Keeping Long-Term Relationships Hot! (Part 2)

Touch Like You’re Madly In Love

julien haler-Body PicHow Touching

In part one, I discussed how the period of time when we’re madly in-love tends to come to an end for most couples. However, we can use the unconscious behaviors and actions that came naturally at the beginning of our relationship to keep the blaze burning over the years.

One key is to consciously choose to engage in the same type of intimate early-in-love behaviors. In my last post, I suggested that you fire it up with some liquid lip love, with luscious wet kisses.

Next on the list: the fine art of touch.

Tender Touching

Touch was your first sense, beginning while you still floated in your mama’s womb feeling held, surrounded and safe. You were already touching your own body before you even emerged.

Touch is so fundamental that without it, babies will wither and die. As grown-ups, we won’t die from touch deprivation, but we won’t be as happy and healthy as we would be if our minimum daily touch needs were met. Yet most of us are starved for this essential tactile nourishment.

For people without intimate partners, it can be challenging to get all the touching you want and need. Even people with partners may be touch deprived if we’ve allowed the frequency and the spectrum of touch to diminish.

Rodin - Eternal Spring resizeArticulate Touch

Touch is a basic form of communication—we all speak this universal tongue. It’s also one of our first languages of love, beginning with mother and infant.

At a subtle level, touch transmits intention, emotion, energy, relaxation or tension, and the rhythms of the body. If someone is touching you in a loving way with the intention of giving you pleasure, it feels very different than if they’re touching you solely for their own enjoyment. Comfort, anxiety, caring, attention and distractedness are all transmitted through physical contact.

While touch is a language everyone shares, many people are tremendously confused about the purpose and value of touch, how to share it appropriately, and how to do it masterfully. Touch is complicated, delicate territory. It’s easy to miscommunicate about it. And it’s not always easy to touch with great skill and finesse.

Whether or not a particular type of touch is pleasurable is completely subjective. For instance, the sensation of being tickled may be something you find dreadful or delightful. Personal preferences notwithstanding, when we fully activate our kinesthetic intelligence, we’re most likely to touch our partner in a way they enjoy.

Remember, though, that no one is born knowing how someone else wants to be touched. Which is why we can’t rely on touch alone. To give exquisite touch, even if we’re totally attuned, it helps to add other modes of communication like sound (“Umm!” “Aah!”), words (“More pressure, please”) and body language.

Play A Touching and Feeling Game!

Play this game in total darkness or use blindfolds. This will remove all the visual stimuli and help you focus solely on the sensations of touch.

Touch each other with full attention and awareness. Use your breath to get centered and stay present. Use sounds of pleasure to amplify the sensations and give feedback..

Alternate your attention: Shift your awareness to the part being touched, then toggle back to the part doing the touching. Imagine that you’re stroking velvet as you slide your fingertips along your partner’s skin. Focus on how lovely it feels on your palm, then toggle your attention back to your partner’s skin. Run your fingers through their hair, alternating your awareness of its texture against your fingers with attention to your partner’s pleasure in having their hair stroked. Try to balance your focus so that you’re really feeling as you touch.

After you’re done, have a chat about what happened, what worked or didn’t and what you learned.

Ask me no more....for at a touch I yield, 1886_Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrenc
The Four Languages of Touch

There are four languages of positive touch—nurturing, healing, sensual and sexual. To keep a relationship vital and satisfying, I believe we need to share all four types of touch.

Here’s a brief introduction to the spectrum of touch.

Nurturing touch transmits caring and acceptance. It’s the kind of tender touch a loving parent gives their beloved child. It helps us feel loved, valued and worthy of being loved.

The second language of touch is therapeutic touch—any form of contact that heals, eases stress, promotes well-being, repairs bodily damage, restores health or palliates pain.Eros-Psyche Bouguereau

The third language of touch is sensual touch—any form of contact designed to heighten the senses, amplify body awareness and magnify perception. Sensual touch is not explicitly erotic. While it might be a warm-up on the path to arousal and is often an excellent prelude to sexual touch, it’s not designed to be a turn-on in and of itself. Think of it as turning on the senses, not the genitals.

