Watch Your Relationship Thrive When You Enhance Emotional Intimacy
The level of emotional intimacy is a good way to measure the health of a relationship. Emotional intimacy is the closeness one feels beyond regular fondness felt for family and friends. It’s hard to have a healthy relationship with a poor degree of emotional intimacy. The connection must be made and carried throughout the relationship with the intent of nourishing the bond.
Build your emotional intimacy and reinforce your bonds of love:
1. Workout together. We maintain intimate connections with those who we share difficult times, whether it be enduring a dreadful boss or training for a bodybuilding contest. Spend time training at the gym together, suffer and sweat together, survive the pain together, and your bond will grow from the experience you share.
2. Release your past. Learn from your past relationships and leave them behind. Past issues are what keep people from being intimately connected. Don’t allow the pain from the past to ruin what can be a beautiful relationship with someone new. Let it go and don’t bleed on those who didn’t cut you.
3. Share your gratitude for one another. Before going to bed, share what you appreciate about one another. It could be a small jester like picking up clothes from the floor or grabbing some food on the way home from work. Sharing your appreciation will change the way you look at your partner because you start to look for things they do that you’re thankful for. You likewise will start to do things they can appreciate about you as well.
4. Touch each other every day. Sex is a part of touching but focus on other ways to touch. Hold hands when out in public, cuddle when you’re watching a movie, tap your partner on the butt when you pass them, or be skin to skin when you sleep. Touching just reassures your spouse that you’re there for them.
5. Be a positive experience for your partner. Research shows that negative experiences affect us more than positive ones at a 5 to 1 ratio. That means, it takes five positive experiences to negate the impact we feel from one negative experience. With that said, try to provide at least 5 positive experiences a week to remove a bad day from your spouse’s plate. This will grow your bond and create favorable moments to hold on to.
6. Be a good listener. You may not care about the new lift kit he got for his truck or the great time she had at a rooftop bar when she was out with friends. However, everyone needs someone to share their stories with and there’s no better person to run home to than your spouse. We like when people take time to listen to what we have to say, so get good at it. Look them in the eye, laugh when it’s funny, give them your undivided attention, and just simply be there to listen.
7. Try something new together. Be creative and experience something that you all haven’t done together. Take a day trip to a place neither of you have gone before. Take a cooking class together or try a new restaurant to eat with foods you haven’t tried yet. Go on a waterfall hike and swim when you get there. Rent out a cabin and go fishing for the weekend. Take a train ride to a winery for some wine tasting. Whatever you do, have fun and do more of it.
8. Be the best version of yourself. You’ll have more to give when you’re at your best. Take care of yourself in all ways, be it emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Spend time daily striving to achieve your goals. This won’t go unnoticed by your spouse, and they too will improve the version of themselves.
9. Show interest in your partner’s life. Be genuine and listen when you ask about how their day went. If she just got home from work, be inquisitive and ask her how things are going. When he comes home from playing golf, ask about how his game went. Be hands on when it comes to what they did when they were out in the world without you. It shows that you care about what they have going on.
It’s easy to be emotionally intimate in the beginning of a relationship. The other person is interesting and everything about them shines. After 5 years have set in, emotional intimacy may need some nurturing, or it may fade away. Keep the relationship fresh and full of excitement, so intimacy will remain a priority in the relationship, no matter how many successful years you have together.
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