The title says it all. I’m going to talk to you about intimacy, types of intimacy, and how fixation on one form of intimacy can reduce your overall intimacy. This is not a “how to fix” article. This is a “Theory of Operations” article. You need to know how a car works before you fix it. With 86 billion neurons in each partner’s brain, there are even more parts than a car, so have patience, learn, and listen to your partner or spouse. Fixing is the very last step, and if you’re wrenching on a random bolt in your car without understanding how it works, you can imagine how disastrous that could be.
What Is Intimacy?
The best definition I know for Intimacy is: connection. If you feel connected through a process with your partner, that’s a form of intimacy. Couples who go for walks together, shop for antiques together, watch a movie together, generate an emotional connection with the other person. They are having a common emotional intimacy, or connection with the other person. There are different ways of dicing different “types” of intimacy, but here are 4 major “types” I talk to my couples about:
Types of Intimacy
Sexual Intimacy
There’s “plain vanilla” sex. (whatever that means to you.). But sexual doesn’t automatically equal penetrative sexual interaction. Sexual intimacy can be on the level of connecting without being physical. Some of my couples get sexually intimate talking to the other person while they’re masturbating. There’s no physical connection there, but you can bet there’s a real, felt connection between two people.
Physical (but not sexual) Intimacy
Having someone put a reassuring hand on your back can feel calming, right? This has proven out to be so powerful, the touch of a romantic partner can reduce the felt sense of pain in fMRI studies. What does this mean? They examined the parts of the brain that light up during a painful sensation, then they watch the brain when a romantic partner holds the subject’s hand in the next round of painful stimulation. The brain centers for pain actually are calmed. So not only is there less report of pain, but we can actually see that the pain centers are not as activated.
No wonder that when my clients talk about how a reduction in connective touch, they also tend to report a substantial reduction in their relationship satisfaction.
Emotional Intimacy
When two people experience a movie or a touching moment together, it is a shared emotional experience. Not only are those two people experiencing pleasure together using dopamine and endorphin neurotransmitters, they are experiencing the “hug neurotransmitter,” oxytocin. It’s a bonding transmitter that lets you know that you have a safe attachment figure in your midst.
Intellectual or religious Intimacy
These are technically emotional intimacy too. The real reason why it matters that someone is able to do the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle is because your emotional experience of it reinforces the bond you have with them. This can be either because you are in awe of their expertise or because you are having a shared emotional experience solving it with them.
Similarly, you can feel enraptured during a church service, and discussing it with your spouse or partner can result in a shared emotional experience. You can feel like you are really in tune with the other person and your amygdala can be communicating to their amygdala through touch, conversation, or non-verbals. Both of you are experiencing something individually and experiencing the “feeling of being felt.”
Why Other Kinds of Intimacy Matter
We’re not in the middle ages where marriage was something for uniting families, or where women were property. We’re looking to our spouses and partners as best friends, sexual partners, co-parents, business partners, etc. When you don’t have intimacy, you don’t have connection. And when you don’t have connection, it can hamper accomplishing all those roles together.
What Can Happen Focusing On Sexual Intimacy
When you insist on sexual intimacy as a bonding method, and aren’t tuning into your partner or spouse, the rift between you can grow even further. The other person may feel like you’re not attracted to them, but that you just want to get off. This can make them feel objectified, less connected, and unimportant. These are all things that are turn offs for most people.
Most people want the other person to be A.R.E.: Accessible, Responsive, and Engaged. If you aren’t tuned into the other person, you can be missing all three of these important traits. Then the other person doesn’t feel like doing something really intimate if you’re not tuned in to them.
In addition, the other forms of intimacy may suffer if you focus solely on the sexual intimacy. Your partner may feel like you’re focused on “getting off,” and not on having sexual intimacy with your partner specifically. This can make them feel dismissed and less important, closing them off for other forms of intimacy.
Why Sexual Intimacy Is Still Important
Now that I’ve spent all this time talking about other kinds of intimacy you have with your partner, I’m going to tell you that sexual intimacy is important anyway? That’s not how I want you to think of the prior section. I want you to talk about sexual intimacy as an important part of connecting with your partner without blowing up the rest of your relationship. It’s important to realize you have other parts of your relationship to attend to.
Sexual Intimacy is important because your relationship can be the only place where you or your partner are going to experience sexual intimacy. In monogamous couples, this is a sharing that only you two will be sharing.
OK, But What Do I Do now?
There are many steps to improving your intimacy. If you are looking for ways to improve intimacy, I recommend starting with my article on being A.R.E.: Accessible, Responsive, and Engaged. If you can be accessible, responsive, and engaged, you can address all these forms of intimacy because you’ll be able to address what matters to them.
Then I want you to read my post on sexual brakes and accelerators. It’s really a way to talk about sexual intimacy. Each person can talk about what their turn ons are as well as their turn-offs. The key here is that your partner can feel uninterested in you, when in fact they have many brakes on (like getting kids to soccer practice, cleaning up the house, laundry, etc.) while simultaneously still being attracted to you.
Getting Some Help
If you’re needing help in being more of a team and operating from a “we” rather from a you or me, I’m here to help. You can look at my Couples and Marriage Counseling page. If you’re in Minnesota and want help working through your arguments, you can contact me at 612.230.7171 or email me through my contact page, or click the button below to self-schedule a free, 15-minute consultation.