Zach steps out of the host chair for this one. In a swap with Heather Shannon of Sex for Couples, Zach is the guest, and the conversation goes straight at a question most couples never ask out loud: what is sex actually for, and does that answer change over the life of a marriage? Zach, who's been married almost thirty years, and Heather dig into why frequency becomes the default target when quality and clarity would serve couples better.

The conversation moves through the different eras a long marriage passes through, the anthropological reasons couples tend to hit a reset every few years, and the idea that any long marriage is really four or five different marriages stitched together. Zach shares specific, practical scenes from his own relationship, including a three hour float down a river with his wife where they talked about sex without ever touching, and describes a couple in his practice who solved their standoff by simply negotiating who gets what on which night. Heather brings in patterns she sees in her own client work, particularly the tendency to take sexual disconnection personally and the exhausting decision fatigue around initiating. Together they name two questions Zach uses to open nearly every session on this topic: what's it for, and what counts.

The takeaway isn't a technique. It's a shift in framing, from sex as an obligation or a performance with a pass or fail outcome, to sex as something couples can actually get better at on purpose, the same way they'd get better at any skill they cared about. For anyone who's felt the pressure of "we should be having more sex" without ever stopping to ask what sex is supposed to accomplish, this conversation gives language for that gap, and permission to define it differently.

Key Takeaways

• Frequency is the wrong target. The better question is whether the sex you're having is actually good, and whether you're willing to get better at it on purpose.
• Sex is a skill, not a talent you either have or don't. It can be learned, practiced, and improved the same way any hobby can.
• Ask "what counts?" Narrow definitions of sex (intercourse only, simultaneous orgasm only) create a lot of ways to fail and very few ways to succeed.
• Intimacy is broader than sex. Physical closeness that isn't sexual, and sexual conversation that isn't physical, both count and both matter.
• Spontaneity is a myth for anything you actually care about. Couples plan meals, workouts, and sleep. Sex deserves the same intentionality.
• When you don't want sex, get specific about what you don't want. It's rarely your partner. It's more often boredom, exhaustion, or feeling obligated.
• A long marriage isn't one marriage. It's several different eras, and checking in roughly every three years, with a therapist or a trusted person, helps couples pivot into the next one.
• The most durable relationship habit isn't avoiding conflict, it's getting good at repair, and doing more of what your partner likes while doing less of what they don't.

Guest Info

This episode centers on a conversation between Zach and Heather Shannon, LCPC, CST (she/her), an AASECT Certified Sex Therapist and host of the podcast Sex for Couples. Heather refers to working directly with clients around sex and communication in relationships throughout the conversation.

Listen to Sex For Couples: podfollow.com/askasextherapist

Website: HeatherShannon.co

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Zach sits down with baseball legend Darryl Strawberry and his wife Tracy for a conversation that has almost nothing to do with baseball. Both are on their third marriage. Both are in long term recovery, Darryl more than two decades sober, Tracy twenty five years clean. And both point to the same turning point in their story: faith. Zach wants to know what actually sits underneath a phrase couples say so easily, Christ is at the center of our marriage, especially since, as he points out, scripture itself says very little about marriage directly.

What follows is unusually candid. Darryl and Tracy talk about the difference between humility and humiliation, and why fighting dirty means trying to shame your partner instead of solving the problem with them. Tracy describes watching Darryl in active addiction and reaching the point where loving him didn't mean rescuing him anymore, a moment she names plainly: he was too painful to love, not unworthy of it. Darryl traces his own turning point back further than the drugs, to the rejection of his father and the bitterness he carried underneath the addiction itself. And Tracy explains how she knew his recovery was real, not because he said the right things, but because his actions stayed consistent over time. They also get into raising nine kids across a blended family, the moment Tracy told Darryl to take his baseball uniform off and figure out who he was as a man, and what it actually looks like to stay married to someone you see only a few days a month.

The reason to press play is that this isn't a highlight reel of two people who fixed their lives. It's a working theory of how repair actually happens: naming the wound before you can heal it, choosing consistency over grand gestures, and refusing to let ego, which Darryl defines simply as Easing God Out, decide who wins the argument. Anyone piecing a marriage back together after addiction, infidelity, or just years of distance will find something to hold onto here.

