CHAPTER 7

PRACTICE INTIMACY

BECOMING ONE—sexual union in marriage—is a biblical expectation. It’s not just performing a physical act. It’s not just about getting a release. It’s not about having needs met or meeting the other’s needs. It’s about true intimacy—connecting on all levels. It is a human realization of a godly ideal. Becoming one is achievable for all couples, but may take more work for some than for others.

Susan and Richard had grown up in the same church and in warm, healthy, nurturing homes. They had common friends and very similar values. But it wasn’t until after college that they met again; they became reacquainted on a mission trip. Their friendship grew, and their romantic feelings became evident to them and everyone around them.

In contrast, Mary and Keith, who both came from troubled backgrounds, met after college in a single-adult church group. Both very attractive and socially desirable, they moved quickly into a romantic connection without much friendship development; sexual attraction and feelings were strong and fueled the growth of their relationship, rather than true intimacy.

Both couples waited for marriage to consummate their sexual relationship.

We met Susan and Richard while we were speaking at a couples’ retreat. After six months of marriage, they had some questions about birth control and decisions regarding family planning. They seemed deeply connected; they looked into each other’s eyes and moved closer as they shared their journey and delightful marital adjustment. We took the opportunity to ask them about their background and current experience as a married couple. Sex was great for both of them; they kissed passionately and both loved it. They truly enjoyed all aspects of married life.

Mary and Keith came to us for sexual therapy after six months of marriage. They were not having sex and were not kissing passionately. He felt awkward and distant; she felt frustrated and sexually needy.

Keith had been raised by a distant mother and had missed out on the bonding of infancy; Mary had been raised with a lot of warmth but also chaos, divorce, and neglect in her home. She began pushing for sex, and he began avoiding it. Their social life was great, and friends would assume they were doing well. But neither felt intimately connected.

Intimacy in marriage is worth working toward.

Our expectation of marriage is rather amazing: that two unique people, often from totally different backgrounds with differing assumptions and expectations, are to connect on a deep and intimate level and flow harmoniously together sexually “until death do us part.”

One author and sex therapist addresses this expectation: “The more I learn about the nature of love and its expression through sexual intimacy, the more I am in awe of it. But sometimes I think we use the concept ‘love is a mystery’ to avoid the responsibility for the hard work true intimacy entails. We live in a culture in dire need of sexual education.”[32]

Intimacy in marriage is worth working toward, however. Even as becoming one with God brings spiritual healing, becoming one in marriage has the potential to bring relational healing and relief from the anxiety that may come with being alone.

Let’s look at what may keep intimacy from happening and how to pursue or increase connection in your marriage.

Obstacles to Intimacy

Fear

You may fear intimacy even if you long for it. The fear of intimacy is the fear of abandonment.

What if you freely give yourself and then are hurt? What if your husband can’t be the person you want him to be? What if he can’t meet your needs? The very closeness and healing you may so long for requires the ability to release those fears and dramatically give yourself during sex.

Keith had used porn as a preadolescent to self-soothe as a compensation for lack of closeness with either parent. As therapy progressed, Keith revealed that he was masturbating to porn several times a day. Mary was shocked; she had an overwhelming feeling of personal rejection. She thought that the reason Keith was using porn rather than having sex with her was that she was not measuring up to the women he was seeing in the porn.

Like Mary and Keith, you or your husband may have brought baggage into your marriage that keeps you from being able to give yourself. You may put up walls to protect from hurt. You may avoid being intimate because you fear you will lose rather than gain.

It can be a vicious cycle: Because you fear losing, you don’t risk intimacy, which would give you what you so desire. Jesus teaches us in Matthew 10:39 that the only way we will gain is by being willing to lose:

He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it. (NASB)

Or as The Message translates this verse:

If your first concern is to look after yourself, you’ll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you’ll find both yourself and me.

In our book The Married Guy’s Guide to Great Sex, we say: Know yourself, open your heart, share yourself, and the comfort of closeness will follow.[33]

If all people were raised in a perfect world with perfect parenting, perfect teachers, perfect friends, and perfect siblings, intimacy fulfillment would flow easily, but that is not reality. Stuff happens. And that stuff can get in the way of capacity for intimacy.

You may put up walls to protect from hurt.

Lack of Bonding in Infancy

The next chapter will address the need to heal from various wounds or hurts. One of those hurts is not having successfully mastered one or more of the necessary stages of sexual development. If, like Keith, you did not bond or attach intimately with a loving mother or parental figure during your first year of life, you will have learned to survive without intimacy and will likely have difficulty being intimate with your husband. You may not even like to be touched.

