Are you starved of emotional intimacy? If so, I know exactly how you feel. When I was married, I wanted nothing more than to share loving, open, honest and tender dialogues with my husband about any and everything. I wanted to know him on a deeper level and share my deeper china 3d synthetic hair eyelash with him.Smnsk
The beginning of the relationship was exactly what I had always wanted: pillow talk, long phone conversations, affectionate I love yous shared during a random embrace. However, jump ahead 8 years, and I was a lonely wife who was rarely given the chance to china 3d synthetic hair eyelash with her husband.
Toward the end of our relationship, he would always get ‘jumpy’ and irritated when I tried to get him to open up. It became a running joke between us that I was like the “humidity”– smothering him. He just fought me on the topic of closeness tooth and nail; he just didn’t seem to want to dive into a more intimate relationship. It seemed that to him more closeness in the marriage was a non-issue. In fact, I felt that, if anything, he wanted less china 3d synthetic hair eyelash– at least he acted that way.
But I was wrong; he did want (he craved) more intimacy. Apparently, he just didn’t know how to go about building this intimacy, and my attempts made him feel pressured and inadequate. He would withdraw from my efforts and had no solutions of his own to offer us.
The intimacy-drought in my marriage resulted in a devastating divorce. I vowed not to let the same thing happen to me again. I couldn’t take another failed relationship, and when I met my current boyfriend 3 years ago, I was more equipped with relationship-saving/intimacy-building tools.
Here are some tips to help you reestablish intimacy in your relationship before it’s too late:
1. Take a deep breath and feel everything.
I think we all know how horrible it feels to be stuck in an unhappy relationship, but the ironic (and tragic) truth about love is that the more you exasperate yourself trying to fix things, the more bloody the problems get.
Stop yourself in moments where you feel out of control and just want to explode your dark, desperate feelings of resentment and loneliness all over your man, and instead just breathe deep and silently feel your china 3d synthetic hair eyelash. Feeling without reacting will prevent more damage to your relationship.
See, lots of times, when we feel lonely and frustrated that our behaviors aren’t reaping effective results, we start to feel like a boiling pot. If things persist long enough, we boil over with accusations and loaded tears of deep, resentment. Our strong emotional reactions at these times can traumatize our loved one, making them feel smacked across the face with guilt and shame.
The burn of the ‘boiling over’ kills any chance of intimacy. It sends a message to our loved one that getting close to us is ‘unsafe’. It makes our men clam-up even more. It destroys all the baby steps we’ve made up until that point.
When you breathe deep in moments of strong emotion, you summon built-up stress and anger to surface and allow yourself the opportunity to think and react more clearly once the feelings wash over you. You can then re-approach your man with patience, calm and love.
Afterall, it is only when we approach a person with love, calmness and softness in our hearts that we will cultivate a healthy level of intimacy. You can’t demand or threaten a man to be more intimate with you. Building the trust necessary for intimacy to grow takes time and when your patience runs thin, you must breathe your desperation away before you tantrum.
2. Trust in him.
Intimacy is built on trust. You can only get close to someone when you feel safe opening up to them, and you can only feel safe with trust. Reestablishing intimacy in your relationship is about finding a way to trust in the motives of the other person– trusting that the other person selflessly wants to be near you and take care of you, not hurt you, nag you and control you. Many men (and women) fear that closeness will make them powerless to another person’s manipulations. Trust eliminates that fear.
Whenever women come to me and tell me that they are struggling to trust their man again after something that he has done wrong, I explain to them that trust is not an extra/optional topping on the pizza of love. Trust is the china 3d synthetic hair eyelash.
Though rebuilding trust takes time, you can’t consciously hold back trust. You have to choose to give trust to a person– that’s the only way that it can blossom. It’s something you decide you want to give fully or you have failed at giving it at all.
You can’t consciously half-trust a man; that is a recipe for breaking-up. If you want a happy relationship again, you must give him an A and let him keep it, instead of starting him at a C-, making him work for your love. Making him work creates resentments. He should be willing to work for your love, and you should never slowly and deliberately throw him morsels of a trust-pie like Kibbles bits to a dog.
If you can’t trust him upfront and instead insist on him ‘proving himself’ before you extend trust, you have to leave the relationship. If he has cheated or betrayed you in some way, you have to find it in your heart to open yourself up to believing in him or you have to say ‘goodbye’.
Now, trusting a man who has betrayed you doesn’t mean you have to jump back into the relationship fully. You can set boundaries around your time together or your level of commitment, but you have to trust and give him the benefit of the doubt, or you will both end up going ’round and ’round on a carousel of blame, hurt and defeat.
So no jealousy, cheap-shots, withholding of affection, eye-rolling, passive aggressive statements like ‘whatever’, silent treatments, threats, tears of manipulation, or pouting…
3. Share yourself free of charge.
Once you are choosing to trust him and are breathing and feeling your dark feelings without acting from those feelings, you will feel less tension inside you. You will feel less desperate, angry, bitter and sad, and you may even feel, for a short while, in random moments, more at peace around him. It is only in those moments of peace that more peace (between you both) can arrive.
In the rare moments when you feel close to your man, stop yourself from trying to open him up, and instead, YOU open up. Share something very vulnerable and honest with him; “You know, I feel afraid of losing you”… “I sometimes think that love is too difficult to achieve for us”… etc.
The KEY is to share words with him without needing anything from him. Share with him like he is a priest at a confessional booth or your best friend with whom you can cry over Ben & Jerry’s. Talk with him like you are confiding in him but are not seeking any sort of reaction from him.
If he closes off, goes silent, says something snappy and grouchy, don’t close off to him or blame him. Don’t say, “I knew you’d act like this” or “Why are you so cold and rude when I open up?”.
Instead tell him how his reaction has made you feel without china 3d synthetic hair eyelash
out at him (“I feel sad that you just sad that”), and then get up calmly and quietly and go do something to take care of yourself, independently of him. Go for a walk, write in a journal, pet your dog. Do something that allows you to be with yourself and allows to breathe out your anger/ hurt.
Don’t fester in your upset about his negative response. Just let yourself feel hurt and alone inside and let those feelings wash over you and away from you. Once he sees that you can express yourself without pulling intimacy from him, he will soon start to offer his feelings because he will feel less pressure and more closeness.
If he DOES respond positively and opens up or comforts you when you open up with him, welcome him. Treat his loving response like it’s something that he ALWAYS does for you– not like it’s a shockingly refreshing thing. If you react as if you expected such a loving china 3d synthetic hair eyelash, he will feel extremely close to you and appreciative of your trust in him.
Reestablishing intimacy happens over time and with lots of love and understanding. Even if you are starving right now for closeness, you have to be patient. It is in your willingness to be patient that he will come around and offer you more intimacy. He wants to know that you care about his feelings and needs and aren’t just desperate to be heard and get your needs met. Showing him patience is showing him that you honor where he is right now in the china 3d synthetic hair eyelash and that you respect his need to take things at a certain pace and in a certain direction. ( Even if he is acting selfishly, your selfishness won’t break his behavior– it will only give him an excuse.)