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Keeping Relationships Hot! Shine the Love-Light (Part 3)

Keeping Long-Term Relationships Hot!

Guerin, Pierre-Narcisse - Venus et AdonisShine the Love-Light (Part 3)

Opening the Windows

In part one, we covered kissing and in part two, touching like you did when you first fell in love can sustain the heat and turn-on your turn-up even in long-term relationships. Here, I offer one more area to explore: shining your love-light onto and into each other.

Seeing Into the Other

Eye-gazing is a powerful way to connect. Cliché though it is, the eyes really are like portals that allow us to see into the heart (and possibly the soul) of another. They show our true feelings, vulnerabilities and desires.

It’s not always easy to eye-gaze, though. Looking deeply into another’s eyes can be dauntingly intimate. You need courage to show up fully and stay present, to see and be seen.

When we’re first enamored of another, we tend to gaze deeply into their eyes, beholding the wonder of our beloved. Wanting to eye-gaze comes naturally, but it tends to be limited to those times when our love hormones are in overdrive. As the years go by, most couples spend less and less time looking into each other with wondrous love. Or, if we do look, it’s not with the open-hearted delight and passion that earlier overflowed through our eyes and face and heart. The result is less intimacy and connection.

New lovers don’t need to set aside special time to use their eyes to pour their love into their mates, but if we’ve been together for a while, we’ve probably fallen out of this habit. Help yourselves fall back in love, by remembering to look at your partner, with love, throughout your regular interactions. Make giving a loving look a regular and frequent occurrence.

In addition to making love-looks an ongoing habit, you can also set aside time for eye-gazing practices as another way to increase the flow of heart-energy between you.

Eye-Gazing Galore

Here are a few suggestions for some simple eye-gazing practices.

  • Get into a comfortable aligned position where you can easily look into each other’s eyes. Lay side-by-side or sit facing each other in chairs or have one partner straddle the other’s lap.
  • Decide which eye will be the focus of your gazes. One particularly useful trick is to look into each other’s non-dominant eye, which is theoretically more connected to emotional state. Look into each other’s eyes. Allow your gaze to be soft and relaxed. Let your gaze softly focus, resting on one eye. Try to avoid switching from one eye to the other or glancing at their mouth.
  • Simply look into each other’s eyes, breathe and be. Relax into the experience.
  • To make sure your gaze is filled with love, it can be helpful to silently say loving things like “I love you” as you look. Try doing that and notice how your heart expands as you repeat loving words and how more love-light shines out.
  • The more love you feel, the more you give, the more loved your partner feels, the more they give, creating a positive love loop between you.

Oh, Babypicasso-maternite-1905

Another practice is to see your partner as if they were a shining newborn baby. Imagine seeing your sweetie with the love, delight and open-hearted joy that greets a new and beloved child.

You Are Divine

One more option is to consciously imagine that you’re seeing the Divine in them.
To expand this practice, try to coordinate your breathing, so that you’re both in the same rhythm. As you sync up your breathing pattern, it often becomes easier to stay in a tranced out, heart-centered love space.

Let There Be Love

Incorporating the actions of new lovers into the habits of long-term ones is crucial to keeping our love luscious. The actions are simple: looks of love, sweet deep kisses and tender touches. Remembering to do these simple actions isn’t so simple. The new love biochemicals aren’t there to drive our impulses toward intimacy. To create sustained ardor, we must call on our conscious choice and our intention. When we add these sorts of fuel to our fires, they can burn on, and falling in love can be transformed into a sustainable life of living in love.

Want more long-term love lessons? You got it! Here’s Part One: Kiss Like You Mean It and Part Two: How Touching

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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.


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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


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