One situation that leads to lack of bonding in infancy is the loss of a mother and no replacement for her role. It may be that she died soon after you were born or she was ill during that time, or for other reasons wasn’t able to be close to you—to hold you closely, sing to you, empathize with you when you cried, and deeply connect with you in a secure, caring way.

You may have been hospitalized as a premature baby or for other medical issues. Maybe your mother wasn’t able to take you to her breast for feeding, nurturing, closeness, and intimacy.

Since you won’t remember that first year of life if you haven’t been told about it, you may need to ask relatives or others who knew your family at that time. The fifteen-minute daily practice of our Formula for Intimacy will be extremely important for you to learn to bond.

Trauma

Have you experienced any personal violation or emotional injury from sexual, verbal, or physical abuse? Were you raised in an out-of-control home as Mary was? If so, you may not feel safe losing yourself with your husband sexually because your world was not a safe place.

If you were wounded in a dating relationship—especially if it was your first love and you opened your heart to this person and then were hurt by rejection, unfaithfulness, meanness, or controlling behaviors—you may have shut the door to being vulnerable and intimate with your husband, even if he is a safe person for you.

It could be that events in your marriage have blocked you from feeling totally free to be connected and comfortable sharing yourself with your husband because he has not been safe for you.

Pornography

This is the most common block to intimacy. Pornography is the exact opposite of intimacy; it is the erotic without connection to oneself or to another person.

Women who experienced their first arousal and release in response to an external stimulus like pornography report being unable to let go during sex with their husband unless they fantasize the pictures they saw at a vulnerable age of development. They can’t lose themselves during sex in marriage because their response is connected to an unnatural, nonintimate, nonpersonal stimulus.

Pornography is the exact opposite of intimacy.

If this is true for you, you can recondition your sexual response through the sexual retraining process we’ve detailed in our book Restoring the Pleasure,[34] or through sexual therapy.

Young men today report that pornography use has made it difficult for them to be intimate. They may continue their habit of self-stimulation in response to pornography, and struggle with erectile dysfunction when with the woman they love intimately. Their arousal is programmed to nonintimate stimuli.

“The majority of the men we see in treatment are between the ages of 35 and 55, although those numbers have skewed younger recently, mainly because of pornography,” says Robert Weiss, who founded a sexual addiction treatment center.

“I’m getting 25-year-old guys who’ve been looking at hardcore porn on the Internet since they were 15 and now say they have trouble with relationships. The reason for this is [that] their expectation of sexuality and orgasm is based off unrealistic imagery that produces an unnatural intensity. It’s like drugs. Nobody enjoys the little things, like smelling flowers, if they’re doing a lot of cocaine because why bother? Smelling a flower releases a small bit of dopamine—the brain chemical that makes us feel good—whereas cocaine releases a veritable tsunami of dopamine. So who needs flowers when you’ve got cocaine? And who needs a relationship when you’ve got hardcore porn?”[35]

If this is true of your husband as it was for Keith, he will need to seek help from a sexual addiction specialist[36] to stop the porn, and then the two of you will need to engage in sexual retraining or sex therapy to learn to be intimately sexual in your marriage.

How to Counter Obstacles to Sexual Intimacy

To counter the blocks to sexual intimacy, first stop using all nonintimate stimuli. Once that behavior is under control, you can begin the sexual retraining process by using Restoring the Pleasure, or you can start sexual therapy with a certified sexual therapist. Either way, you will be reconditioning the brain and body to respond within the context of a normal, intimate, committed relationship.

Accepting each other’s needs for space and connection and practicing our Formula for Intimacy will also help you build intimacy in your marriage.

Within an intimate, caring marriage, needs for space and needs for connection vary; differences must be communicated and negotiated so that both spouses feel heard and affirmed.

The assumption is that women need connection and men need space. In general, that’s true, but all of us ultimately have need for both. Both genders are nourished by other relationship connections and need same-sex friends with whom they can share their inner worlds.

Accept Needs for Space

Susan and Richard had scheduled time for same-sex friends in a way that did not take away from their time together as a couple.

Richard had actually been interested in porn for a time in his college years. He had attended an accountability group and was accountable to a sponsor. Richard left work earlier in the day than Susan did, so he scheduled coffee with his sponsor at the end of his workday. He also used that time to spend with friends.

Since Richard had a meeting at their church every Tuesday evening, Susan used that same time to meet up with her girlfriends. This is how Richard and Susan found space from each other for other, same-sex connections.

It’s fairly well accepted that men need their space—many distance themselves and go into their “man caves.” Yet not all men experience that need, and some women definitely have a need for space.

We find that women who have young children feel a greater need for space than those without children in the home. When the children are pulling on mom all day and she is rarely alone, she understandably wants a break from the kids when her husband gets home.

Accept Needs for Connection

Within marriage, women seem to need close, intimate connection before they can be sexual. And certainly, their emotions need to be in sync with their bodies, which takes more connecting and feeling loved than is typically true for men.

