Vanessa Marin (sex therapist)

Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to our own chair expert son, expert on Daxmarnal Shepherd. I'm joined by Monica Lilybabman. Hi. Hi.

This is a saucy episode because we get to talk about sex baby. Let's talk about you and me. I love this episode. Me too.

It was really, really fun. Vanessa Marin is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in sex therapy. She's also a best-selling author. She has a book coming out on January 30th.

She wrote that with her husband, Xander Marin, and they also have a podcast that is already out called pillow talks, which is hosted by Vanessa and her husband, Xander. I feel like people know about them. Uh huh. They're out and about.

They're out and about. They have a social media presence. Yes, they do. But I do think not unlike her book, if you listen to this and you have been in a relationship, you're going to relate, I think we all will relate to this.

I mean, just like couples therapy orna, where every single couple is dealing with some sort of sex issue, she sort of normalizes that and then helps people get through it. I found it very fascinating. Yeah. And very, very informative.

I think it'll be very encouraging for people. I think a lot of people have thrown in the towel or defeated by it. And I think it's a very pragmatic, simple approach to getting back on track. Back on that horse.

Please enjoy Vanessa Marin. He's an archer. I'm back. Nice to meet you.

Welcome. Thank you. Oh, gats. I'm going to meet you.

Happy new year. Where in California do you live? I live in Santa Barbara. Oh, you do.

I'm from there, but I lived here in Silver Lake for a long time before I moved back last year. How long were you away from Santa Barbara? 20 years. Oh, 20 years.

Yeah, I grew up there and then I was like, I gotta get out of here. And then eventually realized what have I done moving away from the best place in the world. I lived there from 95 to 96 on Bath Street. Oh, maybe two blocks off the ocean in an enormous yellow building apartment.

It looked like a McDonald's. Yeah, that's an interesting spot. What school did you go to? I went to Santa Barbara High School and you didn't want to go to UCSB.

I didn't. I had very romantic ideas of going to school on the East Coast. Of course. Never happened.

I actually did kind of go to school on the East Coast. Well, we can count it. It's technically it's on the East Coast of the South. Oh, sure.

But wait, where did you forgive me? I went to Brown. So I got to have my experience and then was like, I'm not made for this weather. I have to presume my children will want to go to the East.

It's just really funny. Wherever you grew up, you want to go to the opposite. I was in Detroit and I was like, I gotta get over to California. But Santa Barbara is very glamorous.

Yeah, for college. Snow, older buildings and things. Yeah. Santa Barbara is a it's an interesting vibe, though.

I don't know that everyone gets it. Like, if you just go there on vacation, it's glorious. It couldn't be prettier. But when I was living there, I was like, there's a whole strata of kids whose parents are rich and they've been neglected and they're all methadics and there's just a real weird underbelly there.

Right? There is. You don't expect it coming from Santa Barbara. There's so much wealth, but it's low key wealth.

It can mess with you in some interesting ways. So that's why I wanted to get out of it for a while. It's like, I don't want to have my whole life in this place. I need to get out, have some other experiences.

Yeah, and what brought your parents to Santa Barbara? Are they like second generations? Yeah, are you one of the methadics? Are you an methadics?

Yeah. We're going to go in a totally different direction with this scenario. It's great to be a sex life matter. Just talk to the users.

My mom's mom came up from Mexico. They had some family who had already immigrated and came there. My parents still live in the house that my mom grew up in. No way.

How old is that house? It was made in the 1920s. Oh, OK. So you know, Santa Barbara, it's up in the Riviera, like beautiful up in the hills.

But back in the day, apparently, that was a very undesirable neighborhood because it was too far from the beach. Sure. So it was primarily Mexican community because houses are really cheap up there. Yeah.

Is it by the mission that's up there? Yeah. Yeah. It brings back a lot of good memories.

And you got to be from Brown in sexual health and sociology. What was it? Sexual sexuality. Human sexuality.

Human sexuality. And in sociology, I got dual bachelors. OK, now, did you feel brave by declaring this? Because let's just, I want to own my stuff.

I'm a fucking pervert. If I could have majored in sex at college, obviously I could have. If I would have known I could have. But then maybe some voice would have been like, you don't need to explore this more.

You need to pull back. Well, you would have been disappointed because it's not like how to have sex. No. No.

No. That wasn't fun. But no. But did you feel like you were declaring your own pervertedness by majoring in that?

