Kelly is a multi-certified sex educator and relationship coach helping people figure out how to create dating and sex lives that actually feel good—more open, more optimistic, and more pleasurable.
With her warm, emotionally intelligent approach to coaching and facilitation, Kelly creates candid, playful spaces for processing and healing challenges around dating, sexuality, identity, body image, and relationships. She’s particularly enthusiastic about helping softhearted millennial women get re-energized around the dating experience and find joy in the process of connecting with others. She believes relationships should be easy—and that, with room for self-reflection and the right toolkit, they can be.
As a mixed Asian American woman with firsthand experience with the harmful ramifications of growing up in a sex-negative conservative culture, Kelly is also deeply committed to providing kids with the information and knowledge they need to develop a healthy, agentive, and liberated relationship to sexuality in adulthood. She regularly collaborates with schools, nonprofits, and other youth organizations to create spaces for young people to talk about sex, dating, and identity in an open, pleasure-positive educational environment. She also seeks to support parents in leaning into their role as their children’s first sex educators, breaking the cycle of sexual shame and misinformation, and creating a healthier sexual culture for our kids to grow up in.
An educator at heart, Kelly has a knack for distilling complicated psychological concepts, relationship research, and justice frameworks into digestible takeaways the average person can relate to and integrate into their lives. With professional training in evidence-based sexual education, relational psychoeducation, chronic anxiety treatment, and decolonized and identity-conscious care, Kelly’s work blends research-based therapeutic methodologies with bias-aware, anti-oppressive perspective. (This isn’t an easy line to toe, and she’s constantly engaged in further self-education and refining her practice to best serve her clients and the collective good.)
Kelly received her sex educator certifications from Everyone Deserves Sex Ed and the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, and she is a member of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists and the Sexual Health Alliance. She’s also a certified Bringing Baby Home educator through The Gottman Institute, one of the leading couples therapy and relationship research institutes in the world, where she trained in helping couples keep their relationships healthy as they transition into parenthood.
As a long-time journalist, Kelly has also written hundreds of research-based articles about sex, relationships, identity, power, and wellness. She has a journalism degree from Northwestern University with a concentration in sociology and gender studies, and she previously worked as an editor at The Week, where she helped run a 24-hour breaking newsroom with an eye toward social politics and culture. Her research and reporting have debunked myths about the “elusive” female orgasm (nope, women’s orgasms are not a mystery and not naturally more difficult to achieve than men’s orgasms), explored the complicated history of American period care, uncovered the surprising psychology of ex sex, and much more.
She currently serves as the sex and relationships editor at mindbodygreen, where she leads a team of therapists, psychologists, sexuality experts, and writers in facilitating education on sexual health and healthy relationships to millions of monthly readers.
At core, Kelly is a creature of comfort, a seeker of sensual pleasures, and an unyielding goody-goody hell-bent on creating a kinder, more equitable world. She loves long Saturdays spent snuggled up with her bullet journal, boozy board game nights, and staying up to date on everyone's crushes. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her partner of five years, two cats, and 32 plant babies.
✨ four pillars of this work ✨
pleasure
In the words of adrienne maree brown, pleasure is a guide. Pleasure is the way. Pleasure tells us what we need and what we don’t. Pleasure is why we work, why we play, why we fight, and why we love. This work centers pleasure as a pursuit worth chasing.
liberation
Our personal challenges don’t exist in a vacuum. Context matters. Larger systemic forces affect our ability to love and fuck freely. They affect how we see ourselves, how we value our dating lives and our pleasure, and how others see and value us. This work is inherently and explicitly liberatory: we’re ditching the scripts, the shame, the stories that are not our own, and we’re exploring what our relationships can look like when we’re free.
kindness
Relationships—the kind that last forever and the kind that last the night—cannot function without kindness at their core: a kindness to others and a kindness to self. This work is founded on the belief in the power and possibilities of gratuitous, unbridled kindness, given generously, without qualifications or expectations.
dialogue
Talking about it helps. Sharing collective knowledge and wisdom helps. Education and awareness help. Community helps. Let’s find love, together.
how did you get into this work?
I haven’t always had the most positive relationship to my sexuality.
Growing up in a very religious household in an Asian immigrant community, I was expected to save sex for marriage and, even in marriage, to never explore it beyond the purposes of procreation.
And to be honest? I embraced the mantle of “good Catholic school girl” wholeheartedly. I spent much of my adolescence practicing chastity with pride and encouraging others to do so as well. As an active member of my church, I even got involved with teaching abstinence classes to middle school students myself for several years. (Big yikes!)
And yet, I’d always had some inkling of fascination around sex.
I’d started masturbating regularly by at least the fourth grade, mostly after getting turned on reading smut scenes in fanfiction. As a preteen and teenager, I constantly found myself launching conversations about dating and intimacy with my friends, curiously gobbling up their tales of stolen touches and philosophizing about where love and lust intersect. I also became a serial monogamist as soon as I was old enough to date, bouncing from long-term relationship to long-term relationship without much gap in between.
By my junior year of high school, I was getting into all the usual shenanigans many young people find themselves in, making out behind the bleachers and getting handsy in my parents’ basement. In college, I continued teaching Sunday school classes—all the while diving deep into a warm, blossoming, all-bases-covered sex life with my college sweetheart.
People ask me all the time whether I dealt with guilt or shame in those earliest years exploring my sexuality.
The truth is, I didn’t. Or if I did, I can hardly remember it.
Sexuality brought me joy, I found. It brought me pleasure. It brought me closeness and connection and intimacy with my partners, and my body, and myself. I could not find the bad, no matter how I searched and searched for it. I could not find the wrong in my pleasure.
There was no deep thought process or painstaking decision-making process before I decided I wanted to have P-in-V sex for the first time. I just sort of… knew. I knew I wanted it to happen. I knew it was a yes, and I never questioned it. I trusted my body’s instincts, my intuitive sense of what’s good for me.
It’s taken me a long time to articulate what allowed me to explore my sexuality so freely, despite the culture I grew up in loudly telling me to do anything but. Part of it, surely, was education: diving deep into feminist studies and sexuality research in university, learning from incredible sex educators on the internet, attending hands-on sex workshops in New York throughout my twenties, and reading the works of brilliant activists like Audre Lorde and adrienne maree brown and many others. This is why education is so core to the work I do today. I believe education, coupled with open-hearted dialogue, can change lives. It certainly changed mine.
Part of it, too, came from within.
Embodied intuition describes the feeling of knowing or understanding something immediately, instinctively, based on what our body and soul communicate to us. It’s our own internal compass that tells us what’s good for us and what isn’t.
On an intuitive level, I trusted what my body told me it needed. I tapped into my felt sense of what nourished me. I could feel the good pouring out of my sexuality—so I leaned into it.
That’s why I feel called to help others lean into their embodied intuition. This is a central part of the work I do with the people I support, whether that means building awareness of one’s bodily sensations to feel more deeply into one’s sexuality or using intuitive decision-making to move through the dating process with more ease and joy.
As brown teaches, pleasure is a guide.
And I want to help you tap into it.