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I got an email from a listener a little while ago, and I want to tell you about it, because she asked a question nobody asks out loud.

She and her husband both listen. He listens during his work commute. And then she wrote this: there is so much talk about getting wives to like sex more. How about one on getting husbands to like kissing again?

Their sex life is good. He just doesn’t enjoy kissing. She said part of it is sensory. But even when that isn’t the issue, what she gets is a brief peck. She misses the kissing from when they were dating.

And then she wrote, and “I know I’m not the only one.”

She’s not the only one. Not even close.

So let me start with a couple whose version of this is the one I hear most.

The peck

Elise and Declan have been married fourteen years. Their sex life is good, and both of them would tell you so.

Declan comes home. Elise is at the counter. He gives her a little peck on the mouth and goes to change out of his work clothes.

Elise is left standing there wanting. The peck feels like something he does on his way through the room, one more thing to get through before he changes his clothes.

She misses being kissed like he desires her. That kiss tells her nothing about how much he loves her, or how much he wants her. It tells her he’s home. She has been left with that feeling every time he walks in the door for eleven years.

When they’re having sex, he kisses her, some. Mostly at the start. Once things get going, his mouth is other places, and then it’s over.

Elise brought it up once, maybe four years ago. She said she missed making out. Declan laughed and said making out is what you do when you can’t have sex. Then he said, we have sex, why would we make out?

She hasn’t brought it up since. She has thought about it probably a thousand times.

Here is what she has been telling herself in those four years. He isn’t attracted to me anymore. He wants the sex, he doesn’t want me. If he wanted me he’d want to kiss me.

Declan has no idea any of that is happening.

I’m going to come back to them. But first I want to go through how a marriage ends up there, because neither one of them did anything unusual.

Why kissing stops

There are nine reasons why kissing stops, and it is almost never just one reason.

1. Kissing gets absorbed into the sexual script. This is the most common one I see with individuals and couples. Somewhere along the way, kissing stopped being its own thing and became the first step of a sequence. Kiss, touch, sex. The steps got welded together. So a real kiss now means sex is starting.

No one sits down and decides this. It gets built by accident, usually out of efficiency. You have small children and twenty minutes and you are both tired, so you skip the parts that are not strictly necessary and go to the part you both came for. That is a reasonable decision on a Tuesday night. Make it two hundred times and it stops being a decision and becomes the way things work at your house.

And once that’s true, two things follow. Kissing outside of sex disappears, because it doesn’t have a job anymore. And kissing inside of sex gets short, because you’re already headed somewhere and the mouth is in the way.

What that costs you is the entire middle. A lot of marriages end up with two settings. There is a peck, which means nothing, and there is sex. Nothing lives in between.

That is hard on both of you, in opposite directions. If you are the spouse who wants sex less often, you no longer have any way to be physically warm toward your spouse without it reading as an offer. So you get careful. You stop reaching for them, because reaching starts something.

And if you are the spouse who wants sex more often, you can feel that carefulness. You notice the little bit of bracing when you come up behind them at the sink. So you start holding back too, because you would rather not be the person who is always asking.

Two people who both want to be touched, touching each other less every year, and neither of them has done anything wrong.

There is one more cost here, and it shows up in the bedroom. When kissing gets trimmed out of sex for efficiency, sex gets shorter and more goal-focused. I’ll come back to this later, but there is research connecting how much kissing happens during sex to whether wives are able to orgasm. So the sex often gets worse too, and most couples never trace that back to the kissing.

2. The kiss became a question. If you are the spouse who wants sex less often, this one is brutal. If every real kiss means sex is being initiated, then every real kiss requires an answer. Yes, or no, or not tonight. So you start turning your face. You start making it quick. You still want to kiss your spouse. You are just tired of having to decide.

And your spouse reads that as rejection. You are dodging a question. What your spouse hears is an answer about himself or herself.

3. One of you has been touched all day and has nothing left. This is usually the mother of small children, though not always. She has been nursed on, climbed on, carried, and hung off of since six in the morning. Somebody has had a hand on her body for fourteen straight hours.

By nine at night her skin is done. Touch has been a job all day, and now here comes one more person who wants something from her body.

So he gets the peck. And he reads it as she is not attracted to me anymore, when what is actually happening is that she has nothing left to give anybody through her skin today.

This one does not get solved with a conversation about kissing. It is a capacity problem, and capacity gets rebuilt by giving her some hours where nobody is allowed to touch her at all. It also helps enormously for both of you to understand that this is a season, and that a season is not a verdict on your marriage.

