Keeping your marriage thriving will require you to be intentional about nurturing and caring for your relationship. Often the inner workings of what keeps a relationship healthy get set aside once a commitment is established. Unknowingly we prioritize other important aspects of our lives at this point, thinking something like that love song, “love will keep us together.” It often starts with our careers, our children, then we have our hobbies, and outside friendships, church commitments, and then years down the road, we discover our relationship has “lost its sexy.” Today I want to share four actionable steps you can take to bring sexy back into your relationship
I like to compare relationships to a lifelong project that we continually evaluate, decide on purpose what is working, what isn’t working, and what we might do differently to get to our desired end goal. Compare it maybe to launching a business. We wouldn’t get licensed, register with the government, open our checking account, write our mission statement and then go on to other life goals hoping to come back every night with money in our bank account.
Whether you are just starting the journey with your love relationship and still madly in love or feel like your marriage life is more like roommates with benefits. This post will help you be deliberate with what you want to create moving forward. If you’re still madly in love, it will teach you to prioritize your love relationship. If you’re feeling more like roommates with your spouse, it will help you start moving towards where you want to be.
If you’re in the latter scenario, thinking about bringing sexy back into your relationship might sound like some Disney fairy tale that you’ve resolved to believe is pure fantasy. Not knowing how to bring the sexy back is not the problem; the problem is getting over the uncomfortable feelings it might take to do the work of making fantasy your reality. The problem will be getting over your belief that you’re just roommates, that the flame has died, that there isn’t any hope, so settling is good enough.
I believe your sexy is important, and however that looks for you, let’s start the process of bringing it back into your marriage!
First you have to desire to bring intimacy back into your relationship.
Having the desire to bring intimacy back means you care. Having the desire means you’re willing to develop strategies to overcome the obstacles that are in the way of you having the intimate relationship you desire. Let’s look at the definition of intimacy.
Intimacy: a close, familiar and usually affectionate or loving personal relationship with another person.
Now that we know what intimacy means, I want you to ask yourself why you want a more intimate relationship? An excellent, compelling reason to do this work is vital to creating your ideal marriage relationship, so get some paper, pen, and start writing.
As you write, notice what your reasons are. Do you want more intimacy in your marriage for reasons that feel good to you, or do you think more intimacy will make your husband love you more? Remember that we cannot control other people and how they feel, so as your write your list, make sure they are all reasons that make you feel good.
Go back and look through your list and cross off any reasons that you can’t control:
- The ones you can control are the thoughts in your own head, like expressing love in ways that are important to you, making you feel love. A reason could be just because you want to feel love and stop feeling empty.
- The reasons you can’t control are ones that dictate how he acts or treats you so that you can feel good. You can’t control what he thinks about you taking massive action towards your intimacy goals, and you can’t control what he does, or doesn’t, do.
Second, decide on purpose what you want “sexy” to look like for you.
Be very specific and make sure they are all actions that you create for yourself. This is going to require you to come up with another list.
They might look like:
- dressing in a way that feels good to you
- acting in ways that feel like love for you
- losing that last 10 pounds
- creating conversations that stimulate interest and deep thinking
- planning long hand in hand walks through the woods
- warm and embracing hugs
Third is your action plan for achieving the intimacy you desire.
Now take a look at your lists; what is coming up for you? Maybe it all looks like that Disney movie we discussed earlier, and you feel very uncomfortable even thinking about doing some of the actions on your list. Totally ok. Start with the easy ones like how you take care of yourself, things you can do all by yourself to improve how you feel about yourself. Then move on to the less uncomfortable ones, like sending him a friendly text during the workday or leaving a love note in his lunch bag. Make all of these less uncomfortable ones completely comfortable while working on strategies to start implementing the more uncomfortable actions.
Creating your dream marriage is like any other goal you want to succeed at. You wouldn’t go about losing 50 pounds by writing up a plan, thinking about it but never taking the bold steps of learning how to allow the emotion of wanting to eat food that’s not on your plan. So while you are taking the smaller, easier steps, start thinking about implementing some of the less comfortable steps. As you make the easier steps more consistent, you’ll notice how good they feel; this will make you curious about how the success of the bigger actions will feel (much better, I promise).
Start writing down all of the things that are in the way of you taking the actions you dream of taking. Most obstacles are your feelings of fear and discomfort. Think about what you could do to make the action easier. Let’s look at your desire to hold hands during that walk through the woods. Before you tackle all of your thoughts and emotions around the action of holding hands, you’ll actually have to plan the walk, when will it be, where will you go, what else might you do on that trip? Plan the whole experience, start visualizing it and think about how you want to feel during that special time you’re creating.
The fourth step is to start building your self confidence.
Building self-confidence is one of my favorite things to do. Building self-confidence means practicing things that feel uncomfortable and learning to make the outcome not mean anything about who you are as a human. Self-confidence comes from being able to experience any emotion and come out on the other side stronger.
Here is an exercise for you to try around the hand-holding example that will help you build self-confidence. Maybe you thought something like, “we haven’t done this in years,” which makes you feel awkward. When we’re feeling awkward, we will avoid taking the action of holding hands, getting us the result of not holding our spouse’s hand for even longer.
Now think about the walk while feeling self-confident; what would you do? You would hold his hand, feel the emotion of awkwardness, your hand might sweat a bit while thinking something like, “I want this in my marriage.” Giving you the result of doing what you want to do. This will give you the result of getting your sexy back. The feeling you have after will be one of elation, pure glory, and joy for what you created. One time won’t be enough to make it a habit, but you did it, and you built up some self-confidence. It will encourage you to plan another event where you hold his hand; you will still have to be deliberate until this new hand-holding thing becomes normal, but that’s ok, you did it!
Now apply this technique to something else on your list. The more uncomfortable things you make yourself do, the easier they will become, the more self-confidence you will develop. I have a free worksheet available to help you through this self-confidence exercise; reach out to me if you’re interested in using it; I’d love to share it with you.
Having your solid, compelling reason for wanting your dream love relationship will keep you taking one step forward at a time. Don’t worry about how it looks; look at how it’s making you feel. Keep taking massive action every day to bring your sexy back, keep creating, planning, evaluating, learning, and believing in yourself and your dream. Soon enough, you will be living the life you had only previously been dreaming of.
Looking for more information on relationship intimacy? I wrote a five-part series just for you, starting with What Is Relationship Intimacy?
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I am a life coach who works with individuals to break down relationship barriers by awakening their true self. My process isn’t about changing your partner, it’s about discovering who you are so that you can AwakenYou in your marriage. If you’re ready to take your life and your love relationship to the next level then schedule your program inquiry call today and let’s decide together if this is your next step to creating the life you’ve been dreaming of.
