Vice-president says administration wants to ‘build something truly new’ for global trade as he says talks with Modi have agreed trade negotiation reference points

Speaking in India, JD Vance has warned that the 21st century could be “a very dark time for all of humanity” depending on the decisions made over global trade and global partnerships at this juncture.

The US vice-president said “We are now officially one quarter into the 21st century, 25 years in, 75 years to go. And I really believe that the future of the 21st century is going to be determined by the strength of the US-India partnership.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

As temperatures rise and countries back off their decarbonization efforts, we must confront a reality central banks can’t correct

Inflation is, at base, a tax on consumption – and it hits the poor the hardest, since they consume more of their incomes and the rich consume less.

That’s one reason for concern over Donald Trump’s tariffs, which will disproportionately affect the poor. When the 90-day pause on the tariffs expires, it is reasonable to expect prices to rise, and by a lot.

Mark Blyth is a political economist and professor at Brown University. Nicolò Fraccaroli is a visiting scholar at Brown University

Issue dogged Francis throughout his time as head of Catholic church, with abuse survivors saying he failed to do enough

• Pope Francis: cardinals to meet in Rome to set date for funeral – live

In 2002, the Boston Globe published a series of articles exposing the scale of child sexual abuse in the local Catholic church. It shone a spotlight – the title of a later movie based on the investigation – on the church’s dark shameful secrets.

Eleven years later, Francis became pope. Wave after wave of abuse revelations continued to crash at the Vatican’s doors amid mounting anger and revulsion among the faithful and beyond. The issue threatened to derail Francis’s papacy and dominate his trips abroad. He was slow to grasp the scale and systemic nature of the issue and apparently reluctant to take firm action to deal with abusers and those who covered up abuse.

The announcement that members must watch all films nominated in a category in order to vote for the winner, is met with disbelief that it wasn’t already the case

A new rule introduced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to ensure voters have seen all the films in a category before they cast their ballots has provoked disquiet online, with many expressing surprise it wasn’t already a requirement.

A raft of measures were announced by the Oscars governing body on Monday, including the stipulation that “Academy members must now watch all nominated films in each category to be eligible to vote in the final round for the Oscars”.

As the IMF recommends that fit and sharp older workers delay retirement to offset ageing population trends, we’d like to hear what people make of such proposals

People from the baby boomer generation are being encouraged to stay in the workforce for longer and delay retirement as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said governments needed to make more use of fit, older workers to balance public finances amid fiscal pressures caused by an ageing global population.

The financial agency declared that “the 70s are the new 50s”, and released data findings suggesting that a person aged 70 in 2022 had the same cognitive function as the average 53-year-old in 2000. Physical health had also significantly improved, the IMF found, as 70-year-olds displayed the same fitness as 56-year-olds did 25 years ago based on grip strength and lung functionality tests.

Digital media minister Clara Chappaz says TikTok videos promoting extreme thinness ‘revolting and unacceptable’

The French government is seeking to take action against a TikTok group promoting extreme thinness among young women and girls.

France’s minister for digital media, Clara Chappaz, has reported #SkinnyTok to the country’s audiovisual and digital watchdog and the EU over concerns that the trend is body-shaming victims into anorexia and that algorithms are targeting the most vulnerable.

• Canaries missed out on playoff spot in Championship
• A 3-1 defeat at Millwall marks Thorup’s final match

Jack Wilshere will take charge of Norwich’s final two games of the season after the Canaries parted company with head coach Johannes Hoff Thorup.

Norwich have slipped to 14th in the Championship after winning only twice in 14 matches, with their 3-1 Easter Monday defeat at Millwall being their fourth loss in five games. Danish coach Thorup was appointed on a three-year deal last May and leaves alongside his assistant Glen Riddersholm.

One day, life as a finance consultant stopped making sense for Peter Hahn, so he took to organic winegrowing in the Loire instead

One Friday night 24 years ago, Peter Hahn was sitting in the back of a cab to Heathrow, sleepless after yet another 48-hour work bender.

“My computer’s on my lap,” the American-born organic winegrower from France recalls, the spring sun lighting up the deep pink walls of his study in his ancient manor house in the Loire Valley, his beloved vines outside, “and I’m doing a spreadsheet.