A little bit. I was always interested in sex therapy from a really young age. OK. Sex just fascinated me.

And my initial interest in becoming a sex therapist was actually my parents trying to give me the talk. OK. It was super awkward like most people's experience of the talk is. I didn't even get one.

It's like odd most of us. Well, book was placed on a show. It was there when I was born. It was like, she'll probably find it.

She's a gracious reader. She'll run out of everything else to read. Did you get a talk? Oh, it would blow your mind what my mother told me.

Probably over the line. I was in, I think, second grade. And I heard people on the playground calling other kids, butt-humpers. He's a butt-humper.

So I came home and at dinner, I said to my mom, someone's so-called so-and-so a butt-humper. She goes, OK. And I said, do people do that? Do they hump in the butt?

And my mother calls us straight-faced immediately. Well, there's a tremendous amount of nerve endings in the anus. And some people find it pleasurable and some don't. I love it.

I was like, OK, onto the next thing. And did you understand? Yeah. You did.

I'm like, OK, people do that. And some people like it. And some people don't. And that proved to be true.

She probably should have mentioned. Most people don't like it. Some people do. But maybe I'm more honest about whatever.

We're pivoting a tiny bit, but it's in keeping. I didn't tell you this. But I took their daughter on a shopping spree for her birthday. She's my best friend.

Anti-Monica spoils. Yes. And she was turning nine. We went to all these places.

But we ended up at Target. And she's getting like little squish mellows mainly. Very tactile child. Yeah.

But they're very mature, these children. Obviously, that's their grandma. And so we were walking by the lingerie. And I kind of assumed they already knew what it was.

Sure. And Delta said, oh, that's a cool bathing suit. OK. And I didn't even, it just came out of my mouth so fast.

I was like, I think it's lingerie. And then she was like, what's that? And then I felt like I was allowed to follow. What if you just instinctually went?

There's a lot of nerve in it. He's in the anus. But it's a weird thing to explain to a kid that sometimes you'd want to dress sexy. Then I was like, am I putting something in her brain that she probably shouldn't hear that you're supposed to dress up for people?

No. It just got scary fast. Well, I think you say that. Sometimes you want to wear a nice outfit when you go out for dinner and you want to feel pretty.

You can also do that before going to bed if you want your partner. You know, you both want to be excited by what you're wearing to bed. Oh, I didn't. What did you say?

Horsewear launch, right? Don't you ever wear that. You're going to wait to hell. No, I think I just said, oh, sometimes people like to wear it to feel sexy.

Yeah, there you go. Perfect. That's good. What would you have said?

I like what you said, actually. You know, I think sometimes people like to wear different things. And sometimes people like to wear these kinds of outfits. Yeah.

Back to the talk. So my parents tried it. Because they left a lot on said? Yeah.

So their version of it, we were trapped in our minivan driving home from grandma's house after family dinner. And my mom's driving. She looks at me in the rear view mirror. And she says, you have any questions about, you know, sex.

Oh, boy. You can ask. Yeah, you really mean that? Yeah.

It was definitely whispered. There were some long awkward pauses. And I remember in that moment just thinking what she's really saying is, please, for the love of God, don't ask me anything. Oh my God.

Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. I mean, she did you expect it?

That's never happened. That has not happened in six years on this show. I got to get some paper towels. And it's fucking all oil, all of everything.

I'm jealous that you got that out of them. I've said some pretty funny stuff. Wow. I feel really honest.

You really do. What happened? I don't think it's the nature of real. It was really, I can't like it looked very classy.

It looked a lot of fluid. Tell us the truth. It was just that it was too hot. Oh, the girl every of that was fun.

Wow. Great start to 2024. I feel like I need to get some sort of special award. You know, we need to get you a medal.

I'm telling you, I don't think I thought those were real. I didn't either. Fuck. You know, I was wearing my most expensive.

I know. I should never have worn this up here. I should have been trusted to have that. So we had that kind of got on you because it was so Yeah.

It went every year. It's all over the carpet. And it's oil. I just caught it.

It's a farmer. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay.

Wow. Thank you for that. Okay. That's a good moment.

Don't ask. Don't ask. We don't want to talk about it. So that it really struck me in that moment.

I'm like, why can't I ask? Because I have a lot of questions. I was very curious. I was hearing things on the playground.

I'd actually just made a bet with my guy friend Nick about how many holes a lady had down there. Okay. I was wrong. I lost a dollar.

