A few years back, sex therapist Vanessa Marin and her husband of 13 years, Xander, initiated a bedtime policy in their marriage: Before they fell asleep every night, they vowed to make out.
As Marin explained in a viral TikTok video last year, the couple had started to experience a rough patch when it came to physical affection. While the earlier days of their relationship were marked by “wild, passionate make-out sessions,” the urge was mostly gone now. And whenever they’d kiss, it felt to Marin like a lead-up to sex, which she wasn’t always in the mood for.
“I was also noticing that I had developed something that I call ‘the bristle reaction’ in my therapy sessions,” Marin told HuffPost. “I was bristling whenever Xander was trying to have physical contact.”
Marin genuinely wanted to be physically affectionate with her husband, though, so she made a modest proposal: What if they made out every night? It didn’t have to be for long ― on nights when they were especially tired, even just five or 10 seconds would do ― but there did have to be tongue. (What good is making out without a little tongue action?)
“Most nights, though, we prefer to stretch the make-out session out” to one or two minutes, Marin said in her video, which has over 8.4 million views today.
The intent of the nightly make-out sessions was to break the connection between making out and sex, so that touching didn’t automatically lead to bristling.
“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,” Marin said in the clip.
How’s it going a year after the video went viral? Marin said she and her husband still do it every single night, with two exceptions.
“The only exceptions have been if one of us is sick ― we’re not trying to pass germs around, so we don’t do it then ― or if we’re really at odds with each other,” she said.
“We don’t force ourselves to do it, but those times are pretty rare, and actually, knowing that we have this little tradition kind of helps us smooth over a lot of arguments,” said Marin, the author of “Sex Talks: The Five Conversations That Will Transform Your Love Life.”
Megan Fleming, a New York City sex therapist, likes how the exercise focuses on kissing, a highly underestimated item in the toolbox of intimacy.
“Enjoying short and intentional kisses and making that a priority is a way…
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