Reach Styles
What people reach for
Twelve reach styles, reframed into how we experience sexual connection from the inside.
This framework is designed to help you understand and articulate underlying desires involved in reaching for connection through sexual intimacy. These styles provide a shared language for you and your partner to better understand what motivates your bids for intimacy. Our hope is this awareness can help you trace back what you're actually reaching toward in your relationships.
The point isn't to box or limit anyone into one or more of these styles. They're helpful references for the different ways we reach for our partners through sexual intimacy. They're designed to bring the deeper underlying desires to the surface so that our bids for connection don't get lost in translation. We all have our own qualities and reasons for seeking the people we love.
Our approach
Where the reach starts
Three centers, four shapes, twelve reach styles. Sometimes you can feel where a reach is coming from but can't quite name it — it's somewhere in the body, or somewhere in the head. Sometimes it's clearer than that: you know it's about how you're being received, or about something you're trying to demonstrate. Sometimes it lands precisely, with a single word for what's happening. The framework holds all three. Centers, shapes, and styles let you orient yourself in relation to the resolution you're seeking through your reach.
Instead of meeting twelve reach styles as isolated identities, you meet them as twelve specific channels of a reach you already understand the texture of, which makes recognizing yourself or your partner inside one of them less about assignment and more about location.
- Reach
- Mind
- Imagination
- Exploring
- Kindling
- Protecting
- Heart
- Reception
- Opening
- Trusting
- Communing
- Devotion
- Tending
- Exchanging
- Cultivating
- Body
- Sensation
- Savoring
- Releasing
- Daring
Continue to
Where the reach starts
Using it together
In conversation
How partners can use centers, shapes, and styles to descend from “something's off” toward what's actually being asked for.
The twelve styles
Browse the directory
Each tile opens to the full reading. The styles aren't rigid categories you fit into; they're a way of noticing which resonate most with you or your partner.
Imagination (Mind)
Reception (Heart)
Devotion (Heart)