How to Build Intimacy With Your Partner(s) All Year Long
Valentine's day is typically a day to celebrate love, romance, relationships, and connection. However, V-day is not the only day you should be celebrating you and your partners. To sustain a healthy, loving relationship with another person (or persons), we need to keep the celebration going year-round by continuing intimacy in both big and small ways. Building intimacy isn't just about sex, chocolates, flowers, fancy dinners, and large romantic gestures. Intimacy includes the small and medium-sized moments of daily connection. Intimacy is anything that helps you and your partner(s) feel valued and understood by each other. Here are some suggestions on actions you can take to keep a relationship sustainable and spicy.
Tease and flirt with each other throughout the day! Flirting isn't just for the first through third dates! Flirting with an already established partner is so important to keeping the spice in the relationship. When we flirt, we are showing our partner(s) that we still find them emotionally, physically, and cognitively attractive! Flirting can be anything you and your partner(s) are consensually agreeing to. Some examples include inside jokes, intentional small touches on the arms or back (or wherever else you like to be touched for comfort), leaving little love notes on the fridge, sending flirty memes, sexting, and so much more!
Hold hands in the grocery store and plan an intentional in-home dinner together. Intimacy can look like holding hands through the aisles, picking out the ice cream you know your partner likes, planning something that will take both of you working together to prepare, giving them a loving look from across the dinner table, etc. Meals together and talking through the moments in your day that impacted you can help build and grow trust, empathy, and closeness. Making a dedicated space in your home for meals that aren’t in front of the TV can help keep romance and intentionality in your relationship for a long time.
Plan an out-of-the-house date. Dinner at home totally counts as a date. But sometimes we want to show off our partner(s) and love to the world while having fun outside of the house. Dating can be as simple as a meal out or it can look like participating in activities together. Ask your partner(s) whether they have any new interests. They may have discovered new tastes or hobbies you don’t yet know about. Take your partner(s) to the library for free and browse the stacks. Go to the lake and rent a canoe. Go climbing for the first time at a bouldering and rock climbing gym. Buy tickets to an art museum and discuss what paintings draw your eye the most. Take some disposable cameras and go on a walk around a part of town you don’t go to often. Go see a band you like perform live, attend a theatrical play, wave your $1 bills around at a drag brunch, and/or dress up in a fun outfit and watch a burlesque show.
Schedule routine relationship check-ins. Having regularly scheduled check-ins to talk only about your relationship can be such an important way to assess the joys and challenges of long-term love. Check-ins are discussions that help you and your partner(s) feel understood, give space for them to ask for what they are needing in the relationship that they may not be getting, talk about your satisfaction with your sex life, and come up with compromises on how to be there for each other. Some questions to ask during a check-in may entail: What are things I already do that help you feel loved? What could I be doing better to help you feel more valued? How have we been managing conflict lately and do we need to make some improvements? What boundaries do you have that I haven’t been paying attention to, or that you feel like are hard to enforce? What boundaries do we have as partners in a relationship regarding friendships, family, and other people we know?
Talk about your sex life with each other when you aren’t in the moment. One of the many reasons people come to see relational therapists is due to wanting more frequent and passionate sex.The frequency and quality of the sex that you and your partner(s) are having depends on your schedules, what stressors are present in your lives, and how much you communicate about what you want and don’t want in the bedroom. Sometimes it’s hard to bring up in the moment what your desires are. So talk about sex! Have a conversation over dinner or coffee about what you and your partner(s) did like and what they would have wanted to change. Ask each other if there is anything sexy that y’all haven’t tried that they would want to explore with you. Get into a discussion about what the “chill” parts of “Netflix and chill” look like for y’all.
Schedule sex or leave periods of time in the week for spontaneous sex. Society tells us that spontaneity is the only way to have a satisfying sex life. That’s just not true! Spontaneous sex can be exciting and playful, but so can scheduled sex. We all have busy lives and busy weeks. Sometimes, if you don’t explicitly schedule intentional time for sex, you and your partner(s) could go weeks or months without having this intimate connection. I recommend scheduling sex for a specific day, with no pressure of what time that kind of intimacy is going to happen, and be spontaneous within the day y’all know you’d like to have this connective experience.
Go see a relational therapist. Whether you are a few months into the relationship, or a few decades, seeing a relational therapist can be an extra support on how to maintain the relationship you want, manage conflict well, and learn more about each other. Therapy is more beneficial if you attend with your loved ones before conflicts arise. Many relational therapists will help you work on communication styles, building intimacy even further, having a neutral space for you to discuss big decisions and life events, and grow closer in the relationship.
