It’s Not “Just Massage”… Here’s Why.

‘Just massage? You just teach massage?’

Yes, that’s what Den and I do.

I know, it seems improbable that two people can make a living off teaching massage to couples, but that’s our full time work now. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

But we don’t think of it as ‘just massage’ (as a lot of people like to call it).

For us, it actually stretches much farther than that. It means so much more.

Denis and I have worked with couples, in all different capacities, for most of our collective careers now.

Before Melt, we conducted live massage seminars every month as a side business for eight years.

We created a website full of date ideas and relationship advice for couples. I had a national relationships and dating column in a newspaper for three years. We have both written and researched pages and pages of content on the subjects of love and relationships over the years.

Being a couple ourselves (for a decade now!), and knowing the sheer intensity of what goes into sustaining a happy, healthy relationship, we have long been drawn to the idea of helping couples do this.

Den and I are not high-level academics. We don’t have PhDs in psychology and we aren’t science-based research experts.

So, we use the talents we have not to help create groundbreaking studies or counsel marriages back from the brink of divorce, but to help decipher some of the better information out there and – here’s the part that is really important to us – use that research to come up with some practical, helpful tools couples could actually put to use in their everyday lives, to help them take advantage of and put into practice relationship findings from some of the greatest minds in the field of love.

Take $30 Date Night, our date ideas website. It was originally based on research from Arthur P. Aron of the University of Stonybrook in New York.

Aron found that novelty plays an important part in satisfaction levels of couples, and he recommended a regular date night doing new things each time to keep the flames alive.

We thought that sounded like a great idea, so we rallied. We came up with a huge collection of hundreds of date ideas – easy, fun, novel, cheap dates that couples could access when they wanted a boost for their relationship. Practical stuff. Useful stuff.

It worked for us, so we wanted to share it. We put it on the Internet. And we were rapt when we saw it working for other people too.

$30 Date Night provided a small, practical but not to be underestimated solution for an everyday relationship issue – How to get closer. How to stay connected. How to make time for one another in a busy world.

We look at Melt much in the same way, an extension of the same work.

There are scores of studies about the benefits of cuddling for couples, of non-sexual touch and it’s importance in relationships, of how massage between couples can boost trust and intimacy, of how gentle touch with no direct eye contact can help open channels of communication and of how some of the happiest, most long-lasting couples make back rubs a part of their regular routine.

Not to mention the proven health benefits of massage that have been long known in the medical and wellness community.

So it’s not “just massage” that we offer couples. We believe it runs way deeper than that. Massage offers a path to deeper intimacy, stronger trust and a more satisfying relationship.

Being able to massage your partner is a kind, generous act that speaks to every Love Language and shows how much you care.

Den and I see our chance at being able to offer that to couples as one of our most important projects to date. Backed by research. And it’s making a difference – a real difference – to people’s lives all over the globe, one couple at a time.

And that’s way more than “just a massage”.