Think about a time when you have been hurt by your spouse. You instantly felt closed, shut down or disconnected. But have you noticed how quickly your heart reopened when the offender took responsibility for hurting you and sought forgiveness? You went from feeling completely closed to wide open in little more than a heartbeat. This is because openness is the default setting of our hearts. They were designed to be open. It’s all the junk—lies, negative messages, and hurtful behavior—that forces our hearts to shut down. But that isn’t how God created us.

Emotional safety is the bedrock of a close, open, intimate marital relationship. In this kind of secure environment, the couple wants to stay in love and harmony and feel very protected, rather than vulnerable, with each other. Emotional safety will help you create a climate in which you can build an open relationship that will grow and flourish. It will help you and your spouse feel cherished, honored, and fully alive.

Attend a marriage conference, join a couples’ group, make time for daily devotions, or take up a new hobby or activity together. Invest time in doing something constructive as a couple, and your hearts will feel safer.

In your quest to have a satisfying remarriage, we want to encourage you to make emotional safety a top priority—it must be the foundation for your family to survive.

What Does Emotional Safety Mean?

Most marriage books coach you on how to use a new therapy technique, unpack some latest bit of research, or apply the five trendy steps or seven popular principles. What you really need is simply the know-how to create an emotionally safe environment.

We asked more than one thousand couples who attended a recent marriage seminar to define “emotional safety.” Listen to some of their responses:

• Feeling completely secure
• Knowing that you are loved
• Being accepted for who you are
• Feeling relaxed and less tense
• Being cared for above anyone else
• Feeling free to express who you really are
• Being loved unconditionally
• Feeling confident and less insecure
• Feeling respected
• Being with someone who is trustworthy
• Feeling comfortable around that person
• Being there for me
• Being fully understood
• Feeling valued and honored
• Loving reassurance
• Feeling a deep sense that the relationship is solid
• Allowing ourselves to open fully to give and receive love
• Not being judged
• Seeing me for who I am
• Accepting my flaws as part of the whole package
• Maintaining an atmosphere of open communication

That’s a pretty amazing list, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it feel wonderful to have all of these things as the foundation of your marital relationship? We define emotional safety as feeling free to open up and reveal who you really are, knowing that the other person will still love, understand, accept, and value you—no matter what. Wow! I want that in marriage. Don’t you?

Try to come up with five personal questions to ask your spouse that you do not know the answers to, such as her most embarrassing moment or his most memorable meal. Other suggestions? Find out what celebrities your mate has met, how many (and what kind) of pets your partner had growing up, and what your spouse has always secretly wanted to do.

You feel emotionally safe with someone when you believe that person will handle your heart—your deepest feelings and desires—with genuine interest, curiosity, and tender, loving care. In other words, you hold your heart out to the person and say, “Here is who I am—emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and mentally. I want you to know my heart and soul. I want you to get to know who I am and appreciate who I am and value who I am. I am a very fascinating person who will take you more than one lifetime to understand!”

But you will never offer your heart or reveal who you really are if you don’t feel that it is safe to do so.

Issues of trust touch all relationships in one way or another. We either have difficulty trusting others or are frustrated that someone won’t trust us.

Intimacy actually is opening yourself up and sharing some of the deeper parts of yourself with another; therefore, it always exposes some degree of vulnerability and involves an element of risk. As soon as you open up, you expose yourself to the possibility of being hurt. You’ve opened to being ridiculed or rejected, and you’ve chosen to lay down your normal protective barriers. Even the simple act of opening your heart and caring is risky. As soon as you care about someone, what happens with them and to them really matters. You become exposed to loss and disappointment.

Ultimately, trust has to do with feeling safe to be open and vulnerable with someone, trusting that they will respect, honor and care for you and your feelings. Trust occurs best when we feel completely safe. We are then able to relax, let our guard down, and just be ourselves without having to worry about being hurt or needing to be self-conscious in fear of being judged, ridiculed or rejected. It is in this open, honest, and exposed state that deep intimacy truly flourishes. Much like being with someone in a perfect garden—like the Garden of Eden—where the weather is ideal, there is no hint of danger, and you feel completely safe with and confident in the person you are with.

Even though the prospect of actually creating a relational Eden is a bit idealistic, this is the environment that we were created to exist in and is something we can deliberately strive towards even if we can’t perfectly pull it off. If we can commit ourselves to creating an umbrella of safety over our relationship we can create a shelter under which we can relax, and openly and intimately enjoy our lives together. Our relationship becomes a sanctuary, a safe harbor, a place we long to come home to.

