10 Reasons for Lack of Intimacy in Marriage and How to Fix It

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 shares how intimacy is lost in marriage and the right steps to take to restore it.

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

• Get a book to stop those behaviors you have that get in the way of intimacy.
• Learn more about the four marriage styles and how to change yours.
• Learn how to fix a sexless marriage.
• Need help with restoring intimacy? Get Re-connections Relationship Coaching with Coach

Transcript

10 Reasons for Lack of Intimacy in Marriage and How to Fix It

 (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: Both emotional and physical intimacy are essential to satisfaction in marriage. What we do (or don’t do) can make it go away and can make it come back.

For many people, intimacy is synonymous with sex. They are not the same thing. Sex may or may not be intimate, and it is only one example of intimacy. There is a whole lot more to it than that. People who have poor physical intimacy typically are lacking in emotional intimacy. 

(1:01)

Whether working on emotional or physical intimacy, we must always start with emotional intimacy. That will go much better if you understand what intimacy really means…

So, what is intimacy?

Intimacy is sharing with someone what we don’t normally share with everyone. It is a behavior and not a feeling. We can intentionally do intimate behaviors and we can intentionally prevent intimacy. The fewer people we share a thought, feeling, or touch with, the more intimate it is. This is why open marriages and social media addiction lower intimacy.

If you share more with a friend than you do with your spouse, then you have a more intimate relationship with your friend than you do with your spouse. We must reserve some part of ourselves that we only share with our spouse. Sharing deep emotions as well as our bodies is the difference between just having sex and making love.

(2:01)

Sex stops with orgasm. Making love lasts long after that.

Similarly, if you talk with a lot of people about your personal experiences, that is not intimate talk. If you only talk with your spouse about them, that is very intimate talk. The number of people you share thoughts, feelings, or touch with determines how intimate the behavior is. 

Intimacy is personal, private sharing that strengthens a relationship.

Equal, satisfying, levels of emotional and physical intimate behavior in our marriages turns out to be the best for maintaining a loving, healthy relationship. Not only can our level of intimacy be different from when we married, it can also be different between a husband and wife. 

(2:51)

Because intimacy is a behavior, people can make themselves do more or less, but routinely doing more or less than we desire, just as with any behavior, can lead to loss of connection and loving feelings. A person who likes to be intimate much more than his or her spouse can make intimacy into a job for their spouse. That creates distancing and can result in sexless, roommate style relationships.

A matching desire for physical and emotional intimacy is one of the most important considerations for marrying someone.

Levels of physical and emotional intimacy

Intimacy is not all or none. Just like being tall or short, there is a whole range of in-between. Couples often start out their marriages with a high level of physical and emotional intimacy and gradually have less and less. Although commonly occurring together, it is possible to have high physical intimacy with low emotional intimacy and vice versa.

(3:56)

High physical intimacy is characterized by both sexual and nonsexual affectionate touch. Nonsexual affectionate touch, combined with a high level of emotional intimacy, promotes sexual intimacy. People looking to restore sexual intimacy need to work on emotional intimacy first, then nonsexual affectionate touch, saving sexual touch and interaction for last.

When rebuilding relationships, sexual intimacy comes last and should not be allowed to occur before emotional intimacy is improved.

Low physical intimacy is characterized by a lack of sexual and nonsexual touch. The most common reason for that is low emotional connection. It can also happen due to previous trauma that makes people fearful of sexual touch, or any touch that could lead to sexual interaction. In the case of trauma, individual psychotherapy is required. Otherwise, rebuilding emotional connection should be the focus. 

(5:02)

Sometimes people do not know how to have nonsexual touch. For them, all touch is a way to initiate sex. Such people need to focus on increasing touch without having sex. Otherwise, their spouse may resist even casual touch from them. 

High emotional intimacy is characterized by the sharing of pleasant thoughts, ideas, feelings, and activities which are not shared outside the marriage. Sharing with your spouse the same things you share on social media is not emotionally intimate. Sitting in a hot tub with both your spouse and friends is not intimate.

Taking walks together, dating, taking baths together, and other enjoyable one on one activities promotes emotional intimacy. Family outings, and social gatherings do not. Emotional intimacy stops when a third person is involved (even if it is your child), or when an attention getting device such as a TV or cell phone are involved.

(6:07)

Having high emotional intimacy in marriage means that there are many thoughts, ideas, and feelings that you share with your spouse, but not with anyone else. Mutual sharing of secrets, dreams, and vulnerabilities with a spouse that we feel safe with creates high emotional intimacy and a much more satisfying relationship.

Low emotional intimacy is characterized by a lack of personal interaction, lack of validation, and an over focus on the practical aspects of job and family. Low intimacy relationships are either roommate style or business partner style, depending on the degree of interaction. Couples in low intimacy relationships often have different interests, beliefs, and values.

