Member Review

I have mixed feelings about this book - but I’m giving it a relatively high rating because I think that, overall, it has the potential to be helpful for a lot of individuals and couples.

In fact, I think that this book would have been groundbreaking for me and my partner about 5-10 years ago. At that time, we were transitioning from the infatuation stage of our relationship into something much more secure and companionate. We were noticing the reality of (what we called at the time) our “mismatched libidos” and all of the advice online seemed to center on “just have sex and the responsive desire will happen naturally.”

Exactly as Marin points out in this book, that can be a recipe for disaster. It took us years to realize that I needed connection to feel sexual while he needed sex to feel connected (or at least he thought that he should). It took us years to realize that we could do a better job of negotiating what all “sex” could mean for us. And in those years, a lot of damage was done to my relationship with sex. It would’ve been nice to have read this book back then, so that we could have maybe come to those realizations a lot quicker and avoided some of the pain.

At the same time, I’m not entirely convinced that some of Marin’s ideas wouldn’t have just created different issues for us. And that’s for one small but glaring reason: She never truly acknowledges the potential of asexuality.

Don’t get me wrong; the word is said exactly once (where it is rather inaccurately defined as a “lifelong disinterest in sex.”) But it’s never actually approached as a serious consideration for folks. For all of the ways that Marin encourages readers to question what sex means to them, and why they think that sex has to be this perfect, spontaneous, and effortless activity… she never asks us to question why we feel pressured to have sex in the first place. Why so many folks report wanting a higher sex drive, or wanting to want sex when they don’t, or fear losing their partner if they don’t have sex enough. She never questions compulsory sexuality. In fact, she reinforces it by stating this about emotional and physical intimacy: “One can’t survive without the other in a long-term relationship.” This statement ignores so many loving and committed relationships in the world - and that breaks my heart.

So while I think this book will likely appeal to the masses of cisheteronormative couples, AND a lot of my own past experiences were justified, AND a couple ideas such as the “easy win” were inspiring or exciting… it still felt overly simplified and lacking to me. At this point in both my own journey and my partner’s journey of Queering the idea of sex and relationships, it didn’t acknowledge the complexity of our sexualities. And even when the author made a point to include gay, lesbian, or non-binary examples… it still didn’t feel truly inclusive.