Creating a relational sanctuary requires a mutual commitment to making the environment a safe place to be open, vulnerable, and free from self-consciousness and fear. This mutual commitment plants the seed from which trust grows. There are two key commitments that each person must maintain in order to create the umbrella of safety and begin to establish a foundation of trust. In order for this endeavor to work well, both people must consistently follow through and act out both commitments.

The first commitment involves how you treat others: Commit yourself to being trustworthy. Trustworthiness exists when a person always recognizes and respects the incredible infinite worth and value of another, and remembers that they are vulnerable and can be hurt. This is not to say that we can’t be playful, and sometimes even rowdy. But when we are given access to a person’s innermost self, we recognize it as a special privilege and remember that this is where they are vulnerable. We realize our potential to hurt them and we commit ourselves to doing everything in our power to avoid hurting, devaluing, disrespecting or dishonoring them. We commit ourselves to being trustworthy. We recognize that no one owes us trust. In fact, if we truly care about the other’s well-being we would do well not to even ask them to trust us. Rather we can simply focus on being as trustworthy as possible and humbly allow them to determine the extent to which they feel safe trusting us.

The second commitment involves how I treat myself. This is actually the key element: Require others to be trustworthy toward you. This commitment requires that you first recognize and respect your own incredible worth and value, your own vulnerability. As a result, you require anyone that you allow access into your inner sanctuary to proceed with honor and care. When someone gets distracted and forgets to treat you with honor, you respectfully inform them that access to your inner sanctuary is a special privilege that is granted by invitation only, that they will be asked to leave if they continue to behave poorly, and future access may be denied. They need to prove themselves worthy of your trust. You do not owe them your trust, it is earned and must be maintained and continually reestablished through respectful, honoring behavior.

It is important to understand that trust is never something that is earned once and for all. Trust is something that is warranted by consistent honor and care towards another. Trust can be betrayed in an instant. Becoming caught up in your own feelings while even momentarily forgetting about the ultimate well-being of the other is all it takes to be untrustworthy. Thus, focusing on being trustworthy towards the other is far more useful then focusing on getting the other to trust you. When you additionally make respect and honor of you a prerequisite to allowing someone access to your own vulnerable places you begin to trust yourself, and feel deeply cared for and self-confident. Therefore, even if the other person forgets to care about you, even for a moment, you know that you won’t forget!

When two people mutually commit themselves to being simultaneously trustworthy towards the other, and require the other to treat them with honor and respect, the relationship begins to feel extremely safe. Both will tend to relax and open up, creating greater opportunities for deep and satisfying intimacy. If you consistently act in a trustworthy manner others will be far more likely to choose to trust you. After all, isn’t feeling safe enough to relax, open up and just be yourself without the fear of being ridiculed or rejected the state that most of us want to live in. And isn’t the ideal relationship one where entering into the other’s presence feels like coming home into the safety of the garden.

Do you work hard at making sure that your most valuable relationships succeed?

Picture yourself in a rowboat, gliding down the river with your friend or coworker or spouse. Suddenly an argument erupts. You see a shotgun resting in the bottom of the boat, and to make your point, you seize the gun and start blowing holes in the bottom of your little vessel.

You might get your point across—but what happens to the boat? It sinks. And who’s in the boat? Your partner … and you. What a fine time you’ll have, celebrating your “victory” all the way to the bottom of the river!

Remember this: in any kind of significant relationship, you can’t win unless other person also wins. So in your own best interest, you have to make sure that he or she wins. For exactly the same reason, the other person has to make sure that you win. The only alternative is that you both lose.

When you choose to enter into a significant relationship with another person, you’re also choosing to become a member of a team. All relationships involve choice. You can choose whether that team is going to succeed or fail. You decide whether it brings you pain or delight. It’s your choice.

• Solutions for women with low sex drive (About.com)
• Solutions for males with low sex drive (About.com)
  • This one explains the reason
  • This one gives some solutions

Here’s a great quote by Michelle Weiner-Davis…
“Men, on the other hand, generally need to feel close to their partners physically before they invest a great deal of energy into their relationships. So she’s waiting for him to be more intimate emotionally and he’s waiting for her to be more tuned into him physically and the resentment that results in this waiting game is so huge, it’s beyond belief.”

The simple reality is that if you struggle with anything in your marriage, ignoring it doesn’t make the problem go away, but rather it makes the problem worse.

