Friday, March 23, 2012

Write A Better Love Story

You might wonder why emotional intimacy would be a health and wellness topic. There are numerous academic studies and statistics linking marriage, especially happy marriage, to a longer and more fulfilling life, but if you've ever had an intimate relationship, you don't need those. You, like I, have undoubtedly experienced the realities of how the condition of your relationship affects your energy levels, eating habits, stress and anxiety levels, your sleep, and the basic desire to get out of bed in the morning.

I have been married for 7 years and 2 1/2 children, which makes me a wise old sage to some and a novice to others. My marriage has taken me on the typical roller coaster from "This is the best day of my life!" to "What the hell was I thinking?!" and everywhere in between. I have never been one to be content with just getting by, and I've been blessed with a husband willing to struggle with me through the nearly hopeless times to a place of love, peace, and intimacy. I'm a reader and a writer even more than I am a talker, and maybe that's helped, since men aren't generally known for their verbal expressiveness or enjoyment of a good heart-to-heart. Pardon my obvious generalization. My experience certainly isn't all-inclusive for the options of developing emotional intimacy in marriage, but maybe we can find an idea for everyone if we all share.

I've discovered that it doesn't work for my marriage to sit my husband down and ask him for emotional intimacy. I've done that. It got me nowhere but disappointed. For years, I blamed him as uncaring and selfish for not granting my request until I finally realized it wasn't that he didn't care. He had no idea what I was asking for or how to achieve it. I'm not even sure I knew what I was asking for. I had to define it and break it down into meaningful pieces, and since I think in bullet points, my brain jumped at the chance for this little project.

I started by thinking, which turned into writing, which turned into letters that, at the time, I wasn't sure I was even going to share. I wrote about how I was experiencing our marriage. I wrote about the ways I felt hurt and the ways I hated myself for my weaknesses. I wrote about what got me to the alter and what's kept me from running since. I wrote about how and why I loved him. I wrote about my occasional hopelessness and my dream for what I wanted our marriage to become. It all gave me a chance to dig down into my deepest, most personal emotional places and feel and process things I hadn't been accessing very well for a long time. For me, my numbness began to give way, first to pain but then to hope and love. The stress and anxiety of feeling distant from my husband started to melt. After deciding to share them with my husband, I even got some responses to my letters that I never would've gotten had I sat down throwing that all at him in person. I suspect I would've gotten more wide-eyed silence than anything that way. My letters gave him time to process, feel, and respond honestly. It was beautiful, really, to experience that opening up. Hope is a real healer.

When I felt sufficiently processed for the time being, I decided to introduce a series of questions to our written liaisons. They are relatively simple questions, though I'm not sure he agrees with that, meant to help us decide and articulate what we want and envision in and for our relationship. They give us straight-forward views of what we can do to understand and serve each other better. I suggest keeping answers mostly to lists instead of paragraphs. It makes them concise and easier to remember and review. You can research relevant questions, write them yourself, or you could take turns. An interesting date night might be deciding on relevant questions together. There are a couple ground rules, of course. 1) No negativity. It's meant to be direction, not venting or nagging. It's a chance to say what you DO want, instead of what you DON'T want. 2) The questions should be unbiased and open to both spouses, not loaded or unidirectional. I suggest not trying to sit down together to answer an entire page of questions in one evening. I like offering one question at a time, giving each spouse a day or several days to think about their responses. Then talk about them or exchange them. Keep a record of the responses so you each can look back when things get a little foggy. Maybe even re-answer the questions periodically to keep them fresh and accurate.

I've felt both of these simple activities do wonders to take the scariness out of connecting emotionally. They certainly don't replace face-to-face interaction and bonding, but they have been a meaningful supplement for us. In a couple months' time, I've gone from long-term anxiety about the direction of my marriage and the distance between us to a peace, understanding, and newly rekindled love for the man I'm more anxious now to spend the rest of my life with.

2 comments:

  1. Nice. I especially liked your rules. It's good to talk more about positives than negatives and what we hope for, not what we wish would go away! I think improving good things helps naturally push out the negatives.

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  2. This is great! I may try this. It's a nice way to connect.

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