I thought there were two. Yes. That's a hole. Sometimes a hole is not.

We've already discovered. Hold on Monica. It is closed until you're applying pressure on it. It's still a hole.

It's still a hole. You're right. Okay. Sorry.

So I did have a lot of questions. I wanted to ask things and I was very struck in that moment about like why can't we talk about this. I want to talk about it. This would be a great place to start with theories because yes, why is it.

There's obviously like a puritanical religious history to this from the anthropological point of view. We all lived in a one room house most of the time. We've been here on planters. So we were hearing fucking nonstop.

It wasn't this thing that we were coiled from. That all changed when we went to multi room dwellings and you were removed from it. But then beyond that, I think for me, the reason the topic is so loaded that people don't really give credit to is our primary purpose on this planet is to reproduce. You're here to eat, stay alive and reproduce.

And so any talk of sex, sex in general has the stakes of not being desirable, not reproducing, not being attractive, being excluded, not fulfilling this weird primary instinct we have that we never can put our fingers on. Like it's the highest stakes there are in a way. Yeah. I think really for the US it traces back to Victorian times and we started getting really uncomfortable with sex and the attitude started changing a lot.

We haven't really recovered. Right. We're slowly inching towards more openness and more comfort. But I think most people in this day and age just have generations of shame and trauma that we're really struggling to unpack.

Yeah. And if you even look at the art tradition of them going in and covering up famous paintings, The Genitalian and the Vatican, like we had a whole period where everyone loved New York and they were just fine with it. And then we went and put fucking leaves. Did something happen other than just that was the era?

Was there an impetus? No, I'm certainly not like a sexual historian, but Victorians just really had very different attitudes towards sex where the shame started to come into it and a lot of stuff around masturbation. You know, there's really strongly anti masturbation things and just this feeling that sex was something dangerous. To do the degree that they started covering the legs of furniture with fabric, like even the legs of the furniture in the Victorian era was too risque.

Yeah, sex became something to be feared. Yes. Maybe STIs were on the rise. I think you've been with us for a minute.

I know, but maybe there was a major influx or something that caused this fear. I'm just curious. Well, there's once you got removed from hearing your aunts and uncles and your parents having sex and you were just in a bedroom down the hall and you didn't know you had to start filling in the blanks and in the filling in the blanks became the proclivities and the perversions and the shame proclivities are born out of the ignorance and curiosity that no one's educating you on. I think that's part of it.

Yeah. Anyhow, so you're at Brown and is the major itself everything you had wanted it to be? Did it answer all these questions? Did it create new ones?

I decided to go to Brown because at the time it was one of just a couple of schools that had any sort of undergraduate program in human sexuality and it was very small. I was the only person in it. No. My year, the year before and the year after I was the only person.

So it was really more of like a multi disciplinary. So basically I had an advisor and they said take 10 sex related courses. So I kind of got to design my own curriculum. I did classes in anthropology in English and psychology and Brown also let you make up your own classes too.

So you could come up with your own curriculums that you know I'm going to read these books. I'm going to write a paper on this type of thing. So I had a lot of freedom which I've always cherished. I had a lot of freedom to be able to pick and choose and mold my own education.

But I definitely would have enjoyed having some friends. At that stage when you're just getting your bachelor degree, did you have a fantasy of what you were going to do career wise? Did you already think you were going to go into therapy and counseling? Well, I knew I wanted to do sex therapy in particular.

You did right from the jump. I didn't know how I was going to do it though because sex therapy wasn't and still isn't regulated. You could actually call yourself a sex therapist tomorrow if you wanted to do that. I'm not encouraging you to get a space.

I hate this. Well, Mike Lee is knowing so much it angers you. That's really good. Oh, people know I never to say something like that.

Dig it back. Please don't. Please don't. I'm not looking for a space.

So I didn't know how to pursue it. Initially I was thinking maybe I would be a doctor and kind of do it more from the medical route. And that was actually what I had started telling people in high school that I wanted to do. The first few times you tell somebody as a 17 year old, like I'm going to be a sex therapist.

You do not get good reactions. Really. I was getting scholarships to go to school and you know what the scholarships were. So she's going off to Brown.

What are you going to study? What did we just give you money to go study? Sex therapy. The room goes silent.

So I started saying a doctor. Obviously that sounds classier and more professional. That idea got into the back of my head of, okay, maybe I'll be a doctor like an OBGYN and I'll go more of the medical route from it. So that was my initial approach.

