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Relationship closeness promotes desirable health outcomes. Most interventions to increase relationship closeness are verbal, which may not suit all couples. We consider whether Orgasmic Meditation OM , a structured, partnered, largely non-verbal practice that includes genital touch, also increases relationship closeness. We hypothesized that OM would increase feelings of closeness for both romantic and non-romantic partners.
This is important, because intimate touch with non-romantic partners is commonly considered deleterious by clinicians, which may inadvertently increase feelings of shame.
Approximately half of the participants were romantic partners, while the other half only engaged in OM together non-romantic. Closeness after OM increased on average across participants. Non-romantic dyads increased self-other overlap more than romantic dyads. These data support that a partnered, largely non-verbal practice is associated with increased feelings of closeness in the moment, including for individuals who are not in a romantic relationship.
It may be intuitive to think that sexual touch could increase relationship closeness. The literature on romantic relationships is fairly uniform in this regard, whereas the literature on the average effects of consensual sexual touch in non-romantic relationships is more mixed. Here, we consider whether this variation may be mitigated by context by examining uniformity of effects on relationship closeness across romantic versus non-romantic relationships in a specific safe practice involving structured, sexual touch devoid of many of the other uncontrolled aspects of usual sexual interactions, such as professing love.
