Sometimes there’s nothing like a good quickie. But if it seems like your entire sex life consists of quickies and other encounters that don’t make room for foreplay, you’re really missing out. After all, foreplay is more than just an effective way to get nice and warmed up for the main event. It’s a lot of fun, as well.
In other words, it’s officially time to stop writing foreplay off as dull or rushing through it because you’re eager to get to the sex portion of the evening as quickly as possible. Here’s a closer look at some of the most important reasons why.
Foreplay gets your entire body ready for sex.
Yes, this is the case in the obvious sense in that it provides ample opportunity for a man to develop a nice, hard erection or a woman to become adequately wet, but that’s not all. Making sure to engage in plenty of foreplay before getting down to business gives your entire body a chance to become fully aroused.
Your genital region, whether you’re male or female, becomes engorged during foreplay. This helps amplify sensation and improve both partners’ chances of having a good-quality orgasm at one point or another. It gives your brain and nervous system a chance to get ready, too. In other words, foreplay is more than just something extra that helps build anticipation for sex. It makes sex itself exponentially better in many ways.
Foreplay encourages intimacy between partners.
Of course, sex in and of itself is intimate. But there’s so much about foreplay that helps build deeper intimacy between two people. For example, kissing and touching your partner helps stimulate the release of bonding hormones like oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine. It also lowers your body’s levels of stress-triggered cortisol.
This entire process helps encourage feelings of affection and euphoria in one another’s company. It’s a beautiful way to become familiar with the details of how your partner smells, tastes, and sounds when they’re deliciously aroused. If it’s been a while since you and your partner slowed down long enough to experience each other this way, there’s no time like the present to get back on the ball.
Foreplay covers a lot more ground than you think.
Although most people think of acts like kissing and touching when they picture the average foreplay session, it doesn’t have to stop at those things unless you want it to. Foreplay, by definition, is any sexually charged activity that helps trigger the physical, mental, and psychological responses that lead to arousal.
That said, it can potentially go well beyond kissing or touching. In fact, as long as whatever you’re doing is consensual for everyone involved, foreplay can be just about anything you want it to be, so start getting creative. For example, fun, flirty acts like sexting or discreetly whispered dirty talk while in public can turn foreplay into an all-day affair that will find you both counting the minutes until you’re alone together later.
Foreplay is an excellent opportunity to try new things.
Foreplay is a great point in your sexual encounter to play around with new ideas and see how they land since neither of you is probably officially on your way to orgasm yet. Try a bit of dirty talk on for size, including some back and forth about what you’d like to do to each other. Play with outfits, roleplay, light bondage, or even playful stripteases.
Foreplay is a great time to experiment with toys, too, especially if you’ve never used them together before. Options like bullet vibrators can be especially great ways to tease your bodies into arousal territory. And if you want to bring your toys along with you for the main event, that’s certainly on the menu, as well.
Foreplay can be the main event, too.
When done right and approached with enthusiasm, foreplay is anything but boring. In fact, you might find you’re enjoying yourself so much that you don’t necessarily feel the need to move on to intercourse at all. Oral and manual stimulation can be just as satisfying as any penetrative sex you’ve ever had, if not more so.
Try redefining what foreplay is to you, especially as compared to sex. Deliberately work on letting the lines blur a little and allowing things to unfold however they will. It’s a beautiful way to have genuinely primal, organic encounters that follow a rhythm and sequence all their own. You’re less likely to wind up stuck in ruts because of beliefs that sex has to be a specific thing or occur a certain way to “count.”
In other words, foreplay isn’t just a precursor to sex – a necessary task that needs to be completed before you can get to what matters. It’s part of what it means to have incredible sex. Starting to see it that way is a real game-changer.