I did the dual majors and I did pre-med at Brown. And then I took the MCAT and did horribly and hated all my pre-med classes and eventually realized this is not the path for me. So how about psychology instead? Yeah.

And I would only ask you this because I know on your podcast and you're looking pretty open. What is your own sexual life at this time? Because you do see people go into psychology because they have a lot on answer questions about themselves. They hope to get some tools maybe that they can address.

How would you evaluate your own sex life at that point? I was still very curious about sex and interested in it. But the biggest thing that I was really struggling with was orgasming with a partner. I had learned how to orgasm on my own pretty easily.

It felt pretty straightforward. It felt like this very fun, exciting, cool thing that I could do with my body. And I could not replicate that experience with any partners. And it was not only the orgasm itself, but sex with a partner was very performative for me.

So I was really excited about my male partner's pleasure, what he wanted to do. He was taking the lead. And so there was an internal struggle that I had for many years of this interest in sex and this fascination by it and wanting to pursue it for my career is my life on it. But also this huge imposter syndrome of I have so many things within myself.

I cannot find it within myself to initiate sex, to give feedback in the moment, to show a partner what my body likes and responds to. And I like to bring my toy with me to the next session. Yeah. And anything like that.

I really struggled with feeling like sex was something that I gave to a partner or did for a partner rather than something that was for me that I got to participate in. That is so common for people. Yeah. I think especially for women.

I was just going to say, did you feel this frustration of going, this shouldn't be happening to me because I have the knowledge. Yeah. I felt like a horrible imposter. I'm studying this.

I want to help people with this and I'm not really walking the walk myself. But a lot of that was because I was doing all this research and learning and exploration, but I wasn't learning any practical tools. I'm learning about Kinsey and Masters and Johnson and that's great. But what do I do in the moment with my partner when he's doing something that I don't like rather than just baking it and saying, that's so great.

Keep going. Yes. Because there's the awkwardness. It's so vulnerable and you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.

Yeah. I'm not having sex with somebody that I really liked. I want it to feel like the chemistry is there. It's so easy and effortless between the two of us.

And so I had this idea in my head that my pleasure and my body were more complicated or needier than my partners. No, I'm not just saying. And I felt very much alone in that, which I think most people have had the experience of feeling alone with some sort of sexual struggle that they've had. Were you talking to your girlfriends about it at all?

A little bit. But talks with my girlfriends were more kind of braggy. Like, oh, yeah, we had sex last night. Oh, it was so great.

We didn't really get into the nitty gritty of, it's really struggling to work out of anybody else. It was sort of this feeling of we're talking about it openly and look at us evolved college girls, be truly honest and vulnerable with each other about what was actually going on. The imposter syndrome that I felt made that so much harder for me. I was like, I can't admit to anybody that I hear I am this little sex therapist in training and I'm not orgasming with my partners.

I'm not enjoying the sex that I'm having. I can't admit that to anybody. How did a guy said to you, how can I help you orgasm? Would you have even been able to answer that or been confident enough to express what would have helped?

I was never asked that. You weren't. I'm not sure, honestly, how I would have responded to it. I probably would not have been honest.

I probably would have said like, oh, what you're doing is great. You're always making me orgasm. The final straw for me when I decided to stop faking orgasms and finally figure this all out was actually a partner who did the exact opposite. So we had been hooking up and I had faked an orgasm.

I had gotten really good at a great convincing performance by that time and he'd been using his hands on me and he said, I can play you like a fiddle. Oh boy. And I just, my stomach just turned in that moment, like this huge pit in my stomach and I thought this is so gross. This guy is so proud of himself and this sleazy like, what a weird thing to say to someone, right?

I can play like a fiddle. And so that was the moment for me of like, I'm not doing this. And so in some bizarre way, we have some gratitude for this person. Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. I have a lot of those experiences in life where it seems horrible in the moment and then you look back and you're like, that terrible thing that happened to me was actually one of the best things that happened to me. Yeah. As we'll discuss, there's so many tight ropes in sex.

Yeah. It's so precarious. And so for a guy, you're writing, there's the trope of the guy like immediately going, did you come, which no one wants that. And yet also you want to make sure your partner's org has a mean, you want to help in any way you can to facilitate that.

So it's like this very narrow lane you can be in to explore that where you're not the guy just going, like, did you come from my ego versus I want to make this as good as it can be for you? How could I help? That's a tricky, I think, especially if you're a young dude zone to navigate. I think sex is tricky for everyone.

