Best Lifestyle & Open Relationship Podcasts: Top 10 Shows (2026)

Where Should We Begin? invites you into one-time therapy sessions between the world's leading couples therapist, Esther Perel, and real anonymous couples. You hear desire, jealousy, resentment, and transformation in real time — including couples exploring non-traditional relationship structures, navigating infidelity, and reimagining what intimacy means to them. Esther Perel's ability to illuminate the erotic imagination within a relationship makes this unmissable for anyone exploring relationship boundaries.

Based on the beloved 'Dear Sugar' advice column, Dear Sugars tackles listener questions about love, sexuality, desire, and the full complexity of human relationships — including non-traditional ones. Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond bring literary beauty and radical empathy to questions about open relationships, sexual identity, longing, and what it means to build an honest life with another person. No other advice podcast handles intimate topics with this level of honesty and grace.

Death, Sex & Money is a show about the subjects we think about constantly but rarely discuss honestly — and sex, desire, and relationship structure are central to every season. Host Anna Sale has remarkably intimate conversations with both celebrities and ordinary people about the messy reality of their intimate lives: open marriages, desires kept secret, relationships transformed by honesty, and the full spectrum of human sexuality. One of the most emotionally honest podcasts in any genre.

Modern Love adapts the beloved New York Times essay series — in which real people write about love, loss, desire, and connection — into a podcast with celebrity readings. The essays explore intimacy in all its forms: open relationships, unconventional desire, the reinvention of long partnerships, and the profound vulnerability of honest communication. Many episodes directly address non-traditional relationship structures with the same literary quality that makes the entire series remarkable.

Terrible, Thanks for Asking is Nora McInerney's raw, honest, and often funny podcast about the parts of life we don't share politely — including the complicated terrain of desire, sexuality, and the mess of trying to build honest intimate lives. Guests speak with extraordinary candor about experiences that include non-traditional relationships, sexuality after loss, and the unexpected forms that intimacy takes across a life. It creates space for the conversations most of us are afraid to have.

Hidden Brain uses behavioral science and psychology to explore the unconscious forces driving human desire and relationship behavior. Episodes on the psychology of attraction, the science of jealousy and possessiveness, why relationships evolve over time, and how evolutionary biology shapes our most intimate impulses are directly relevant to anyone navigating non-traditional relationship structures. Understanding the science of why we feel what we feel makes all relationships clearer.

On Being regularly features thinkers — including Esther Perel — who explore desire and intimacy as dimensions of the fully lived human life. These conversations examine what it means to be truly seen by another person, how honest communication transforms relationships, and how desire is connected to aliveness itself. For listeners who want to explore the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of open and honest relating, On Being offers depth unavailable elsewhere.

The Moth's live storytelling events regularly feature stories about love, desire, sexuality, and the most intimate moments of people's lives — including stories about unconventional relationships and non-traditional paths to intimacy. Told without notes in front of a live audience, these stories are raw, funny, heartbreaking, and intensely human. The stories about the full spectrum of human desire and intimate experience appear throughout the vast catalog.

This American Life has produced some of the most groundbreaking journalism and storytelling about human sexuality and relationship structures ever recorded in audio. From episodes about open marriages and polyamory to investigations into how desire and identity intersect with culture, This American Life treats intimate topics with the seriousness, humor, and profound humanity that defines all of its best work. The archive is an extraordinary resource.

Making Sense has dedicated substantial episodes to the neuroscience and philosophy of sexuality, desire, and human mating — conversations with leading researchers about what attraction is at a neurological level, how desire works in the brain, and what evolutionary psychology reveals about our most intimate impulses. For listeners who want to understand the biology and philosophy of human sexuality at the deepest possible level, including what that understanding means for non-traditional relationship structures.