Why Closing Your Eyes Changes Everything
Almost everyone closes their eyes when they kiss. Nobody is taught to. It happens before you're old enough to think about it, and most people have never once wondered why.
I started wondering about it while Brittney and I were building Coelle, because we kept running into the same question from people: why audio? Why not video, which is obviously more immersive, more produced, more of everything?
The answer turned out to be the opposite of what I expected. Audio isn't the compromise. It's the point.
The research
A study led by Sandra Murphy and Polly Dalton at the University of London, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, tested something deceptively simple. Participants watched a stream of flashing letters and had to report when they saw a specific one. At the same time, they felt vibrations on one hand or the other and had to identify which hand.
As the visual task got harder, participants detected the touches less often. Heavier visual demands measurably reduced tactile awareness.
I want to be careful about how far to take this: the researchers did not study kissing, and the connection to closing your eyes during intimacy is a plausible inference rather than a demonstrated finding. Dalton herself framed it as a possibility — shutting out visual input leaves more mental resources for other aspects of experience.
But as an explanation for something billions of people do spontaneously, it's pretty satisfying. Attention is finite. Vision is expensive. Spend less on looking and you have more to spend on feeling.
Attention is the actual scarce resource
This reframed how I think about the whole field.
The standard assumption is that better intimacy comes from better input — more novelty, more technique, more stimulation. Add something. The research above suggests the opposite dynamic: that what's often missing isn't input but available attention, and that adding more input can consume the very resource that makes sensation vivid.
Think about what competes for visual attention during intimacy. The clock. Your phone screen lighting up. Laundry on the chair. The gap under the door. Your own body, watched and assessed from the outside — which for a great many people is the single loudest channel in the room.
That last one deserves its own paragraph. If a meaningful share of your attention is allocated to monitoring how you look, that attention isn't available for sensation. You can't be fully in a body you're busy watching. This is, I think, why body image concerns damage intimacy so reliably: not through emotion alone, but through a direct and measurable competition for attention.
Close your eyes and a large fraction of that competition stops.
Why audio is the right medium
So here's the design logic behind what we built, stated plainly.
Visual media asks for the expensive channel. However good the content is, watching requires you to look — eyes open, attention allocated outward, toward a screen. You're observing something. Observation and immersion in your own body are in direct competition.
Audio asks for a different channel entirely, and it leaves your eyes free to close. A voice can give you structure, pacing, and language without taking your visual attention. You're not watching anything. You're being guided, with your eyes shut, in your own bed, attending to what's actually happening in your own skin.
That's not a limitation we worked around. It's the mechanism.
There's a second thing audio does that I didn't anticipate. Because there's nothing to look at, there's nobody to compare yourself to. Visual content inevitably supplies bodies — and the moment there's a body on a screen, some part of your attention starts measuring. Audio supplies only language, and language leaves the imagining to you. The bodies in the scene are yours.
Interoception, the sense nobody mentions
There's a term for the ability to sense what's happening inside your own body: interoception. Your heartbeat, your breath, your muscle tension, your arousal.
It varies enormously between people, and it's trainable. Some people can locate arousal precisely as it builds. Others genuinely cannot tell, and for them "I don't know what I want" is a literal statement rather than an evasion — the signal is there and the receiver is offline.
The things that degrade interoception are the things most of us do constantly: living in our heads, maintaining a screen in front of our eyes, staying in a mild stress response all day, treating the body as transport. The things that build it are attention practices — breath work, slow movement, and being guided through sustained attention to physical sensation with your eyes closed.
Which is, functionally, what a guided audio experience is. The erotic content is the reason you'll actually do it. The attention training is what it's doing underneath.
Try this tonight
You don't need an app for the core of this. Here's the experiment:
Next time you and your partner have time together, one of you closes your eyes. Not for a minute — for ten. The other does nothing special. Just touch, slowly, without a plan.
Then switch.
What most people report is that it feels unfamiliar in a way they can't immediately explain, and considerably more intense than the same touch with eyes open. Part of that is attention. Part of it is that closing your eyes in front of another person is a genuine act of trust, and your nervous system knows it.
That's also why it's harder than it sounds. Eyes open, you can monitor — their face, the room, how it's going. Eyes closed, you have to receive without checking. For people who struggle to receive, which is a lot of us, ten minutes is a real ask.
But it's the whole skill. And it's free.
If you've noticed you're never fully present during intimacy — watching yourself, monitoring, somewhere else — that's a specific and workable problem. Book a free discovery call.
And if you want the version with structure and a voice to follow, that's exactly what Coelle is: guided audio intimacy experiences built for eyes closed, in your own bed, with nothing to watch.
Scott Schwertly is a Nashville-based sex and intimacy coach, founder of Coelle, and co-host of Do You Feel That? with his wife Brittney.
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