# touch: a touching game for couples
i'm quite a reserved person. it's quite hard for me to verbally express my wishes. i often don't even know what i want. and when i do, then i worry that if i express it to the other person, they will get offended about me and it just ruins the relationship. i'm always on the lookout for things that make human interactions a little bit easier.
i like receiving and giving touch quite much. but people have very diverse preferences about what is an okay touch and what is not. so i tend to err on the conservative side and just keep to myself. otherwise i'd need to communicate with people. fortunately i found a very nice but very simple game that can free up people from all the worries when it comes to touch. and you can play this with any willing person. it's called the "3 minute game" and was popularized by betty martin.
first, let's talk about some aspects of the "wheel of consent", or a simplified version of it. each act a human does can be categorized into one of the following 4 dimensions:
they complement each other. when person a is giving to b, then b is receiving. if person a is taking from b, person b is allowing. you can draw this in a fancy circle, that's where the name "wheel of consent" comes from.
how much giving, receiving, taking, allowing a person does, matters. each person has a healthy limit for each dimension. going over we get to the "shadow sides" of the dimensions:
you want to ensure that every act for everyone involved remains in the inner, non-shadow side of the dimensions.
next up, you really need to understand which dimension each act is in for each person involved. suppose you regularly do an activity (e.g. foot massage). you think you are doing it as a favor for person b so you are in the giving dimension. for the other person that activity is in the allowing dimension. they let you do it because they think you like doing it. but giving and allowing are not complementary dimensions. it turns out nobody really wants that activity yet none of the people involved realize this. this is basically a variant of the abilene paradox. there's also the flipside to this: you often don't do some acts because you think the other person wouldn't like it. however it might be the case they would allow you to experiment with it. but you don't even ask because of the fear of rejection.
the "3 minute game" is a short game that helps you structure communication along those 4 dimensions. it helps you do activities where it is super clear who it is for. it consists of four 3 minute rounds. in round 1 player a asks player b:
this means person a will be doing something to person b for person b's benefit. per above definitions from person a's perspective the activity is giving, from person b's perspective it is a receiving activity. keep in mind that person a shouldn't sink to the shadow sides of their dimension, they should only do what they are comfortable to give to the other person. in other words they have to consent to the act. if person a is not happy with the arrangement, they might negotiate a little bit what their limits are and then agree on that. on the flipside person b might just want a boring neck massage. it doesn't have to sexual all the time. person a has to accept that in this round it's all about person b's wishes. once everybody is happy agreed on the activity, person a does the agreed on touch for 3 minutes. then person b thanks for person a for this.
in round 2, player a again asks player b:
this means person b will be doing something to person a for person b's benefit. per above definitions from person a's perspective this is allowing, while from person b's perspective this is taking. the same negotiation and consent process happens just as before. person b might be very horny and might want to crazy stuff. person a must realize that this is fine to express and that they don't have to succumb to the shadow side, they can refuse and person b shall respect that otherwise they are succumbing to the shadow side. once agreed, person b does the activity for 3 minutes. again, since this was for person b's benefit, person b thanks person a for the act.
round 3 and 4 is the same as round 1 and 2 but with the other person asking the questions. the whole thing takes about 15 minutes and is worth every minute of it.
this game might sound a little bit silly at first. but what makes it truly remarkable is that it makes you stop for a minute and think. the question might initially look simple enough but answering them often is quite hard. it's very rare that we get a question on what we want. often i don't even know what sort of touch i really want but this lets me think deep on what sort of thing would fill me up now the best. and i can be very selfish in these thoughts, i don't need to play an internal chess to ensure whatever i want is something compatible with my partner. or that if i ask for this particular thing then my relationship would spoil a bit. the flipside is true too: my partner can think of anything. even if i don't really like the requested activity, i'm certainly willing to give it 3 minutes, whatever it is. it can be a really freeing sensation once you experience this game in a safe and supportive environment. you feel like you can ask for anything and not be judged. you can say anything you want. i haven't really tried it in a non-sexual environment so i don't know how well it works there but i'd suspect it should hold up quite well there as well. you can see sample sessions from such environment in betty's original videos and you can see the participants happy with the game. betty's videos are well worth a watch.
in the original documentation of this game, betty mentions that this is a game for 2 or more people. the "or more" version is quite intriguing to me. she didn't really explain that part as far as i remember. i'm not entirely sure how that would work. e.g. how could 3 people play this game? i think what you can do is that rather than a single person asking the questions, 2 people ask the questions together to the 3rd person. the third person then can come up with activities that involve the first two people doing something to the third and only proceed with the act if everyone agrees to it without succumbing to the shadow sides. i guess that's how the "or more" works: each round a selected person has to ask the group for something they can do together for the selected person's benefit. it probably scales okay to 4 people but afterwards i'd imagine it has way too much communication overhead. never tried this though so not sure how transformative experience the group setting is yet.
the wheel of consent itself is a quite generic concept. it can apply in other cases as well, not just the above game. e.g. you get invited to a party. do you go or not? who benefits from you going to the party? it is an interesting viewpoint to see our activities from. and things can get complicated: you only benefit from the party if some other person also goes. and that other person only benefits if you go. now you have these complex, conditional scenarios that i can't really wrap my head around yet, so i'll not dig into this aspect. i'm just trying to popularize this wheel of consent concept because looks like it's a useful framework to work with.
if you ever try this game then let me know how it went and what your experiences with it were.
edit: i just rewatched https://bettymartin.org/how-to-play-the-3-minute-game/ (https://youtu.be/_KCzpNBNbVM) and i realized the original questions from harry faddis were even more generic and powerful:
oh, and here's a short summary of the rules in the form of a neat booklet taken from betty's site and rehosted in case it ever goes down: @/touch.pdf. folding instructions at https://youtu.be/21qi9ZcQVto or https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Zine_Making/Putting_pages_together#An_8-sided_zine_from_1_sheet_with_1_cut.
published on 2020-04-09, last modified on 2022-01-30
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