I think we have this tendency to think of male sexuality as simpler or easier than female sexuality. And it's really not, we're all struggling with what do we do in the moment? But yeah, for a lot of men, they feel this pressure to be in the lead, to be taking control, to know what they're doing and to be able to guide the whole interaction. And that's a lot of pressure.

Let's start with the fact that the male orgasm is almost a given. The female is much more elusive. So a guy's pride and esteem. That's not true.

OK, tell me. Yeah. So we're talking about something inherently more complicated about female orgasm than about male orgasm. What the problem is, is the way that we're all having sex.

You know, male, female cisgender relationships, the type of sex that we're having heavily prioritizes male pleasure. Penetration. Right, right, right, right. Most male, female couples, we use sex and intercourse interchangeably.

Like when we have sex, we're having intercourse. To a degree that in the 80s, people would ask like, how are two lesbians having sex? Yes, exactly. I mean, even think of the bases metaphor, you know, the homeroom.

And it's the test of virginity. It's the thing, right? So if we look at intercourse, so a man is getting stimulation of the most sensitive part of his body. His clitoris.

Well, tell everyone. Yeah, most people don't know. Fetus is in the womb. We all start off like as the same little blob.

And when we're differentiating into we're going to be born a man or born a woman, the tissues are differentiated around eight to 11 weeks. And the exact same tissues that make a penis make a clitoris. So it's like having a ball of clay. I can mold it into a mug or I can mold it into a bowl.

It's a different shape, but it's the same ball of clay that I'm starting with. So the clitoris and the penis are biological equivalents. They're called homologous structures. And they both are the pleasure centers of their respective genders.

So if we go to intercourse, like a man's getting stimulation of his penis and a woman is getting stimulation in her vagina. Let's add there too. So yes, all fetuses are female. And so mom senses testosterone.

The ovaries are dropping down through the body and becoming testes and where they drop down through and come is where your vagina is. And then the clitoris grows into a penis. And so if you can imagine if you're a guy right now removing your balls and starting to put your fingers inside that hole, how stimulating you think that might be, probably not entirely stimulating. Exactly.

So the clitoris has anywhere from eight to 10,000 nerve endings and at the penis has two to 3,000. The vagina, there's not really even an accurate scientific tally of how many nerve endings are there, but it's not a particularly sensitive part of our bodies. I pass a baby through that. Yeah.

I mean, the funny comparison that I always like to make is that intercourse for a woman is like playing with the man's balls. Sure, it might feel good. It can feel pleasurable. It can feel fun to do with a partner, but for the vast majority of men, it's nowhere near enough stimulation to lead to orgasm.

Right. And we don't make men feel bad about that, right? There's not some alternate universe where we're like, you know, the penis, it's so complicated. Why do I have to touch that?

Why can't you get the orgasm from the balls instead? Right. So I'm in a hundred percent agreement with you that biologically neither is predisposed to have an orgasm easier. In the current sex teenagers are having with the lack of education and the lack of instruction and lack of understanding of the clitoris, all of that.

The results of which is females are having far fewer orgasms than men are. Yes. And so in that world, which is the reality of the teenage boy, if a woman orgasms, that's the blue ribbon. Like that's the thing you have to do or you were bad, even though you don't understand how to make that happen because you've watched porn, which is not realistic.

So I'm just saying when we're talking about different pressures, like I think for the boy, the pressure is like, oh, I got to figure out how to get this. I don't know what the hell to do. You know, yeah, we're in agreement on that. It's not that biologically anything's different or more complicated than our bodies.

People of all genders, we just need stimulation of the part of our body that's the most sensitive. Yeah. It's not an extremely difficult thing to do to invite the clitoris along to the party, the same way that the penis is always invited to the party. But yeah, the way that most male-female couplings are having sex these days, there's very little in it for the woman and everything in it for the man.

And so many of us women don't have that information or that knowledge. So most women feel like something is horribly wrong with them. I mean, it's one of the number one questions that I get from our community. Like, what's wrong with me?

I don't enjoy sex. I'm never having orgasms. It barely even feels good and broken in some sort of way, but it's just a basic lack of information about what our bodies need to experience pleasure. Okay.