(6:58)

Replacing dating with family outings is a common way couples become less intimate.

Feeling safe and validated are requirements for people to share personal thoughts, feelings, desires, and dreams. People with low intimacy relationships have to stop all needy behaviors such as arguing, criticism, or other insecure and controlling behaviors. These make people feel unsafe to share. 

If you have behaviors that make your spouse desire to get away from you and be careful when talking to you, then I recommend you get my book on overcoming neediness in your quest to have a more intimate relationship

After stopping those needy behaviors, the next step is learning to agree and empathize–merely listening does not promote intimacy. I also have a book for learning to agree if you tend to argue, persuade, convince, or fix, rather than agree. Correction tendencies prevent many people from having intimate relationships.

(8:04)

We connect by being similar and we disconnect by being different.

Giving practical help and advice will never build intimacy. At best it creates appreciation. A lot of people work very hard doing practical things to get intimacy, but only get a little appreciation that they mistake for intimacy. 

While everyone likes people who are helpful, people love others who are similar.

People usually don’t have affairs in order to get practical help. They have them to feel validated by people who they feel are similar.

The degree to which your spouse feels the two of you are similar determines his or her comfort level in being intimate. 

How similar would your spouse say the two of you are?

Let’s talk about ten common behaviors that poison intimacy in marriage.

(8:58)

There are many things that can damage intimacy. But before you going looking for complex psychological explanations, start with the more basic and obvious reasons.

10 Major contributors to low emotional intimacy:

1. Not prioritizing daily one-on-one time,
2. Not prioritizing weekly dating,
3. Not developing common interests,
4. Talking about relationship problems,
5. Working together in the same business,
6. Being a fixer rather than empathizing,
7. Being nice rather than being similar,
8. Spending too much time together,
9. Social media, and
10. Drug and alcohol addictions.

You might be surprised by a few of the items in this list. Let me help…

(10:04)

Talking about relationship problems never builds relationships. Occasionally it is necessary in order to clarify a problem, but then building must immediately follow. We will never become more similar by talking about differences.

Couples who talk regularly about problems are focusing on removing weeds when they should be focused on growing the flowers.

Being nice often gets appreciation, but does not promote similarity, and therefore does not contribute to emotional connection. Mr. or Mrs. Nice Guy often are well liked by others but have distant marriages.

Spending too much time together creates distancing behaviors, like petty conflict, which leads to loss of love. We build relationships by being enjoyable, but giving the other person less interaction so that they will desire us more. Too much of anything makes us desire it less.

(11:04)

People don’t desire what they have in abundance. Spend time with your spouse, but make sure you have a life of your own.

You might have been able to identify how your relationship became less intimate, but wonder where to get started rebuilding it…

Steps for rebuilding intimacy in a badly damaged relationship

People often think that rebuilding a relationship is somehow an entirely different process from building a relationship. In fact, they are both the same process. Relationships when we are single start from no intimacy and build to commitment and intimacy. That is the same thing we do when we work on reconciling.

(11:47)

Here are 10 steps for building or restoring intimacy:

1. Being consistently relaxed around your spouse.
2. Being friendly.
3. General small talk with validation.
4. Signaling attraction with nonverbal cues.
5. Finding common interests and activities or developing them.
6. Talking about common interests with validation.
7. Doing common interests together.
8. Non sexual affectionate touch.
9. Continued validation, sharing common interests, and being desirable.
10. Provide a matching level of emotional sharing, physical touch and sexual interaction.

(12:41)

Once you have achieved these ten steps, you must maintain all of them.

These steps happen in order. People who don’t have success are either doing steps in the wrong order, skipping steps, or are moving too fast. The pace of the relationship is set by the person with less desire. If you move faster than that person’s feelings can grow, distance will result rather than closeness.

(13:08)

How long does it take to go through these steps?

It takes as long as it takes. In a new relationship with two very similar people both attracted to each other, it could happen very quickly. In an established relationship with two very different people who are no longer attracted to each other, it is going to take much longer and be much more work.

Although the steps are the same, it takes longer to rebuild than to build. Habits and perceptions have to be changed, and trust needs to be rebuilt. That takes time.

It is not possible to go through all these steps with everyone. This is why we have close friends, friends, acquaintances, people we tolerate, and people we avoid. The closest relationships will always be between people who are relaxed with each other, similar to each other, and validate each other. That is your best friend. Add in physical attraction and that will be your romance partner who is hopefully your spouse!

(14:15)

Would you like some help with these steps?

Many things look very easy until you go to to do them. I have helped a lot of people who don’t know how to be attractive, or to connect, or to be secure, or to go from a business partnership or roommate style relationship to a romantic one. That is what relationship coaches are for. I would be happy to help you with any skills you need for improving your marriage. Coaching packages and consultations are available on my website coachjackito.com.

 (14:50)

 [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.