Why emotional intimacy is the secret to more love and a happier relationship
Want to learn how to build emotional intimacy and connect with your partner on a deeper level? You’re in the right place. For couples, intimacy isn’t optional—it’s essential. If you want love that lasts, emotional connection is at the heart of having a fulfilling marriage or long-term relationship.
Have you ever found yourself wondering, what is emotional intimacy exactly? We’ll give you a clear definition of emotional intimacy, so you can know what you’re working toward. And you’ll also learn the three keys to emotional intimacy in relationships, so you can start connecting with your partner at a deeper level.
Learning how to build emotional connection is well worth your time, especially if you’re experiencing a lack of emotional intimacy in your relationship. And if you’re not currently in a relationship, understanding the building blocks for connection will help you get your next relationship off on the right foot.
The difference between a mostly functional relationship and a truly fulfilling one often boils down to the quality of emotional connection.
The good news is that when you understand the common roadblocks to emotional intimacy—and how to overcome them— you can immediately start nurturing a deeper connection with your partner.
Let’s begin with the deep truth about relationships that we know instinctively as children but have forgotten by the time we start dating: relationships are all about connection.
As humans, we’re wired for emotional bonding from the moment we’re born. So what happens when we grow up? If we’re all wired to connect since birth, why is it so difficult to be emotionally connected in adult relationships?
The roadblocks to emotional intimacy begin in childhood.
We’re born into this world trusting that those around us will love us and meet our needs. We have to trust like this because as infants, we’re helpless. Because our survival depends on being able to connect with someone who’ll care for us, we’re born with amazing skills to connect with others.
We each begin life completely open and trusting. But this changes as we grow up. At some point, we get hurt.
We discover, painfully, that the world isn’t an entirely safe place for us.
Once we’ve been hurt, we become more cautious, less trusting, and less open with others. If these experiences of being hurt are few and far between, all is well. We learn the valuable lesson that trusting others requires discernment and we develop the ability to discriminate between those who are worthy of our trust and those who aren’t.
That’s the best case scenario for growing up … in which our needs are met consistently by our caregivers and we feel loved, cared for, and safe. Sadly, it’s not the most common scenario.
Many of us grow up in environments that are more unpredictable, and we go through many painful experiences of being emotionally hurt or rejected.
When we grow up in an environment that feels more threatening, whether that’s because of our home life, or school, or our larger social environment, we learn that in order to be keep ourselves safe, we need to protect our deepest, truest self from the outside world. Instead of learning to discriminate between those who are trustworthy and those who aren’t, we instead learn it’s safer not to trust anyone.
So we build walls to keep ourselves safe and We learn how to put on a mask that hides our vulnerability.
Our walls and masks protect us, but at a great cost—we’re no longer emotionally open. We don’t let anyone see our authentic self.
Sadly, when we don’t let anyone see who we really are, we can’t truly connect with another person. We’ve kept ourselves emotionally protected at the expense of being able to connect with others.
If you’re lucky, you made it through childhood trusting the world is a safe place to share your authentic self. Maybe you threw yourself into your first romantic relationship with abandon—your heart wide open, ready to connect.
And when that relationship ended with heartbreak, you said to yourself, I’m never going to do that again.
The fact is, by the time most of us make it through our 20s, we’ve learned that the easiest way to protect ourselves is to hold others at a distance and close ourselves off to true emotional intimacy. As a result, our relationships suffer from emotional distance and lack of emotional connection.
The good news is that you can learn how to create more emotional connection with your partner by practicing the three keys to emotional intimacy.
And if you’re curious about how your own childhood experiences have affected your style in relationships, check out our Relationship Archetypes quiz.
Key # 1: Be vulnerable
Here’s the strange paradox we’ve discovered in our work with couples. Many couples describe feeling more connected and open with each other very early in their relationship.
They look back and see that they’ve actually become less close with each other as the relationship progressed.
In order to make sense of this, it’s important to talk about vulnerability and risk. When you are first falling in love, there are two reasons why it’s easier to be vulnerable.
Remember how we said that we’re wired to connect from the moment of birth? Well, amidst the intoxicating feelings of new love, it’s easy to forget to keep your walls up.
Falling in love is a delicious experience that takes us by surprise, making it easier to let ourselves connect deeply with another person.
It feels good to be seen, and loved, for who you are.
When the relationship is new and you’re bathed in the glow of love, the risks associated with letting yourself be truly seen are less apparent.
And because you’re less committed to and invested in a new relationship, taking risks and being vulnerable is easier.
Rejection and breakups in new relationships still sting, but it’s far easier to recover from the end of a three month relationship than it is to recover from a three year (or three decade) relationship.
