Get Closer Than Ever: Practical Tips for Improving Emotional Intimacy in Your Relationship
Do you feel like your relationship lacks emotional intimacy? You may be right. And a relationship that’s lacking emotional intimacy is nowhere near as fulfilling as one that has affection and understanding. If you’d like to enhance this area of your life then try using the following 10 tips.
1. Embark on a New Adventure
While daily routines may feel comfortable and nice, they don’t always support the emotional intimacy that you or your partner may crave. This can also cause you to feel that your relationship has lost its spark. Trying something new can rekindle this spark and bring you and your partner closer emotionally.
2. Embrace Physical Contact
Another thing that tends to disappear as relationships wear on is the amount of time that a couple spends touching one another. If you start to feel your emotional intimacy is slipping, make more time to spend touching one another, whether this is cuddling, a massage, or even just a hug before you leave for work each day.
3. Keep in Contact
Sometimes when couples have been together awhile, their communication begins to fail even if they live together, and this can cause a loss of emotional intimacy. Even if you and your partner have been together for years, send each other cute messages during the day. This will help you feel more connected and increase your emotional intimacy.
4. Show Appreciation
One of the top ways to increase emotional intimacy is to be vocal about your appreciation for one another. Although this can start one sided, don’t be afraid to let your partner know that you desire more appreciation, if they really care about you, they won’t be afraid to tell you how much they appreciate you!
5. Don’t Stop Dating
Emotional intimacy can wane when couples move from the dating phase to the long-term relationship phase, and much of this is because they forget to continue dating even though they are now together. Thus if you want to restore emotional intimacy, it’s time to schedule a date night with your partner and try to do this on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.
6. Have Your Own Life
Besides just dating and keeping in contact to keep a relationship emotionally intimate, you should also be sure to have a life outside of your partner. When the two of you spend every moment together, this can lead to irritation and other negative feelings while some time apart will help both of you to become emotionally closer the next time you see one another.
7. Always Be Supportive
Support is a huge player when it comes to emotional intimacy. If you don’t support your partner, or feel that they don’t support you, this can really damage the way you feel towards each other. Although you may not always agree with your partners endeavors, resolve to always be supportive no matter what they do, and ask them to do the same for you.
8. Share Your Fears
The hardest thing about improving emotional intimacy is that you have to learn to be vulnerable in your relationship. This means sharing the things that scare you, or that are stressing you out. This can be scary at first, especially if you aren’t used to speaking from a place of fear. But stick with it, because it will help you to feel better in the long run. Sometimes, if you find this especially difficult it may be helpful to write down what you want to say before you speak it out loud.
9. Make Time for Deep Chats
Life is busy, and this doesn’t always leave time for more than the daily small talk. Unfortunately, this daily small talk is not enough to improve emotional intimacy. If you want to have real emotional intimacy with your partner you should schedule time to have some of the harder talks. Aim to have time to talk about the deep or difficult subjects at least once a week, maybe even twice if your schedule allows it.
10. Reminisce
Chances are, you and your partner are still together because the two of you have had some great times together. And when you feel that the emotional intimacy in your relationship may not be all it used to be, then it might be time to reminisce about some of the great things you’ve done. This can help remind you and your partner of the things that have inspired emotional intimacy between you in the past and lead you back to a more emotionally intimate relationship.
Overall, you don’t have to use every tip on this list to bring emotional intimacy back into your life and relationship, so start with one or two and see how it goes! No matter which tips you pick, they are sure to help restore emotional intimacy back in your life so pick a couple and get started!
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