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, George Elek and Sanny Rudravajhala as Leeds and Burnley confirm their return to the Premier League over a busy Easter weekend in the EFL

Rate, review, share on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast and Stitcher, and join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and email.

On the podcast today; the panel briefly summarise Nottingham Forest’s huge win over Spurs that propelled them back into the Champions League qualification spots before moving on to the Championship and Leeds and Burnley being promoted back into the Premier League.

• Wolves forward is Amorim’s prime target at No 10
• Sale of Rashford would allow United to finance deal

Manchester United are pushing to sign the Wolves forward Matheus Cunha but may have to raise the money to trigger his £62.5m release clause by selling Marcus Rashford or other players.

Ruben Amorim has identified the 25-year-old as his prime target for the No 10 berth, one of the head coach’s two priority positions, along with a centre-forward.

Our cartoonist on the big German striker’s blunt opinion of his Hammers teammates and life in general

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• David’s new book, Chaos in the Box: buy it now

Company says it will create 12,000 jobs in manufacturing and R&D over next five years

• Business live – latest updates

The Swiss drugmaker Roche has said it will put $50bn (£37bn) into manufacturing in the US over the next five years, joining the queue of companies unveiling investments to try to head off potentially punitive Donald Trump tariffs.

Roche said on Tuesday the investment would create more than 12,000 jobs, including 6,500 in construction and 1,000 at new and expanded existing facilities in the US, including factories and distribution centres in Kentucky, New Jersey and California.

A new study of a sphere orbiting a red dwarf star 124 light years from Earth is raising hopes. Here’s why the evidence is inconclusive

• Nathalie Cabrol is director of the Carl Sagan Center at the Seti Institute

Astrobiology has entered an exciting new phase in recent decades. Since the 1990s, but accelerating in recent years, researchers have begun confirming the existence of exoplanets – that is, planets outside our own solar system – and studying their properties. We now know that planets are common, and a sizeable fraction orbit in the habitable zone of their parent star – suggesting they could have the conditions to sustain biological life.

Studies have also revealed entirely new classes of worlds we had no idea could exist. Hycean planets are unknown in our solar system, and are possibly some of the strangest planets discovered to date. They may be ocean-covered worlds with hydrogen-rich atmospheres and, as such, are promising candidates for the detection of biosignature gases – chemical products we associate with living things. But this is not the only possibility. Their discovery has expanded our concept of habitability and challenged our notions of what kinds of environments can sustain life – both as we know it and as we might not.

Nathalie Cabrol is director of the Carl Sagan Center at the Seti Institute, and author of The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist’s Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life

The double Oscar-winner responded to the president’s criticism of his New York Times op-ed last summer urging Joe Biden to step down for re-election, saying it was his ‘civic duty’

George Clooney has said he is unconcerned about the persistent verbal abuse levelled at him by Donald Trump, after the president labelled him a “fake movie actor” on Truth Social.

Speaking to Gayle King on CBS Mornings, Clooney said: “I don’t care. I’ve known Donald Trump for a long time. My job is not to please the president of the United States. My job is to try and tell the truth when I can and when I have the opportunity. I am well aware of the idea that people will not like that.”

Essay describes a surprise invitation in 1939 to a previously vocal critic for dinner with the Nazi leader, where ‘suddenly he seemed so human’

Larry David has written a long spoof essay in the New York Times in response to Bill Maher’s recent glowing account of his dinner with President Trump in the White House.

The essay, entitled My Dinner With Adolf, purports to be written by someone who was “a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship”. But he agrees to dine with the Führer because he “concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side”.

Patriotism is on the rise in Quebec, a region that has held two referendums over whether to leave Canada

• Canada elections: the key players and what is at stake

It was the middle of the night that the Bloc Québécois realized they had achieved the improbable. For weeks, the separatist party in Canada’s Francophone province had been campaigning hard to steal an electoral district in Montreal long held by the Liberals.

When the trickle of votes finally stopped on that September evening, the Bloc’s Louis-Philippe Sauvé had emerged victorious by a narrow margin of 200 votes.

Without a pathway to follow in their own country, players have had to look overseas to make a career. But no more

As “O Canada” reverberated around Vancouver’s BC Place last Wednesday, the emotion was clear on the faces of those on the pitch and in the crowd. There were hugs, there were tears, and there was an unbeatable cacophony of noise when Quinn slotted home the winning penalty, the first goal of the Northern Super League era. All 14,000 inside the stadium were aware of how momentous this occasion was, the moment professional domestic women’s football had finally arrived in Canada.

