This simple move can spell disaster for your relationship

The ‘bristle reaction’ is a common phenomenon, writes Franki Cookney. But it can be devastating

Touch is the primary way we communicate intimacy (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

When my youngest child was about seven months old, I was sitting on the sofa, half-watching whatever was on the telly, half-debating whether 8:30pm was too early to go to bed, when my husband, who was sitting next to me, went to stroke my hair.

Far from welcoming it as an expression of care, I did something I don’t think I’d ever done before. I flinched. To him, it was merely a gesture of affection, but to me at that moment, it felt like an unspoken request for sex. And in those overwhelming, sleep-deprived, milk-sodden days of early parenthood, sex just felt like yet another thing someone wanted from me.

That new parents get “touched out” after they have a baby is well known. You spend so much time holding the baby, carrying the baby, and in my case breast-feeding the baby, the last thing you want is more physical contact. But underneath what I think was the entirely understandable need to be left the hell alone, something more pernicious lurked. I knew that by avoiding physical affection, I was sending myself down a slippery slope.

To admit that you have, on occasion, cringed away from your partner’s caresses, that you have avoided their kisses, recoiled at their touch, feels faintly catastrophic. But it turns out the “bristle reaction” is a really common phenomenon.

The term was coined by California sex therapist Vanessa Marin after she started to see a common theme in her clients’ stories of relationship dissatisfaction. People reported tensing up or seeing their partners “bristle” when they tried to make physical contact. Her TikTok video on the subject has had 8.4 million views.

“The pattern for most people is that once they get into a long-term relationship they really stop touching and kissing so much,” she explains in the video. Many couples get to a point where the only time they’re really being physically intimate with one another is when they’re trying to initiate sex. What happens then, she says, is that “if you’re not wildly in the mood, you start becoming avoidant of any type of touch or kissing.”

Instead of receiving affection as an act of love in and of itself, we can start to interpret it as a demand. Over time, we can become hypervigilant, and this results in the “bristle reaction”. In my case, this hypervigilance stemmed from trying to conserve what little personal space I had with a new baby in my life. But here’s the thing: avoiding affection when you’re not in the mood for sex actually exacerbates the problem.

This is something I’ve heard repeatedly from other sex and relationship therapists. When couples are experiencing a disparity in sex drive, the person with lower desire starts to avoid and withhold acts like kissing and caressing, lest it be taken “the wrong way”. But over time this can lead to a dearth of physical affection in the relationship, which leads to feelings of disconnection, leaving both partners feeling really unhappy.

There are any number of reasons why we might not want sex and, as long as we’re communicating openly about it, that doesn’t have to be a cause for concern. But touch is the primary way we communicate intimacy and as such it is a vital part of relationship satisfaction. It’s important to break this vicious cycle, and the best way to do that is actually to introduce more physical affection into your relationship.

Marin and her husband have a rule that they have an extended kissing session every evening, regardless of whether or not they want to have sex. This, she says, has given them back opportunities for affection, and allowed them to connect, “just for the joy of making out”. The point is not to get turned on. In fact, she says, for at least some of the time, you should actively ban yourselves from having sex, even if you do end up getting aroused, so as to break the association.

Honestly? The idea of a mandatory “six-minute snog” sounds excruciating to me. But I can definitely get on board with the idea of more affection. “It’s like fighting fire with fire,” I explained to my husband as I snuggled up to him in bed, having first made it clear that this was not a come-on.

A few days later, he came up and put his arms around my waist while I was making my kids’ tea, kissed the back of my neck, and whispered softly in my ear, “I’m not trying to seduce you.”

I’ve never felt more loved.