E20 Who We Are… And Why This Might Offend You

This is who we really are.
After 32 years of marriage, we’re finally saying the things most couples avoid, about intimacy, religion, connection, and what actually brings a relationship back to life.
This isn’t expert advice. This is lived experience, battle scars, and the truth most people keep to themselves.
If you’ve ever felt stuck, disconnected, or curious about what more could look like in your relationship, this is where it starts. 

 #UndressedConversations #MarriageTruth #RealRelationships #IntimacyMatters #LoveUnfiltered 

⭐ About Undressed Conversations

We’re Mark and Tonya, high school sweethearts married for 30 years. After decades of trying to fit into roles that weren't ours, we finally dropped the masks and started telling the truth about marriage, intimacy, shame, healing, and what it actually takes to stay connected for life. Our goal is simple, to help couples build relationships that feel alive again.

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Website: https://undressedconvesation.com

Email Us: stories@undressedconversation.com


🔒 Join the After Hours Vault

Welcome to the deeper, unfiltered side of Undressed Conversations.
Our private membership includes extended episodes, intimate conversations, behind-the-scenes moments, and the stories we can’t share publicly.
The Vault opens soon. 


🛍️ Our Favorite Things

We share only items we genuinely use and love.



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⚠️ Disclaimer

We share personal experiences and opinions. This content is not professional medical, psychological, legal, or therapeutic advice. Viewer discretion is advised for mature topics.

Support the show

Want more? Watch clips, follow us everywhere, and join After Hours: vault.UndressedConversation.com

Support the show

Want more? Watch clips, follow us everywhere, and join After Hours: vault.UndressedConversation.com

Support the show

Want more? Watch clips, follow us everywhere, and join After Hours: vault.UndressedConversation.com

Support the show

Want more? Watch clips, follow us everywhere, and join After Hours: vault.UndressedConversation.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You may have heard of us on Strictly Anonymous. We were episode 1405, I believe. Yeah. And so a lot of you are trying to figure out exactly who Mark and Tanya Olsen are and what Undressed Conversations is. And so we figured we would take about 15 minutes to tell you exactly who we are. So thank you, Kathy Kay, for the huge exposure to what we do and what we're about. And what we're going to do is we'll tell you a little bit about what we are, kind of our story arc as far as our marriage is concerned, how we have 32 years of history, and then kind of what our podcast is about and why we started that up. Yeah. But before we do that, what we want to invite you guys to do is follow us on all the socials. We're getting ready to release the vault, which is where we have extra content. We'll be putting out uh the yes no maybe quiz. We've got a way to put that out. And if you want to sign up for that, those announcements will be made on places like YouTube. TikTok is a great place if you just like to be entertained.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

We're also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

And please, if you are a Apple Podcast listener or Spotify listener, please click the follow button. That certainly helps us out. It lets those platforms know that what we're doing matters.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

And we do check our messages. So if you have any comments or questions or anything, send us a message on any of those platforms.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

So now that we've invited you to continue to join us, if this is your type of material, let's tell them a little bit about what we do and how we got started. We started dating in 1994. We did. And took us three months to kiss.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

It did. No, no, no. It took you three months to kiss me.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

That's what I just said.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

I'm saying it's your fault.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Oh, oh. She's squarely placing the blame on me. So it took me three months to kiss her. It took us another probably year or better to have any kind of actual intimacy. We did. Although we did some things leading up to that. We were we were froggy, even though I was raised LDS, Mormon, whatever you want to call it. Um that's the religion of my youth. And about the time I met you, I was really falling away.

unknown 2:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

We spent, uh let's see, so in 1997 we got married.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

We did.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Uh as freshmen, like after our first year of college. First year of college, yeah. And then spent uh a few years together, getting to know each other, traveling, just sort of moving for work and stuff, and just trying to figure out what we wanted to do with life.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Went to college, we did that. Was a manager of a CarQuest for a few uh for a year exactly, assistant manager prior to that. And then moved right back to Wyoming and started some businesses and did that. Yes. In 2005, we decided to introduce our first child, and that is probably about the place the brakes got put on our intimate life.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

I would say that's that's kind of that was a big urge. Two years later, after being inactive from the age of 15 all the way up until about 30, two years later in 2007, um late 2007, early 2008, I got reactive in the Mormon LDS church. Yeah. And that was like a second break check for the intimate life.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

Yeah, let's put those brakes on.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

So from about 2008, I would say, until 2018, when we just kind of got worn out of the boredom and started playing a little bit more, bringing play back into our intimacy, things were pretty dead.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Well, and let's also mention that between 2008 and 2018, we also introduced two more children. One in 2008, one in 2010. So we had three small children in that time too.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Yeah, but that period from 2008 during those young child rearing, that's that's when we didn't date as much. We didn't do those things.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

So we still did. We dated, but not like we should have.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Fast forward to 2020, we find out that a bunch of the information uh we find out basically that the religion that I had grown up and known my whole life, whether I was in it or out of it, and then the one that had shaped my sexual beliefs, was um, let's just say not exactly honest with me.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Right.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

And so that shook my faith, and I ended up leaving the religion. And at the same time, because TikTok was helping me learn more information about my religion, it was also showing me other content, trying to figure out who I was, and what do you know? I stumble on some adult content TikTok where they start talking about non-monogamous relationships. And that leads me to read a bunch of books, and in 2021 is when our more exciting but still very tame lifestyle started. As we have described to many other people, Tanya is still um the love of my life. Yes, I am still her one and only. I am the only person she's ever been with, and she prides herself in that. But we do love to be in sexy environments, so we absolutely love that. We're talking about that. We talk about how that brought the spark back to our marriage and how we navigate all of that stuff. It's not really um I don't think this is anywhere where we talk about a swingers podcast because that's not what it is. We do visit clubs, we do all a lot of the things and that are parallel in the lifestyle, but we are on the much more mild side of it, I would say. This is much more about helping couples reconnect with each other after years of struggle and raising kids and careers and everything else gets in the way.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