So now we're like perfectly into the beginning, I think, of the book, which is breaking the fairy tale, confronting the fairy tale. And so there's a bunch of pretty well-worn and common things you'll see in your practice. And they're broken up into some categories that I think everyone will kind of relate to. But first and foremost, back to the growing up in multi-room homes, the only time we've seen anyone have sex is in a film or TV, unless you've got anybody doing orgia at a young age.

Like, I don't know where one would see it, right? So tell us what we see and what we expect. Yeah, we see that same scene over and over again on TV and in the movies. It's the characters just look at each other across from the room and it's on and they're dashing off into the bedroom.

It's hot and passionate and wild, the clothes are flying off. And we really only see a couple of seconds of rolling around in what we assume is intercourse. And then both heads are flopping back onto the pillow, everybody is satisfied in how. You say like in the book, you say like three pumps of missionary and all people are totally associated.

So I mean, some of it is even just a logistical challenge for TV in the movies. There's a limited demand time that you're not going to show an entire 30 or 45 minute interaction or all the little pieces of it. So we see this condensed version of it. But as viewers, if that's the only thing we're ever seeing, rationally in our heads, we can think, okay, they're taking some license with the way they're filming it.

But when we see it over and over and over and over again, it just gets drilled into your head. And that's how it's supposed to be spontaneously passionate, completely effortless, zero communication required heavy emphasis on intercourse and simultaneous orgasm. Yeah, sounds great. Sounds like how it should be.

You're right, though, because they're showing other things in the movies and even in a car chase, they still got to shift the gears and hit the brakes and hit the gas. It's not like they deviate entirely in the other areas, even when it's romanticized. But that one, yeah, is a real departure from what needs to happen. So as a sex therapist, I think the things that frustrate me their most are the feeling of effortlessness.

Most people feel like sex should be absolutely effortless. So we shouldn't have to try or put effort into it in any sort of way. And then also the lack of communication that my partner should just be able to read my mind. They should know my body better than I even know my own body and just magically do all those things that I need.

And I magically doing all the things that they need. So we're magically having the orgasm at the exact same moment. So those two things in particular are really harmful when we internalize them. And then also, oh, sorry.

No, I just wanted to back up for just two seconds about the actual profession of sex therapist. So is that a couple comes in and is having trouble connecting or a person is? What is sex therapy? Sex therapy is just helping people create the sex lives that they want to have.

Yeah, that's the way that the simplified version that I look at it. So I would see people individually. I would see couples. And it would be anything from our relationship is about to break up because we're not connecting in the bedroom to somebody just saying, you know, like, I feel like I don't really know who I am sexually and I kind of want to explore that.

So all sorts of different goals and questions and concerns, but all wrapped up in the idea like understanding and having the kind of sex that we want to be having. Stay tuned for more armature expert. If you dare. I just don't know a couple, truly.

I don't know a couple that's been together for at least a year who doesn't have an issue with sex. I don't know what every couple does. Yeah. And that's a perfect other thing that's really required at the very beginning, which is your chemistry, what happens chemically when you meet somebody when there's novelty and something new that you get dopamine and you get serotonin and you get all these incredible chemicals, they're encouraging you to fuck nonstop and have a baby.

And then those are replaced with really nice oxytocin and other here and now chemicals that make you feel bonded for life and mates. Exactly. No matter who you are or how horny you are, how invested you are, you two are going to go through this cycle of chemistry. It's completely unavoidable.

It's so important to normalize that because physiologically our bodies are incapable of sustaining that kind of intensity of emotion. And sometimes even tell people like, imagine what life would look like if you were still as obsessed with your partner as you were at the very beginning. Like it is fun at the beginning, undeniably fun and exciting. But you're not collecting your work and your friendships.

You're not cleaning your house. Exactly. To be in that 15, 20 years later, your life would be crazy. The other aspect of it that I think we forget a lot is that we were actually putting a tremendous amount of effort in at the beginning of a relationship.

We think of it again, so effortless, this myth of effortlessness. So when I think back to when I started dating my husband, Xander, those dates that we went on, I was spending days thinking about, okay, Friday, we have the date. It's four days away. It's three days away.

It's two days away. It's two days away. And anticipation. I'm canceling plans for other things.

I'm spending hours picking out what outfit am I going to wear and trying things on. You're eating differently all week. Putting on the lingerie. I'm going to the gym.

I'm playing all my pump up jams before the date. I'm so excited. There was so much effort going into it. So it's not that we just had this spontaneous, perfect connection.

