Emotional intimacy constitutes communication and trust levels that allow individuals as couple to share their most personal thoughts and feelings with one another. Emotional intimacy is also described as feeling secure, trust, comfort, support, and safe when you are with an individual with whom you share this type of intimacy.
The absence of emotional intimacy in relationshipscan lead to break-ups and divorce.
If you want to develop and increase emotional intimacy in your relationship..
Get to Know Yourself: You may think this is silly, but how can you express your deepest thoughts, feelings, and beliefs if you aren’t sure what those are yourself?
You may spend some time sitting quietly everyday to examine your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.It may be helpful to keep a journal while reflecting inward.
What are my Strengths? What are my weaknesses? What events and people had the most impact on my life? How did these people and events impact my life? Once you get to know your inner thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, you will be able to share them with your significant other.
Acceptance: Acceptance of both yourselfand your partner is another important step in developing emotional intimacy. Accepting yourself means liking yourself for who you are.
Certainly, you can work on changing things you don’t like about yourself, but learning to stop criticizing yourself and starting to accept yourself for who you are is vital for joy and personal wellness.
Acceptance of your partner is also important to creating emotional intimacy in romantic relationships. If your partner feels judged or criticized, he or she is likely to keep his or her deepest feelings and thoughts to himself or herself. If you accept every part of your partner, he or she is more likely to let you see inside himself or herself.
You can foster feelings of acceptance by not criticizing your partner for things he or she does. Instead, focus on the positives, tell your partner how much you admire his or her strengths. If your partner expresses an emotion, validate how he or she feels and don’t criticize him or her for having it. Accepting your partner doesn’t mean you have to love everything about him or her, but it does mean that you won’t try to get him or her to change who he or she is.
Communicate: Communication is another very important step to developing emotional intimacy. When you begin to share your thoughts and feelings, it will encourage your significant other to do the same. You may want to start sharing your feelings on relatively benign topics, like a movie you saw together, the food at the restaurant you ate at, and your thoughts on education. When you see that your partner accepts your thoughts and feelings and can respectfully disagree rather than criticizing you for thinking or feeling a specific way, you can begin to share deeper thoughts and feelings with him or her. It will take time to get to a place where you can share your deepest thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, but try to go with the flow of things and share when it feels right to you.
Spend Quality Time Together: Spending time together will give you the opportunity to develop emotional intimacy with your significant other.
It seems that we are all always busy with school, work, family obligations, housework, exercising at the gym, and more, but it is possible to make time for your significant other and it is very important to make your relationship a priority when building this type of intimacy. Choose one night a week to be your special date night, for instance. If you live together, set aside some special time everyday where you can talk. Take a walk together and chat about how your day was, how you are feeling, and so forth.