Building intimacy in marriage is about a lot more than just sex. In this episode of the Love Hope Adventure podcast, we’ll talk about creating an intimacy beyond physical. It will encompass emotional, spiritual, as well as a non-sexual physical relationship with your spouse. Transcription for this episode: Hi. Welcome to the love hope adventure podcast, where we talked about the marriage relationship, intimacy in marriage, and how you can go deeper with your spouse. Today, I want to talk about intimacy and marriage. And I’m not talking just specifically about sexual intimacy. And one of the reasons I want to talk about this is that a lot of times, I have people write in, and they’re all asking very similar questions about how to get their spouse to be more engaged with sex. Be more adventurous, and try new things. Yeah, initiate what have you all, like, whatever the thing is, right? They just want more out of their sex life. And then I always want to ask the question, well, what are you doing? That’s really intentional, and the rest of your life that’s intimate, and rebuilding that intimate connection with your spouse? Because I think sometimes, and this is often men writing in, I’m not saying women never write in; they just usually have different questions. But most often, it’s men. And the first thing that comes to their mind when they’re trying to build intimacy with their wife is it’s very sexual. Unfortunately, I think the word intimacy has come to mean sex exclusively. Yeah. Which, which is unfortunate, is because it’s such a richer word than that. But I mean, we talked about, I mean, just listen to when we used the word intimate, right? You know, we’re talking about intimate apparel; what does that mean? Lingerie, you know, like, you know, all these, the word has been stripped so much of its meaning. And really, it just, it just speaks to a closeness you can have, you can have an intimate relationship with a friend, right? Where it is a deeply meaningful relationship that’s very close, has a lot of tight bonds, and is completely a friendship and platonic, no physical, no sexual, any part of that, you know, even somebody you would never possibly be romantically interested in, you can have an intimate relationship with. And when we get rid of that idea, and we just couch intimacy means we’re having great, awesome sex. We’re missing so much more, of what marriage is and can be; I think that a couple of years back, I remember, we had a big, big focus on friendship and marriage. We did our five foundations of intimacy, Marriage Course, which maybe is still on the website, I don’t even know. And one of the five foundations was friendship because, for you and I, that was a big part of it. And so when you boil it down to its, just sex, you’re missing out on so much richness that your marriage can have. So I think the focus is a lot of times, not always, right, because it’s like so much 100% on building more adventure in the bedroom, more or less boredom, more excitement. And so then I asked people, okay, so what are you doing when you’re not engaging in sexual intimacy, to build intimacy, because if you are only being intentional about sex, you are missing out on so much greater, deeper, richer intimacy with your spouse. And I think that the closer your spouse feels to you, the more connected they feel to you, the better the sex life is going to be anyway, and the easier it’s going to be for your husband or wife to open up to you sexually in the bedroom if you have shared a lot with each other relationally. So I think there is a couple of different levels that you can look at here. And we just talked a little bit about the friendship part of marriage, and you’re like, you can be really, really intimate with a friend and not sexual at all. So in that situation, I would say, think of your husband or wife as your closest friend. And then ask yourself, like, how close are you and what are you doing? If there was no sex, and you guys weren’t cohabitating or raising kids together or paying bills together, whatever. What would you be doing with them to build the relationship? Did you say if you weren’t cohabitating? Like, just kind of take all those things out of the picture for just a minute because you could say, well, we raise our kids together. No, that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about deepening a relationship between white or white disagree because I wouldn’t include those things. Do you think raising the kids builds intimacy? I mean, it probably does. We are kind of, You know, waterline if you’re shoulder to shoulder, you know, on the same team as we always talk about Yeah, no, that’s the thing. Okay, so our five foundations for intimacy from that course. Can we even remember their communication, friendship, romance, sex, and finances? We did a whole unit in a course called the five foundations for intimacy in marriage, like budgeting, like finances and what it wasn’t a budget and what we weren’t doing Dave Ramsey or anything. We weren’t not doing Dave Ramsey, but it’s, I think, all of those things. I think that’s part of the richness, kind of like being on the same page about it. Yeah, because there’s nobody else that I sit down with and talk about our budget with. There’s nobody else that I’m day to day slogging it out raising the kids. Like, I might ask a buddy of mine, like, hey, how do you handle this when your teenager does that, or whatever. But, you know, he’s not there. When we’re, when we’re doing it when we’re enacting, when we’re taking away the privileges, you know, when we’re grounding the kid or when we’re having the talks and figuring things out, it’s you that’s there. It’s, I mean, this might sound silly, but like, we go to the grocery store, every now and then. And, you know, together, we used to do it as a whole family. And there, you know, different periods in our, in our marriage, we went together, we went as a family, there have been times where it just basically you were doing it on your own. And we were here to help unload everything. But like when we go together, that’s a bonding experience. You and I, most nights of the week, for the last, I don’t know, six months or so, go out for a walk at night when this just awful Texas sun finally scorches, it’s way below the horizon, and we can go back out into the land of the living again, we go for that walk, and I look forward to that so much. It’s something as mundane as a walk. I know we’re gonna have great conversation, we’re gonna have a great time catching up for the day, downloading with each other, and all those kinds of things. And I think, to me, it’s all of those things. It’s, it’s the going out on an on a date, and flirting with each other. It’s having sex; it’s laughing with each other. It’s watching a movie and enjoying it and talking about it later, it’s going over the budget and seeing Are we still on the same page and slogging that out every now and then it’s, you know, it’s buying a house, it’s, you know, taking the kid to get their license. It’s, it’s so many of those things. It’s all of those shared experiences that we have, to me, that define that’s what makes our relationship. So very, very different from every other relationship I have. Right? Yeah. And I think that when you’re coming in building intimacy in the relationship, sex is one single part, although I feel like it became become the biggest division point. Yeah. And I feel like sometimes there are couples who think if they can just get the sex figured out, the rest of it will follow suit. And so that, that’s what you started saying earlier was you said, Take Take sex out of the equation, right? And then you also took everything else out? And that’s where I disagree with you. I just boil it down to the relationship part. Yeah, I know, I get what you’re saying. But I would say the same thing, except just stop at the sex part, pull the sex life out of the conversation in the equation for a second. And what are you doing to build intimacy? What are you doing with your finances? What are you doing raising your kids? What are you doing in the day-to-day, your career, you know, your spouse’s career, do the day-to-day chores and life and all these kinds of things? What are you doing in those areas to build intimacy? And then my question to a person who’s concerned about their spouse not really initiating or whatever in the way of sex life, my question is, are they doing other things throughout the day to build a connection with you? So I think it’s the Gottman Institute that talks about bidding. So bidding is when you know your spouse comes in, and they want your attention in some way or another. And if you don’t give it to them, then that’s like a sign a couple won’t make it like they did this, however, long study. And I think that most of the time, your spouse may come in, and they’re bidding for your attention, and maybe you’re not giving it to them. So you’re like if you’re continually killing the intimacy throughout the day, and maybe they were trying, maybe they’ve been trying to build intimacy and other ways, and they’re getting shut down, then that’s gonna make the bidding for sex even more difficult, like, Well, you didn’t enter time for me earlier. But you certainly got time for me. Okay, right. And then they don’t see it as a form of intimacy; they see it as a form of somebody wanting to have a need met. This is one of the things I’ve talked about with sexual need is that when you boil it down to something that’s just physical, it’s a release, it’s something that I have to have, or I need. It’s like, okay, well, I need to e
