Why has our intimacy changed?

If you’ve lost intimacy in your relationship (physical or emotional), I’m here to offer a possible explanation why…

The loss of intimacy within a relationship is most often actually a loss of safety within a relationship. Have you heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?

The idea here is that we need each bottom layer before we can build on top… so we first need food, water, oxygen etc. Then we need safety and security, the third layer is then connection and intimacy, then our self-esteem and finally self-actualisation.

What we can see from this hierarchy of needs is that in order to have connection and intimacy (which sit in the third layer), we HAVE to have safety and security first which sits underneath it.

Over time in relationships, things change between couples. Patterns set in and that sense of safety can be lost. This can happen in multiple ways; there may have been a betrayal, there may be anger issues, frequent arguments, aggression, stress which causes our nervous systems to feel things aren’t safe, perhaps one of you doesn’t listen well or isn’t approachable, perhaps one is distant or can be punitive. So many possible reasons.

But the important thing here is that once the safety has gone, it MUST be rebuilt in order to enable intimacy. There is no point in trying to force intimacy, either emotional or physical. If it is forced it will only add further feelings of danger and increase the lack of safety.

We have to get to the bottom of what is feeling unsafe.

Please remember that in order to feel safe, we have to feel able to be vulnerable and for that vulnerability to be received well, contained, and attended to in a compassionate way. This means we need to feel that we can go to our partner with anything, with our most vulnerable parts and know it’s safe.

So, if intimacy has lessened or been lost in your relationship, have a think about the safety between the two of you. How do you communicate? How do you attend to each other’s vulnerabilities?

Once you build that safety layer, the intimacy and connection will be possible.

So remember, safety first!