Long term relationship — less ticklish?

[LerLee]

Hello,

I’ve sometimes heard people say that if you are tickled regularly over many years you get less ticklish over time. While I see the logic here (kinda) my wife is just as ticklish today as she was when I first tickled her which was over 10 years ago. I tickle her every day — on most days it’s a quick tickle but we regularly have intense tickle fights which she usually loses. She also gets tickled by people at work.

For those that have been with the same person for over 10 years, have you noticed that they are less ticklish today compared to when you first tickled them?

 

[Wade]

The longer I'm with my wife (previously my girlfriend), the more devastatingly effective she is at tickling me. I don't know how much of that is psychological -- my body's been conditioned to just give up when her fingers alight on me -- and how much of it is familiarity -- the more times she tickles me, the more data she collects, even unconsciously, about what to do to me, and where to do it, to maximize my responses. She's always been able to reduce me to a giggling shrieking mess, of course, from the first time she tickled me on our fourth date, but my involuntary responses to her stimuli just get more acute and irresistible with every passing year.