Becoming Us: Rebuilding Couples’ Connections
I believe that love and relationships aren’t end-states but a practice we constantly hone and refine over time. Whether you’re a couple navigating a new phase, trying to find space for your relationship amid parenting, or have found yourself drifting over the decades, you can learn how to prioritize closeness in your relationship.
Does this sound familiar?
A funny thing happens to couples. In the beginning, our relationships are filled with sparks, every experience heightened by the intensity and intimacy of our emotional experience. As the relationship grows, it makes room for things besides our emotional connection with one another: careers, mortgages, kids, parents, and all of the administrative work that comes with them. Our lives become overwhelmed by busyness: the meetings, the carpool lines, the screens we begin and end our days with. Most days, it feels like actually connecting with one another ends up as the last thing on the to-do list.
When our emotional lives go on autopilot, we often don’t see how much they’ve drifted from one another until it feels like we’ve already lost something. Why does closeness feel so difficult, even when love is present?
I’ve worked with thousands of couples at all different stages of life, and I’m convinced that we can achieve closeness if we learn to approach it as a habit, practice, and a skill.
What does closeness look like?
Practice close communication
Open communication starts with sharing how you feel and being willing to get vulnerable about your true desires, fears, insecurities, worries, and anxieties. When we do this, we let our partners see our full selves.
Bringing your whole self to a conversation is sacred and intimate, and it can feel really uncomfortable if you’ve fallen out of the habit. That’s why close communication is just as much about how couples receive the information their partners share as what they share. Practice holding space for what your partner tells you without interrupting, and challenge yourself to exercising compassion as they speak. Focus on trying to understand where it is they’re coming from.
Try this:
Next time you feel stressed at work, tell your partner: “I’m feeling really stressed about xx.” Don’t feel you must supplement it with other details, actions, or spin. Let your emotions alone be the subject of the conversation. Give your partner the space to respond to your emotions.
Next time you get into an argument, commit to a period of active listening for thirty minutes. Each person gets to fully express their feelings and emotions without interruption and pauses before responding. Observe how this changes the way that you fight.
Create Intentional Moments of Connection
Intentional moments of connection are about creating regular rhythms that foster closeness in a relationship. These can be bigger traditions that anchor you to your values, like how you as a family give back to your community over Christmas, or smaller behaviors and routines that make it easy to bring our emotional lives to the forefront of our relationships, like sharing ten technology-free moments with your partner over coffee every morning. It’s about more than just creating space for one another: rituals tend to leave us feeling a more profound sense of belonging and togetherness.
Try this:
Go technology-free for one dinner every week so you can focus on one anothers’ company.
Make the hour after your kids go to bed your time to catch up on each others’ days.
Once a month, take a class or practice a shared hobby together.
For your next family holiday, consider an activity that reflects the things that matter to your family, like making soup for the homeless
Find Shared Values
We often take for granted that our partner shares the same vision for our relationship, family, and legacy that we have. But in a world where many couples come from different social and cultural backgrounds, and our personal values tend to change and grow over time, it’s so important that you take the time to articulate what matters to you both, and how you’ll reflect that in your day-to-day life. These values help ground a relationship and provide a framework for navigating life together. Learning to negotiate values is just as important as sharing a vision, core values, and priorities for your relationship.
Try this: 10 Questions for Identifying What Matters to You
What makes you joyful? Angry? Sad?
What do you need from me?
How do you want to be comforted by me?
What do you enjoy the most about each other?
What’s your favorite way to spend time together?
What kind of gift would make you happy?
How can I help when you feel upset or overwhelmed?
What’s the best way to support you?
How do you envision us growing over time?
What future do you picture for us, and how can I help us move toward that?