And if you are the husband here, one of the most useful things you can offer is touch that asks for nothing whatsoever. A hand on her back on the way past. No follow-up. She will start to relax when her body stops bracing for what comes next.

4. There is something unresolved between you. Sometimes the kissing stopped because one of you is angry, and neither of you has said so.

Your mouth is honest in a way the rest of you is not. It is very hard to kiss somebody warmly while you are quietly keeping score about what they said in March, or about the thing they have promised to handle four times now. So you don’t. You give them a peck, which is exactly as warm as you actually feel, and you both go on with the evening.

This never gets announced. There is no conversation where somebody says, I am withholding kissing until you apologize. It just quietly happens, and then a year goes by.

I bring this up because nothing else in this episode will help you if this is what is going on at your house. You can slow down, soften your mouth, take sex off the table, and none of it will touch a resentment you have been carrying for years.

If that is you, the work is not kissing. The work is saying the thing you have not said. And that part is yours. Your spouse cannot go first on a conversation they do not know they are supposed to be having.

5. Nobody ever taught them how, and the culture we grew up in taught them the opposite. A lot of us grew up hearing about necking and petting. And they were always said as a warning, as the thing that would get you into trouble if you didn’t stop it in time.

Necking was the cliff. Kissing was where it started, and once you were kissing, you were already close to the edge. Don’t get carried away. Don’t let it go too far. Keep your standards. So kissing became the thing you had to pull yourself back from, and the skill we all practiced was stopping.

Then you get married, and the assumption is that a switch flips. For a lot of people it never flips. They got very good at shutting a kiss down before it went anywhere, and years later they are still shutting it down, in their own bed, with their own spouse.

6. Kissing used to be the furthest you could go. This one I believe is bigger than most people realize. For many of us, the kissing we remember from dating was electric partly because it was the furthest we were allowed to go. Everything we felt for that person had one place to land, and it landed there.

Then you get married, and kissing is not the furthest you can go anymore. Everything that used to have nowhere else to go now has somewhere else to go. So kissing stops carrying what it carried, and neither of you can work out why it feels so different than it used to.

7. Sensory reasons, which are real. The listener who wrote in named this one herself. Her husband has a genuine aversion to certain tastes and smells. That is not an excuse he’s making. Some people have significant sensory sensitivity, around texture, taste, wetness, breath, all of it.

The mistake couples make here is treating it as a referendum on the marriage. It usually isn’t. It’s a logistics problem that has been mistaken for a rejection problem.

8. It might be your breath.

This is the one nobody wants me to say, and I’m going to say it anyway, because I would rather you hear it from me than never hear it at all.

Sometimes a spouse stops kissing because kissing you is genuinely unpleasant. Chronic bad breath. Teeth that have not seen a dentist in a very long time. Gum disease. Dry mouth from a medication that never came up. Reflux. A tongue that never gets brushed. Onions at lunch every single day.

And your spouse has almost certainly never told you. Because how would they? There is not a kind way to walk up to somebody you love and tell them their mouth smells. So instead they shorten the kiss. And they shorten it again. And the years go by and you’re on the internet at eleven at night trying to figure out why your spouse won’t kiss you.

Two things about this.

If you’re the one who has been avoiding: your silence is not kindness. You have let your spouse believe something much worse about themselves than what is actually going on. What is actually going on is fixable in about two weeks. What they’ve been telling themselves isn’t.

If you’re the one who has been wondering why: before you build a whole theory about whether your spouse still finds you attractive, go get a dental cleaning. Get a checkup. Ask your dentist straight out whether your breath is a problem, because they will tell you honestly and they will not be weird about the question. They get asked it all the time. Scrape your tongue. Notice whether your breath lines up with what you ate.

I know this is uncomfortable. But I’ve watched individuals and couples spend years grieving a marriage problem that turned out to be a dentist appointment. Please just rule it out.

And this cuts both ways. Wives, this is not only a husband problem. If your husband stopped kissing you and you’ve decided it’s because he’s checked out, ask yourself whether he has been quietly holding his breath this whole time.

9. Somebody told them once that they were bad at it. Maybe it was a girlfriend before you. Maybe it was a sibling teasing them at fifteen. Maybe it was you, in an argument, and you don’t even remember saying it.

One sentence, possibly half joking, and now kissing is a thing they can fail at. So they keep it short. A quick kiss cannot be graded.