The more invested we become in a relationship, the more risk-averse we become.
What happens for some people, especially those who tend to be less open and vulnerable, is that once the relationship is firmly established and they’ve bonded with a partner, they respond to their emotional attachment to their partner by withdrawing into a safety zone where they don’t feel emotionally exposed. They put up walls to protect themselves, and keep their partner at arm’s length. And as a result, emotional intimacy and connection fades over time, replaced by emotional disconnection and distance.
Vulnerability in Relationships
Research shows that vulnerability in relationships is the most important key to emotional intimacy and to feeling connected in your relationship.
What does vulnerability mean in relationships? We have a simple definition: it means letting yourself be seen.
It means letting your partner see your real, true self. It means giving your partner a window into your inner world. It means letting your partner in and letting them see who you really are.
If that feels scary to you, know that you’re not alone. The fear of vulnerability in relationships is common.
Learning how to be more vulnerable in your relationship is an act of courage. It’s also absolutely necessary if you want to have a close loving relationship with another person. You have to let yourself be seen.
When we try to stay safe by constructing a persona to hide behind in our relationship, we miss the opportunity to be loved for who we really are.
Ultimately, when you don’t let yourself be seen, you’ll never really feel loved. There will always be a lingering question that always remains: Would you still love me, if you knew the real me?
The other downside to trying to avoid being hurt by not being vulnerable is your relationship is that your partner will feel like they can’t connect with you.
Trying to avoid risk by avoiding being vulnerable actually opens you up to the risk of the relationship ending, because your partner is likely to feel disconnected from you and unsatisfied in the relationship.
Vulnerability is essential for emotional intimacy. It’s not possible to fake it. As humans, we can only connect at the level of our real, authentic selves.
Everyone struggles with being vulnerable, but this piece of relationship advice for couples is often particularly difficult for men.
There’s a reason for this. As Dr. Carol Gilligan writes in The Birth of Pleasure, boys are socialized to devalue their own feelings (and those of others). This means that boys lose access to their own emotional experience by the time they grow up. Through the process of being socialized to act like men, men become disconnected from themselves at a fundamental level. When you don’t know your own emotions and when you’re disconnected from yourself, it’s hard to connect with a partner, even when you want to.
The process of reconnecting to yourself and learning how to express how you feel takes practice. We created Relationship Communication 101 as a program that can help you reconnect with yourself as you also learn how to communicate with your partner.
If emotional awareness is something you have difficulty with, journaling is also incredibly beneficial in understanding your feelings.
Key #2: Quality Time
If you’re familiar with The Five Love Languages, you know that quality time is one of the love languages. However, quality time is more than just a love language. According to research, quality time is an essential part of having a satisfying relationship.
Quality time is also crucial for emotional intimacy. Creating and nurturing emotional connection in a relationship requires plenty of time.
Opening up and being vulnerable with your partner takes time—time without distractions, when you can really focus on each other. In order to open up and be vulnerable with your partner, you need a strong foundation of trust in your relationship. When there’s no trust in a relationship, it’s not going to feel safe to open up and share a window into your inner world.
If you want to build (or rebuild) trust in your relationship, prioritize quality time when you can focus on each other and your relationship.
Emotional closeness in your relationship requires that you make space for experiences of connection and intimacy. These experiences can only come to the surface when you make time to let it happen.
So what do we mean by quality time? Even sitcoms and romcoms have understood the truth beneath the romantic cliche of long glances, late nights, and slow mornings.
Quality time means time spent together with no competing distractions, no pressure, and no expectations.
It’s the relationship version of free play as a child. It’s spontaneous time that you’re spending together without an agenda. It’s time when you can relax together and let your guard down with each other, and really be present with each other.
quality time: more than just a love language
We mentioned that quality time is a love language for many people. If quality time is your love language, you know that spending quality time with your partner is how you feel most loved in your relationship.
Quality time also happens to be one of the magical ingredients of falling in love.
Think back to the experience of being newly in love. Remember how minutes turned into hours and hours floated by like minutes? You might lose a whole afternoon over a cup of coffee or spend half the night talking in bed.
Conversations meandered in unexpected directions. There’s nothing efficient about the experience of falling in love. It happens in its own time. And the same is actually true for long-term relationships too.
Part of why people tend to remember the early details of falling in love is because they were totally present in the moment. They fully experienced the whirl of sensory impressions—the caresses, the light reflected in a partner’s eyes, the tastes of a favorite meal during the early months together.
Love is nurtured when you spend this kind of quality time together, whether you’ve been together for 5 months or 15 years.
