Vanessa and Xander Marin talk to people who need everything clean before and after sex. They trace it back to shame and social messages, then suggest small changes like shorter showers or washing sheets less often instead of overhauling everything at once.
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We can't start a video. Are you someone who wants sex to feel clean?
Like you want you and your partner to shower before and maybe after sex, too?
Or maybe the sheets have to be clean in order to have sex, or you have to replace the sheets right after you have it.
Or maybe you sometimes just get really uncomfortable during sex because it all just feels too messy.
We're curious to hear your clean routine, so let us know down in the comments. What do you need to have in place in order to feel comfortable having sex? Now, if your whole routine is just starting to feel kind of cumbersome to you or your partner starting to feel like it's just getting in the way of your sex life, then keep watching this video.
All right, but first we want to say hi. If you're brand new to our channel, we are Vanessa and Xander Marin. Vanessa here is a sex therapist. I'm just a regular dude, but we've been together for 14 years. Also, if their little heads pop up, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. These are our cute little pugs, Maggie and Winston.
And our account is all about giving you the tools, tips, and techniques that you need to create a truly extraordinary relationship inside of the bedroom and out. So if you already know that's something that you're interested in, then just go ahead and hit that subscribe button.
All right, so we are gonna get into it right now, but first, we do want to give you just a general disclaimer about this topic. So, look, you get to do whatever feels good and right for you and your sex life. Like, we are not going to. We're not trying to tell you you need to do this. You need to stop doing that. Ultimately, you get to decide what's right for you. If your routine and your needs are working for you and for your partner, then you do. You. You don't even need to watch this video.
All right, so let's talk about a little bit more. So for a lot of people, this sense of, like, needing to have cleanliness or order around sex, it from pretty deeply rooted or buried shame about sex. Like, we all get raised with negative messages about sex, whether that's from religion, culture, media, friends. Like, we all get these messages. It's impossible not to.
And it's really hard to not internalize these type of messages because you're usually getting them pretty hot and heavy from the time you are a little kid. And so, look, here's the problem because of that, even if you start to understand this and realize, oh, this is where it's coming from. I don't want to believe these things anymore. You can't just flip a switch and not feel that shame anymore because it's been internalized.
So we wanna invite you to explore where this desire for things to be clean, where does it come from? So we're gonna give you some questions that you can ask yourself and take a little bit of time to think about, like, when did I first start doing this? Why am I doing this? See if you can identify where that TR to. And also asking yourself, like, what impact does it have on me to have this whole routine that I have to go through?
All right, so then next you can ask yourself, is this serving me? Is this practice? Is this thing that I'm doing or this thing that I need, is that serving me? Because the bottom line is when you have a lot of rules in place around sex, around what you need to feel comfortable, you need your partner to do, et cetera, it can just create a bigger barrier to having sex. Like, there's a logistical aspect to the barrier. Right? Like what needs to be done. There's a time barrier. Like, it takes some time to do whatever these things are to prepare or that you have to do afterwards. And so if you don't have all that time available, then you're not going to be able to or want to have sex. And then finally there's just an emotional barrier. Like, you might even just be feeling like, oh, it just. It feels. Feels like too much to want to do. So, yeah, the end result is that you may be having a lot less sex than you would be otherwise because of these habits or because of these needs or this routine.
Yeah. So, I mean, that's where your routine might start to get really harmful. You might start off thinking like, oh, yeah, it's not a big deal to shower beforehand, so we're clean. But then all these rules start adding up, and it's like, this is a lot of time and effort and energy, and it makes me feel icky and bad when I'm not doing it. So it can all just really start to snowball and feel really uncomfortable and unhelpful. So that's why we recommend asking yourself, like, yeah, is this serving me? So if you start to get the sense of, you know what. Yeah, all these rules that I have in place, all these guidelines, like, it's not really doing anything good for me. It's actually bringing up more shame, anxiety. It's creating these barriers between me and my partner. Then we want to encourage you to start to take baby steps towards removing those barriers. So like Xander was saying a minute ago, it's not like you can just flip a switch and all of a sudden be like, oh, I have a completely shame free relationship with sex. I feel completely, completely comfortable with everything in my sex life.
That would be nice, though.
Would be nice. But it really takes time to kind of dismantle that. So you're going to need to spend a little bit of time, like, working on the shame that you may have internalized around sex. These feelings of sex being dirty or you being dirty. So we'll put in a quick little plug to follow us on Instagram. We post daily stories, daily content, and having that kind of like daily exposure to healthy, normalizing messages about sexual really helps to strip away that shame. And then when it comes to your actual routine, you can take baby steps here, like removing one piece of the routine at a time. So. Or maybe it's even minimizing or lessening it. Like, maybe even something as simple as taking a shorter shower or replacing the sheets every other time instead of every time, like, just take these little steps towards dismantling that routine rather than feeling like you have to just go cold turkey and stop doing all of it immediately.
All right, so like I said at the very beginning of this video, you get to do what, whatever you want with your sex life. But we hope that this video serves just as a reminder that sex is natural, sex is normal, it is healthy, and it is not unclean.
All right, well, that wraps up our video on what to do if you are a clean freak about sex.
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