Hi! I'm Jess Benge,

I'm a therapist and a writer, and most days I can't fully separate the two.

I'm a Chicago-based Marriage and Family Therapist with two master's degrees, Level 2 trained in Internal Family Systems, and certified in Brainspotting. For over a decade, I've sat across from people while they tell me their stories — marriages, desire, the ways they've learned to survive closeness, and what it's cost them.

My clinical focus is relationships: infidelity and breaks in trust, mismatched desire, out-of-control sexual behavior, sexual dysfunction, modern dating, and the kind of complex trauma that shows up in the body long before it shows up in language.

I call myself a realistic romantic — fascinated by love, desire, and all the complicated ways we try to find and keep both. I believe in passion without pretending relationships are easy. Here, I write about modern dating, sex, desire, and the messy relationship problems most of us don't know how to talk about out loud.

This website is where that writing lives.

Therapy asks me to stay present with your story for 53 minutes. Writing lets me follow a thought all the way to the end of itself — without a treatment goal or a value system attached to where it lands. I don't write to have answers. I write because paying close attention to being human, mine and yours, is the work I can't stop doing, on the page or off it.