This brings us to another roadblock that prevents emotional intimacy and connection in relationships. Modern life is so busy and there can be so many responsibilities to juggle, and so many competing claims on our attention, it’s easy to lose sight of the importance of creating space for quality time together.
We see this all the time with the couples we work with. A lot of couples imagine that they’re going to have more time in their schedule to reconnect...a few weeks from now. They keep waiting for life to be a little less busy. Spending quality time together ends up always being something around the corner, in the future that never seems to arrive.
In our experience, if you don’t make quality time a priority, it’s not likely to happen on its own. Instead, you have to make time for the things that matter most.
So if you value your relationship (and we’re guessing you do), make time for creating and sustaining a deep emotional connection with your partner.
One way you can do this is by creating new rituals of connection in your relationship. Explore ways that you can come together at some point every day, just to be together, sharing space without distractions, even for a brief time.
Consider how you might create a weekly ritual of quality time as well. In many ways, the simpler you make this, the better.
It could be a shared time each evening going for a walk around your neighborhood, or sitting outside watching the birds with your morning cup of coffee, or turning off your alarms on Saturday morning with the intention of spending some time together in bed.
Carving out time to spend together is one of the most powerful things you can do in cultivating more emotional intimacy in your relationship.
key # 3: open communication
The role of communication in creating emotional intimacy cannot be overstated.
Emotional intimacy in relationships cannot exist without heartfelt, honest communication. And yet, we’re never taught how to communicate in relationships. We’re all just left to figure it out by trial and error … not a great strategy for something as vital as communication and relationships.
Learning how to communicate openly, to share from your heart and listen well, requires being authentic and vulnerable.
This, of course, means that you have to know yourself in order to be able to share yourself, and your inner world, with your partner. Communication in relationships is one of our passions, because it’s something that so many people struggle with.
The good news is that, with education and practice, you can learn how to communicate effectively in your relationship, which will pay dividends in your time together.
Communication involves two parts which work together: speaking and listening. When it comes to open communication, you need to know how to speak from your heart. This is a way of being vulnerable with your partner, letting down your walls, and allowing them to see the real you.
So many of us feel a sense of pressure to tell others what we think they want to hear. It takes courage to speak your own truth, to own your perspective and your experience, especially when it’s different from your partner’s.
How to communicate better
We referenced the work of Dr. Carol Gilligan earlier, when we mentioned that men struggle with emotional awareness because as children, they were shamed for having feelings. Gilligan found that similar social training cause women to struggle with “knowing what they know” … basically, owning your perspective and your sense of things and being able to speak up for what you know.
While men in relationships typically need to work on understanding and expressing their feelings, women often need to work on expressing what they know, or believe, in situations where that might create waves or discomfort for a partner.
In our work with couples, we find so much value in helping couples learn how to accommodate and welcome individual differences between partners.
The most amazing thing about intimate relationships is that each partner has a singular life history and past experiences.
These differences have the power to enrich a relationship immeasurably, when couples learn how to welcome differences rather than seek to eliminate differences in order to achieve agreement on all things.
When you learn how to welcome differences between perspectives and preferences in the relationship, it becomes easier to communicate openly and authentically and it becomes easier to embrace the ways in which your partner is different from you.
When we’re not threatened by differences, it’s easier to listen to our partner with an open heart and be empathetic and understanding of their experiences, even when we might experience the same situation in another way.
Conclusion
The path to more emotional intimacy in your relationship may be challenging at times, but it will also be immensely rewarding. Learning how to communicate from the heart and to show up authentically and vulnerably with your partner takes courage.
In order to do this, make space for quality time. You can even begin by making quality time to spend with yourself. Having time alone will help you connect with yourself at a deeper level, so you can get to know yourself, and learn how you feel and what you think.
Then it’s time to make space for quality time together, when you’ll be able to connect with each other on a deeper level and practice being more authentic and vulnerable with each other.
Relationships aren’t for the faint of heart, but they’re also one of life’s greatest sources of pleasure and meaning.
Know that we’re cheering you on and that we’re here for you if you’d like some additional support. You can also sign up for our free relationship communication training below.
Learn how to Create more intimacy in your relationship when you sign up for The communication cure, our free training to help you improve communication and deepen your connection.
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About angela & Daniel
We help those with painful childhood experiences to heal your relationship with yourself, deeply connect with others, and learn the skills for having fulfilling relationships.
Healthy relationships are an essential part of living a good life and yet, many of us (perhaps even most of us) have core wounds from childhood experiences that affect our ability to have the kinds of intimate relationships in adulthood that we long to have.