Last but definitely not least, there is sexual touch—any contact that arouses and stimulates. Sexual touch entices your erotic energy to come out and play. It teases, titillates, ignites and (hopefully) satisfies erotic desires.

Remember, new lovers caress, hold, rock, stroke and creatively explore all kinds of different ways to discover and delight with contact. An important strategy to sustain your relationship’s passion is to consciously incorporate all four touch vocabularies into your connections.


Want to know how to fall in love over and over again? Did you miss the first part of this series of posts? No worries — here’s Part One: Kiss Like You Mean It and Part Three: Shine the Love-Light.


Succulent_Sexcraft_Sheri_WinstonDiscover more Touching Succulence!

Sheri recent book, Succulent SexCraft: Your Hands-On Guide to Erotic Play & Practice is for singles and partners of all genders and orientations–for anyone and everyone who wants more pleasure!

Do you dream of having spectacular sex? Can you imagine becoming an erotic virtuoso? Now it’s possible with the help of Sheri Winston’s groundbreaking new book!

Visionary yet practical, Succulent SexCraft offers a detailed road map to supercharging your erotic life and becoming sexually whole and empowered. With its wealth of ideas, practices and games, you’ll be able to access extraordinary pleasure, overcome challenges and learn to play masterfully with your inner ‘sexcraft’ toolkit. It’s your personal guide to developing a healthy, celebratory and ecstatic relationship with your sexuality.


 

Keeping Long-Term Relationships Hot! Luscious Kissing (Part 1)

How to Fall In Love … Over and Over Again

Dicksee Romeo & JulietLook around at couples in any busy restaurant and you can probably tell which ones are madly and newly in love. It’s easy to recognize the telltale signs—they gaze into each others’ eyes, can’t keep their hands off each other, seem fascinated by everything their partner has to say and find opportunities to kiss.

Like other animals, our biological mating template is in full force when we connect to a special and especially delicious partner. These behaviors are the result of a biological cascade—we’re awash in a falling-in-love chemical soup. It’s a delicious, intoxicating, delirious cocktail … and it doesn’t last. For the vast majority of people, the in-loveness compounds run out within the first four years of a relationship. We can continue to experience all sorts of other forms of a love connection like caring commitment, deep attachment and special friendship. But the sparks of ardent desire usually evaporate and our burning passion cools.

What can we do to sustain or rekindle the fires of desire?

One technique is to act like you did when you first fell madly in love. Think of the in-love period as your relationship training wheels. Now, after so many years, the biological support system is gone and you’re on your own to feed the fire and keep the connection sizzling.

Act Like You’re Madly In Love

Here’s one suggestion for using the falling-in-love template to keep those hot and heady feelings alive or to revive them if they’re slumbering.

Hot Kiss

Photo See-ming Lee. CC Lic.

Kiss Like You Mean It

Remember how when you first were in love you wanted to smooch, lap up, sniff and nuzzle your lover? Can you recall the pleasures of sweet soft lips pressing together? Remember the sensations of that delicious yielding mouth slowly opening, followed by hungry exploring and some serious deep wet kissing.

Have you forgotten? Has your kiss fountain dried up and become a scarce desert of dry little pecks? When is the last time you had a hot make-out session with your long-term sweetie?

If it’s been awhile, then it’s time to put wet kissing back on your menu.

Kissing creates a sexual circuit between lovers, an intoxicating reciprocal scent and taste response loop. Arousal heightens your senses, increasing your pleasure in the flavor and aroma of your partner’s body. As you get more turned on, your arousal causes your mouth to become tastier while heightening your senses—you taste better to your lover and they to you. The more you do it, the more turned on you get, and the more delicious the kissing becomes. You’re creating a positive kissing feedback loop.

Not only is your sense of taste intermixed with your ability to smell (and get turned on by scent), but your mouth, lips and tongue are some of the most richly innervated areas of your body. That’s why licking, kissing, sucking and nibbling are such significant erotic activities. You get the delicious combination of taste, aroma and tactile delight all rolled into one delicious ball.

