When you talk about intimacy in marriage, a great many people automatically assume the word intimacy with sexual activity. While sexual contact is a part or a form of intimacy it is not the sole proprietor of the intimacy of marriage. In fact, the sexual expression of love and devotion is but a single facet of a marriage’s intimacy.
If you look at marriage as a journey, where you are pilot and co-pilot, navigator and passenger, then you will begin to see that unless you maintain constant communication there will be problems in your flight plan. It’s important that you both know where you are and a transmission of ‘copy that’ is returned. If you are not acknowledging your partner’s messages or they are not acknowledging yours – you will both become lost to each other.
Marriages breakdown for a variety of reasons, but one of the most common reasons is that they simply let go of their intimacy. Married couples forget a crucial lesson we learned on the playgrounds of our youth. When you ignore someone – they go away. You don’t have to ignore them on purpose, but simply being too busy to listen, or too forgetful to share can create a rift that will simply widen with time.
If you have not done so already, it’s important to create rituals that generate communication. A family breakfast, a family dinner, coffee together at lunchtime, hours to yourselves after the children have gone to bed. It does not matter how busy you are – if you do not make the time for this, you may find that you are both living parallel lives with little to no intersections at all and the intimacy that you both crave may be sought elsewhere.
My husband and I make a habit of touching base several times a day. Whether it is by phone or in person, we check in – we ask how each other is doing – we let each other gripe about various problems or brag about successes. We offer sympathy and we offer congratulations. We do not have a perfect marriage by any means and we have had to make some serious efforts in the past to bridge rifts that formed. But despite some cracks here and there, the foundation is pretty solid and we’ll keep building those bridges with every word, thought and feeling.