Sex, Love & Goop and It Ends With Us: What These Stories Teach Us About Intimacy, Cycles, and Healing

Exploring how two very different stories reveal the spectrum of love, pleasure, and breaking harmful

How many of us can confidently say, “I had a wonderful sexual introduction”?

Not many. And that’s the point.

I was talking with a friend recently, and we both realized how much of women’s work — whether it’s body healing, leadership, creativity, or even career choices — is tied back to romantic relationships. The way we were loved. The way we weren’t loved. The way we learned to give love at our own expense.

So much of our healing begins here, in the stories we carry about intimacy. Which is why Sex, Love & Goop and It Ends With Us feel like essential mirrors right now. On the surface, they couldn’t be more different — one is a playful exploration of pleasure, the other a sobering look at abuse and generational cycles. But when we place them side by side, they reveal the same truth: intimacy is the place where we can either repeat old wounds or begin to rewrite the story.

Why Sex, Love & Goop Matters

Watching Sex, Love & Goop is like pulling up a chair to the world’s most vulnerable couples therapy session — minus the tissues they forgot to hand out. It’s messy. It’s awkward. It’s the kind of show where you catch yourself cringing and then realize, oh, that’s me too. Real couples working with intimacy coaches to reconnect to sexuality, pleasure, communication, and sacred connection.

The show is not glamorized or neatly packaged. It is awkward. It is squirm-worthy. It is heart-in-your-throat real. Couples laugh nervously. They cry when they finally touch what they’ve been longing for in their bodies or their relationships. The moments are full of hesitation, and they are full of breakthroughs.

What moved me most was not the techniques themselves — though breathwork, touch-based communication, and tantric presence are powerful practices I also integrate into my own work with women. What moved me was the courage.

The courage to say yes to the question, What are you hungry for? The courage to feel what is truly alive in the body. The courage to receive, and to let themselves be received in turn.

Sex, Love & Goop is about remembering the difference between pleasure and pain. It’s about showing up in our bodies and our relationships in ways that allow us to feel more alive.

The Pleasure of Being Fully Alive

When it comes to women and pleasure, our culture has left deep wounds of disconnection. We’ve been taught — directly and indirectly — that pleasure is indulgent, selfish, or simply not for us.

Pleasure has been covered in layers of shame rather than embraced as the medicine it is.

Sex, Love & Goop shows what happens when women are given permission to reclaim pleasure as their birthright. It reminds us that pleasure is not manufactured or numbed; it already lives in our bodies. To experience it requires intention, vulnerability, and honesty. It requires removing layers of conditioning that have told us otherwise.

Pleasure, when embraced, is a form of healing. A reclamation. A remembering.

The Brutal Honesty of It Ends With Us

If Sex, Love & Goop is a laboratory of intimacy, It Ends With Us is a confrontation with love’s darker shadow.

The film tells the story of Lily Bloom, who falls for a seemingly perfect man whose passion soon unravels into cycles of abuse. It’s a chilling reminder of how charm and violence can coexist, and how easily women can be trapped in relationships that erode their safety.

This story is not rare — and that’s what makes it so devastating. It mirrors the experience of countless women who are forced to wrestle with impossible questions:

• Why do women stay in abusive relationships?

• How do generational wounds pass silently from mother to daughter, father to son?

• What does it truly take to say, Enough?

The power of It Ends With Us lies in its title. It is a declaration. A line in the sand. A woman’s choice to end the cycle — not just for herself, but for her children and the generations to come.

It is not only a love story. It is a survival story.

A Red Thread Between the Two

So why hold these two works in the same conversation? Because together, they reveal the spectrum of women’s lived experience in love and intimacy.

On one end: the longing for deeper connection, authentic communication, and permission to explore pleasure without shame.On the other: the urgent need to break the cycles of harm, silence, and abuse that too often define relationships.

Both are mirrors. Both are necessary.

They remind us that:

• Love without safety cannot heal.

• Pleasure without respect cannot last.

• Cycles can be broken — but only when we choose sovereignty over silence.

  
  

My Invitation to You

In my own work — whether womb healing, natural gynecology, or ritual — I witness this truth again and again: each body carries memory. Each womb carries both love and wounds. And every woman holds the power to choose differently.

So here is my invitation:

• Watch Sex, Love & Goop with curiosity, not just as entertainment but as inspiration. Ask yourself: What intimacy do I long for? What does my body hunger for?

• Watch It Ends With Us as more than a film. See it as a reminder of where cycles of harm might still live in your lineage — and where you have the power to end them.

Together, these works are not just entertainment. They are a map. One guides us toward deeper pleasure and joy. The other toward liberation from cycles of harm. Both whisper the same mantra:

Our love stories must be rewritten from a place of sovereignty, safety, and embodied joy.

Nina Wolf