Three Voices That Changed How We Think About Intimacy

I didn’t set out to become someone who listens to podcasts about sex.

I was a husband in a long marriage, trying to figure out why something that should have been natural felt increasingly complicated. I had questions I didn’t know how to ask and desires I didn’t know how to express. I was doing the research quietly, the way I had always done things privately, alone, without a roadmap, hoping to find something that would help me make sense of what was happening in our marriage and in our bed.

What I found were three voices that changed everything.

I’ve written in earlier posts about the journey my wife and I have been on, the conversations we’ve had, the shame we’ve worked through, the intimacy we’ve been rebuilding together. What I haven’t fully named until now is where a lot of the language and the framework for that journey came from. It came from these three sources. I’m sharing them here because if you’re in a long marriage and you’re quietly wondering the same things I was wondering, these voices might do for you what they did for us.

Dr. Emily Morse — Sex With Emily

If you only add one resource to your life after reading this post, make it Sex With Emily.

Dr. Emily Morse is a sex educator who has spent her career doing something most people still can’t bring themselves to do — talking about sex honestly, without shame, and with genuine warmth. Her podcast covers the full spectrum of sex education. Products, wellness, desire, communication, relationships, bodies, pleasure. She brings in guests who are researchers, therapists, educators, and occasionally people who are simply living and learning in the same ways the rest of us are.

My wife and I have listened to many of her episodes together. That’s worth noting — together. Over the last several years we were in the middle of a relocation from one state to another, which meant many long car rides with hours to fill. Those drives turned out to be the perfect opportunity for long form podcasts. All three of these podcasts are available on Spotify, which is where we do most of our listening. Easy to pull up on a long drive and let run.

We started putting Sex With Emily on during those rides, and what happened was that she gave us a shared language we hadn’t had before. A way to talk about things we had circled for years without quite landing on. We’ve discovered sex products we wouldn’t have known to look for. We’ve learned things about each other’s bodies and desires that years of marriage hadn’t surfaced on their own.

The episode that changed everything for us aired on September 5, 2023. The title was “Why do couples stop having sex? w/Esther Perel.” I remember listening to it and feeling something shift. Not just in how I understood our marriage but in how I understood desire itself — what it requires, what kills it, and what it takes to bring it back in a long relationship. That episode introduced me to Esther Perel. And Esther Perel changed everything again.

Esther Perel

Esther Perel is a Belgian psychotherapist, author, and one of the most original thinkers on love, desire, and long-term relationships working today. If Emily Morse gave us the language, Esther Perel gave us the framework.

Her central insight is about the tension between love and desire. Love seeks closeness, security, and knowing. Desire requires distance, mystery, and the unknown.

When I heard that, something clicked into place. My wife and I had the first part in spades. Twenty-seven years of closeness, security, and knowing each other completely. What we had been suppressing — what had gone underground for both of us, each in our own way — was the second part. The distance, the mystery, the unknown. The parts of ourselves and each other that we had never fully let into the light.

Being open about the pornography — letting my wife into that private world I had carried alone for decades, which I wrote about in What I Never Told My Wife — was the first crack in the wall. What came through that crack was something neither of us expected. Not judgment, but curiosity. Not shame, but exploration. Once we started talking honestly about what turned us on, what we had imagined, what we had kept hidden, the distance and mystery that Esther Perel talks about started to exist between us rather than around us. We weren’t keeping secrets anymore. We were discovering each other.

That’s what led us to new and adventurous encounters we never would have found our way to otherwise. Not despite our commitment to each other — because of it. The safety of the marriage was what made the exploration possible.

But it was a second Esther Perel resource that pushed us further. Her podcast “Say More” included an episode with Gillian Anderson on the subject of fantasy. That conversation — two women discussing sexual fantasy with honesty and specificity and complete lack of shame — opened something in my wife and me that hadn’t been open before.

We started talking about fantasy. Not abstractly, not hypothetically, specifically. What we were curious about. What we had imagined but never said out loud. What we might want to explore together within the safety of our marriage and our commitment to each other.

Those conversations led directly to the Closer Together Workbook. The ten scenarios in that workbook — voyeurism, exhibitionism, roleplay, dirty talk, BDSM, impact play — grew out of the exploration that Esther Perel and Gillian Anderson’s conversation made possible for us. I wouldn’t have known how to begin building that without the framework Esther Perel gave us and the permission that episode extended.

Her card game, Where Should We Begin, has also been a fixture in our date nights, directing some of the most intimate conversations my wife and I have had. I wrote about it in an earlier post in this series. If you haven’t explored it, it’s worth your time.

2HotWives

This one requires some context before the recommendation.

2HotWives is a podcast hosted by two women who approach intimacy from a swinging lifestyle perspective. They are no longer producing new episodes but their back catalog is substantial and genuinely valuable. My wife and I are not swingers — our commitment to each other and to monogamy is absolute — and I want to be clear about that upfront. But I am recommending this podcast anyway, and here’s why.

What 2HotWives does exceptionally well is take specific sexual topics — BDSM, exhibitionism, voyeurism, roleplay, impact play, dirty talk, and others — and explore them with warmth, humor, and real honesty in a two-part format. The first episode introduces the concept. What is it, where does it come from, what does it mean, what do people who practice it actually experience. The second episode is the two hosts putting it into practice themselves and reporting back — what worked, what didn’t, what surprised them, what they’d do differently.

That format is exactly what couples in monogamous marriages need when they’re curious about a topic but have no roadmap for exploring it. You don’t have to share their lifestyle to benefit from their research. The curiosity, the conversation, the willingness to try something new and talk honestly about the experience — all of that translates completely to a committed marriage.

The Closer Together Workbook owes a debt to this podcast. The structure of each scenario — introducing a concept, creating a safe container to explore it, building toward an experience together — was shaped in part by what 2HotWives modeled. They showed me that fantasy and exploration don’t require a particular lifestyle. They require curiosity, communication, and a partner willing to meet you there.

Where These Three Voices Led

I started listening quietly, alone, trying to make sense of things I couldn’t articulate.

What these three voices gave me was language, framework, and permission. Once my wife and I started listening together, those things became shared. We had a common vocabulary for conversations we’d never been able to have. We had a framework for understanding what was happening in our marriage and what it would take to change it. And we had permission — from real people speaking honestly about real experiences — to explore things we had both kept underground for most of our adult lives.

My wife and I took that into our marriage. Into the conversations we should have had years earlier. Into the exploration that those conversations made possible. Into the workbook that grew out of all of it.

If you’re in a long marriage and something feels stuck — not broken, just stuck — these three voices are a good place to start. They won’t fix anything on their own. But they will give you things to talk about. And in my experience, that’s where everything begins.

The Closer Together Workbook is available at closertogetherpress.com. It’s where the listening led us. It might be where it leads you too.

If anything in this post resonated, I put my five most important insights about long-term intimacy into a free guide — including five action steps you can take right now to move the needle. It's short, honest, and written from 27 years of real marriage. No fluff. Just the things that actually worked for us. Download it free below.