Why We Do Both

Some of you found us through a podcast episode about why desire dies in long marriages. Some of you found us through Dawn of Desire, where Dawn shares the sexual side of our marriage openly and explicitly, for adults who choose to see it.

Sooner or later, people who know one side find the other. For a lot of them, that's where something short-circuits. The same two people who talk about childhood wounds, grief, devotion, and the inner work of staying in love also make adult content? How does that fit?

It fits better than you'd expect.

What we've spent years taking apart

Everything we teach comes down to one idea. The parts of you that got buried under shame are usually the truest parts of you.

A child learns that some of what they are costs them love. So those parts go underground, and a more acceptable self gets built on top. That acceptable self can be approved of. It can't be loved, because it isn't the real person.

The guard around a buried part is usually fiercest where the treasure is deepest. For Dawn, the most heavily guarded room held her sexuality.

She grew up in a world where her own heart and her own flesh were declared evil. For most of our marriage, her desire was locked away so completely that she didn't know it was there to find. We were good roommates in a dead bedroom for years, and neither of us could name what was missing.

When it came back, it came back enormous. It came with grief, with orgasm tears, with years of shame breaking loose. It came with a woman who had been told her whole life that this part of her was the problem, discovering it was the closest thing she had to her soul.

She tells that story far better than I can, in her own words, in her letter and in the episode we recorded about it.

Why we stopped hiding it

So when Dawn wanted to share that part of herself openly, we had to face a question we couldn't dodge. If we believe what we teach, what business did we have putting it back in a drawer?

The shame that locked her away for most of her life was the exact thing we'd spent years dismantling. Hiding her sexuality now, so nobody would be uncomfortable, would've been the old programming winning with better manners. We'd be asking you to stop performing an acceptable version of yourself while we performed one of our own.

We decided we'd rather be whole in public than acceptable in public. Dawn of Desire is what came out of that decision.

What Dawn of Desire is

It's Dawn's platform. It's explicit, it's for adults, and it's hers. I'm part of it too: behind the camera, on the lights, in the edit, and sometimes in front of the camera with her.

It's made the way anything we make is made. It's real, and it's us. Nobody is playing a character. It's not an act or a "scene". And it's not trying to be spiritual or clean or nice. It's honest, it's kinky, and above all else, it's fun.

It's also a part of our business, and it pays us. That part alone has been a massive turn on for Dawn.

How the two fit together

Infinite Devotion is about the whole house of a relationship: the childhood patterns, the grief, the leadership and the surrender, the thousand ordinary days in between. Sex is one room in that house.

It's also the most honest room, because desire can't be faked for long. When the bedroom goes quiet, it's usually telling the truth about everything else. That's why our work keeps coming back to it, and why most of our work happens everywhere else.

Dawn of Desire shows what that one room looks like after two people have spent years doing the work in all the others. Think of it as the evidence. The method lives here: in the podcast, the book, the essays, and the one-on-one work.

You never need to go there to do any of this. Plenty of people who listen every week never will, and that's exactly as it should be.

Some people will be offended

I know. For most of my life I would've been one of them, and part of me would've enjoyed feeling superior about it.

Following the truth has already cost us friendships, and cost Dawn the approval of more than a few people. Some listeners will stop listening after reading this. I understand, and I don't hold it against anyone. What we teach doesn't depend on anyone approving of how we live.

If you're somewhere in the middle, uncomfortable and still curious, pay attention to that. Discomfort is where most of the good stuff in this work starts.

How we keep them separate

Infinite Devotion stays focused on the relationship. Nothing explicit lives on this site, and our emails won't send you there.

Dawn of Desire has its own home, for adults 18 and over, and you only go if you choose to. If you want to see it, this page will take you there after one honest warning.

If something stirred while you read this

Maybe you're a woman who felt a flicker of something reading Dawn's story, and shame showed up right behind it. That flicker is information. It's the part of you that got buried, still breathing. You don't need to show it to anyone to start bringing it back. You only need to stop agreeing that it's the problem.

Maybe you're a man who felt a pang of envy reading this, then judgment. Sit with the envy first. It's pointing at something you want, and the judgment was built to keep you from looking.

Either way, you can start here. Receiving To Give is where I'd send a woman. Giving To Receive is where I'd send a man. The podcast is where we talk about all of it, every week. And my book, Infinite Devotion, is the full story of how we reclaimed ourselves and set our lives free from shame.

Whatever got buried in you is still there. It's been waiting for you the whole time.