I was putting a lot of energy and he was putting a lot of energy on his end to create that connection. Yes, but in that period of time, it's effortless. It's simply what you want to do. The effort is fun.

Fun. And initiating all of that is effortless. The inertia is there. As opposed to later when you don't have those chemicals, all that work has to be conscious and thoughtful and mindful and intentional.

But it just happens when you meet somebody. Yeah. So you're telling yourself, get excited for Friday. I didn't have to tell myself, but I was using a lot of energy and time and making decisions.

And I think that we can change our attitudes about the effort as well. We get into relationships and then the effort feels heavy and hard and boring. But I think we can recapture some of that early feeling of I enjoy putting effort in. And that is what makes life meaningful.

We put effort into the things that we care about and we see that effort as a good thing. A lot of parenting examples come up. If your kid has a soccer game on Tuesday and maybe you wanted to do something different on Tuesday, but the effort that you put in to show up for your kid, to be there, to have the snacks, that effort feels powerful to you. It feels like a sign of love.

I'm doing this for you because I care about you and I want to show up for you in this way. But it's really only with sex that we start to see effort as a bad thing. Well, as evidence, in some cases, that we're not with the right person, that we're broken or they're broken or something's broken and probably you're repairable. And I'm seeing other people, they seem to be having more sex and I'm seeing TV.

And then this is just done. Yeah. And people regularly are entering your office in that spot. And you talk about stress to stress being a very, I don't know, horniness killer, what we call it.

The number one libido killer. And this is the part where people always roll their eyes because we're all sick of hearing about stress. We know like stress is around for us. We're not supposed to be feeling it.

We need to decrease the stress in our lives. But I do think it's really important for people to recognize that stress has a huge impact on libido. And it does go back to our caveman days to stress was a way to help the body survive, to figure out am I staying and fighting this woolly mammoth that's coming at me or am I running away from it? And so when we're feeling stress, all of our body's resources go into survival and figuring out what we're going to do in those moments.

And when you're literally in a life or death moment, having an erection or being wet is not a necessary function. It's going to have anything right in the book. You know, having an erection is going to slow you down as you're a caveman running away from the woolly mammoth. So all of the resources get redirected.

And there's just no way to be really turned on and horny all the time when you're under extreme amounts of stress. Although what about in this situation? This is something I literally do. So I'm an addict.

My brain is great at figuring out external things that can alleviate my suffering. So when I'm super stressed, I do get enormous bouts of horniness because I see it as relief. The brain is going reliefs over here if you want it. Yeah, there are some people who associate sex with stress relief and those people typically have a pattern of sex being something that's enjoyable and pleasurable.

So there's a trust that you have in it of this is going to work versus maybe let's look at a woman who's not getting a lot out of the sex feeling disconnected from her partner. She doesn't have that same amount of trust that, oh, this is going to feel good for me. It is going to get me out of my head. Yeah, that's interesting.

So I want to order. I want to go in here. I just wrote down a lot of things that I like to reading. I just want to read one of them.

Hearing the word no from our partner, especially when it comes to sex typically brings up enormous amounts of shame. Rejection feels so terrible that most of us will go to great lengths to avoid it. If your partner turns you down, your instinct is likely to stop initiating. But if no one is initiating, what do you think is going to happen to your sex life?

But yeah, that weird, immediate sense of shame. It's a different type of rejection. It is. It's so deep and primal.

It feels like the longer you are in a relationship, the closer you are with your partner, the more it hurts to be turned down for sex. It's been my own personal experience too. Like I was saying earlier, initiating sex was something that I struggled with personally, especially the woman it felt like something I wasn't allowed to do. And I'm walking that fine line as a woman of, well, I don't want to be the ice queen and too close up, but I also don't want to be a slut and too forward.

And so it felt like this dangerous thing to do. And once I finally did work up the courage to start doing it, then it's this horrible wave of shame that comes crashing over you when you hear a no from your partner. Let's dig deeper on the shame. Things pop into mind.

One is like, well, I'm not attractive. That's a necessarily shame-inducing. But there's all of us as kids were starting to feel sexual and that was confusing. And for me, masturbating and feeling shame, even though I wasn't in a religious household and my mother was saying things like, you just heard.

There's no reason for me to, but I was trying to quit it all the time. So does it bring you back to that thing? Like I'm a perverse little weirdo, or is it just the rejection of I'm not attractive or is it all things? What do you think that shame is?

