Showering before a couples massage is a simple question with a complication attached, and the complication is that there are two of you and usually one bathroom. Nobody writes about this, and yet it is the single most common source of a rushed first ten minutes: two people taking turns under a hotel shower while a confirmed arrival window closes, one of them still damp when the knock comes, the other one apologising. It is entirely avoidable with about four minutes of planning, so here is the planning.
Should you shower first at all
Yes, if there is time, and it is a kindness rather than a requirement. Nobody is inspecting anybody. Warm skin takes oil better, a body that has been walking the canal ring since ten in the morning is more comfortable clean, and the two of you will settle faster.
If there is not time, do not turn it into a crisis. A quick wash and clean feet covers most of it. Two therapists who arrive to find a couple who have been out all day are not remotely surprised by that, and it changes nothing about how the hour goes.
What is worth doing regardless: skip heavy body lotion. Oil and lotion do not cooperate, and a freshly moisturised back is a slightly worse surface than a plain one.
One bathroom, two of you, thirty minutes
Work backwards from the arrival window rather than forwards from now. A pair reaches a central address forty to sixty minutes after the booking is confirmed, and the confirmation itself takes about ten. So from the moment you send the message you have roughly forty minutes, and forty minutes is two unhurried showers if you start immediately and one panicked one if you check your phone for a while first.
Decide the order before either of you undresses. The person who takes longer with hair goes first, always, because hair is the thing that cannot be hurried at the end. The second shower can be five minutes and nobody notices.
Then put the room right while the other one is in there. That is the trick the experienced couples use: the showering and the tidying happen in parallel rather than in sequence. Suitcase against the wall, chair moved, ceiling light off and a lamp on, water on the table, phones face down. By the time the second of you is out, the room is done and the two of you are standing about in robes with nothing left to do, which is the correct state to be in when somebody knocks.
The room setup guide covers what the pair need from the space, and it is less than most people assume.
Hot water, hair and the practical details
Do not take a very hot shower immediately beforehand. You want warm rather than cooked, because skin that has just come out of something scalding is oddly less responsive for the first ten minutes and you lose part of the opening.
Dry your hair, or tie it up, or clip it. Wet hair on a towel becomes cold hair twenty minutes in, and cold is the one thing that will pull either of you out of a session that was otherwise going perfectly.
Leave the bathroom usable. Hang the towels rather than leaving them on the floor, because the two of you will be back in there later and so, briefly, will the therapists. Put out two extra towels if the room has them.
Afterwards, which is the part people get wrong
Do not shower straight away. This is the most consistent piece of advice in the whole business and the most consistently ignored. Oil goes on working for a while after the hands stop, and washing it off at the ten minute mark throws away a decent portion of what you just paid for.
Give it an hour if you can. Lie there. Say nothing in particular. The couples who report the best evenings are almost always the ones who did nothing at all for the first half hour after the door closed, and the piece on what follows makes the case at greater length.
When you do wash, a warm rinse rather than a scrub takes the residue off. The bathroom order matters less at this end because nobody is waiting on anything.
Formats where the bathroom does more work
Gel is a different proposition from oil. Nuru work happens on a waterproof sheet and involves a good deal more to rinse off at the end, so the sequence shifts: a light shower before, and a proper one after, with the second one being the longer of the two. Two people washing gel off in one hotel bathroom is a queue, and it is worth knowing that in advance rather than discovering it at midnight.
For ordinary oil work the balance runs the other way, and the shower before matters more than the one after.
One last thing that applies to every format. If the two of you are staying somewhere with a bath rather than only a shower, use it afterwards rather than before, together, with the lights off. It is the cheapest upgrade available to this entire evening and it costs nothing at all. Booking into your own room is precisely what makes that possible, and it is the argument for a session that comes to you rather than one you have to travel home from.