Sex Talks

Sex Talks

Three years into their marriage, Vanessa and Xander Marin had a sex life that looked fine on paper. They were communicating well. They were not fighting. But after their first child arrived, they stopped having sex almost entirely -- and neither of them said a word about it. Not because they did not care. Because they did not know how to start the conversation. Vanessa is a licensed marriage and family therapist who had spent over a decade helping other couples fix exactly this problem. And she was stuck in her own version of it.

That gap -- between knowing what couples need and actually being able to say it out loud to the person sleeping next to you -- is the entire subject of this book. Sex Talks, published in January 2023 by Simon and Schuster, became an instant New York Times bestseller. It was written by Vanessa and Xander together, the two of them alternating perspectives throughout, partly because Vanessa wanted the book to be something couples could read together, and partly because she recognized that a sex therapist writing alone about her own marriage was missing half the story.

The central argument is this: long-term couples do not fail at sex because of a lack of attraction, technique, or time. They fail because they never learn to talk about it. The silence is not the symptom of a broken relationship. The silence is the problem.

This is a book written by two people who built their marriage on the same principles they teach -- and who, by their own account, needed all of them. Vanessa is a licensed MFT with over 20 years of experience in sex therapy, a large following on Instagram and TikTok, and a podcast called Pillow Talks that has amassed millions of listeners. Xander is not a therapist. He is the person sitting across the dinner table from a sex therapist, navigating the same anxieties and silences that his wife helps other couples work through. Both voices are in the book. That is not a stylistic choice. It is an argument: these conversations are not naturally easier for the person who knows the theory.