Do you sometimes feel you have very little in common with your partner or spouse? Do you often feel lonely in your relationship or marriage? Do you silently ask yourself if you and your partner are slowly growing apart?
If so, you are not alone. Many couples struggle to maintain intimacy and stay emotionally connected over time. The good news is, connection and intimacy in your marriage or relationship is something you can build. Here are five ways to improve intimacy in your marriage or relationship:
1. Empathize – Don’t Problem-Solve:
When your partner opens up to you about a concern they are having at work or elsewhere, don’t try to solve their problem. Instead, try to connect with their feelings. Show that you understand what your partner must be going through, how difficult it must be to be in their shoes. Encourage your partner to tell you more about what bothers them; show interest. Have your partner tell you enough about their feelings, opinions, and thoughts so that if your friend asked you to tell them why your partner is upset, you would be able to give them an accurate summary. Sometimes, all we want from each other is someone who will hear us out without being judgmental, without siding with “the enemy”, and without giving us advise based on their own perspective. Feeling understood rather than evaluated, can greatly increase our sense of intimacy and connection with our partner.
2. Create Rituals of Connection:
Do you really know what is going on with your partner at work? Do you know what worries are on their mind? Instead of leaving these kinds of questions unanswered, why not build in a ritual of sitting down for dinner or for late evening tea, to check in about each other’s day? Turn off the TV and cell phone and make this your daily together-time. Maybe set aside 15 minutes for each person to share about their day. When focus is on your partner, make it all about them, and don’t redirect the conversation to yourself. The goal is not to bring up concerns about each other, but to discuss all the external stressors and successes that are going on at work or with other people. The goal is to strengthen the conviction that you have an ally in each other and are facing the world together. This sense of togetherness and support is one of the best ways to improve intimacy in your marriage over time.
3. Share Your Spontaneous Reactions:
Famous couples researcher, John Gottman, discovered that healthy couples share many more of their spontaneous reactions with each other than couples who are disconnected. Couples who complain that they just don’t have anything to talk to each other about anymore, forget that connection is not always about depth of conversation. Get in the habit of sharing your reactions to even mundane things. Did you like your cup of coffee this morning? Share it. Did you laugh at a Facebook post? Let your partner know. These little invitations to connect are important to the health and intimacy of your relationship. In relationships where partners feel disconnected, Gottman found that not only are these little “bids for connection” few and far between, they are also often met with lack of interest from the partner. If your partner makes a bid for connection, be sure not to turn them down or ignore them. If you routinely do, they will soon stop sharing and your level of intimacy will slowly wither away.
4. Invite Deeper Conversations:
Sometimes when couples get into the doldrum of things, they may interact with each other in routine-like ways that can become deadening or boring and can decrease the sense of intimacy. Couples may start to feel like they are out of things to talk about or that they already know their partners position on different topics. In such cases, it usually pays to ask more philosophical or personal questions, to get at your partner’s deeper underlying thoughts and feelings. Your partner likes to travel: Why is this so important to them? How might this relate to their background or childhood history in some way? It’s important to your partner to be on time: Why do they attach importance to punctuality? Where does that value stem from? What feelings do they have about this issue? Learn to become interested in the deeper motivations, desires, and values of your partner. It is one of the best ways to improve intimacy in your marriage and have more meaningful conversations with your partner.
5. Get Away from the Everyday:
Sometimes what couples really need to rediscover their connection and improve their intimacy is to create new experiences and memories together. It often pays to plan a trip or take time away from the everyday routine. If you always go for dinner and a movie on Fridays, shake it up a little. Try something new. Stay overnight at a hotel in a different city. Take turns planning an outing, by looking up events in the local newspaper. Agree to be open-minded about your partner’s suggestions and try out an event your partner is interested in without judging or dragging your feet. A relationship is a living thing, and new experiences can help give new life to your shared existence and improve intimacy in your marriage.
About me: I am Rune Moelbak, Ph.D. a couples therapist in Houston, Texas. I help couples reconnect and improve intimacy in their relationship or marriage. Read more about my approach to couples therapy.
