YouTube video by Vanessa Marin (licensed psychotherapist specializing in sex) explaining why she and her husband make out every night. Marin describes a nightly makeout routine (must include some tongue contact) intended to decouple kissing from sex, reduce pressure around sexual initiation, and restore non-sexual physical intimacy in long-term relationships.
Chapters
Get ready with me while I talk about why my husband and I make out every single night. Hey there. I'm Vanessa Marin. I'm a licensed psychotherapist specializing in sex. So here's how it usually goes in long term relationships. When you first start dating each other, it's like you can't keep your hands off each other, right? You're always touching, always kissing. But the pattern for most people is that once they get into a long term relationship, they really stop touching and kissing so much. And eventually it gets to the point where the only time that you're like really, really kissing each other is when you're trying to initiate sex. But what happens for a lot of people, especially if you're the lower sex drive partner in the relationship, is that you start becoming avoidant of any sort of touch or kissing. Like if you're not wildly in the mood, you don't want your partner to kiss you and think that it's going to lead to more. Right. But this only further intensifies that connection that kissing has to or is supposed to lead to sexual. And this can even lead to what I call the bristle reaction, which is when you become so hyper vigilant to your partner's touch or kisses that you actually can feel yourself bristle whenever your partner comes in to try to make contact with you. So the intent behind our nightly makeout sessions is to actually break the connection between making out and sex. We wanted to give ourselves lots of experiences where we were making out and it wasn't leading to sex. So. So our rule is that we have to make out every single night and there has to be some tongue contact. So if we're really exhausted, it can be very fast. It doesn't need to take much time or much energy, but there has to be some contact of the tongues. Most nights though, we prefer to stretch the makeout session out to just be like a minute or two. This nightly routine has taken the pressure off of us to have to have sex if we start making out. And it's really allowed us to enjoy making out just for the sake of making out.