Well, and I think the a key point here is the fact that we have had a number of people come to us and because our I don't want to say our marriage is overly successful, but we have a we have a really good marriage. And we've had a number of people come to us and inquire about how they can get their marriage to that point.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Well, people have watched us, and so this came about because as I'm getting past one career and feeling a pull into a different direction, this opened up, and it was something that we've always really enjoyed is talking to people about how to stay in love. Because even though those years weren't our best intimately, we were still very connected, very much in love, and I would not consider any of those years terrible years. It's not at all to say either that like the Nebraska year, uh, should do a very good show on that sometime, but that was hard, and it was those years that almost broke us. Yeah, there was probably three or four different times, and you can go back into some of the earlier episodes that we've recorded on YouTube and Apple Podcasts or wherever, starting at episode one, and start learning a little bit more about us and how we've gotten to where we are. Yeah. Some of the things we may journey into are the use of psychedelics and things like psilocybin to help repair and recover from traumatic and emotional damage caused by early abuse. Well, which is also part of my story. A lot of this you can get brushed up on on TikTok because we've got a lot of stuff, you know, in the last few months. We've put a lot of stuff out there and it's it's there. But we've tried to keep it fun.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

We are not counselors, we're not therapists, we are not licensed in any sort.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

We have a lot of battle scars. That's what we're gonna share is the bottle scars that led us to where we are, because you don't get to see the years of fighting through the trenches. What you get to see on the other side, and what you're seeing now is the years of fighting. Just like starting a podcast, you don't see all the years of struggle that people like whistling diesel and all these people that we watch and we aspire to be like, we don't see the years of struggle they put in. It's humble, it's meager, and you just put the work in, and then later on you look back and you say, Wow, we built this great big thing, and it didn't really feel like work. That's what we want people to do with marriage because it's just as easy as that, and that's what we're doing with our podcast. So that's why we ask you again. We are a teeny tiny little channel, and if you would possibly share this content if it's changed your life or helped you in any way, and subscribe to what we're doing, we certainly appreciate those things. Tell them, Tanya, one reason that they should tune in every week to see what we have to say.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

I think the the main thing I would tell you is that we are raw and we're honest, and this comes from just the depth of our heart. We really enjoy helping people and we really just want to get stuff out there to see if people can live better lives and have better intimacy.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

And we don't want to just continue to regurgitate the same old tired stuff that comes out of religious institutions that is not helping anybody because what we found is the audience that we have is largely still very religious and still struggling through this, and I know a lot about that just from my own personal experience. And we'll share those stories all coming up. Now, we don't just want to share our stories. We would like to build this into a podcast where we could actually have some guests and call-ins and some other interaction because what we really want to do is get stories from other people. We want to get stories from the couples that are still in the trenches and fighting through the dead bedrooms, and we want to talk to the couples that are in the middle of it and seeing some light at the end of the tunnel, and we want to talk to the couples that are successful at this to ask them what they do differently.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

So if you're one of those couples, please send us an email or a message on TikTok or Facebook or any of the platforms that we're on. We'd love to hear from you.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

You can send us any fan mail. If you go to our podcast link, you can follow that and send us mail there. You can send mail to stories at undressed conversation.com. Make sure it's singular. I will give that again. It is stories at undressconversation.com, and we would be very happy to answer your questions and take your suggestions if you have a great topic, something else. This is a show where we want to talk about the things that interest you. There's a lot of things we don't know, and sometimes we need to do some research. And a good question we don't know the answer to is an opportunity to do research.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

So that's a little bit about us and our 32-year-year history together. We hope to be able to help you out in marriage and intimacy and help revive your sex life or provide some insight. Even if you're more advanced, you might get some tips and tricks that just keep things really, really interesting.

SPEAKER_01 10:25

Very interesting.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

And we'll share some of those tips and tricks on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok about the things that we love because there are several things that we've added over the years, and we try new things all the time. Sometimes we're happy to try something, so you don't have to.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

Right. And sometimes we have successes, but sometimes we have failures.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

You want to know an example of a failure for us? CNC.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

No.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

No, thank you. Sounded super hot, super terrible for us.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

Not good.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

But it did sound.

SPEAKER_01 10:57

It sounded fun. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

That's in the nope category now.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

But we you know, the thing is you don't know until you try.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

And that's why you have things like the yes no maybe quiz. So drop us a comment down below if you would like us to email that to you. Or just send us a message with your email on whatever platform you got this from. Again, the email is stories at undressconversation.com. You can email us, we'll email you out that yes no maybe quiz. And that's just a really good tool to help these people start having a conversation about the things that they mutually agree upon. Now, the other thing we need to tell them is we didn't invent that quiz.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

No, no, we we actually got that quiz from for the love of it in Wenatchee, Washington.

SPEAKER_00 11:42

Lalani and Jake, they're a couple that runs that store, does an amazing job of it, have amazing shipping on their website. So if you get any good information out of that, there will be a logo on the back of that. Please make sure that you check that out and go to FTLOI.net and check out their huge selection of marital aids and enhancers.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

Yes. So it's amazing. My name is Tanya.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

And I'm Mark. And we invite you to always stay undressed.