Before you start
These cards are for ordinary relationship conflict. They are not a tool for coercive control, intimidation, threats, stalking, sexual pressure or violence. If someone is using them to press you, put them down.
A settled nervous system is not proof that someone is right. A strong emotional response is not proof that someone is wrong. Naming a cycle does not make responsibility equal.
Pass is a whole answer. So is “I cannot find it in my body”, and so is “there was not one this week”. Nobody has to earn their way out of a card.
No one should be calmed, therapised or culturally pressured into staying in a conversation they do not feel safe in.
How a round works
One card per person per round. Answer in the first person, about yourself. The other person reflects back what they heard before they answer anything of their own. Then swap.
A card arrives and neither of you picked it. Good for a night when choosing feels loaded.
Three cards land face up. You read all three and answer one. Curiosity from them, the choice stays with you.
Not everyone thinks out loud. Write the answer instead, or take the card away and bring it back tomorrow.
Optional. Two minutes where the other person does not speak. Useful when one of you is quicker with words.
What is in play
Turn off anything you do not want tonight. Nothing is in play unless you put it there. The wanting starts switched off.
The deck
Carried forward
Kept for the next session
Ask me again
The overlap
For the wanting, and only if you both want to. You each mark the list privately, one at a time on the same screen. When you are both done it shows only what you both said yes to, and how many you both said maybe to. It never shows what one of you wanted on your own.
A maybe is not a yes. Nothing here is a contract, everything can change on the night, and this is not a document to hold up in an argument. If you want a conversation to go a certain way, this is the wrong tool for it.
Where this comes from
An original Queer Love Lounge resource. It integrates Lauren Lynch’s training in the Gottman Method and Esther Perel’s relational framework; the attention Orna Guralnik brings to unconscious repetition, difference and the social world inside intimate relationships; Deb Dana’s language for state, protection and settling together; and Aboriginal social and emotional wellbeing principles (Gee, Dudgeon, Schultz, Hart & Kelly, 2014; Gayaa Dhuwi, 2025). The wanting draws on Karen Doherty, psychosexual therapist, on intimacy as far wider than sex, on the mismatch where one partner needs closeness before they want sex and the other needs sex before they feel close, on aiming for good enough rather than extraordinary, and on sensory and neurodivergent experience inside desire; Karen Gurney on sexual currency and on desire sitting between people rather than inside one of them; Rosemary Basson on desire that follows rather than leads; Peggy Kleinplatz on making sex worth wanting; and Barker and Hancock on consent as ongoing rather than settled once.
Polyvagal language is used here as a compassionate organising map, not a diagnosis or a literal test of how a nerve is working. Nothing on these cards is a measurement of anybody.
Where those sources assume two people and a closed door, this deck does not. The thinking has been kept and the defaults rebuilt: for relationships beyond one partner, for people who are out in some rooms and not others, for bodies that do not all work the same way, and for couples who do not live in the same house.
The seventh stripe. Gilbert Baker’s original 1978 flag had eight stripes, and hot pink sat at the top of it. Its meaning was sex. The six stripe flag most of us grew up with does not have it. This deck puts that stripe back, and gives it a suit.