i think a great example of this and this is a super common fantasy you hear your partner say oh i've been fantasizing about having sex in public and then you immediately go like oh my god they want to like go down to the mall and have stuff like like have sex like have sex on a park bench like in front of macy's or nordstroms or something [Music] hello and welcome to the pillowtalks podcast we're your hosts vanessa and xander marin i'm a sex therapist with over 20 years of experience and i'm jus
t a regular dude we share the ups and downs in our relationship while giving you step-by-step techniques for improving yours make sure you subscribe for your weekly double date full of totally doable sex tips practical relationship advice hilarious and honest stories of what really goes on behind closed bedroom doors and so much more it's the sex education you wish you'd had all right babe i have an idea for how we can start off this podcast episode let's hear it can you sing us a little bit of
mariah carey's fantasy sweet sweet fantasy baby [Laughter] i just i can't hit the first note i can't hit the person sweet sweet fantasy baby when i close my eyes you come back and take me wait come back and hold on i think so what does that mean we have to look this up now i only know sweet sweet fantasy baby those are the only lyrics from that song i know all right i guess that's enough that was really good thanks you're welcome so do you want more singing from me i don't know it's entertaining
to me let's let the audience decide let us know over on instagram vanessa marin therapy more xander singing thumbs up thumbs down what songs would you like him to sing actually no do it this way leave us a review of the podcast on apple podcasts and put in your review what song you would like to hear xander sing alright so let's get into it today we are talking about fantasies fantasies they're really healthy normal common part of our sex lives and i think experiencing your fantasies with your
partner can be very fun very exciting but what happens if you and your partner's fantasies don't match up so maybe you're completely uninterested in your partner's fantasies maybe your partner's fantasies even turn you off oh so we went over to instagram we asked people tell us about the fantasies that either you have or your partner has that the other person is not interested in and there were four most common ones that came up number one far and away was the threesome then there was anal anal
play anal intercourse public sex a very popular one and also power play so like some domination some submission that kind of stuff we actually have we have a couple fantasies that we don't have in common one of them is the mile high club which one of us wants to join you be the judge we should put it up on an instagram poll well i think we just have to tell the people since they're listening to this now so i want to join the mile high club i don't think it would be particularly sexy or pleasurab
le sex but i think it would be funny just to like be able to say i did it but you not interested i guess i'm a little worried about logistics i'm worried about our height difference given the limited possibility for positions in a small airplane lavatory and honestly it's funny because usually in most things vanessa is like the rule follower and i'm a little more loosey-goosey but i'm scared of getting caught i'm not gonna lie i'm scared of getting caught you go to airplane jail you know what it
really is that xander loves flying so much and he loves planes so much it would feel like sacrilegious i don't i don't want to get in trouble doing something that i love so much i don't i don't want it to be ruined the sex or the flying all of it all of the above okay so today we're gonna talk about exactly what to do if your partner has a fantasy that you're just not into or the other way around if you have a fantasy that your partner is not into yeah and maybe we'll help you be able to handle
it better than i just did right then we will because we're gonna give you a five-step process that you can walk through it's gonna be a very detailed episode yeah and by the end of it i'm just gonna be chomping at the bit for mile high club oh that's airplane sex can't wait too bad we don't have another trip planned for a while but okay let's do it before i get my mile high club on we are going to read the review of the week can't get enough i love following the instagram and listening to the p
odcast seriously it feels like two best friends talking about any and everything i love the chemistry between v and x the honesty and the content is so so good it makes the tips and topics feel so much easier and natural to incorporate into my own life so glad i came across these two oh and oh yeah i'm waiting for a hanging emoji to be honest this one creeps me out because it's like a big smile with rosy cheeks and then teeny tiny hands i think they're proportionate look i'm acting it out right
now no it's not close you have small hands but those are teeny tiny hands the hand is like smaller than the smile that okay that's true but i mean i think that this is just you know rosy cheeks going in for a hug that's your final name that's my that's my translation rosy cheeks going in for a hug emoji all right we already asked you to leave your creative review with what song you would like to hear sanders sing your reviews really do mean so much to us we really really appreciate you taking th
e time to leave them and it helps so much with letting the podcast grow and reach new people so we thank you so much and we always have a good time at making xander try to decipher your emojis please leave us a review with whatever song you'd like him to sing and the most challenging emoji that you can come across if we pick your review to be featured as our review of the week as our little way of saying thank you we are going to give you a free mini coaching session so if you see your review po
sted you can come over to instagram and dm us at vanessa marin therapy tell us your situation what your questions are and we will send you a little mini coaching session back totally private all right so let's get back to it so we went over to instagram and first we asked people have you ever talked about fantasies in your relationship and only 45 percent of people said that they had so the majority of people have never had a conversation about fantasies with their partner yeah keeping it to you
