As a culture, our diet often suffers from the overwhelming demands of schedule and time constraints. We pick up food on the run and call it a meal. Even when we take the time to prepare a meal at home, we often eat it in front of a screen, eating quickly and mindlessly. Taking the time to taste our food is a luxury many of us don’t know we are missing. We leap to the main course – overeating, but never really filling up.

In many ways our sexual drive sadly gets the same treatment. We take the sensuous part of ourselves for granted, forgetting the power that scent has in waking up our memory, sexuality and emotions. It is well documented that people who lose their sense of smell suffer not only a significant drop in their ability to taste, but also to emote. Thus, their sexual drive plummets.

How Scent, Taste, and Emotion Are Connected

Learning to pay attention to scent and the associated tastes is a form of building a sensory vocabulary. Taking the time to savor our senses makes life rich. Nowhere is that more true than in our intimate lives. Thinking about your sex life like a gourmet meal takes the pressure off of any preconceived ideas of the main event and opens a gateway to the wonders of what it means to be a sexual being.

Years ago when I visited with hundreds of naturopathic physicians at their annual conference, the analogy of a gourmet meal occurred to me when I was explaining why Good Clean Love is not just a lubricant company. The best lubricant in the world is a penetration aid, and contrary to the millions of dollars of KY advertising that “a little lube is all you need,” a satisfying intimate encounter takes more than a just squirt of lube.

I explained over and over how our Good Clean Love product solution is a multi-course meal. Love Oils that heighten your own pheromones and awareness of the scent chemistry between you and your partner, trigger the limbic brain through the olfactory bulb. The arousal mechanism is stirred and so is the feeling of your partner’s body as the oils give the curves and valleys in the body glide.

A Slow-Food Approach to Intimacy

Adding time and attention to our intimate encounters changes the game completely. Think of the last fabulous meal you had; perhaps it included hors d’oeuvres, a second course, etc. Tastes, conversation, lingering touches. These awaken all of your senses. Why hurry to the main course? Experiment with a Love Oil as a second step to extend the pleasure, introducing a whole new synergy of scent and flavor to kissing our most sensitive tissue. Enervated with sensuality, the pressure is off and the pleasure is on.

Picking up a bottle of lubricant at this point, fully aroused, makes infinitely more sense. This is the moment when a penetration device can do its job, adding the old familiar slip to the deepest communion we can manifest. Hurrying to the main course is anti-climactic at best and painful at worst. Take time to explore what it means to feel sensuous. It is a close cousin to our most satisfying sexual selves.