Emotional intimacy is an important ingredient of healthy relationships, enabling partners to feel close, share feelings freely and receive confirmation.
Enhance emotional partnership by prioritizing having fun together, sharing memories of past experiences and showing your appreciation. Also try new activities – hobbies or sports you haven’t tried yet could provide great ways to grow closer as partners.
Spend Time Together
Expanding intimacy outside the bedroom is another essential component of creating a strong and healthy relationship. Spend time alone without distractions such as cell phones and televisions by turning them off or going for walks in nature – or have some fun and laugh together; doing this can bring you even closer together as partners.
Physical contact can also help create intimacy, and doesn’t need to end in sexual encounters. Kissing, hugging and holding hands are all effective ways of increasing feelings of closeness and connection – try cuddling while watching a movie together or enjoying a long bath together for maximum effect.
Sharing common values and interests can also help strengthen intimacy between partners. This could mean anything from practicing shared spirituality or religion, to simply having regular date nights together.
Be Open and Vulnerable
Vulnerability can be challenging to practice due to our natural instinct to guard ourselves and avoid injury. To combat this tendency, therapy may be needed in order to identify why you’re so protective and find healthier ways of being vulnerable.
Assuming vulnerability can range from being honest about how much you appreciate someone to engaging in deep discussions about sensitive subjects or even engaging in intellectual dialogue on current events or personal philosophies.
Being open and vulnerable requires more than simply sharing emotions; it means accepting that life doesn’t revolve solely around you, that others have their own opinions and beliefs, which may be especially challenging for people who tend to be control freaks or perfectionists.
Try New Things
Traveling, planning a special date night and engaging in new activities are great ways to venture outside your comfort zone and gain more knowledge about each other. Plus, this helps build emotional intimacy by discussing relevant current events or personal life goals together!
Flirting can be an enjoyable way to increase intimacy in the bedroom and can increase sexual arousal by reinvigorating your libido. A few seductive smiles, flirtatious text messages, or sensual gestures can go a long way toward deepening intimate bonds between partners.
Relationship intimacy is key to overall well-being in romantic relationships, so if your intimacy with your partner has suffered, speak to a couple’s therapist. You can always go to marriage counseling – a common practice at most institutions. Many provide both in-person sessions as well as online counseling solutions where users can work through issues at their own pace from anywhere around the world.
Overcome Your Fear of Intimacy
Fears of engulfment and abandonment lie at the core of this condition, leading people with it to have difficulty showing vulnerability in relationships. They typically want close connections but tend to sabotage these by creating distance or criticizing aspects about their partner that they find unappealing.
Overcoming fears takes time and effort from both partners, but can be done successfully with help from a therapist. Read reviews on Yelp and Talkspace to help make it easy to locate qualified therapists that specialize in intimacy avoidance therapy; these services make finding qualified help easy.
Make Eye Contact
According to this study, eye contact can be an extremely powerful tool in building intimacy in any relationship. It shows your interest and helps you understand their feelings, so when talking with your partner try looking directly into their eyes for several seconds at a time while speaking and see how that makes them feel.
Breaking eye contact can be taken as a sign that someone is shy or disinterested with what’s being discussed, while looking at you before quickly turning away may signal something more sinister like hiding something or feeling guilty for what they said.
As part of intimate moments like kissing and having sex, eye contact can help partners connect emotionally and create a deeper experience during sex, creating closeness between partners. Making eye contact increases levels of oxytocin in your body – a natural hormone which increases intimacy and trust – as well as being an ideal way to flirt and express attraction.
