Why is intimacy in a relationship so important? First, human beings are remarkable creatures capable of doing many amazing things. We can make captivating musical compositions and write emotional poetry. We have impressive athletic abilities and can build beautiful architectural structures.
Perhaps, though, one of the unique capabilities of the human is our innate tendency, desire, and effort to create and maintain relationships with other humans.
It’s inherent in our DNA that we long for closeness with other people. “No man is an island,” John Donne wrote a few centuries ago. Having healthy relationships connects with having more vibrant lives. Committed relationships, especially marriage, can reduce amounts of the stress hormone, cortisol, released in the body and minimize undesirable responses to psychological stress.
Would you believe according to research, the lack of interpersonal relationships had the same impact on the health of people as if they smoked 15 cigarettes every day? A loving marriage can give a person a purpose, which reports claim can add years to a person’s life. Marriage is more than just commitment. It’s a way of thinking and an attitude. With the right attitude, you and your spouse can weather any storm — even a deficiency of intimacy in a relationship.
For a lot of married couples, holding onto affection is a challenge and subject to rises, falls, and shifts of satisfaction. Closeness is not purely physical. There can also be a lack or inadequate presence of emotional and spiritual closeness. Affection is fragile and can become imperceptible or atrophied because of monotony, distractions, or neglect.
Affection is vital in a marriage because along with it comes contentedness and wholeness.
Intimacy in Spirituality
Cultivating the closeness in the relationship on a transcendent level will fortify any other types of closeness experienced in the marriage. Often, while time gets spent on physical closeness, the spirituality of the matrimony gets neglected. Whatever you and your wife believe in or choose not to believe, this is a choice that no one else should dissuade or interfere.
Spend time with others who share your faith. Other like-minded couples can mentor you and encourage you and your spouse spiritually. Also, serve and help others together. Open your home, if you like, and offer hospitality. Volunteer as a couple to help neighbors, troubled young people, community programs, your church, the homeless, and any others you could bless with your united, homogeneous intentions.
Connect with abundant expressions of love in everything. All faiths share one thing in common, and that is love. Acts of love and sharing love with others is an excellent way to strengthen your spiritual connection with one another.
Physical Intimacy
There have been a few significant studies recently which suggests that couples who are having more physical encounters elevated their well-being, which fostered more happiness and overall satisfaction within their relationship. Research shows a frequency of physical intimacy in a marriage once a week is sufficient for positive health results. Realize although the whole of your companionship does not depend on physical intimacy, having a positive rapport in your marriage is essential to having a loving relationship.
Make love as often as you can, instead of trying to have sex
Intimacy in Friendship
Like with platonic intimacy in relationship, married couples who are emotionally intimate are close friends.They share their feelings, thoughts, secrets, and desires. Any friendship comes with a few innocent expectations, especially if you allow yourself to be vulnerable to another person about your emotions. You have a right to expect from an intimate friendship:
- Respect
- Attentiveness
- Trust
- Active listening
- Non-judgment
- Dependability
- Honesty [6]
Turn off or silence all smartphones, TVs, and game consoles. Human interaction is essential to have meaningful and deep affection as friends. In society, the number of virtual friends on Facebook, “likes” to posted selfies in Instagram stories, and shares of tweets on Twitter are a huge part of current culture.
Text messages and emails zip from device to device but when you are with your spouse, find time to silence the rings and notifications. Try powering off the TV, muting cellphones, putting the computer to sleep and talk to one another, looking into each other’s eyes, and enjoying a fulfilling, real-time, person-to-person interaction.
Spend 30 minutes of uninterrupted time with each other every day.
You understand the importance of turning off electronics from time to time to interact with your spouse. Now take it a step further and plan a half an hour each day after the kids drift off to sleep to be together.
You don’t have to limit yourselves to just 30 minutes, but you can shop, do tasks, errands, and chores together. Not only will it help to add quality to your affection in the relationship but you’ll get a lot done and in less time than if each of you were to go at it alone.