For many of the Canadian players involved for Vancouver Rise and Calgary Wild, it was the first time they will have heard only their anthem at the start of the match. “It was something I said to our team before the game,” the Rise midfielder Quinn reflected after the game. “That was pretty neat.”

It was the biggest open secret in TV history – but even though millions knew it was coming, that death still stunned beyond belief. Now, can it really achieve the impossible … and make us root for the killer?

This article contains spoilers for the The Last of Us season two. Please do not read unless you have seen the first two episodes.

When is a twist not a twist? This is a question many people will be asking after this week’s brutal episode of The Last of Us. Titled Through the Valley, it demonstrated more clearly than ever that the show has two types of viewer: those who primarily know it as a television series and were stunned beyond belief by the violent, unheralded death of Pedro Pascal’s Joel at the hands of Kaitlyn Dever’s vengeful Abby; and those who have played the video game on which it is based.

Sisters 360, Khan’s new play for children, tells the story of two hijab-wearing skateboarding sisters in Bradford. He hopes it will upend lazy ideas around Muslim girls – and bring new audiences to the theatre

Asif Khan first heard about Lena, Maysa and Ameya – the three Muslim skateboarding sisters from Hull who became social media stars in 2022 with their skills – from his mother-in-law. “She does this a lot. She’ll send me an article and say: ‘You could write a play about this,’” laughs Khan. But there was something about this particular story that piqued his interest. “They all wore the hijab, lived with their mum and had an Instagram account where they did their own raps and filmed skateboarding tricks … I immediately thought: Oh OK, this is a good premise for a play.”

So, he set about adapting it for the stage. He contacted the girls’ parents and had a “good, long hour’s chat”. “They were excited that someone was interested in doing a play about them,” says Khan, 44, who also works as an actor. The result of those chats is Sisters 360, a play about two Bradford-based hijab-wearing, skateboarding stepsisters, Fatima and Salima, aimed at audiences between the ages of eight and 12.

Demonstrations rarely lead to immediate policy change. But they are essential to building community and long-term resistance

Opinions about the protests this month keep oscillating between two extremes. Optimists point to the larger-than-expected numbers (larger than expected by many police departments for sure); they enthusiastically recall a famous social scientific finding according to which a non-violent mobilization of 3.5% of a population can bring down a regime. Pessimists, by contrast, see protests as largely performative. Both views are simplistic: it is true that protests almost never lead to immediate policy changes – yet they are crucial for building morale and long-term movement power.

Earlier this year, observers had rushed to declare resistance “cringe” and a form of pointless “hyperpolitics”, a “vibe shift” (most felt by rightwing pundits, coincidentally) supposedly gave Donald Trump a clear mandate, even if he had won the election only narrowly. Meanwhile, Democrats were flailing in the face of a rapid succession of outrageous executive orders – many of which were effectively memos to underlings, rather than laws. But taken at face value, they reinforced an impression of irresistible Trumpist power.

F Scott Fitzgerald’s Long Island novel has become a grand stage production at the London Coliseum

As the season finale draws near, we nominate 10 goal-kickers you can count on when the pressure cranks up

It is approaching that time of year. Big games hinging on increasingly slim margins, the pressure on goal-kickers intense. Check out Marcus Smith’s conversion attempt after Cadan Murley’s try for Harlequins against Sale on Saturday. The ball struck the right post, the crossbar, the left post and then the crossbar again in a classic “What happened next?” moment that captured perfectly the agonies of the tortured marksman’s art.

But the old maxim still holds true: goal-kickers don’t lose games, they win them. So if you could pick one individual from the professional era to kick a goal for your life, who would it be? Unfair, perhaps, to nudge aside the deadliest kickers of the amateur era such as Naas Botha, Don Clarke, Dusty Hare, Grant Fox, Ollie Campbell et al – imagine how good some of their stats would have been without heavy, muddy pitches, heavy leather balls and no tees – but for the purposes of this exercise let’s focus on the sharpest shooters of the past 30 years.

