Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack

How to Have More Emotional Intimacy with a Difficult Spouse

• Jack Ito PhD, Psychologist, Author, and Relationship Coach • Season 3 • Episode 22

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On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.

On today's episode, Coach Jack gives steps to create a more emotionally connected relationship, even if your spouse has lower intimacy needs than you.

After listening to today's episode, you may want to:

Work one-on-one with Coach Jack to repair your relationship using small, easy steps that rebuild connection quickly. Visit CoachJackIto.com to learn more about relationship coaching.

How to Have More Emotional Intimacy with a Difficult Spouse 

(Podcast Transcript)

(0:00)

[Introduction to the podcast]

Announcer: On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.

(0:29)

Coach Jack: Some spouses are reluctant to be more emotionally intimate and seem to be bothered when you try. Don’t despair! There are some helpful things you can do to restore emotional intimacy–even with a difficult spouse. 

Before getting married, most couples enjoy spending a lot of time together doing things just because they like to be with each other. After getting married, routine practical matters can displace emotional connection to the point where all that is left is a business partner relationship.

When people go from interacting when they want to, to interacting when they need to, the relationship has become emotionally disconnected.

(1:08)

Decreased one on one time and focus on the practical is tolerable at first, but creates an emotional vacuum the longer it goes on. One of the few things that I learned from my high school that is actually helpful is that nature abhors a vacuum. Our emotional voids will be filled by something or someone, healthy or not. From what I see, social media and affairs are filling a lot of emotional voids in marriages.

It does not have to be this way in your marriage. Even if your spouse does not seem to be desiring the emotional intimacy as much as you, you can still get more. That is not going to happen by criticizing your spouse–a needy behavior that damages connection. It also won’t happen by begging your spouse for more attention–a needy behavior that makes your relationship feel like a job to your spouse.

(2:01)

You need to have a way to create desire in your spouse to have more emotional intimacy. People don’t resent doing what they desire to do. Sharing your needs with your spouse won’t create desire and neither will talking about problems. Those create desire about as much as body odor makes someone more attractive. Today I will give you the steps to create the desire for more connection in your spouse.

Once you increase emotional connection, you must work to maintain it. 

Once in love, always in love is a dysfunctional belief that naive people have. 

The strength of our early feelings does not determine the strength of our later feelings. Many so called “soul mates” come to a bitter end. There is no such thing as “soul mates.” There is something far more important than love in predicting how long relationships will last….

This brings us to the importance of matching in maintaining emotional intimacy.

(3:00)

Humans are adaptable. If you grew up in a cold climate, you are used to it. If you move to a cold climate from a warm one, you will struggle with it for a while, but gradually adapt. However, you will always miss the warmer climate. So it is with emotional intimacy. If you grow up without much emotional intimacy and marry someone who did the same, you are likely to both be satisfied with a low amount of emotional intimacy. There is nothing wrong with that.

If however, you grew up with a high amount of emotional intimacy and marry someone who grew up with a low amount of emotional intimacy, you will both struggle. 

This struggle can get resolved in different ways:

  • You may meet somewhere in the middle, with a medium amount of emotional intimacy (both people compromise).
  • One of you may need to get used to high emotional intimacy (one person compromises).
  • One of you may need to get used to low emotional intimacy (one person compromises).
  • Your relationship may alternate between high emotional intimacy and low emotional intimacy (neither person compromises).

(4:10)

The first three compromise options create resentment. The more we compromise, the faster we will have feelings of resentment. This is why I don’t like compromise as a strategy for resolving differences. If you have been the one doing the compromising, you may realize that your feelings for your spouse have been damaged as a result. (My article on ending resentment may be something that will also benefit you).

Large differences in need for emotional connection are typically resolved by the fourth no-compromise option–cycling between high and low intimacy so that both get what they want. High intimacy results when the relationship is threatened to the point where the person with low intimacy needs becomes fearful. Then, he or she will become more emotionally intimate, even to an extreme.

(5:01)

The relationship will return to low intimacy once the threat to the relationship has passed. The spouse with low intimacy needs can once again focus on practical matters. The other spouse can again tolerate a period of low intimacy for a while. Then he or she will either precipitate another crisis or will get his or her emotional needs met in some other way.

If you don’t meet your spouse’s emotional needs, eventually someone else will.

Mr. Nice Guy and Suzie Homemaker are particularly good at taking care of their spouse practically while neglecting them emotionally. If you married one of these two, you will need to help them to transition if you want to get more emotional intimacy from them. Typically the only way they know how to get love is by doing things for people and have no idea how to emotionally connect with people.