Great sexual intimacy DVD session and in-depth study guide. Includes special Adventurous couples guide (new ideas for the bedroom), secret his folder, and secret her folder! Click here to purchase your copy today.

If you’re interested in discovering more on this important topic, read Dr. Stanley’s book on this, The Heart of Commitment. For now, here’s a guideline for you to recharge your mate’s need for a lifetime together, a way for you to implement your dedication and show your commitment to your relationship:

•Plan several activities and dreams you’ll be doing together over the next twenty years. Where do you want to travel? What goals do you both have together and separately that your mate can help you accomplish? What do you want to do together with your children? What projects do you desire to finish? Any future educational paths that might be mutually enriching? How about buying a boat big enough to live on for a while? My wife and I sat down recently and made a plan to follow our dreams of taking two major trips per year. We decided that one of the trips would be with our three grown children and grandkids; the other will be reserved exclusively for the two of us.

•Write out an agreement on what you plan to do for the next twenty years to keep your love alive. Here’s a contract for you to consider for lasting love:
We agree to enter the fourth and fifth levels of intimacy whenever the other one so desires. We will do this by deeply listening to each other, not defending our own opinions, but striving to love, understand, and validate the other’s feelings and needs.

We agree to highly value each other and consider each other as more important than anything else on earth, except our relationship with God. If gold could describe our honor for each other, we would each be married to a 24-carat person.

We agree to communicate with each other regularly. This will be accomplished by speaking to each other by sharing truthful loving information and listening carefully to understand and validate each other’s uniqueness. Our preferred method of communication will be drive-through listening. Our everyday conversations will include the safety necessary to share opinions, concerns, and expectations.

We agree never to go to sleep at night without resolving our major differences or conflicts. We will forgive each other as needed.

We agree to find creative ways of meeting each other’s deepest relational needs. As we each grow older and change, we will strive to stay current with our understanding of each other’s needs and ways of meeting those needs.

Now, back to our guideline for recharging your mate’s needs:

•Express your lifetime commitment in words. Print it on a plaque, say it with gifts, just plain say it. “I will be with you forever and keep loving you until death do us part.” Write a poem and print it for the whole family to see.

•Become a student of your mate. Find out all you can about who she or he is. What are your mate’s favorite foods, activities, clothes, dreams? Treasure your mate’s special differences.

•When conflict arises, employ the three skills that can take you to the deepest level of intimacy. Write down how you plan to implement each of these skills in your relationship. Remember the three skills: (1) Keep honor alive daily; (2) use drive-through listening after you have a serious argument and have given yourselves time to calm down; and (3) lovingly recharge your mate twenty minutes per day in the areas in which your mate needs your care.
Another type of commitment that couples need from one another is a willingness to keep searching for solutions to problems between them. Thousands of couples have expressed the need to feel that each has a working plan to resolve personal problems or conflicts. After thirty-five years of marriage, my wife and I have discovered that we feel secure and included in all aspects of our relationship because of the establishment of a simple plan for solving disagreements. Here are the steps:

•We first try to resolve the disagreement by simply discussing the situation as calmly as we can. We go back and forth trying to understand each other’s positions. We can do this on most subjects. Either she or I will see a logical solution or compromise that we can settle on. In this way we have truly become one, a successful “blending of two individuals together.” Occasionally, we hit the wall of anger on some subject and start defending our positions with enthusiasm. That can lead to escalation of anger, so we usually take a time out and wait until we both calm down to take the next step.

•We head to a restaurant. Yes, that’s right. We calmly sit down at the table or at a restaurant. We can’t go out of control with other people there. We use drive-through listening and argue by the rules. We hold an object—a fork, spoon, or candle—when we are sharing our feelings or needs about the situation. The one not holding the object simply paraphrases what is being said to gain as much understanding as possible. We take turns passing the object back and forth until we both feel completely understood and validated. Then we start sharing any ideas we can think of that would solve the situation in a win-win way. We use our creative juices to think of some solution to fit both of our feelings and needs. It almost always works. But sometimes we can’t do it on our own, so we move to the next step.

•We ask two or three of our trusted friends to sit with us as we use drive-through listening again. This step has never failed to work. We always go away from the meeting with friends with a solution we can both live with, and it feels really safe to know we can always solve our disagreements. Our friends are like the grand jury—they just help us say what our feelings are and what we need out of the solution. There have been times when Norma and I have been upset with each other during the group meeting, but it has always ended in peace. If it didn’t, we would develop the next step. We haven’t had to move another step, so I can’t tell you what it is yet. But if we were forced into it, we’d keep trying different actions until we found the method that worked best for us. We keep trying, we never give up—which is, of course, another instance of a positive charge, a way to say, “You’re so central in my life I’ll do anything to get through problems and clear the way to deeper intimacy.”
© Copyright 2005 Smalley Relationship Center

Intimacy: A Deeper Discussion | The Simple Marriage Project.

