Intimacy is very difficult to define but is wonderful to feel. It’s what makes us close and warm and loyal to the bond we share with someone special. While sometimes intimacy “just happens”, there are lots of things in our daily lives can interfere with it and allow us to forget how much our partners mean to us. Here are some ideas that might help enhance the intimacy of your relationship:
1. Open Communication: Foster open and honest communication with your partner. Share your thoughts, feelings, and desires, and encourage your partner to do the same. Effective communication helps deepen understanding and emotional connection.
2. Trust and Vulnerability: Build a foundation of trust by being reliable, keeping your promises, and maintaining confidentiality. Do not break promises. Your relationship should be a safe space where both partners can be vulnerable and share their deepest emotions and fears without fear of judgment, criticism, or betrayal of trust.
3. Be Honest: Admit to your mistakes and apologize (without prompting) when your mistakes have hurt people. Failure to do so might make people think you don’t care about them, and may cause them to mistrust you. Being inept but honest is much better than appearing to be uncaring.
4. Spend Quality Time Together: Spend dedicated quality time with your partner, free from distractions. Engage in activities you both enjoy, have meaningful conversations, and create opportunities for shared experiences that strengthen the bond between you.
5. Show Affection: Express affection through physical touch, words of affirmation, and gestures of love. Small acts of kindness and expressions of appreciation can go a long way in nurturing intimacy; they are easy to deliver, and they don’t have to cost a thing. Little love notes, winks, flowers, kisses… there are lots of ways to make your partner feel appreciated and wanted. Ladies, you may have heard that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach and there’s some truth to that, but for most men, creative and unprompted sex has that beat hands down. It is sometimes said that women need intimacy to enjoy good sex, and men need good sex to feel intimate. Men, your ladies are precious and special – make sure they know that. Touch has healing powers that we don’t understand very well, but most of us need it very much – and it’s free for you to give!
6. Show Pride in Your Partner: Your partner has qualities, skills, values, behaviours, and accomplishments that are unique that may contribute to your happiness (and maybe for others too). Let others know how proud you are of your partner. Tell your partner how proud you are of him or her once in a while, and why.
7. DO NOT: Do not be sarcastic with with your partner in public. Do not belittle them or diminish the importance of their accomplishments. Do not make them the butt of jokes. Do not call them insulting names. While you may be displaying a degree of wit to others when you do that, you are destroying the joy they had being with you. Preventing shows of affection can also be devastating. Pushing your partner away when they try to hug you for example, sends a hurtful message, even if you didn’t intend to send such a thing. Show your partner the respect you would expect for yourself.
8. Support and Empathy: Be there for your partner during both the joys and challenges of life. Show empathy, understanding, and support when they face difficulties. Do not belittle your partner’s accomplishments, even if you don’t think they were big deals. Consider that you may not understand how hard those accomplishments were for them. Knowing that you have each other’s backs strengthens the emotional connection.
SCIT – Sexual Compatibility and Intimacy
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