So often we consider that intimacy means sex, activity, and behavior causing us to work up a sweat, but even being close and sitting together is intimate. Holding hands can be remarkably intimate as well. In societies where the whole body is covered up only the hands and feet are visible through the clothing. Hands become much more important when your partner’s face may be partly covered by a veil.
Touching is essential to the intimate life in private and also in public as well. When there are others around you may not be able to cuddle up against each other, but you can do so in bed.
“Sleeping with someone” is the term often used to describe having genital sex with them, and for the man who has embraced male chastity this is only going to occur when his partner unlocks him, or initiates activity. But if they are still in the same bed together cuddling up against each other can feel so good.
With the outside pressures on us all the value of cuddling up in bed, one against the other cannot be overstated. There are so many options. As always you can only cuddle up to someone if they want it. You should ask first, and get consent. You should thank them for letting you do it. You should not take it for granted. Then you can have the utter pleasure of spending all night cuddled up together, or cuddle on the couch for a few minutes every evening as well.
There is little more pleasurable than waking in the night to feel your partner cuddled up against you and listening to them sleeping quietly. Of course if your partner has bad breath or body odor, or has not properly washed, or stabs you with their long toenails then it is a different matter.
The man who is in the dog house and is banished to the other side of the bed or to the floor knows that he is missing out on bodily contact and that is the issue for him even more than the hardness of the floor. The man whose partner is too hot to be touched, or who is in pain from a bodily ailment, and who cannot be cuddled up to in bed knows he is missing out, and so does she.
Cuddles are essential to intimacy, In the process of restarting intimacy they are a key element to the growth of intimacy between partners. Cuddles were what we had as children, and gave us pleasure and a knowledge that we were cared for and being held. We forget this as adults at our peril.
Consider lying facing each other, with her knees up to his groin, and his parts firm between her legs.
Consider just lying there with one hand touching the thigh of the other.
When one wants to move, they can move to another position, and over time can make the moves even in sleep, so you start in one position cuddled close, and wake in another with no knowledge of the move. Remember to thank your partner in the morning or at the end of the cuddle for allowing you to cuddle up against them and express how much you liked it.
One particularly intimate variant on cuddling is for the two to cuddle close to each other, one against the back of the other, so they can sense the movements of their breathing. Then try to synchronize the breathing pattern so both move together as one. This is one of the techniques used in Eastern tantric sex to get both “in tune” with the rhythms of each other, but irrespective of where it may lead it is such an intimate act to adjust your breathing to that of your partner.
The sharing that comes from being together, eating and drinking together, reading together, exercising together, and above all cuddling up close to each other are such powerful drivers of intimacy that they often lead further into other expressions including full genital sex. But they should not just be the prelude to other things, they can be valuable as an expression of intimacy in their own right, and are valuable as something we can do every day and night to reintroduce or grow intimacy in a relationship.
Ms. Sierra Parker 