The US health and human services secretary dismissed autistic people in recent comments. It’s not hard to disprove his theories

When Tarik El-Abour was in middle school, his teacher asked him and his classmates a simple question. What do you want to be when you grow up? When it was time for him to answer, El-Abour gave a reply that thousands of children have said before. He wanted to be a baseball player. But his teacher shot back with something less than encouraging: “You’d better have a Plan B.” El-Abour, who was diagnosed with autism at the age of three, remained undeterred. Rather than listening to his pessimistic instructor, he distanced himself from her.

He thought that if he continued to talk to her, she might convince him he was unable to achieve his goal. In the end, he was right, and the teacher was wrong. El-Abour grew up to become a baseball player after receiving a degree in business administration from Bristol University in California. He first played professionally in the Empire League, where he was named rookie of the year in 2016 and was an All-Star in 2017. Then, in 2018, he signed a deal with the Kansas City Royals, a franchise just three years removed from winning the World Series. He played outfield in the minor leagues during the 2018 season, flourishing under the mentorship of JD Nichols of World Wide Baseball Prospects and Reggie Sanders of the Royals, becoming the first recorded autistic player in MLB history.

Dmitry Peskov says Russia ready to consider Zelenskyy’s proposal to halt attacks on infrastructure such as energy facilities as Ukraine says Russian attacks have killed six

British prime minister Keir Starmer praised the “resilience” of Ukrainians as he addressed personnel taking part in training being provided by British personnel and other allies to Ukrainian troops.

Addressing Ukrainians taking part in the programme to train troops, the prime minister thanked them for attending and said it is “incredible to see the resilience and inspiration that you have” as they head to the Russian frontline.

Prime minister says he thinks court’s decision has given a ‘much clearer position for those drawing up guidance’

Some MPs and peers are calling for President Trump not to be invited to address parliament when he visits the UK. In 2017, during Trump’s first presidency, the then Speaker, John Bercow, vetoed a proposal for Trump to address parliamentarians in Westminster Hall.

In an interview with Times Radio this morning, Stephen Morgan, an education minister, said Trump should be allowed to give a speech in parliament. Asked if Trump should be allowed to address MPs and peers, Morgan said:

I look forward to the US president addressing parliament in due course.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as dollar weakens and gold soars after latest Trump blast at Jerome Powell

• Reeves to make case for free global trade at Washington IMF talks

With a week to go, April is turning into the worst month for the US stock market since the Great Depression.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is headed for its worst April performance since 1932, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

People traumatised by conflict have queued outside the Saint Vincent de Paul neuropsychiatric hospital in Goma each day since free scheme launched

On a sunny morning in the city of Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where fighting between the M23 rebel group and the Congolese army raged earlier this year, men and women rushed towards a line of chairs outside a medical facility.

Since 24 March, the Saint Vincent de Paul neuropsychiatric hospital, a medical facility for people with mental health issues, has been offering free consultations on a first-come first-served basis for people affected by the fighting. Dozens have lined up to be seen each day.

Beer crawls are out and bakery crawls are in, with people arranging whole days, weekends or even holidays around the search for the perfect loaf or croissant

Just one day into a 225-mile hike across the width of Scotland last August, Dan Warren was feeling the burn, his old trail shoes wearing painfully thin. But neither sore feet nor swarms of midges would stop the librarian and his scientist wife, Dee Johnson, from reaching their goal: the promise of pastries at the Bakehouse in the west coast fishing town of Mallaig, a 14-day trek plus two ferry hops away from their home near Montrose.

The pair are so-called “bakery pilgrims”, travelling significant distances in the pursuit of a fine loaf or bun. “Some of the time we were pushing through overgrown tracks, and there were lots of bogs,” Warren says of their journey. But their eventual reward was a soft brioche bun, filled with crème pâtissière and finished with crumble and berries.

Visitors to Buckingham Palace will be able to see works by official tour artists who accompanied visits to 96 countries

Forty years ago the then Prince of Wales invited, at his own expense, the artist John Ward to join an official visit to Italy as an official tour artist, with the brief to draw or paint whatever inspired him.

Since then, 42 artists to have undertaken this role, collectively visiting 95 countries during 69 tours, with their work now going on display at Buckingham Palace.

Geopolitical tensions are heating up on Canada’s borders, but the biggest threat may be from wildly fluctuating temperatures transforming the tundra and ocean

In early February, during the depths of winter, Twin Otter aircraft belonging to the Canadian military flew over the vast expanse of the western Arctic looking for sea ice. Below, sheets of white extended beyond the horizon.