Ask The Readers: What’s The Difference Between Intimacy And Sex? | The Simple Marriage Project.

I would like this question answered if possible…My wife thinks sex is a want, and I say sex is a need! I have heard and read conflicting answers and would like to know what you think.

Answer:

This is not as complicated as it might feel to the two of you. The most important thing that needs to be accomplished here is validation. It sounds to me, that sex is a need to you. I don’t have a problem with this. There’s nothing wrong with sex being a need for someone. If sex is a need for you to gain intimacy with your wife, to feel loved, to feel desired, to feel wanted, to feel connected, then sex is a need. End of story.

For your wife, it sounds like sex is a want. No problem, then sex for your wife is a want. I can live with that as well. She needs to be validated for her viewpoint as well.

But here is where I get on my soapbox. I’m tired of women (and I’m not saying your wife is doing this, because I don’t know, but I’m taking an opportunity to make a point.) being irritated with men needing sex. Sex is a way for men to connect with their wives emotionally. Most women like to connect with their husbands through communication, which seems to be the “accepted” means of connecting emotionally. Most men connect to women emotionally through physical intimacy, or sex, and that should not be “wrong”!

There…I said it and I feel better.

A man who can cry is a man who has learned some secrets about intimacy. But sadly, for many men it takes something tragic or life-changing before they understand this truth.

Here are a few ways you can tell if the man you love has trouble with intimacy or struggles to open up:

•He’s unable to discuss his feelings.
•He’s determined to avoid his feelings.
•He’s unable to express love, sorrow, or pain.
•He’s unable or unwilling to cry.
•He’s determined to make all situations into a joke.
•He’s determined to lighten the mood or change the topic when emotional issues are discussed.
•He physically leaves the room when emotional issues are discussed.
•He’s insensitive to the emotions of those around him.
Most men—unfortunately—do not undergo such traumatic experiences as the one described above. Yet many boys emerge from adolescence with a strong sense that being strong and unfeeling is the “masculine” thing to do. When a male brain is saturated in testosterone, it doesn’t take much, even from well-meaning family members, to give a boy the message that emotions and feelings are only for girls.

Here are some things your husband may have heard when growing up—things that may have shaped him into a seemingly uncaring person:

•”Don’t cry unless you’re hurt.”
•”Tough it out.”
•”Boys don’t cry.”
•”Only sissies get hurt feelings.”
•”It’s a sign of weakness to let people know you’re hurting.”
If you love a man who doesn’t seem to be able to express his feelings, you might want to consider using word pictures to help him identify what’s going on inside. A word picture uses a story or object to simultaneously activate the emotions and intellect of the hearer. As a result, he experiences your words rather than just hearing them.

It’s important to realize that helping your husband learn to express his feelings will take time. you might have to use several examples or try for several days, weeks, or even months before he is able to feel and share with you what’s in his heart. And until he reaches that point, he won’t be able to connect with you on an emotional intimate level.

Based on what I’ve learned in my many years of counseling, I’ve found that a woman’s definition of intimacy is very different from a man’s. Consider the following lists:

What women mean by intimacy?

•Deep emotional connection
•Daily time sharing your heart
•Daily time hearing the heart of the one you love
•Ability to cry easily and together at emotional moments
•A sensitivity to know immediately when feelings are hurt
•Understanding each other’s dreams and goals
•Closeness of the heart and soul
What men mean by intimacy?

•Deep physical connection
•Foreplay
•Hand-holding, hugging, kissing
•Understanding each other’s physical needs
•An ability to communicate physical needs
•Physical time alone together
•A sensitivity to know when physical needs are present
One of the reasons men may be more focused on physical closeness is that men aren’t as sensitive to physical touch as women are. In other words, it takes more physical touch to meet a man’s physical needs. In the same way that a woman has twice the daily word count, a man has twice the need for physical stimulation.

The point is this: Women often feel unloved because their emotional needs aren’t being met, and in the same way, men often feel ignored because their physical needs aren’t being met.

I think the problem is clear at this point: Guys have trouble with true emotional intimacy.

© Copyright 2003 Smalley Relationship Center