Shake Up Your Love Life With a Private Affair

By Charlotte Bumstead
After years of living together and being set in routine, it’s easy for couples to lose the language of sharing they once found so exciting. Winnipeg residents Todd Sellick and his wife, Jan, came up with a new way of encouraging couples to practise more openness in their relationship.

You can do it in the car or maybe at a restaurant. Try it on a sandy beach or even over the phone. The goal is to reawaken the sense of risk and pleasure in your relationship through intimacy and play. They call it A Private Affair: The Erotic Game of Secrets, Plans and Promises —and it’s more than your typical board game.

“This is not one of those sex games you play at home on a Friday night with a blindfold, a bottle of oil and a feather,” says Sellick, marriage therapist of 26 years. It’s a way of reigniting the inner flame of your relationship and bringing you back to the day you first met; reviving the butterflies you felt when you shared that first kiss many, many years ago. The game holds 500 cards of deep conversation starters. Just tuck a handful of questions into your purse or wallet and you can play anywhere you want.

A Private Affair helps couples think about events or discussions they may not have otherwise considered. And you might be surprised with the number of things you never knew about your partner—even after so many years together—simply because it has yet to come up in conversation. “What makes a relationship rich is some of the tension and the things that are separate and different about us,” says Sellick. “When we first fell in love, we’d sit for hours and talk about those things.”

Sellick explains what he believes to be the greatest struggle for today’s couples over the age of 45. “Couples today face some very interesting challenges which can impoverish their love relationship in so many ways,” he says. Too easily, these relationships can drift and become lack lustre. “I think there’s a natural feeling that we’ve been together for a long time, and that what we have is as good as it’s going to get. I think it’s often a loss of vision and belief.” This is a terrifying theme for a relationship.

Now that the kids have moved on to start lives of their own, Zoomers are given a chance to refocus their connection. In a sense, the game acts as a third person in the room, initiating conversation. “A lot of marriage therapies just focus on what is broken, and I think that wears people out at times,” Sellick says.

A Private Affair offers an approach to rediscovering your appetite for one another. “These are secrets that we consider sharing with each other about how we think, how we feel, what we’re all about; the plans that we start to consider and aim together for in our lives. When you start having these conversations, you just never know where it’s going to end up.”