Key Takeaways

• Humility and humiliation aren't the same thing. Humility invites you both to the same level to find a solution. Humiliation is fighting dirty, trying to wound your partner instead of working with them.
• Trust isn't rebuilt with an apology. It's rebuilt through consistency over time, doing the same right thing again and again until it becomes believable.
• Unhealed wounds from your past don't stay in your past. Left alone, they bleed into your marriage and erode it from the inside.
• Recovery isn't only about quitting a substance. It's about dealing with whatever is underneath it, for Darryl that meant confronting the bitterness and rejection wound from his father.
• Loving someone in active addiction can reach a point where stepping back isn't giving up on them, it's refusing to keep enabling the behavior that's killing them.
• Blended families take a village. The Strawberrys say it takes nineteen people, across both sides of two divorces, to make their family work.
• You don't have to make love complicated. A home cooked meal, a card, or a phone call can matter more than a big gesture.
• Adult children still carry the wounds of a divorce they never chose. Being a great listener matters more than being right.

Guest Info

Darryl Strawberry, former Major League Baseball player who spent much of his career with the New York Mets. author of the book Another Life. In long term recovery from addiction, more than two decades sober at the time of this conversation.

Tracy Strawberry, Darryl's wife, a pastor who works at the Dream Center in St. Louis, a recovery home for men and women. Twenty five years in recovery herself.

Book: Another Life, out now, available wherever books are sold. https://amzn.to/4cqjAAs

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Zach sits down with his cousin Kara and her wife Stacy, two women he has known since before they were officially a couple, for a conversation that starts as a family reunion and turns into something much deeper. Kara and Stacy have been together for 26 years, married twice (once in civil union, once when it finally became legal), and are raising two kids, Rylan, 11, and Avery, 13, in a household they describe as running on accommodations instead of an off switch.

The conversation moves through family history most people don't say out loud, including an unaddressed abuser in Kara's extended family and the trickle-down effect it has had for generations. From there, Kara and Stacy talk candidly about parenting a neurodivergent son, the grief of letting go of the parent they each expected to be, and the strategy, cost, and constant vigilance behind things as simple as a trip to an amusement park. They also get into what makes their marriage work: they don't fight, they disagree and stay in the room, and their professional lives in education and mental health mean they never fully clock out.

What makes this one land is the honesty. Kara names her own theory of generational trauma, "the story you tell yourself," and traces it back to her mother, who buffered her from the worst of it without either of them ever naming it that way. Stacy, in turn, reflects on being raised by people with hot tempers and choosing, quietly and consistently, not to pass that down. By the end, Kara turns the mirror back on Zach and Rebecca's own marriage, and the answer she gives him, that you can't rationalize your way out of anything in a relationship, is as much a takeaway for the listener as it is for Zach.

Key Takeaways

• Generational trauma doesn't move in a straight line. It finds new paths even when you think you've closed off the old ones.
• "The story you tell yourself" can outlast the actual event, and revisiting your own history later in life can change what you thought you knew about it.
• A buffer parent, someone who absorbs hardship so their kids don't have to, can shape a person's resilience without either of them realizing it at the time.
• Disagreement doesn't have to mean conflict. Communication skills, not avoidance, are what let a couple skip the fighting altogether.
• Parenting a neurodivergent child often means grieving the parent you expected to be, even while embracing who your child actually is.
• Accommodations can be a love language: constant, invisible planning (escape routes, VIP tickets, visual aids) that a child may never recognize as an act of love.
• You can't feel or rationalize your way out of relationship problems. Longevity comes from staying honest and staying in it, even when one partner is healthier than the other at a given moment.
• Space, grace, and time: not every conversation needs to happen immediately, and giving people room to come back to it matters as much as the conversation itself.

Guest Info

Kara and Stacy are Zach's cousin (by marriage on his wife's side). Both work in education and mental health: Kara does professional talks and introductions related to her field, and Stacy is a science inclusion teacher. They live in New Jersey with their two children.

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