rself and 90 of people said they thought that they and their partner had different fantasies yeah and so that was like either they've explicitly talked about it and they're different or they're like worried that they have different fantasies so that could be a huge driver as to why 55 percent of people haven't talked about it if you're scared it's not going to be the same then that could be a big reason why you don't want to share well i think that number is really important to share 90 of peopl
e think that they have different fantasies to really normalize that this is a very common thing that happens in relationships and i think it's very easy for us to have this idea of oh my gosh we have different fantasies like we're not compatible but the reality is like how could you not have different fantasies you're different people you have different likes and dislikes with other things you know your hobbies food that you i'm like trying to find food examples i was like okay here it comes the
food you have different preferences different likes and dislikes in every other area of your life so why would you not have different fantasies in the bedroom that's really where we want to start like it's okay to have different fantasies you can have totally different fantasies and still have an amazing sex life we have different fantasies it's okay that being said this can be a tricky situation to navigate if there are a lot of differences or really strong differences so for example you know
should you do something that you're not really interested in doing just for your partner's sake or should your partner have to forego this fantasy that's really important to them because you're not into it so we're gonna give you our five-step process for what to do in this situation we're going to approach this podcast episode as if you and your partner have already had some sort of conversation about fantasies and you've discovered that there are differences right so we could do a different ep
isode about like how to bring up fantasies for the very first time if you and your partner haven't let us know if you're interested in that but for now we're going to assume that you guys have already discovered some sort of difference and we're going to give you some tips this five-step process that we have for what to do in this situation so let's get right into it with step number one and that is to handle your partner's fantasy with grace because it's very likely that up until this point you
may not have handled it particularly gracefully it's really easy to hear something that our partner shares with us that we don't agree with or it feels weird to us we feel nervous and kind of like respond in a bit of an icky way or like we go kind of silent we show some body language that probably implies that maybe we're not so into it or we feel uncomfortable yeah and i think this has definitely happened with us i don't remember the exact conversation that we had talking about the mile high c
lub but i do remember you being like oh like having sex in a bathroom like those bathrooms are so tiny and they're gross and they're disgusting so there was i don't remember feeling like deeply ashamed for it but i do remember there being some sort of like oh he's like really not into it yeah i was i was probably a bit judgmental and i would approach that differently now i can do better vanessa you know what i just thought about hearing you describe what it was like for you when you brought up t
he mile high club thing with me why is it so funny to hear you call me vanessa what xander tell me xander i would love to tell you vanessa oh this is funny because i was listening to a sports podcast the other day and it's two guys one of the guys is named guy and it was yeah it was playing on my phone oh my this is so confusing because i'm saying guy in the other person the other the other person is like oh let me tell you guy like vanessa was like oh my god these guys like who are these people
and i'm like no no no the guy's name is guy all right guy tell me about you let me tell you guys let me tell you a guy all right what that made me think about is i made it about me when you shared about the mile high club and i immediately went inside and went oh i don't want to do that the bathroom sounds gross to me oh i'm scared i'm not going to be able to get it up blah blah blah i made it all about me and really that fantasy has nothing to do with me it's your fantasy i should have just sh
owed up to listen to you and i think that really fits in with handling it with grace it's not about me it's about you and it's about hearing and respecting your fantasy trying to take myself out of it until we even get to the point where we're talking about how we might be able to do this i don't play any role in that fantasy yet until we're further along in the process of figuring out whether we're going to do anything about it yeah i mean i think if you had asked me some questions about it and
maybe said oh like why is that interesting to you or when did you first start being turned on by that or how would you imagine that going like there are a lot of questions that you could ask somebody about their fantasy to like learn more about it rather than going immediately to like what your reaction is so i think the bottom line with fantasies is that whenever you have a fantasy that you share with your partner like that takes a tremendous amount of courage and especially if you have a fant
asy that isn't super common or you feel like it's kind of a taboo or a kinky fantasy like it takes so much courage to be honest about your desires to talk about fantasies openly and so when your partner shares something like that with you like they have shown you so much trust and they've really let you into their inner sexual world the other thing is like your partner knew that there was a possibility that they could be embarrassed shamed even humiliated by their fantasy and again especially if
it was one that was like uncommon or they felt like it was taboo so your partner really took a big risk by sharing that with you and you really want to try to like treat those fantasies with grace with compassion with gentleness even if it's not something that feels very sexy to you so even if in the moment itself let's say you pulled a xander and you are like oh gross you know like you can always come back around and you can tell your partner hey i want to talk about that fantasy thing again i
