally, I was introduced to pornography through Tumblr, a microblogging and social network platform that allows users to blog about their ideas and interests via text, photos, quotes, links, music and videos. Or, as we 1990s kids can attest to, Tumblr was secretly created for desire and pornography. You cannot fool me into believing that I was the only teen who enjoyed scrolling through aesthetically pleasing one-page blogs, stroking my mouse past bloggers’ diary contributions, written sexual fantasies, short two-second GIFs generated from more professional pornographic footage, and abstracted nudes. In 2018, Tumblr banned nudity, ‘mature subject matter’ and ‘visual depictions of sexually explicit acts’ from its platform, effectively banning my (and many others’) ability to go back to the days when I still felt like I could slide a finger into strangers’ sexual desires from afar.
Even though Tumblr has been attempting to reverse its bans on nudity in recent years, the adult stage of my life has handed me an alternative for my crowd-sourced pleasure: XConfessions.com. Created in 2014 by Swedish erotic film director Erika Lust and her community, XConfessions is a platform and network dedicated to producing short artistic pornographic films based on crowd-sourced stories. In a Tumblr-like manner, viewers can leave anonymous confessions on the project’s website. Not only does it recreate the hyper-personal, diary-like Tumblr peek into its users’ shared sexual desires through its open text-based blog but it also visualises them. Each month, Lust handpicks two written stories and commissions filmmakers to turn these into cinematic, erotic short films. In addition to this shared structure, I cannot help but feel even more stimulated by XConfessions’ decision to guarantee that my subscription payment ensures safe working conditions and fair pay for those who enable our desires.
No6 •
Formerly Known as Audio Desires
I’ve seen a rise in the use of voice messages on WhatsApp over recent years, and maybe you’ve noticed the same. Friends, partners and family are drifting away in the minutes of their message, which slowly starts to sound like a mini-podcast episode about their lives. Unlike WhatsApp text messages, voice messages still carry the nuances of tone, pitch and emotion, providing a more immediate connection between the sender and the recipient. Listening to someone’s voice evokes a sense of presence in a beloved’s life, bridging the physical distance with the warmth of a familiar voice.
Voice notes encapsu-late moments beyond the visual spectrum, painting vivid scenes with sound alone. Each audio message becomes a portal, moving me closer to distant locations. I’m transported as I listen to my friend’s voice, a head-on wind intertwining with their words as if we’re strolling through the city together. In my mind I see them, pressing record on their phone with determined fingers, their voice mirroring the rhythm of their steps. Meanwhile, I’m attempting to hold my phone steady between my ear and shoulder, trying to find my metro ticket to check in to the underground.
In the context of intimate relationships, voice messages can serve as a form of verbal affection, where partners exchange sweet nothings, words of encouragement or expressions of intimate longing. We can all likely attest to either having experienced more erotic audio interactions with a faraway lover, or perhaps one step further – through a pornographic audiobook vo-calised by voice actors.
In recent years, however, while AI based on large language models has been seeping into our everyday lives, platforms such as Bloom Stories (formerly known as Audio Desires) have introduced intimate conversations from an entirely different angle – aiming to bring the worlds of scripted erotic stories and messy human-to-human conversations even closer together. Through AI-generated chatbots Bloom Stories users can engage in immersive text and voice role-playing experiences, including intimate and erotic encounters. While trying to be understanding of the people who might benefit from these types of AI-generated interactions, the tech-sceptic inside of me is hesitant to install the Bloom app on my phone. But at the same time I wonder: How realistic (or perhaps outdated) is it to write an article in 2024 about language-based interactions and intimacy without mentioning at least one AI-generated project? Will AI change our relationship to the intimate conversations and interactions I described above? And if so, how?
Bloom Stories isn’t the first to create erotic AI chatbots – the Replika app already serves thousands of chatty users. However, while Replika’s chatbot develops based on user conversations, Bloom Stories offers pre-defined characters and backgrounds such as Noah the Architect and Mistress Mia. Recently, Replika faced backlash for scaling back the ‘sexual eagerness’ of their bots after the company received complaints of aggres-sion, which in turn caused panic and outrage among some users who relied on their bots for companionship.As I conclude my thoughts on the intimate exchange of words, I find myself increasingly aware of the personal technological dystopia we are drifting into – where some even marry their erotic chatbots. For me, this rather unsettling reality only deepens my appreciation for the profound and sensual complexities of human-to-human conversations. In these dialogues I will continuously seek to uncover the tension, intimacy and visceral impact of another person’s words, reaffirming the irreplaceable value of genuine human connection.