And none of us gets feedback about this. There is no way to find out whether it was ever true, so the comment just sits there being true. Twenty years later you’re still thinking you are a bad kisser and you’ve never asked your spouse.

Underneath several of those reasons is one thing that I think explains why kissing has this much power in the first place.

Kissing is intimate, and intimacy means being known

Kissing is intimate, and intimacy means being known. I use that word carefully, because a lot of people use intimacy when what they mean is sex. Those are two different things. Intimacy is being known by another person. And kissing is one of the most intimate things two people do.

Your faces are three inches apart. You are breathing the same air. There is no position to hide in, nothing to focus on, no task. You can have sex while somewhere else in your head. It is much harder to kiss for two minutes while somewhere else in your head.

That is why some people find kissing more exposing than being naked. It asks you to be present and available and known, all at the same time, with nothing to do with your hands and nowhere to look. For some people that is more than they can hold for very long, so they keep it short. It is not a character flaw.

Now, some of you are thinking, kissing is not automatically intimate. And you are right. Plenty of people have kissed somebody they barely knew and felt nothing in particular about it afterward.

If you went to school in Utah you know exactly what a NCMO is. The non-committal make out. There was a whole culture built around it, and the entire premise was that you could kiss somebody for an hour and it did not have to mean anything at all.

So which is it. Is kissing intimate or isn’t it.

Here is what I think is going on. The intimacy is not in the mechanics. Two mouths are two mouths. What makes it intimate is whether you are actually present, and whether the other person actually knows you. A NCMO works precisely because the person is left out of it. It is mouths without people. That is why it feels like nothing much afterward.

There is an old saying that prostitutes will not kiss on the mouth. It turns out that is not just a line from a movie. Sociologists who study sex work have documented it as a real practice. Workers draw what researchers call symbolic boundaries, and refusing to kiss is one of the most common ones, right alongside keeping a separate name and a separate persona. They will sell almost anything else and hold that back.

Of everything two people can do with their bodies, the thing that gets walled off to protect the private self is the kiss. Because a kiss is where you would have to actually be there.

You cannot do that with your spouse. They know you. They know what your face does when you are somewhere else, and they will feel it if you are not there. Which means kissing your spouse asks something of you that kissing a stranger at nineteen never did.

So if you are married to somebody who keeps it short, keep that in mind. It might not be that they don’t want you. It might be that being known for two straight minutes is a lot, and they have never had to do it before.

Now, somebody is going to say, shouldn’t they want to be known? Isn’t that the whole point of being married? We all say we want intimacy.

We do want it. We are also afraid of it, and both of those things live in the same person at the same time.

Being known means somebody is looking at the parts of you that you have not tidied up first. Wanting that in the abstract and being able to hold still for it are two different capacities. Most of us want to be known by somebody who we are certain will approve of everything they find. That is a different request.

So your spouse can honestly want to be close to you and still end a kiss at four seconds. They are not lying to you when they say they want it. They are finding out in real time that it costs something to actually let you in.

Now, a few of those nine reasons show up more often in husbands and a few show up more often in wives, and people ask me about that constantly. So let’s look at what the research actually found.

What the research actually says about men and women

Before I get into this, I want to say what these numbers are and what they aren’t. These are averages across large groups of people. They describe a tendency in a population. They do not describe your spouse, and they do not describe your marriage. Plenty of men care deeply about kissing. Plenty of women could take it or leave it. If the research doesn’t match what happens at your house, the research is wrong about you, not the other way around.

In 2007, three researchers at the University at Albany, Susan Hughes, Marissa Harrison, and Gordon Gallup, surveyed just over a thousand college students about kissing. A few things came out of it. Men were more likely to treat kissing as a means to an end, as a way to move toward sex or to end a fight. Women were more likely to use kissing to evaluate a partner and to keep track of where the relationship stood. Roughly half the men said they would be willing to have sex with someone they hadn’t kissed. Among the women, it was a small fraction of that.

And here is the finding that matters most for a marriage. As a relationship went on, kissing became less important to the men in that sample and more important to the women.

That study was college students, in dating relationships. So take it for what it is. But six years later, Rafael Wlodarski and Robin Dunbar at Oxford surveyed over nine hundred adults ranging from eighteen to sixty-three, and found the same basic thing. Women rated kissing as more important in relationships than men did. They also found that in established relationships, how often a couple kissed was significantly related to how satisfied they were with the relationship.

So what does that mean practically.