know that i had a really specific reaction to it in the moment and i'm sorry for that i wanted to let my ego get in the way yeah like i just wanted to go back and actually thank you for sharing your fantasy with me because i realized that took a lot of courage for you to share and i'm sorry i didn't have a good reaction to it yeah so this is a huge opportunity to build trust and to build intimacy so if it really truly is in the moment they're sharing something new with you it's an opportunity t
o reward their vulnerability with trust and respond gracefully or if it's a situation where you can look back and you can see that you didn't really hear their fantasy in a very respectful way in the past you made it about you instead of holding space for them to be vulnerable it's an opportunity to go back and clean that up a little bit and build some trust and intimacy out of an experience that maybe kind of took things in the opposite direction absolutely okay so let's move on to step number
two and that is to discuss how important the fantasy is so here's the thing about fantasies most of us have fantasies that we are curious about actually trying out and we have fantasies that we know that we don't ever want to try out but we just kind of like playing with the fantasy aspect of it yeah i think as long as it is still a fantasy i think we often don't even always know like oh i definitely want to do this or i don't want to do this or i'm somewhere in the middle maybe your partner sai
d to you oh sometimes i fantasize about having an orgy and your brain immediately leads to like oh my god my partner wants to have an orgy this weekend and it's going to be with our neighbors and my best friend and like yeah and oh my god they don't want to be monogamous they must not be into me i'm not enough oh yeah like it's so easy to take it down this really long road yeah so you want to know you want to get to know from your partner like is this something that they actually want to play ar
ound with then even if your partner does want to try out this fantasy in real life there are still so many different ways that that could happen so this idea that you might have blown up in your head of like what the orgy is like that may not necessarily be exactly what your partner wants to do so you want to get a sense from your partner of how important is this fantasy to them even if it's something that you know hey there is no way i'm bringing another person into our bedroom you still want t
o get a sense of like is this fantasy something that's really central to your partner's experience or it's something that they're just curious about but they would be totally fine if they never got to do it so you want to get a sense from your partner of is this fantasy something that your partner is curious about playing with but maybe they would also be fine if they never got to do it fantasies have different levels of centrality to our sex lives some people might think ah yeah that's somethin
g that would be fun but i'm okay like the mile high club example is perfect like i'm not gonna feel like something is missing from my sex life i never got to express myself in a certain way i couldn't be fully authentic with myself because i never i'm gonna have mile high club sex it just sort of feels like ah i wish he was into it i wish we did it once but okay whatever yeah or it's like oh that would be fun if it fell into my lap but like everything required to fulfill this fantasy just sounds
complicated and not actually fun when i really like think through the logistical aspects of it oh i think threesomes are a good example of that too like a lot of us are like oh the idea of like this perfect threesome with this like mysterious stranger like that sounds so fun but the reality of like having to what do we do get on an app or do we like find people at the bar and do we ask them to get tested and do they come back to our where do we go or to a hotel like it just starts to feel like
too much but on the other end of the spectrum there are some fantasies that people have where it's like it's so central to their sex life that it could be a deal breaker for them so i think a great example of those kinds of fantasies is maybe you are in a male female relationship but your partner has always wanted to do a little bit of same-sex exploration and for them that feels like yeah this is a part of my sexuality that feels very central that i need to explore and and i wouldn't feel authe
ntic to myself if i went my entire life without doing a little bit of this exploration bottom line here is that there are just so many aspects of the fantasy that you want to learn more about from your partner here are some questions that you could ask is this a fantasy that you would want to try in real life or did you just want to share the idea with me is this a fantasy that you want me to be a part of or that you want to explore on your own what level of involvement were you hoping for from
me how central is this fantasy to your sexual expression and fulfillment and what do you think it would be like for you if you never got to play with this fantasy all right so that takes us in to step three which is to do some research so some fantasies are pretty straightforward like 69 you probably know how to do that already maybe you have done it in the past but other fantasies can be a lot more complex like exploring pain play maybe using heavy duty restraints going to a sex party having an
orgy for some of your partner's fantasies before you even fully decide whether or not you're into this or could be potentially interested in exploring it like you might want to do a little bit of research to find out more about this fantasy more about how it all really works you can always ask your partner if they have any particular resources that they think might be helpful so it could be saying something like you know okay i want to learn a little bit more about getting tied up before i deci
de whether or not that's something that i want to do do you have any articles that you recommend i check out yeah and i think this is so important because in doing this research you may very well find the image that you had of what this fantasy is may be very different from the image that your partner has oh yeah they may even be two completely separate things i think it's really easy for us to like we hear something that we don't really know that much about and we just kind of get this like vis