Gulácsy_Lajos-Ecstasy_ca_1908Biochemical Bliss

In addition, kissing mingles hormones and biochemicals in a way that not only shares but literally increases the body’s love and lust substances. You can literally taste and smell your playmate’s arousal. Arousal tastes divine!

One of the simplest ways to get some juice flowing is to take up the art of ardent kissing. Have a minimum of three ‘wet kiss dates’ a day. They can be sweet and soft gentle explorations or hungry feasts of ravenous desire. Your kiss trysts doesn’t have to be long—even a minute of serious succulent smooching will start to shift the energy from ‘ho-hum housemates’ to luscious lovers.

Put a ban on the parched pecks! Shift from dry lip skims to liquid lip love when you wake up, leave for work, come home or go to bed. Or take ‘kiss breaks’ and do a few minutes of lusty lip locking a few times a day.

There are so many ways to kiss. You can use your lips, mouth and tongue (and occasionally even your teeth) to give and receive, to be soft or fierce. Your oral equipment provides a huge variety of perfect ways to play with your lover.

Serious smooching is an easy yet powerful relationship fire-starter. It’s an intimate and inspiring way to lubricate your relationship and re-ignite your partner passion. Make time for making out!


Want more ways to keep long-term relationship hot? You can have it. Here’s Part Two: How Touching and Part Three: Shine the Love-Light


Succulent_Sexcraft_Sheri_Winston

Want even more? You can have that, too!

With Sheri’s recent book, Succulent SexCraft: Your Hands-On Guide for Erotic Play & Practice, you’ll get specialized knowledge laid out in a clear and entertaining manner, along with lots of suggestions for sexy fun, illuminating ‘playshops’ and super-useful practices.

Whatever level your sex life is at, no matter how happy (or unhappy) you are with it, Succulent SexCraft will help you take it higher!


Developing Erotic Mastery: Conscious Learning

Conscious Learning

A Tasty Little Excerpt From “Succulent SexCraft: Your Hands-On Guide to Erotic Play & Practice

In many ways, learning to expand your sexual pleasure is like learning to play a musical instrument. It’s about acquiring a set of complex skills, albeit more intimate ones. There’s one important difference, though. If you don’t know how to play the piano, you don’t feel weird, ashamed or somehow broken. Nor do you believe that everyone except you already knows how to play really well. We all understand that playing an instrument requires conscious learning and practice over time. No one is born knowing how to tickle the ivories, yet somehow we’re supposed to know how to have great sex without the benefit of lessons or teachers.

In one way, learning sex is unlike learning to play the piano. With sex, you aren’t only the musician, you’re also the instrument. In this sense, it’s more like learning to dance. Whether it’s the piano or the instrument of yourself that you’re studying, learning is required to become a skilled artist—and anyone who wants to learn, can.

“The more technique you have the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is the less there is.” — Pablo Picasso

Becoming An Erotic Virtuoso

Don’t expect to become a virtuoso overnight. Mastery takes time, energy, attention and practice. Lots of it. This is true for playing the piano and it’s true for sex, too. It’s been estimated that becoming expert at anything takes at least 10,000 hours. Luckily, since we’re talking about sex here, you’ve probably already put in quite a few hours! In addition, you have some very deep, hardwired sexual circuits that make developing your erotic proficiency much easier than mastering Mozart. This is one area of your life where you can make pretty quick progress on your learning journey once you have a guide, maps and the desire to excel.

Also bear in mind that while technique is an indispensable means to an end, erotic mastery isn’t solely about technique. Great sex isn’t about performance or ‘doing it right’—it’s a magical improvisational dance. Technique provides a foundation of embodied learning that you then use to play freely and imaginatively—it’s the underlying skill set that allows you to be fully in the moment and open to the flow. So learn your moves, practice your techniques, train your mind and body to excel—then forget all that and let passion and energy be your guide.

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