As we mentioned in an earlier chapter, women function on two tracks, and those tracks need to be in harmony before women are ready for sex. Men function on one track—when they are physically ready, they typically are emotionally ready.

A woman wants a husband who connects—someone who’s interested in knowing about her feelings, reactions, thoughts, and intuitions.

For the woman, intimacy and good sex will develop when her husband shares his love throughout their daily life. If he shows interest in her only when he wants to have sex, sex will not be good. Intimacy is thwarted if the husband is distant, cold, or preoccupied much of the day, and then right before bed—when he wants sex—he suddenly becomes all “lovey.” That isn’t going to work for her, so it will not work for him. She needs someone who is attuned to her desires and is communicating his love in a way that actually shows her that he cares about her, not just about sex.

Kissing and cuddling, whether or not it leads to sex, is a way to build daily connection and intimacy. It had been a vital part of Susan and Richard’s dating time, and that continued into their marriage.

On the contrary, Mary and Keith had stopped kissing in an effort to save sex for marriage. They had shut down their sexual feelings in order to control their actions. Shutting off passion was likely safer for both of them due to their family of origin issues. Yet feelings don’t easily turn back on when a couple marries.

Most women enjoy the warmth of nonsexual touch (holding and cuddling) as a precursor to stimulation and becoming aroused. It’s the gentle kissing and cuddling that prepares a woman’s body best for arousal and response. As the man is able to let himself relax and enjoy the pleasure of the experience rather than push for the end result, the woman will come along with him and enjoy the ride.

Kissing and cuddling is a way to build daily connection.

A woman feels connected when her husband focuses on the process of enjoying the journey of sex rather than on the goal of achieving a result. Men often will be focused on “getting her aroused” or “getting her to the point of orgasm” or “getting themselves aroused or to the point of ejaculation.” And this is why it is so essential that you as a woman lead your husband with your sexuality and enjoyment of the pleasure of the process. When you do this, you not only can help him keep his pace slightly behind yours, you will develop more intimacy.

What is true for you and your husband concerning your needs for connection and for space? It serves you best to clarify each of your needs, and then plan ways to meet both sets of needs.

When you accept the realities of who you are and how you each find your way to intimacy, and then bring those differences together, you will move more freely to abandoned sexual intimacy.

Practice the Formula for Intimacy

The Formula for Intimacy (see page 40) is a significant tool for building the brain’s capacity to connect intimately, even for adults who missed bonding as infants or are blocked from bonding due to trauma.

Once research revealed how to encourage the brain’s production of the chemical oxytocin, we were able to use that information to help spouses who had wounds from the past. As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, oxytocin promotes bonding, so producing more of it is a good thing! Oxytocin is also the bonding hormone of mothers and infants, produced when a mother gazes at, cuddles, and breast-feeds her baby. Infants who miss that bonding suffer as adults.

We use our formula to help adults like Richard, who didn’t bond with his mother during that first year of life. Eye-to-eye communication and full body hugs are important for training people like Richard to connect intimately with a spouse.

For any couple wanting to avoid blocks to intimacy, the fifteen-minutes-per-day portion of the formula is the most important discipline for developing the capacity for intimacy. The portion of the formula that requires sharing while looking into each other’s eyes may be quite uncomfortable if you have never experienced attachment or bonding as a child. Try having fun with it to move past the discomfort—play “bug-eyes” or have staring contests with each other.

The formula’s spiritual connection includes God and your faith in the process of connecting. Connecting this way provides an additional level of intimacy based on your souls, rather than just your minds and bodies—and it is deep and real.

The full body, front-to-front hug portion of the fifteen minutes can be fun or tender, and it may trigger vulnerable feelings. If giving yourself fully in that way is scary, start with small steps. You might make it a short hug or not a full embrace at first. Do what you are able, and gradually increase the length of time. A more complete embrace will activate the oxytocin, the important bonding hormone.

Next comes the passionate kiss. Usually it works best if you, the woman, lead in the intensity and the duration of both the hug and the kiss. However, if your husband is the hesitant one, he should lead. Even as the hug triggers the oxytocin, the passionate kiss raises the dopamine level, which may bring back feelings of what you experienced early in your relationship. If kissing is a struggle for either of you, refer to our discussion on kissing at the end of Chapter 5.

Developing a deep intimacy between you and your husband is the key to truly becoming one. In the process of truly becoming one, you will discover the dynamic sexual relationship that ignites the spark, time after time after time. Even though sex in marriage is more of a quiet love based on oxytocin and is different from the dopamine-fueled love of new attractions,[37] it has that deep, intimate spark that continues to grow and glow over the lifetime of your marriage.