ual flash in our head of what that's going to be and then and then we talk about it with someone else and like they're envisioning something totally different yeah so one quick tip here a little pro tip is to look for resources that are written by the people who are into those fantasies so there are lots of different communities on the internet you know all around different fantasies if you look into those areas like you'll find more complete and more accurate guides like somebody who's doing bd
sm stuff every time they have sex they're gonna have like really pro level tips techniques advice so as you are doing that research you can also start getting into step four which is to see if there's a part of your partner's fantasy that does interest you a lot of the times you know when we start talking about fantasies with our partner we hear their fantasy and we just immediately feel like we have to do the whole shebang the whole hog yeah like that's the only way we can satisfy them and i th
ink a great example of this and this is a super common fantasy is so like you hear your partner say oh i've been fantasizing about having sex in public and then you immediately go like oh my god like they want to like go down to the mall and like have stuff like like have sex like have sex on a park bench like in front of macy's or nordstroms or something does macy's even exist anymore i'm not sure they want to go like have sex they want to go with like right in front of nordstrom down at the ma
ll whoa that seems like a bit much to me like like we might go to jail like i might become a sex offender like wow like you know you might really start spinning out about that but the reality is there are a lot of variations there's a whole scale of sex in public from not having sex in public to having sex like in front of a store with hundreds of people coming in and out coming in and out wow interesting yeah even if you and your partner were to say yeah we are both totally on board with the id
ea of public sex or having a threesome whatever it is like we would still recommend hey let's break it down into baby steps when people go all in that's when you know issues can arise if you are hearing your partner's fantasy and you're like i'm just not into that see if you can think about other baby steps into that fantasy and potential pieces of it that you might be interested in so for example maybe you hear the idea of sex in public and you're like no freaking way but if you get a little bi
t creative and you think about like what are some ways that we could work up to that okay what if it was we had sex in front of our window with like the sheer blinds closed so if somebody was peeping two feet in front of the window that's a different fantasy that is a different fantasy that you're talking about what what vanessa is trying to say here if someone were to walk by and to see your shadows in the sheer blinds you know they might make out some shapes moving around they might you know s
ee the outline of your body parts if they're peeping in your shades that's that's different also possibly a variation of the sex in public you know you could cut a little hole in your blinds [Laughter] okay so the point i'm trying to make there might be variations of the fantasy or little pieces of the fantasy that you could be interested in another really good one is bdsm a lot of people hear bdsm and they think you got to go full 50 shades of gray like signing a contract having pain play all t
his stuff maybe you're like okay whoa not into the sex dungeon but what if my partner like spanked me during sex or what if we put on you know we use my little sleep mask as a blindfold or what if they held my hands above my head you know so there are always ways to kind of like break down a fantasy little pieces of it that you're like oh okay i could be interested in trying that or that sounds good to me just to be totally clear like you're allowed to have your own boundaries you're allowed to
say there is no aspect of bdsm that i even want to go near that's totally fine but i think it's great to just show your partner the respect of being willing to consider aspects of their fantasy and ask yourself like is there some piece of this that i would feel good participating in yeah and in addition to that like you're allowed to come up with your own boundaries around the pieces that you're okay with so in the public sects example let's say that you start to get comfortable having sex in yo
ur house with maybe the blinds open slightly or something like that and you're like you know it's my house i can do what i want in my house and you know people want to look into my house well whatever they can do that or let's say that you graduate to like i'm open to performing some oral sex like outside on our deck or something like that out in the yard but you may feel like i'm okay like giving my partner oral sex but it feels too uncomfortable for me to be like fully naked outside so i don't
i don't want my partner performing oral on me i'm fine being clothed and doing it on them or something like that you know it's just kind of feeling into like what feels okay to you you're allowed to set those boundaries there's no rule that in a relationship you have to fulfill every single one of your partner's desires absolutely and i think this can also be a really fun step too like getting creative and thinking outside of the box coming up with different possibilities that could be really f
un and maybe that's even enough in and of itself just talking through like hey what would it really be like to have a threesome what are different ways we could play with that and stuff like that so you tell me what are some ways that we could play with my mile high club fantasy without going whole hog well one idea is um next time we're having sex i could put on our white noise machine really loud to make this what it sounds like to be on an airplane um i could find i could find some you know l
ike airplane like ding like the seat belt the seat belt sign is now on please take your seats we are heading into an area of heavy turbulence i'm not sure i'm interested in that part but sure we could have sex in our little bathroom we could we oh yeah we have we have a tiny we have one tiny bathroom our downstairs bathroom it's kind of like the uh the like the harry potter closet what about a make out session on the plane or a little hand under the blanket action oh yeah see i i feel like for m
