Can You Save Your Relationship When Intimacy Feels Lost?

How can I save my relationship when we’ve been struggling with intimacy issues?

It’s a painful place to be, feeling disconnected from your partner, especially when intimacy struggles are at the heart of the problem. The good news is, according to the sources, relationships can change, and for the better. Even relationships some people were ready to end have been transformed. The potential for both the best and worst relationship is wrapped up in the same two people; the task is finding how to get to the best. This journey often involves understanding key dynamics and making conscious shifts, even if only one person is initially driving the change, because marriage is a system, and impacting one part impacts others.

Moving Beyond the “You/Me Trap” to “WE”

A central theme in addressing relationship issues, including intimacy, is moving from a “You & Me” focus to a “WE” focus. Failed marriages often fail to escape the “You/Me Trap,” where each person is concerned about what they are getting out of the relationship, like keeping a ledger. Successful relationships are not based on this kind of accounting; they are about going beyond, sometimes giving more, sometimes receiving more, without keeping track. Keeping a “tit-for-tat” ledger is destructive to the sense of “WE”.

Dynamics that undermine the “WE” include:

• Controlled/Controlling: One person tries to control, and the other allows it, often unconsciously. This isn’t a conscious agreement but happens over time.
• Under/Overfunctioning: One person overfunctions in certain areas (like managing emotions or family duties), allowing or forcing the other to underfunction. This pattern can emerge little by little over time.
• Power Struggles: These are attempts to wrestle control from the other and are a primary symptom that the sense of “WE” is missing. Power struggles are attempts to maintain autonomy and keep out of the “WE”. They often stem from feeling overpowered or powerless. The alternative is interdependence, not dependence or independence.

Understanding the Path to Intimacy

Intimacy is described as a path with four stages:

1. Pseudo-Intimacy: Relationships often start here, based on the assumption that “We are just alike!”. Similar interests and values are highlighted, and differences may be ignored.
2. Chaos: This stage begins when one person risks disagreeing, leading to the realization of differences. It can feel like “You changed. I need to get you back,” though the differences were likely there all along. Conflict and fighting are common.
3. Emptiness: Following Chaos, this is described as the most painful stage, where the relationship is most vulnerable to being abandoned. The feeling is “We are nothing alike, and I don’t have a clue what to do with you”. There’s a sense of being mired and lost, leading to fear and hopelessness.
4. Intimacy: This stage follows Emptiness, provided you “hang in”. Intimacy is characterized by an appreciation of differences, understanding that these differences foster growth and strengthen the relationship. It’s about seeing the other person for who they are and treasuring it.

The sources emphasize that the only way to intimacy is through emptiness. Moving backward to Chaos (fighting) or Pseudo-Intimacy (pretending) only prolongs the journey. Strategies for moving through the stage of Emptiness include deciding to hang in, deciding things must improve and taking action, deciding how to re-energize the relationship (like being playful), and crucially, moving toward acceptance of the other.

Specific Areas Where Intimacy Struggles Appear

Intimacy is often intertwined with underlying dynamics and specific areas of conflict:

• Fears of Intimacy and Abandonment: People inherently fear both being too close (intimacy) and too far (abandonment). These fears relate to the boundaries of connection and distance in a relationship. When one person seeks distance and the other fears abandonment, or vice versa, it creates difficulties and misunderstandings. We often try to get our needs met indirectly due to cultural pressure to reject our own needs.
• Anger: Anger in a relationship is often a secondary emotion. It is not about anger itself, but masks primary emotions like hurts and disappointments that haven’t been addressed. Focusing on the primary emotions, rather than reacting to the anger, allows the anger to dissipate. Shifting your understanding of anger from an attack to a revelation of something important by the other person can be helpful.
• Sex and Money: These are two special areas where the struggle for power and against “WE” frequently emerge. Issues in these areas are often symbolic and carry emotional baggage. For sex, it has the potential to be a deeply bonding experience for a “WE”. Problems in sexual relating are likely if there are problems in the “WE”. The source suggests intervening in areas where there are problems with “WE” first, and then exploring the sexual relationship. Making love is ultimately about connection and the “WE,” not just intercourse.

Actionable Steps to Rebuild Intimacy and Save Your Relationship

Saving your relationship and fostering intimacy requires conscious effort and shifts in perspective and action. Here are some strategies drawing from the sources:

• Shift Your Perception: Instead of focusing on communication skills first, work on clearing up misperceptions. Recognize that you interpret your spouse’s actions through your own flawed paradigm. Strive to understand your spouse’s worldview or paradigm, remembering that understanding doesn’t mean agreement. Practice “Benefit-of-the-Doubt” thinking, especially when feeling threatened.
• Focus on Action, Not Just Emotion: Love is often linked to emotion, but it’s more useful to focus on action. Instead of asking if you’re in love, ask “how do I love (action) him/her?”. Act as if you feel the way you want to feel toward your spouse; doing so can shift your feelings.
• Identify and Cherish Complementarity: Recognize how you and your spouse complete each other, how one’s weakness is the other’s strength. Troubled couples often lose sight of this and only see how different they are. Focusing on complementarity helps you move toward each other.
• Make Decisions for the Relationship: When faced with decisions, ask yourself, “What would be best for the relationship?”. This forces you to treat the “WE” as a real entity and creates a sense of “being in it together”.
• Set and Maintain Boundaries: Boundaries define where you begin and end and are crucial for maintaining self-respect. If a boundary is violated, reassert it dispassionately by informing the other person of the incursion. If necessary, follow up with asking, telling, and implementing a consequence. Strengthening boundaries can help shift the balance of the relationship toward health.
• Create Time for Connection and Communication: While not the lead factor, clear communication is vital. Make intentional time to discuss your relationship. Remember what you talked about early on, like hopes, dreams, concerns, and fears. Stay in touch with each other to prevent small variances from becoming pronounced differences.
• Be Playful and Remember the Beginning: To reconnect with positive emotions, choose to be playful together or take up new hobbies. Remember how your relationship started; reminiscing can reconnect you to buried feelings.
• Live in the Present: Avoid getting trapped in the past, which can prevent change by focusing on what didn’t work before. Practice being truly present during conversations, listening to your spouse instead of thinking about your response or dwelling on past interactions.
• Shift the Momentum: Relationships have momentum, either upward or downward. A change in momentum begins with a shift, which can happen even if only one person changes their perception or action. Consciously deciding to do things differently, even if it feels unnatural at first, is key. Small, intentional shifts can initiate a reversal.

The Goal is Evolution

Ultimately, the aim is not just growth, but evolution. Evolution is a leap, happening when old ways of relating (paradigms) no longer work. Crisis points are opportunities for this evolutionary leap, a time when a new paradigm is needed to encompass more of each person’s individuality within the “WE”. An evolved relationship allows you to be who you are in the context of a relationship that includes the “WE”.

Saving a relationship struggling with intimacy is challenging work, requiring conscious effort and a willingness to shift perspectives and actions. But the sources offer hope that change is possible, leading toward a stronger, more intimate “WE.”