Sex therapist Vanessa Marin explains the bristle reaction, when your body tenses up at your partner's touch. Three fixes: tell them what touch you like, add more casual touching during the day, and be direct when you want sex instead of waiting for them to initiate.
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Get unready with me while I share three ways to overcome the bristle reaction. Hi, I'm Vanessa, I'm a sex therapist and I came up with the term bristle reaction to describe that feeling when your partner comes in to just give you a hug, a kiss, maybe even just touch you and you feel your whole body bristle up in reaction to that. I made a different video all about it. You can scroll back if you want to learn more. But this video we're going to talk about three ways to overcome it. The first thing to do is make sure your partner understands how you like and don't like to be touched. This might sound really straightforward, but most couples have never had this conversation. And your partner might be shocked to know that the ways that they're reaching out to touch you are actually not your favorites. I wrote a book called Sex Talks. There's an exercise in it called making your touch maps that you and your partner can do together. But you can also just have a conversation about this. The second thing is to have more non sexual touch throughout the day. So if the only time you and your partner are touching each other is in the lead up to sex, of course you're going to create this connection that touch is supposed to lead to sex and you're going to bristle up if your partner touches you in moments that you don't want to have sex. So a great thing to do is to make sure that you are touching each other more throughout the day. And again, that's why you want to know what your favorite and least favorite ways of being touched are. You can even come up with a little name for this for a temporary period of time if it helps you try this out, like actually tell your partner, okay, this is our non sexual touch time, or come up with a cute little nickname that you guys can laugh about together. And the third thing is to be more direct when you're actually initiating sex and ask your partner to be more direct too. So we can create the bristle reaction in our relationships when we try to initiate in these really roundabout ways like trying to extend, extend a kiss for a little bit longer or just hold on to a hug for a little bit longer. So this is another one where doing it for a temporary period of time can be really beneficial. You can make an agreement with your partner that you're only going to initiate sex verbally for a short period of time. So you give your body some time to relax and realize that when your partner wants sex, they're going to tell you they're not just going to touch you. The bristle reaction can take a little bit of time to undo, especially if it's something that you've been experiencing for a long period of time. But it so worth it to undo. So let me know in the comments down below which of these three tips you think would be most helpful in your relationship.