It means that in a lot of marriages, one spouse is reading the kissing as data about the relationship, and the other one is not sending any. He isn’t withholding. He genuinely doesn’t experience the kiss as a message. She is reading a message anyway, because that’s what kissing has always been for her. And the message she is receiving is that he doesn’t like kissing her, or doesn’t want to kiss her, and from there it is a very short step to deciding he doesn’t want her.

That was Elise’s whole four years, right there.

It runs the other way too, and just as often. Plenty of husbands are the ones counting. He notices that she used to kiss him goodbye and now she says goodbye from the other room, and he has built the same theory about himself that Elise built about hers. The averages say something about a population. They do not tell you which side of it you’re standing on.

The other direction

The version I hear about most often is the one where the wife is the one who stopped.

Josie and Nolan. Married nine years. Josie is the one who wants sex less often, and it has been that way since their second baby.

Nolan is affectionate. He reaches for her a lot. And about six years ago, Josie noticed that every time he kissed her for more than a couple of seconds, his hands started moving. Every single time.

So she started cutting the kisses off. Turning her cheek. Kissing him and immediately saying something about the dishwasher.

Nolan started reaching less. Then he stopped initiating almost entirely, and told himself he was being respectful.

Josie sat with me on a Zoom call and said she missed kissing him. She missed it badly. She said she didn’t know how to tell him she wanted to kiss him for five minutes and then go to sleep. She was afraid he would feel led on, and she didn’t want to lead him on. She didn’t want him to feel rejected all over again, or to think she had tricked him into it.

So she said nothing, and kept the kisses short.

Nine years, two people who both wanted the same thing, neither of them able to say it, because in that house a kiss meant sex was starting. That was the only thing it was allowed to mean.

What kissing actually does

Everything up to now has been about why kissing disappears. What I want to look at now is what goes missing along with it, because this is one of the few corners of marriage research where people have actually run the numbers.

In 2009, Kory Floyd and a team at Arizona State ran an experiment. Fifty-two adults in marriages or living with a partner. They gave blood samples and filled out surveys, then got randomly assigned to two groups. One group was told to increase how much they kissed their partner over the next six weeks. The other group was told nothing. Six weeks later everybody got tested again.

The group that kissed more showed improvements in perceived stress, in relationship satisfaction, and in total serum cholesterol.

Fifty-two people is a small study, and I want to be honest about that. But the direction of it lines up with everything else, and it was a real experiment with a control group, not just a survey.

Then there is a study I especially like, because it came out of BYU. Dean Busby, Veronica Hanna-Walker, and Chelom Leavitt surveyed 878 people who had been with their partner at least two years, and looked at kissing during their most recent sexual experience, and kissing over the past year.

Dr. Leavitt was on the podcast back in episode 422, talking about the science of sexual mindfulness. If you have not heard that one, go back and listen, because it sits right alongside everything I am about to tell you.

For the women, how much kissing happened during sex was connected to their ability to orgasm, and to how often they had sex. For both the men and the women, overall kissing frequency tracked with sexual and relationship satisfaction. And it tracked even more strongly with dissatisfaction.

That last part is the one to hold onto. The researchers used the word bellwether.

A bellwether is the lead sheep in a flock, the one with the bell around its neck. You listen for that bell to know which way the flock is about to move. It tells you what is coming before you can see it for yourself.

That is what they found kissing does in a marriage. When kissing drops off, it shows up before the couple can put words to anything being wrong. Nobody is fighting yet. Neither of them has decided they are unhappy. The kissing just quietly goes first.

So it is one of the earliest things to go and one of the last things anyone thinks to mention.

If you have been quietly grieving the kissing and telling yourself it’s stupid to care about, it isn’t stupid. You are hearing the bell.

You can take everything I just said and use it to make your marriage better or worse. The worse happens more than you think, so let me start there.

Before you turn this into a project

I don’t want you to walk away from this episode with ammunition for you or your spouse.

Kissing can absolutely become one more thing you’re failing at. If you take this episode and hand it to your spouse and now there’s a kissing quota, you have not created connection. You have created a chore. And they will feel the difference, and so will you.

Kissing can also become a new place to keep score. That was four seconds. It used to be ten. I noticed. I’m counting.

And if your spouse has real sensory issues, or something happened to them that makes mouths hard, pushing harder is going to make it worse, not better.

So take what’s useful here and leave the rest.

With that said, here is where I would start if you want to get the kissing back.

Getting it back

Take sex off the table. This is the single most useful thing, and it has to be said out loud, not assumed. Some version of: I want to kiss you tonight, and I am not trying to start anything. I want to kiss you, and then I want to go to sleep.