e i could be into maybe a little fumbling around like not in the bathroom yet the thing that feels intimidating to me is sort of like okay how do we actually plan for like getting us both into the lavatory at the same time like i worry i guess i i guess i've always assumed that like i would be the one going in second and so i always worry like what happens if like someone else is standing there the stewardess is like um that one is awkward like someone's in there and then and then i'm like outsi
de the lavatory i can't like text you because you're not supposed to use your phone on the plane so like i'm like oh well i'm not coming in because this door just told me not to we'll see i think i see i i think through all the all the ways that it could go awkward for me okay this is interesting because if that was like the main thing that came up for you one creative way around it is we could say you're the one who goes into the bathroom first and i'll be the one to deal with the potential rep
ercussions of getting caught true see like this is what i mean just being creative and kind of talking it through and realizing different takes you can yeah i mean so that's why it's so important to just like be honest about what's going on for you because it's like i just assumed that this was the way it had to be and perhaps it doesn't interesting final idea you threw a bag of peanuts at me after we're done having sex what oh yeah yeah yeah oh wow okay that joke did not go over well yeah right
taking too long it took me too long to understand but vanessa most airplanes don't get peanuts anymore because of peanut allergies well i can't eat the pretzels so we were we just flew on southwest and they had a really nice snack mix i was very happy it was like chex mix can't eat it i was asleep with my mouth wide open on that flight all right that brings us to step five this step we included for the specific scenario where let's say that your partner has a fantasy that is very central to the
m it's really important for them to be able to fulfill this fantasy and you know you are not interested in it it's not in alignment with your boundaries you're just a hard no so we wanted to talk about a specific step for this because this is like the hardest situation to deal with right your partner really wants to do this you really don't want to so i think that in these kinds of situations it can be very useful to talk about other options for your partner's satisfaction so in this example one
possibility for you guys is to explore other options for fulfilling your partner's fantasy that may be them going outside of the relationship to fulfill the fantasy it could even be the two of you like taking a break to give them some time to like explore this aspect of themselves obviously like this is again the most challenging of the challenging situations that comes up and i think it's a very very small percentage of like overall differences in fantasies but we wanted to include it because
it you know the bottom line is there is no one-size-fits-all approach and there are ways that we can be creative and think of other options think of other solutions when it is again something that like is very central to your partner's identity so i'm really thinking about that example we mentioned earlier of if you're in a male female relationship and let's say your male partners like i just i really want to see what it's like to be with another man you know or maybe it is like the bdsm one and
you're like i'm not going near that i'm not doing any of that but maybe it's you know your partner could explore with somebody else so there are a lot of different ways that you can do this a lot of different configurations but we just want to include it because i think a lot of people put this pressure on themselves to feel like you're the one who has to fulfill all of your partner's fantasies and be everything that they want you know everything that they need and the reality is that's hard to
find inside and outside of the bedroom obviously this brings up questions of monogamy what do we feel comfortable with it's going to be different for every couple but i think at least the idea of discussing it even if you don't follow through on it i think there's something about like your partner at least feeling like respected enough and seen enough for you guys to have the conversation of is there a way to like explore this outside of their relationship yeah it means a lot to be able to be l
ike yeah we can at least talk this through we can talk about what kind of possibilities there could be what kind of boundaries would need to be in place how creative can we get that's a really good point yeah because i think like a lot of times people here open up the relationship and they just think like free-for-all you know but it doesn't have to be that way like you may have very specific rules and boundaries in place of okay you can put up a dating profile and flirt with people online but n
o physical contact or you can make out with somebody or you can use your hands with somebody but it doesn't go further than that there are so many different ways that you can break this down and still have a lot of boundaries and guidelines in place not alike just complete and utter free-for-all all right so that wraps up our five-step process for dealing with different fantasies in relationships so we want to bring up one other topic that often comes up in fantasies a lot of times if you ask so
mebody what their fantasy is you might get a deer in headlights look well i've been there before a lot of people feel like they don't really know what their fantasies are what even are the options we've put together a really quick little guide of the most common fantasies and this is based on some pretty recent research it has found what the most common fantasies are so we will put a link to download that in the show notes and hopefully it'll give you a little creativity a little inspiration all
right that's all for today's episode of pillow talks thank you so much for listening join us again next week when we talk about attachment styles [Music] you
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