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Why Intimacy Breaks Down in Modern Relationships | Caitlin V | Ep. 427
19 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What do intimacy coaches do and why is the term sensitive?
What do you tell people you do for a living?
Well, it depends on the context.
Random, you're at a dinner with people you don't know.
So I will sometimes say I'm an intimacy coach or a relationship coach.
Do you go right out with that or do you start with an educator?
Yeah. No, no, no. I like to tell people that I'm a coach because that really is the best term that describes what I do. Okay. I learned early on in my career that when you say sex coach, certain people have like an automatic response. It doesn't even feel voluntary. They just have like a disgust response almost to the fact that sex has been done.
Do those people not have sex?
No. of course they have sex.
Then why do they have such a response?
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Chapter 2: How do societal perceptions affect discussions about sex?
I... So there's a couple of things that happened. I figured out how to have an orgasm early on in life, like completely naively, innocently, like a lot of people do. I figured out how to give my body pleasure. And then when I got to the age where sex ed became a thing, I started learning about what that all meant. And that conversation turned towards avoiding pregnancy and avoiding disease.
I had the natural inclination of like, but that's not what I've experienced. Like, this is a cool thing that your body's capable of doing. Why aren't we talking about the pleasure aspect of that?
Oh, that's not part of the traditional curriculum.
No, and I felt people were really being robbed of that part of the conversation, which is sort of like teaching driver's ed, but only teaching about accidents, right? Driving can be so pleasurable. It also gets you from point A to point B. It's like an incredible experience that you could have for pleasure as well. we don't just focus on accidents because that's not why people drive.
So I had this sense that my peers were sort of being robbed of the main point of sex in sex ed, but I knew even before I'd ever had sex, and nothing traumatic happened to me, I didn't have a bad experience early on, I just knew this is what I was gonna do for a living.
It took me a while to figure out exactly how because I didn't know that you could really get a degree and work one-on-one with people outside of therapy. And I knew I didn't want to be a therapist. Like I wanted to help people. I wanted to educate. My mission from early on in life has been get quality sexual education that is pleasure centric out to as many people as possible.
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Chapter 3: What role does effective communication play in relationships?
So what was sex ed like?
Not legitimately. I remember two, like clearly I can remember two separate times. One was in eighth grade. One was in like freshman or sophomore year. In eighth grade, they actually didn't separate boys and girls. And a lady came in and she just basically explained.
You're good. Keep going.
Basically just explained sex. And then she actually, if I'm remembering correctly, she didn't even teach abstinence only. She was like, hey, this is what it is. These are the consequences. It was actually pretty neutral.
When you explain sex, you mean like physiologically? Like this is technically what meets?
Yes. She's like, this is technically what sex is. Got it. And kind of explained pros, cons. Sounds like a riveting class. It was actually very neutral. It's surprising for Butte, Montana was very neutral and just kind of threw it out there. And then in my high school class, it went deeper into actual anatomy. And so it was like kind of sex ed, but more like a physiology type thing.
Is that even really sex ed? I mean, what are you educating the audience with? I would like to think education prepares you for something you might encounter later in life. That description, what does that...
And if that were the case, I would say then communication has to be the primary thing that you teach in sex ed.
I would have to agree.
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Chapter 4: How can past experiences shape our current relationships?
They just use it to get your attention and then they slide the car in and hope that you buy.
Right. But if you're sexually satisfied and happy, I don't know that that works on you.
I don't think it would. The better you know yourself, I think the less the outside manipulation or malleability actually occurs. I don't really know a lot of people who went to religious schooling. Do you have any idea what they teach in sex ed? I feel like there's a little bit more of a shame aspect or abstinence or you're going to hell. And again, I want people to believe whatever they want to.
I'm just curious what that experience is like.
Yeah.
People who grow up, whether that's religious school or like in a highly religious or a household that like had a more strict view of a religious view of sexuality, tend to experience more shame and they tend to actually they will self-identify as having problems with sex and sexuality more often than folks who didn't.
And the best place to look at that is people who report to be addicted to porn are overwhelmingly people from a religious background, specifically men from a religious background. Because folks who didn't grow up feeling that sexuality was shameful or that maybe even porn or masturbation was bad, don't tend to self-identify as being addicted to it.