But the pilots, who were searching for a suitable site to land a 34-tonne (76,000lb) Hercules transport plane a month later, needed ice that was 1.5-metres (5ft) thick.

The draft makes for brilliant television and maintains interest in the league even during the offseason. But it’s worth considering other options

There is something funky about the draft being one of the NFL’s marquee events. At root, it’s a man stepping to the podium, being booed and reading names. The NFL still dominates Sundays … and Mondays … and Thursdays … and playoff Saturdays during the season; the draft allows the league to gobble up the offseason months too. But as interest continues to grow, there has been relatively little pushback from those who make the draft work: the prospects, particularly those slated to go at the top of the first round.

Think about it. Your reward for being one of the best college athletes in the country is to wind up on one of the worst rosters in the NFL, typically one beset by mismanagement at the top, iffy coaching or a third-rate roster. Quarterbacks can win with teams that draft them No 1 overall – Peyton Manning and Troy Aikman are a couple of examples – but more often than not, the top quarterbacks end up in a spot where they’re likely to fail. There is a reason that Sam Darnold and Baker Mayfield found success after they were let go by the teams that selected them in the top three. Environment is king – having no say over where they start their career puts the best prospects at the whims of blundering franchises. Is there a system that can maintain the interest and parity the league craves, while handing some agency to players over their careers – or at least not reward floundering franchises?

Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt upends audience expectations in a feature debut that’s hyper-aware of the origin story’s sexual and patriarchal imagery

Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt makes her feature debut with an ingenious revisionist body-horror version of Cinderella, lavishly costumed and designed. There are twists in the style of David Cronenberg and Walerian Borowczyk, with (maybe inevitably) echoes of Carrie and Alien. In one scene, there could even be a nod to Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Cynical widow Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) remarries a well-heeled widower somewhere in 18th-century central Europe; he then makes her a widow for the second time by fatally gorging on cake at the wedding breakfast. As a result, Rebekka is left financially embarrassed with her plain daughter Elvira (Lea Myren), Elvira’s kid sister Alma (Flo Fagerli) and a new stepdaughter Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), a beautiful young woman who haughtily resents the ugly Elvira. Instead of paying for a funeral for her late husband, Rebekka lets his body rot somewhere in the house while spending money on bizarre cosmetic treatments for Elvira – brutal nose- and eyelash-remodelling – in the hope that Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) will choose her for his bride at his forthcoming ball. But Elvira rashly swallows a tapeworm to allow her to indulge a passion for cakes (Ozempic not being available in those days) and calamity approaches.

In this blazingly honest collection, the Canadian poet catalogues humanity’s destructive impact on the natural world

It is human nature to prefer our landscapes neatly framed – walls and wooden fences create the illusion that the great outdoors can be controlled and contained. Yet Karen Solie’s wildly unpredictable collection Wellwater flips the script. In this blazingly honest catalogue of human-made hazard and harm, we celebrate instead the contemporary landscapes refusing to be tamed.

Solie, who teaches at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in western Canada, where vast prairies supply much of the world’s pulse crops. This fertile expanse in Wellwater, however, seems tired of endless service. The poem Red Spring witnesses how “weeds jump up unbidden, each year a little smarter”. They are trying, almost courageously, to outwit what Solie condemns as “zombie technology”, whose genetically modified “terminator seeds” sprout terrifying plants that are “more dead than alive”.

Of 135 cardinals eligible to take part in choosing successor, late pontiff appointed about 110 including conservatives

• Who will be the next pope? Some potential candidates to succeed Francis
• Latest updates after death of Pope Francis

The death of Pope Francis will throw into sharp relief the internecine power struggle that has been a hallmark of his papacy.

In the coming days, a ferocious battle for the future of the church will be played out with the highest of stakes within the sanctity of the Sistine Chapel.

After the death of Pope Francis, experts weigh in on how much the real-life papal election will mirror the hit Oscar-winning movie

• Latest updates after death of Pope Francis

I confess: my first thought this morning, when I heard the news that Pope Francis died at the age of 88, was of Conclave. As in both the lowercase, technical meaning – the sequestration of cardinals to elect a new pope with a two-thirds majority – and the capital-C film of the same name from last year, which allowed viewers to vicariously participate in a process long shrouded in secrecy and reverence. (And premiering during the US vote, to experience election thrills without grim disappointment.)