I think it's the two main things. So it does bring up just that deep shame around sex that all of us have. By initiating sex, you are acknowledging that sex is a thing and you want to be having it. And if you hear a no from it, it just brings up all of those primal feelings of, oh, this is this bad thing that I'm not supposed to want it.

Yeah. And it's wrong and shameful and sinful and all the things. And it also brings up feelings of inadequacy. Most of us take it extremely personally.

And it's very interesting as a therapist, you know, when I work with couples, I can see the reasons that people turn their partner down for sex are almost never personal, really. They're more situational or they're more about how the person is feeling. It's so rare that someone says, I don't want to have sex with you because you don't look good right now. You know, we're like, I'm not attracted to you anymore.

But when we hear that no, we go to these really dark places inside of ourselves of I'm not pretty enough. I'm not thin enough. I'm not sexy enough. I'm not desirable enough.

The spark is gone. My partner is interested in other people. Like we take it extremely personally. You're so right.

And we love couples. Everybody wants to have a good one. Yes. Oh, I'm so good.

And it is very revealing every single couple that enters there. So the standard is one wants to be having more sex than others. There's no two people that seem to be wanting to have the same amount of sex. I mean, that would be crazy though.

It's so normal. I don't even like to call it mismatch sex drives because every couple has mismatched sex drives. You're never going to find a partner who wants sex the exact same time you want sex every single time you exact same type of sex that you want to have in that moment. It's just not realistic.

So most of us get so up in our heads about, oh, I'm mismatched. Are we in a different sex drive? What's the problem here? But I think it's important for couples to realize that's normal.

There's nothing wrong. Instead, let's use our attention and energy to figure out how do we need to work together as a team to create the space for us to connect. What also comes out in every single one of those is that when they start exploring that, almost without exception, the person that rejected the other person, they themselves don't feel attractive. It actually isn't their partner.

I think that's so mind-blowing if you acknowledge that. Not only is it not about you. It's about them. But you're having all this cognitive dissonance, which is like, well, I'm pursuing you.

So obviously you're hot and sexy. So that couldn't possibly be what you're experiencing right now, but it is. There's so many wild dynamics that come up around it. One of the things that came up for me was there were times where Xander would initiate sex with me and my gut instinct to reaction is almost always a no.

And that comes from the deep shame place inside of me and feeling like, as a woman, I'm trying to navigate that line of not too available, but there's always this feeling of like, I'm not supposed to. We've been married for 12 years, you know, by all definitions and putting this in air quotes, like I'm doing it the right way. But there's still that feeling that comes up of like, I'm not supposed to. Right.

You were about to say something and I cut off. No, no, I was just because I know, as we have just said, everyone listening who's in a partnership is experiencing this. And I know some personal cases currently that would love to hear. If a couple comes in and says, this person really doesn't want to have sex, I really do a lot and I feel rejected or whatever.

Also, I want to have sex. How will I get pleasure if my partner isn't giving it to me? What would you go? She pulls out her rolladex of divorce attorneys and says, I think you'll repair nicely.

I think it's common. Yeah. So the first place that I start is helping a couple explore what does each person need to feel open to sex? A lot of it is just figuring out what makes me feel excited, what creates the space for me.

And then if there really is an issue with low libido, that's the thing that comes up a lot. There are really three main causes of low libido that actually really aren't about the libido at all. Libido is not the problem that most of us think it is. It's a lack of emotional connection.

It's a lack of pleasure and it's also sexual pain. I mean, actually- 30%. Yes, I'm so glad you know that stat. For me books.

Okay. Yeah, 30% of women experienced pain the last time. And solutions are used in lubrication always. 15 minutes of warm up.

Stop if it's hurting. So you don't start associating it with that. There's a two more I've forgotten. Well, I see a pelvic floor specialist or a pelvic pain specialist if you're having any sort of pain that those simple steps can't address.

So that's a good low hanging fruit one to knock out and then that leaves us with the connection and the pleasure and pleasure really is the biggest one. You give your clients really good little homework. So she'll say for the next three weeks, just log when the environment or the context or the situation did make you open for sex. What was happening?

What happened before that? No, what gets you in the mood? Don't just wait for the mood to hit you. Be aware of what things got you in the mood.

Also, conversely, be aware of the things that take you out of the mood, right? Know what these things are to avoid. Yeah. So the book Sex Talks, you know, a lot of it, I thought back to that younger version of myself who was struggling so much with her own sex life and really struggling to find practical tools and solutions.