It sounds clinical. Say it anyway. If the kissing has dropped off at your house, the most likely explanation is that a kiss has picked up one meaning, and that meaning is that sex is starting. If that is what has happened, your spouse will keep hearing it that way until you tell them otherwise. You cannot give a kiss a second meaning quietly.

And then you have to actually honor it. If you say sex is off the table and then twenty minutes later your hands are moving, you have just taught your spouse that your words don’t hold, and it will be much harder the next time.

Deal with the sensory and hygiene piece as logistics. If salad is a problem, keep mints in the kitchen. Have the conversation about what specifically is unpleasant, and get particular about it, because “I don’t like it” and “I don’t like it when your breath tastes like onion” are two completely different problems and only one of them is solvable.

Both of you go to the dentist. Both of you. It takes the accusation out of it entirely. It’s a checkup, you were due, and now you know.

For the spouse who has been avoiding: I would ask you to say it plainly instead of just avoiding. Your husband or your wife has been interpreting years of short kisses. They have built a whole theory. Tell them it’s the taste, or the breath, or the timing. It will not land nearly as hard as what they have been telling themselves.

And say it once, kindly, at a neutral moment. Not while they’re leaning in.

Ask for something specific. I wish you were more romantic is not a request anybody can act on. Kiss me for ten seconds before you leave in the morning is a request. Somebody can do that today.

If you are the one who wants more kissing, get concrete. When, how long, what kind. It feels unromantic to spell it out. It is much less unromantic than another year of not getting it.

Now, some of you just thought, if I have to ask for it, it doesn’t count. I hear that constantly.

Look at where that thought leaves you. If it only counts when your spouse comes up with it on their own, then you are waiting for them to correctly guess something you have never said out loud. You could be waiting a very long time.

Your spouse doing it because you asked means they heard you and they cared enough to act on it. That is not a lesser version of love. And if you find yourself deciding it doesn’t count, that is yours to work on, because that thought will take something real your spouse did for you and turn it into nothing.

For the spouse who is going to do the kissing: you don’t have to feel it first. You do not have to work up desire for kissing before you kiss your spouse. You can decide to do it, do it, and let whatever comes, come. Behavior is always driven by what we’re feeling, and we get to choose our thoughts about the thing before we do it.

If your thought is this is pointless and they just want sex, that’s what you’ll feel and that’s the kiss they’ll get. If your thought is I’m going to spend ten seconds telling this person I like them, you’ll feel something different and so will they.

Talk about what kissing means to each of you. Most couples have never done this. You have each been assuming the other person’s kiss means what your kiss would mean. That assumption is doing enormous damage in a lot of marriages and it costs one conversation to check.

There is one more possibility, and I’ve saved it for last because it’s the hardest one to hear.

Maybe nobody ever taught you

We spent our teenage years being taught how to stop kissing. Nobody taught us how to do it well. Then we got married and everyone assumed we’d figure it out. Some couples did. Plenty didn’t, and now one of them quietly dreads it and can’t say why.

If your spouse pulls away from kissing you, one possibility is that they don’t enjoy how you kiss.

That is a hard sentence to hear. I’d rather you hear it than spend nine more years on a theory about being unwanted.

So I want to give you some real, practical advice about how to be a good kisser. There are nine things here.

1. Go slower than feels natural. Almost everybody moves too fast. Fast reads as urgent, and urgent reads as headed somewhere, which is the exact thing you’re trying to undo.
2. Soften your mouth. Rigid, pressed-together lips are one of the most common complaints people have, and so is too much pressure. Pressing harder does not come across as more passionate. It mostly comes across as force.

Let your jaw relax. Lips slightly parted instead of pursed. A tight mouth cannot respond to anything. Your spouse shifts and you stay exactly the same, so it stops being something the two of you are doing together. A soft mouth can follow what they are doing and change with it.

And if you spent years practicing how to hold back, that habit lives in your jaw. Pay attention to your face the next time you kiss your spouse. A lot of people are surprised to find they are clenched.