Take part in marriage retreats or marriage improvement groups. You and your spouse may enjoy the activities in some communities, with civic groups and churches which sponsor and host events created to enrich the bonds and closeness of married couples. Many couples reap wonderful benefits by having structured guidance from a public leader or clergy.
Make a date night or pick a day every week when you two can have fun together.
It’s easy to get swept away by family affairs, work obligations, and social demands for your time and attention. By spending this time together, you and your spouse create new memories and strengthen your emotional closeness.
Also, consider collaborating on a checklist of various enjoyable activities you and your spouse can do. It’s like a bucket list but without morbidity. You two will always have something to look forward to. The collective desires and dreams will encourage more affection in the relationship.
Create an environment where your spouse feels valued and secure. They say the people closest to you hurt you the most because they know you the most. Cohabitation with matrimony implies an extreme closeness of two individuals. As years go by, you learn what hurts the one you love, but that doesn’t mean you should do it. Do your part to make your spouse feel safe to speak and express feelings without fear of backlash.
Don’t hold grudges. Resentment towards your spouse could be emotionally dangerous. When disagreements come up, your partner should feel comfortable talking with you and know things between you two always settle. Forgiveness fosters emotional intimacy.
Intimacy in Relationship Through Growth
Understand you and your spouse are not the only ones who require a refuel of closeness in their marriage. Take inventory of the lovely things going well in the relationship and of what you two hope to improve. Then, work together to plan on what changes you two need to make to achieve those areas of growth.
Usually, when the words, “You aren’t the person I married,” come up within a marriage, it’s negative. However, as you both take steps to improve individually and as a unit in positive ways, the two of you become different people who are better than before. You are growing together as a couple in an intrinsic and intimate way.
Put down the boxing gloves. There will be conflict from time to time in any relationship, but its arrival doesn’t mean you and your spouse are lacking something that seemingly happier couples own. It says both parties have defenses up. It may sound contradictory, but you want to fight positively and not by creating a dynamic of inequality in the relationship. In this way, instead of affection, anger and anxiety build.
You don’t want your marriage to turn into a toxic relationship. If you feel they are controlling tendencies, then do your best break free from those circumstances. If you feel the controlling is getting out of hand and you aren’t able to neutralize it together, then seek help and make a plan.
Try flirting nostalgically like the relationship was brand new and compliment your spouse. You don’t want to get in a rut and too comfortable with your spouse and stultify the relationship. Reports show the tendency for cheating and affairs in marriage appears when one person gets dissatisfied. Keep the spice and flavor in your love and avoid routine, complacency, or monotony.
Take time for yourself.
You want to be an interdependent partner with your spouse in your marriage. You likely have things you enjoy doing as a personal passion, sport, or hobby. It’s all right to experience these things by yourself or with your friends outside of the marriage. It’s healthy to spend time with your spouse but not too much. As the popular adage claims, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
Don’t shy away from therapy if you need the help. To rekindle intimacy and rebuild closeness, intervention from a therapist could be helpful if there are stumbling blocks. Therapists can help a couple restore affection and facilitate necessary adjustments within the marriage. Speaking to a trained and objectively unbiased ear can help with these obstructions to closeness:
- Communication issues
- Affection anxiety
- Unproductive beliefs or intentions
- Cognitive misinterpretations
As Dean Martin once crooned, “Everybody loves somebody sometime.” Typically, people enjoy spending time with others. In a lot of those situations, romance penetrates the scene, and we also find people enjoy being in love with other people. Although the definition of marriage has morphed into more politically correct terms over the recent years, it remains a union between two people in a committed relationship of legally recognized love. However, the law has no jurisprudence over affection — only couples can desire, cultivate, and achieve it together.
Intimacy doesn’t just involve sex but holistically, also implicates physical proximity, emotional, and spiritual closeness. The important thing to remember is to be receptive and inviting to the blossoming of real affection. It’s about being open to spending time together, interdependence, understanding, expressions of love, new experiences, fellowship with other couples, enrichment, and growth. When there’s intimacy in relationship, there’s love and a “happily ever after.”
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