Whether you have been married for 6 months or 10 years, I am certain that having an intimate relationship with your spouse remains one of your marriage goals.
Building Intimacy in Marriage is therefore not an event or a one-time thing, rather it’s a continuous journey of cultivating and nurturing the love that we share with our partners. This also means that everything we do in marriage should be geared towards strengthening our intimacy – from simply talking about your day to going on a luxurious vacation, couples can maximize every opportunity to deepen their intimacy.
Intimacy can simply be described as a sense of closeness, emotional connection, and “knowing” your partner beyond any other person.
According to Verywellmind, intimacy is a feeling of closeness and connection in an interpersonal relationship.
As simple as this sounds, it can become very difficult for couples to continue to build intimacy especially as they’ve been in the marriage for longer. Between work, house chores and a demanding social life, spending quality time, and building emotional & physical connections with your spouse can easily become a routine you don’t give thought to anymore.
What used to be an opportunity for closeness and connection between the two of you now gets overlooked, not because you don’t love your partner anymore but because you have become too familiar and gotten into a routine of “adulting”.
The good news? Even if your marriage has settled into a comfortable routine, there are ways to reignite that spark again and strengthen your intimacy in marriage.
Here are 5 practical tips to get you started
1. Be Comfortable Having Difficult Conversations
If you run from difficult conversations, you miss out on building a deep connection. Most people don’t know how to talk about difficult issues, because they fear it might expose them and lead to conflicts.
To be honest, no one likes to be confronted with their wrongs or not-so-good behaviours. Yet, being able to have conversations that address issues is a great way to strengthen the bond in your marriage.
Picture this, if you continue to sweep dirt underneath your bed and not properly dispose of it, what do you think will happen eventually?
Sweeping issues under the rug do more harm than good. You might avoid conflict in the moment but in the long run, pent-up issues can have a more disastrous effect on your marriage.
Being able to have difficult conversations is a skill we all need to learn if we are going to be married for a long time. The truth is my husband and I struggled with this for a while and now we are able to have conversations that are seemingly difficult in very productive ways That’s why I created The 3C’s Guide! It’s an effective guide for couples check-ups, communication, conflicts and hard conversations guide. You can get the guide here
2. Have Little Daily Rituals of Connection
A ritual is something you do consistently e.g. good morning hugs and smooch is more effective than a once-in-a-year fancy vacation.
As a couple, it is important to have daily rituals – things you do constantly and consistently that improve the connection you share.
Some daily rituals of connection ideas include praying together, cooking together, reading a book together, evening walks, going to bed together etc These little acts of connection build up to form a lasting bond and connection
What you do consistently has more impact than what you do occasionally.
3. Be Curious and Spend Focused Time Together
Don’t stop being curious about your partner, your partner is evolving and what their needs were when you were newly married may not be what their needs are five years into your marriage.
People evolve. I used to like cornflakes as a child but as an adult, I’d rather have a bowl of custard. That is not to say I don’t take golden morn, but my preference changed as I grew.
Your spouse will not remain the way you married them forever, their likes, interests, and desires might change and switch over time. Be open to learning new things about how they act, think, or even what they want.
If you realize there’s a change in routine from how they used to behave, be curious to find out why, and adapt. For example, if your spouse decides to start hitting the gym at forty, think of it as a time to connect rather than discourage them
4. Engage in Spiritual Connection and Individual Self-care
The more connected you are to God, and feel good individually, the more connected you feel with each other. Everything you give in marriage starts from YOU!
You’ve heard the saying, “You cannot pour from an empty cup.”
As a person, you need to be emotionally and spiritually stable before you can seek stability with someone. Prioritizing your self-care and mental health allows you to be more open to creating better bonds with your partner.
Take time to work on yourself individually, before working on one another. Attend therapy sessions individually to seek professional help if you’re finding it difficult to work on yourself. Two sharp swords are better for battle than two blunts or one blunt.
5. Build Emotional Intimacy and Physical Intimacy
Emotional and Physical intimacy are intertwined. You can’t have one without the other. It’s a feeling of being close, seen, understood and safe with each other.
It’s a feeling of being close, seen, understood and safe with each other. It’s when you are both “naked and not ashamed” just like the scripture says in Gen 2:25
Your marriage should be a safe space where both of you find it easy and comfortable to speak, listen and be with each other. No one needs to hide who they truly are or how they truly feel.
Women in particular find it difficult to connect physically if they don’t feel emotionally connected. It is therefore important as a man to give space for your wife’s emotions, listen to her when she talks about her feelings, empathize even when you don’t understand. This way she feels emotionally connected to you and it’s easier for her to be physically intimate with you.
Wives also need to understand their husband’s need for physical and sexual intimacy. A man whose need for physical intimacy is constantly being denied will struggle to connect emotionally with his wife.
As a wife, one of the ways to make your husband feel desired and connected to you is your desire to be physically intimate with him. A man wants his wife to want sex and physical intimacy with him just like a woman also wants a man to connect to her emotionally.
Both are intertwined and meeting each other’s needs in these two ways will definitely increase your bond as a couple.
Wrapping Up
In essence, building intimacy in your marriage is a life-long journey. It’s about putting in effort every day. And it’s never too late to start to put in that effort.
Sign up for The 30-Day Couples Reconnecting Challenge where I coach and guide couples on how to refocus on investing in loving actions, respectful communication and creating love deposits in their marriage to rebuild connection and intimacy. Over a thousand couples have been on this challenge with transformation feedback in their marriage
In 30 days, you will build a culture that you can hang on to even after.
