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 to prioritize intimacy in your relationship, as well as potentially creating the conditions for responsive desire,” she said. “What’s key here, as Vanessa says, is that kissing is the main event. There is no expectation or pressure that it will lead to anything more.”
Generally speaking, scheduling time for intimacy can be a great way to make sure that it doesn’t fade away in long-term relationships, said Celeste Hirschman, a co-founder of the Somatica Institute of Sex and Relationship Coaching in San Francisco.
It might not work for everybody, though.
“For some people, scheduling intimacy can be a buzzkill because what actually turns them on is spontaneity or mystery,” Hirschman said. “Other people might not like it if they feel like it takes away from the feeling that their partner desires them.”
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If couples are going to try this, Hirschman thinks it’s great to negotiate whether they want to do it every day, or pick three days a week — or agree on any other arrangement.
And she thinks couples who are experiencing a big discrepancy in desire ― one partner has a high sex drive while the other has a relatively low one ― need to outline their expectations before they give this a trial run.
“The person with a higher sex drive would probably be happy because it might lead to sex more often, but if the other person is already having obligation sex, this can just exacerbate the problem by adding another obligation,” she said.
Marin gets that. To further decouple kissing from sex, she and her husband actually made a rule that sex was off the table for the first month, even if they were both really turned on.
“We really wanted to break that connection between making out and having sex, so there were even times in that first month where we both got turned on and we made ourselves get out of bed,” she recalled. “We’d leave the room, come back in and kind of like reset the energy just to make it super clear that’s not the point of this ritual.”
Since the video went viral, some people considering the bedtime ritual have asked Marin if there’s a time limit involved, or if it’s more improvisational.
“That was one of the big misunderstandings that a lot of people had ― they thought we were doing it for really long period of time,” she said. “I would say, on average, the longest we’re doing it is a minute, but usually it’s more like 15 seconds, 30 seconds. Like, it’s pretty brief.”
In other words, no need to set a timer ― just enjoy.
