By Oluwafunke Allen
Say “foreplay” to most couples i sit with and watch what happens. Eyes flick toward the bedroom. Shoulders tense slightly, like I’ve just brought up homework. Somebody usually mumbles something about “not really having time for all that.”
Here’s the plot twist I’ve been delivering in session for fifteen years: you’ve been defining foreplay about
eighteen hours too narrowly.
Quick note: today’s post talks about physical intimacy directly, no anatomy involved this time, but honest
throughout. Keep reading.
The five-minute myth
Somewhere along the way, “foreplay” got shrunk down to mean whatever happens in the five minutes
immediately before sex. A checklist. A warm-up lap before the main event. And under that definition, sure, it feels like a chore — one more item competing for five minutes you don’t have at 10:47pm after the kids are finally down and one of you still has emails open on a laptop somewhere in the house.
But that five-minute version was never the actual design. It’s a shrunk, exhausted, modern imitation of
something that was supposed to run all day.
What the research and the counselling room both actually say
Ask almost any woman what made her feel desired the previous week, and — with striking consistency, across every couple I’ve counselled — the answer is rarely about the bedroom at all. It’s the way he looked at her across the kitchen while she was mid-sentence about something unrelated. It’s him doing the school run without being asked, which somehow did more for her than any single line whispered later that night. It’s a text in the middle of the day that had nothing to do with logistics.
That’s not a coincidence, and it’s not “just how women are” as some kind of biological footnote. That’s foreplay, correctly defined. Foreplay is not the five minutes before. Foreplay is the entire day building toward trust,
attention, and safety — and sex is simply where that accumulated trust eventually shows up, physically. You cannot manufacture in five minutes what an entire week of distraction, dismissiveness, or resentment quietly dismantled.
Where the language itself set us up to fail
Even the word does us no favour. “Fore” — before. As if it’s a preamble to the real event, rather than being, for a huge number of couples, the actual main event that makes the rest of it mean anything at all. I’d genuinely rather we retired the word and called it what it is: the entire relationship, doing its job.
What this looks like practically, because I promised you no fluff
Attention paid earlier in the day outperforms technique attempted later at night, every single time, in every couple I have ever sat with. A hand on the small of the back while passing in the kitchen. Actually putting the phone down during the two minutes she’s telling you about her day, instead of nodding at half-volume.
Remembering the thing he mentioned once, three days ago, and bringing it up unprompted.
None of that reads as “foreplay” by the shrunk definition. All of it is foreplay by the correct one — and it costs nothing, requires no privacy, and works on the hardest, most exhausted weeks precisely because it doesn’t need five uninterrupted minutes to happen.
Genesis 2:24 describes marriage as two becoming “one flesh” — but notice the order in the verse: leaving, then
holding fast, then one flesh. Cleaving comes before the physical union, not as a footnote to it, but as its
foundation. The daily holding fast — attention, presence, choosing each other in the ordinary hours — was
always meant to be the actual engine. The physical was designed to be the natural overflow of that, not a
separate transaction bolted on at the end of a distracted day.
The line I want you to keep
If intimacy has gone quiet in your marriage, don’t start troubleshooting at 10:47pm. Start troubleshooting at 7am. The five minutes were never the problem. The other twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes were quietly deciding the outcome the whole time.
There’s a full chapter unpacking this — with a lot more than I can fit into one post — in the book.
Sacred, but Fully Known launches October 3rd. Subscribe below for more of this, every week.
— Funke