The film, directed by Edward Berger, luxuriated in process both sacred and profane – the orderly processions and cafeteria run-ins, the ceremonial burning of paper votes and security screenings, the white smoke and the complimentary toiletries bags. The hallowed halls of the Vatican and the gossip that flits among them, especially as different factions compete to see their vision cemented by the most powerful religious leader in the world. As a deft and highly entertaining thriller on the furtive process of electing a new pope, well, you can expect people to consider Conclave as close to documentary as laypeople can get to the action. But how accurate is it?

The coverage of Manchester United’s win over Lyon last week was just the latest sign that fandom is consuming everything

Impartiality fan here – for my sins! – but you have to say Robbie Savage and Rio Ferdinand during the closing minutes of Manchester United v Lyon on Thursday night were absolute class. It all starts in the 118th minute, with United 6-5 down on aggregate, and the TNT Sports camera lingering on the face of a crying boy in the crowd. “Let’s hope we can put a smile on that young man’s face by the time we finish,” the commentator Darren Fletcher says.

And it’s worth unpacking those 17 words, because contained within them are at least three layers of assumption. Foremost among which is the assumption that it would be a good thing, all round, if United won. The child is crying. Is there any cause more catholic or universal, any image more reliably guaranteed to tug at the tear ducts, than a crying child? The coefficient can wait for now.

Once you learn how straightforward it is to make these flatbreads, they’ll be in your culinary arsenal for ever – perfect for lunch topped with smoked salmon and cream cheese

Yoghurt flatbreads make a weekly appearance in our kitchen, because they are so effortless and versatile. If I have forgotten to pick up a loaf, I will often panic-make them for breakfast or packed lunches. While they are great on the side of stews, soups and curries (or on the barbecue, if that’s the way the weather is going), I’ve made them the hero in this elegant but easy brunch/lunch-style setup. You can make one flatbread per person (as instructed), or you could make multiple mini ones that are almost like little herby pancakes. The dill-spiked cream cheese, however, is a must with smoked salmon.

Tuvalu is celebrating its first ATM, but here’s a warning from the UK, where human contact has been lost to the self-service age

Life is about to change on the remote island nation of Tuvalu. And not, in my opinion, for the better. To great fanfare, Tuvalu – an entirely cash-based society – has unveiled its first ever ATM, marking its move towards financial modernisation. But while the 10,000 people living in that country may be celebrating no longer having to queue at the bank, I fear their happiness will be short-lived. It’s the start of the slow erosion of human contact that heralds the dehumanisation of yet another society.

The world’s first ATM was introduced in Britain in 1967, but for me the tyranny of machines that promise convenience but erode human contact really began about 20 years ago, in the form of self-checkouts in our local Sainsbury’s. Having watched the Terminator movie franchise during my formative years, I railed prophetically against them, aware that it was just a small slippery slope from “unexpected item in the bagging area” to the extinction of the human race. I wrote about my fear of these machines with their Dalek-like commands and even started a short-lived and extremely unpopular Facebook campaign against them. But like a modern-day Cassandra, I was doomed to be ignored.

Hilary Freeman is a journalist and author

During a brief separation, I had my first sexual experiences with cis and trans women. They were ecstatic

I’m a thirtysomething woman who has been with the same man since I was 21. I’ve always known I was queer but was monogamous with him until, during a brief separation, I had my first intimate experiences with cis and trans women. They were ecstatic and affirming in the parts of me that they unlocked, as well as the agency I felt in seeking to fulfil desires I had long consigned to fantasy. I can’t imagine going through life never again experiencing the range of emotion I did in those moments.

My partner and I are now back together and in some ways stronger than ever as a couple – more communicative and committed to the relationship. I’ve told him everything written here and more, including my desire for an open relationship. He has said he needs time: he can imagine one day being OK with us exploring our sexuality together with a third person, but at present he does not want to have sex with anyone else and can’t conceive of what it would be like to know or suspect that I am doing so.

Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a US-based psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.

If you would like advice from Pamela on sexual matters, send us a brief description of your concerns to private.lives@theguardian.com (please don’t send attachments). Each week, Pamela chooses one problem to answer, which will be published online. She regrets that she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.