If your best friends — or parents, or siblings — were swingers, would they tell you? Would you even want to know? The answers are likely no, and no. By Dan Savage’s logic, that means some of the people closest to you could be out partying. And maybe it’s keeping their relationships together.

For Savage, consensual infidelity plays a big role in adding excitement to his marital life, and he’s not afraid to talk about it. What he doesn’t like discussing is money. Namely, that his husband Terry likes spending it. On shoes, and clothes, and records he may never listen to. It’s a major sticking point in their relationship.

But when you come out to your parents as a teenager in the late 70s, as Savage did, talking about sex with your peers is comparatively easy. It’s the other stuff that proves tougher. So that’s what he and I talked about for next week’s episode — money insecurities, being a gay activist with a conservative father, and maybe the hardest thing of all: raising a teenager.

The episode comes out July 16.

Dan Savage talked about the death of his mother onstage at This American Life in 2009: