Couples Who Never Forget To Do This After Breakfast Stay Madly In Love, According To Research
Cuddling after breakfast can elevate your marriage.
Vadislav Nikonov | Unsplash Sure, there’s no one right way to cuddle. Men can be little spoons, women can be jetpacks, and everyone gets a shoulder to rest their heads on. But there are smart cuddling strategies and strategic times to employ them for healthy relationships, and experts agree.
For instance, relationship therapist Sarah Hunter Murray maintains that married couples often short-change themselves by only cuddling before or after being intimate.
“Given how common it is for couples to experience intimate desire at different times, cuddling allows for another way to get close and experience an intimate connection when intimacy isn’t necessarily on the table,” Murray, author of the book Not Always in the Mood, explained.
According to research, couples who cuddle after breakfast stay madly in love.
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Cuddling often gets conflated because it releases oxytocin, a hormone that promotes bonding, and like being intimate, cuddling can lower blood pressure, ease pain, and increase intimate and life satisfaction.
“If every time we cuddle it turns to being intimate, we may start pulling back from cuddling if we aren’t sure we are in the mood to avoid giving our partner the impression intimacy is on the table, so to speak,” she adds. “Then we lose out on all the other benefits cuddling provides.”
Cuddling does not have to be romantic, let alone physical. Cuddling with children is crucial for parent-child bonding, for instance.
Research has shown that physically embracing can benefit our well-being, whether romantic or not because it releases endorphins.
Although cuddling can be beneficial even when done platonically, when cuddling happens in romantic relationships, it can benefit the relationship in several important ways.
Cuddling is versatile, but just like couples can get complacent when it comes to the restaurants they eat at or the intimate position they try, they can get stuck in a rut of only cuddling with each other when they’re in the mood. But there’s more to good cuddling than merely separating it from intimacy.
Registered nurse James Cobb says couples should be careful about wrapping their legs around their partners in the spooning position, because “that can lead to back pain in certain positions.”
Keeping the goals of a cuddle session clear can also help. “If the goal is sleep, lights should go off or the room should be darkened,” Cobb says. “If it’s an after-breakfast cuddle, perhaps a time limit should be considered.”
In any case, good communication is crucial to good cuddling. “Just because we see a cuddle session one way doesn’t mean our partner is interpreting the interaction the same,” Murray says. Cuddling can be quiet, without being silent.
The most obvious way parents can make non-intimate cuddling a priority is by making it a family ritual.
This can help moms and dads remember what’s so great about cuddling, even when the kids are killing the mood. That way, even when they are too exhausted for actual intimacy, parents can stay close. And then, when the lights go out and the kids go to sleep…
Lauren Vinopal is a freelance journalist who writes about health and science. She is a staff writer for MEL Magazine and has appeared in MTV News, Vice, GQ, and more.