It is those folks who's, because think about like how much, how much energy there is behind doing something that you're not supposed to be doing, how much shame, how much that's kink, right? Like that is a definition of kink. It's just not conscious kink. It's an unconscious kink to do something that you feel you're not supposed to be doing.
And then to feel like you have a compulsion towards doing that, like you're not in control of yourself doing that. All of that is really like comes from a reading of sexuality that is based in a religious upbringing more often than not.
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges of online dating in modern relationships?
He's lying about that, I think. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. We did it. We're into 2026 through the holiday season. And if you're anything like me, especially in years past, you know, the holidays can be a little bit rough. There's stress, there's buildup, there's anxiety, and there's no better time to check under the hood to see how you're doing than in January.
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Chapter 6: How do societal expectations influence intimacy?
That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P, Hotel Echo Lima Papa dot com slash ClearedHop. Back to the show.
He went to Japan and took pictures of architecture. Here's your question. How many women did you talk to? Yeah. A handful.
Yeah, but I know you're lying, though, because you're embarrassed to say zero.
No, I legitimately did talk to a half a woman. Now, was it an actual conversation? No, not really. It was like a server. But I did talk to a woman. That's good.
Did you talk to any other people that were tourists or like women that were expats?
I talked to other people, like a couple other people. I generally don't really like talking to new people anyways. So I'm just kind of cute to myself. But yeah, I talked to a few other people.
Really good way to develop a social circle.
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Chapter 7: What role does vulnerability play in relationships?
Yeah, social circle in a different country of people I'll never see again.
That's what the Internet's for. You could FaceTime them. Checkmate.
Yeah, I don't really want to do that.
So what he is describing, though, I've also seen some stats not only around. And I mean, again, he Michael and I know each other really well. People think I give him a hard time, which is 100 percent accurate. I'm trying to forge him into a weapon that he doesn't even understand the lethality that he'll have. He's going to crush the world at some point after he's not 23 anymore. But it's.
I, we, and we've talked about relationship stuff off air and obviously I'll leave that stuff off air, but I've also seen stats that are showing men of his age are, that's a little bit more of the trend. And also young men and women are avoiding engaging in sexual activity. And what do you think that is? What do you think that's about?
Well, I think that online dating has made a pretty significant shift in the way that people meet each other. And there's been some positives that have come from that, and there's been a lot of negatives that have come from the shift towards online dating. Because when you meet someone in person, you have a chance to actually see them in motion.
Your nose actually responds much faster to a person than your eyes do.
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Chapter 8: How can couples improve their communication and intimacy?
You actually get information. Yeah, because your nose developed first. So it's older technology. And your nose also will tell you so much more about whether or not a person is a good genetic match for you to mate with, right? Which may or may not mean that they're a great partner for you, but they will let you know that there is attraction there, right?
Your eyes, which are younger in evolution, they will tell you whether or not you're physically attracted to another person, right? But they can't tell you if the two of you are going to have like any sort of chemistry in the same way that your nose can and in the same way that interacting with someone in a physical space can. I learned how to partner dance in the last couple years.
I learned how to swing dance. And you can pick up so much about a person from partner dancing with them. The way that they move and they engage, like so much more than you can get from just having a conversation. And certainly so much more than you can get from a photograph, right? So when we're dating online,
we're choosing people with our eyes and we're not choosing them based off of like how they actually move into space and do they make us laugh and how do they smell we're choosing them based on like five to seven images that they curated and a handful of words and then online dating becomes a very very miserable game that people are playing and they feel like it's just a numbers game because it sort of is how many times you have to roll the dice on someone that you
that looks attractive to you before you find someone who smells attractive to you, who your body actually feels good around, who you have chemistry with. And so people burn themselves out. They go on 50 or 100 dates to find one person that they want to go on more than one date with.
That sounds exhausting.
It is. It is exhausting. And I'm saying this, like having, having had very limited experience with it, all of my partners, my significant relationships I met online or met, I met in person rather, not really spend a lot of time online dating because every time I've tried it in my past, I've gone, oh, this is this, the juice is not worth the squeeze on how much effort this takes.
And that's for me.
Yeah. What did you describe it as Michael? The last time you described online dating?
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