3. Less wetness than you think. Too much saliva is the single most common complaint people have about their spouse’s kissing, and almost no one has ever been told. This is also where a real difference tends to show up between husbands and wives. In that 2007 study I mentioned, men reported preferring wetter kisses with more tongue than women did. So if you are a husband kissing your wife the way you would want to be kissed, there is a decent chance you are overshooting. Kiss her the way she wants it, not the way you’d want it.
4. Don’t lead with tongue. Start with lips only. Stay there longer than you think you should. Tongue is something you build to, and for some people it never has to arrive at all.
5. Vary what you’re doing. One motion on repeat gets boring fast. Change pressure, change angle, stop and start.
6. Use your hands. Kissing is not only a mouth activity. A hand on the jaw, the back of the neck, the side of the face.
7. Pause. Pull back an inch. Stay there. Come back. Those pauses are what made kissing feel like something when you were dating.
8. Breathe through your nose so you don’t have to keep breaking away.
9. Ask. And this one beats the other eight. Ask your spouse what they like. Ask them to show you. It feels awkward for about ninety seconds, and then you have information you have been guessing at for a decade.

One caution. Do not take this list, hand it to your spouse, and tell them to study up. That will not go how you want. If you want to use it, use it on yourself first, and ask your spouse what they’d want more of instead of telling them what they’re doing wrong.

Now, everything I have just given you assumes your spouse is willing to try any of it. And some of you have been listening to this whole episode thinking, that is lovely, but mine won’t. You have asked. You have taken the pressure off. Nothing changed.

What if your spouse won’t

So let me take that seriously, because it is a real situation and it deserves a real answer.

The first thing I would do is separate won’t from can’t. Somebody who has real sensory difficulty, or who was never taught, or who has something in their history around their mouth, is not refusing you. They may need to go slower, or work with a professional, or start somewhere other than the mouth. That’s a different conversation than refusal and it deserves patience.

And there is a third category I want to make room for, because I have given you a long list of reasons in this episode and that can leave the impression that there is always one to find.

Some people just do not like kissing. They have thought about it, and there is no story underneath it. No bad experience, nothing anyone said, nothing from childhood. They do not like it the way some people do not like the feeling of velvet. That is allowed.

If that is you, you do not owe anybody an excavation. You are not broken and you do not have to produce a reason to be taken seriously. What I would ask of you is that you tell your spouse it is not about them, because in the absence of an explanation they will write one, and the one they write will be about themselves.

And if that is your spouse, believe them. No reason offered is not the same thing as a reason being hidden. If you keep digging for the real answer, you are telling the person you love that their own account of themselves is not good enough, and that will cost you more than the kissing ever did.

Then the question becomes what else you two can do that gives you some of what kissing was giving you. There is a lot of territory between a peck and making out, and most couples have never gone looking for it.

But if you have had the real conversation, and you have made it specific, and you have taken the pressure off, and your spouse still says no, that is information. Not about kissing. About the marriage.

And then I’d ask you what you want to do with it.

Because you cannot make your spouse kiss you. That is not available to you, and chasing it will make both of you miserable. What is available to you is deciding how you’re going to show up, what you’re going to keep asking for, and what you’re going to make it mean about you.

That last one is the one I would work on first. Elise spent four years believing her husband wasn’t attracted to her, and none of it was true.

That work is yours. No one can do it for you, and your spouse changing wouldn’t do it either, because if you don’t handle what you’ve made it mean, you will find the next thing to make it mean the same thing.

Which brings me back to the couple I started with.

Elise and Declan

Elise told Declan what she had been thinking for four years. That she’d decided he wasn’t attracted to her.

He was floored. He told her he’d never once thought about the kissing. He said the reason he keeps it short is that kissing turns him on, and if he lets himself get turned on at six o’clock on a Tuesday when nothing is going to happen, he spends the whole evening frustrated. So years ago he started keeping it brief.

That is the opposite of what she’d been telling herself. He wasn’t kissing her less because he wanted her less. He was kissing her less because he wanted her and had decided that wanting her at the wrong time of day was a problem to manage.

They made an agreement. Kissing does not mean sex is starting. Either of them can kiss the other for as long as they want and it means nothing except that they wanted to.

Declan told me it took about two months before he believed it. The first several weeks he kept waiting for the other shoe. And then one night they sat on the couch and kissed for a while and watched the rest of the show, and something in him let go.

Elise said the thing she noticed wasn’t the kissing. It was that she stopped scanning him for evidence.

If the kissing has gone quiet at your house, there is probably something going on that neither of you has said out loud. Maybe a kiss picked up a meaning that neither of you assigned to it on purpose. Maybe there is something physical that has never been mentioned. Maybe one of you is still carrying a sentence somebody said a long time ago.

Whatever it is, your spouse almost certainly does not know what you have decided their kisses mean about you. And you almost certainly do not know what they would say if you asked them.

That conversation is available to you this week.