So, how do you bridge the emotional closeness gap?

(5:58)

If you are not yet married, make sure you are matched on the need for emotional closeness. You will not be able to determine that in the first part of your relationship. New relationships always promote closeness for a variety of reasons. Find the best match that you can before becoming exclusive. Once you do, be ready to return to dating others if you find you don’t match after all. Marriage will not fix a mismatch, regardless of how long you have dated.

Due to increased neutral and negative time together, marriage will always reduce emotional intimacy. This means your level of connection needs to be high before getting married.

We build our relationship before marriage; we maintain our relationship after marriage.

If you are married, make sure you are doing your part to maintain emotional closeness. 

Don’t expect your spouse to be emotionally close to you if you: 

  • Are not prioritizing your spouse, 
  • are not making your spouse feel desirable, 
  • are not validating your spouse, and 
  • are not continuing to be an attractive and desirable person. 

(7:04)

If you want to maintain emotional closeness, you will need to continue the same behavior that made your spouse fall in love with you in the first place. We can’t maintain something by doing something different. To maintain means to continue doing the same thing.

If you are not being the same person your spouse fell in love with, it shouldn’t be surprising if your spouse isn’t in love with you. Your spouse will instead be attracted to people who are the way you used to be.

Changing too fast can prevent re-connection

If the emotional divide between you and your spouse is large, you will need to bridge it gradually. 

Your first step should be just to focus on being relaxed whenever you are around your spouse. Looking upset halts relationship progress. When your spouse consistently appears more relaxed around you, then you can take another step.

(8:00)

Your second step will be to be friendly–treating your spouse like a same gender friend. This will help you to not have pursuit behaviors that will make your spouse feel pressured. Until your spouse is consistently responding in a friendly way, don’t go on further.

Progress is made by taking the right steps, in the right order, at the right pace.

Lack of progress is always due to problems with one of these steps. Blaming your spouse for lack of progress will only be helpful if you want to feel good about giving up. Taking responsibility helps us to achieve our goals–blaming never does.

Your third step will be increasing validation and developing common interests. You will need to avoid all needy behaviors such as criticism, blaming, and arguing. You will also need to avoid talking about problems in your relationship. These behaviors derail progress. If you are stuck at this point, you may want to work in my book on overcoming neediness.

(9:03)

Note that these are the same steps you would do if you were single and interested in having a new relationship. They are also the behaviors you would use in making friends.

In addition to these steps, you will need to be attractive in a way that appeals to your spouse. Attraction is partially physical, but encompasses much more than that. Are you the kind of man or woman your spouse would want to date if meeting you for the first time?

If you have done a good job at consistently looking happy to see your spouse, being similar, validating, and being attractive, you still have one more thing to do to create desire. That is to be less available to your spouse than he or she wants (just a little less). Needy people tend to give others much more interaction than they enjoy, which lowers other’s desire for them.

People only desire what they wish they had more of. That is what desire is.

(10:01)

If you give someone more than they want, they will not only have no desire, but they will actually be repulsed. If you are not pleasant, not validating, not similar, or not attractive, they also won’t desire you no matter how little you give them. To create desire, you must be a person your spouse looks forward to being with, but have your own life in addition.

Single people call this the hard-to-get strategy. I call it being secure and having more going on in your life than trying to hang out with your spouse all the time.

Don’t try to get all of your emotional needs met from your spouse. The relationship ideal is to make your spouse feel like you love him or her, but don’t need him or her. This creates the right dynamic for keeping love, romance, and emotional connection alive. Having real friends you get together with is one of the qualities of being an attractive partner.

(10:57)

Do you need help with any of these steps?

The steps I laid out for you are the only ones you need to create more emotional intimacy, but that doesn’t mean they are easy. I grew up with very few social skills and was a very needy person. It took me a lot of learning before I could do these things. Maybe you are in somewhat the same situation.

I would be happy to work with you on any or all of the steps for connection, validation, attraction, and creating that little bit of anxiety in your spouse that promotes a more emotionally connected relationship. I have a one month coaching package called Re-Connections Relationship Coaching. If you get stuck in the steps or just want to be sure you are doing things the right way, you may want to check it out.

(11:45)

 [Podcast wrap-up]

Announcer: Thank you for listening to Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack. Visit coachjackito.com to learn more skills for reconnecting with your spouse and restoring your marriage.