A marriage without intimacy is at best, an association.
Physical intimacy is one vital ingredient that makes marriage sweet.
When we say physical intimacy, people are quick to cap it up as meaning sex, but that’s untrue.
Physical intimacy includes sex, kissing, hugging, foreplay, and any physical way of stewarding deep connection in marriage.
I attended a seminar years ago where the speaker asked, “What’s the most sensitive sex organ?”.
I watched as she signaled NO to all the obvious answers.
“What could it be?” I wondered.
Finally, she let the cat out of the bag- The mind!
I was prepared to protest until she started to explain it, and boy, did I see how powerful my mind is in stewarding intimacy with my spouse!
I learned many other things at that seminar, and today, I’ll be vulnerable in sharing with you the things I stopped doing that were hurting our marriage.
You know how you self-righteously think you’ve got things on lockdown meanwhile you are self-sabotaging your marriage?
That was my story until I started to make shifts and upgraded.
I hope you learn from my mistakes too and embrace your own upgrade.
8 Things I Stopped Doing That Were Hurting Physical Intimacy In Our Marriage
1. Waiting for spontaneous sex
Romance movies messed a lot with my head and made me expect unrealistic things in marriage.
One such is spontaneous sex.
I mean, as newlyweds, my husband and I had a lot of that.
In fact, we explored different sex styles and experienced the different rooms and corners of our home.
However, as our children started to come and life got busier, I still expected it to be like that, like in the movies.
I didn’t want it if it was steamy hot and causing sparks that could burn down the house.
What I didn’t know was that physical intimacy was an intentional act and could not always be spontaneous.
Some days, I resented my husband for not being spontaneous and romantic.
Meanwhile, the guy was clueless and wondering he was doing wrong.
We were both in limbo, dealing with all sorts of emotions that further threw us apart.
I suddenly came to the realization that I had swapped my imperfect life with the perfect love world of Paloma.
Ah! (an exclamation of surprise).
This was my husband and not some Diego… Odiegwu!
I adjusted quickly and started to tone down my fairy tale expectations.
Some days, it was a spontaneous hit, and other days, it was just there, but I started to value our connection more, which made a whole world of difference to our physical intimacy.
2. Refusing to communicate
So, what I didn’t tell you about point one was that communication was the game changer for me.
I had expectations my husband knew nothing of, and I expected him to read my mind. Lol!
Well, I shifted and started communicating better.
It also helped that I listened to him better.
You know that communication is such a catalyst for intimacy right?
Don’t worry, I’ll explain.
I noticed that unlike the earlier days when we had misunderstandings, we would both withdraw and nurse our hurts individually; when we started communicating, it made us understand each other better.
And guess what?
Make-up sex is one of the hottest ever! (winks).
It bangs differently.
3. Being too absorbed in motherhood
They say that motherhood is synonymous with sacrifice, and it is true.
However, I started to learn that it was unwise to sacrifice the physical intimacy of our marriage on the altar of motherhood.
Yes some seasons are insanely draining, especially when you are dealing with an infant, but getting too absorbed in it can make you start ignoring your husband.
I sat comfortably on this table until I saw my errors.
I started to outsource some things and build structures to let my guy and I have alone time.
I became more intentional about giving and receiving affection to my husband amid the endless cries for ‘Mommy’ and the children’s demands.
Sometimes it was a quick kiss, other times a butt tap, sometimes a heartfelt hug, and chief of all; we refused to allow the fear of the baby waking up to stop sex.
Although I must confess that the quickies in random parts of the house were brain resetting in the middle of a hard day.
3. Being ashamed of my body
One of the things pregnancy does is that it changes your body.
In my case, I moved from being a size eight pre-first pregnancy to being a size 14/16 after my second child.
I felt awful about my body; the stretch marks, the wrinkles on my tummy, the obvious mommy pouch due to diastasis recti, and even my C-section scar made me cringe.
My body image affected how I felt every time my husband initiated intimacy.
I felt embarrassed and wanted to hide.
He, on the other hand, kept telling me how much he loved my body, and truly, he couldn’t keep his eyes and hands off me.
But I wasn’t having it because I didn’t feel good about my body.
This continued for a while until I went for therapy and the whole process made me realize how much my body hatred was hurting the physical intimacy in our marriage.
It led me to embark on a journey of healing.
I was bigger but no less me and no less beautiful.
The more I affirmed myself, the better I felt.
To be sincere, I needed my husband more than I knew because every time he gushed over my body, it validated and healed me.
It was a win-win for both of us and our marriage.
4. Going on long stretches without sex
It is ironic how many single people knock themselves out thinking about sex only to get married and go long stretches without it.
I have heard of a sexless marriage before, but never in my whole life did I imagine that would be us.
To be honest, it was mostly my fault.
The tired excuse was the go-to.
It started out as effects of the overwhelm of life but it started to lead me to low libido and almost no desire for intimacy.
Some days, I just wanted to be left alone and I’d shun my husband’s attempts at connecting with me in a hug or kiss.
With time, I started to hate it altogether, and as a gentleman, he kept his hands to himself.
It only hurt our marriage the more and drew us apart.
By the time I saw the light, I started to recalibrate my mind; remember what I shared about the mind being the most sensitive sexual organ?
Armed with that knowledge, I understood that if my mind was ready for physical intimacy, my body too would respond.
With a lot of communication and tenderness from my husband, we got back on track again in our marriage.
5. Not scheduling sex
Some personalities are so coordinated and scheduling is their superpower, as they thrive on routine.
However, for Sanguines like myself who love spontaneity, I hated the idea of scheduling sex.
It felt so drab to think about!
Guess what?
We weren’t doing so well on my insistence on spontaneity.
Life had gotten busier and we were finding it hard to sync our times because I was a nocturnal person while my husband was a day person.
He was ready for us to explore the option of scheduling sex, but I shut it down every time.
Well, things grew worse, and eventually, I had to ditch the mindset and explore scheduling sex.
Omo, (Nigerian exclamation) it worked wonders for our marriage!
Our physical intimacy quickly rose from 10 to 100!
6. Being a workaholic
If someone were to walk up to me and say, “Hello workaholic?”
I’d say “Hi!” because the cap fits perfectly.
I was not a workaholic because I loved to work, but because I had a conscientious personality.
Being conscientious has its pros and cons.
One of the cons was that it made me a compulsive workaholic and made me have an unhealthy attitude to work.
As a result of this, I over worked and sent more time at work than I should.
It also made me miss out on moments and time to grow my intimacy with my husband.
Many nights he wanted to bond and gist with me but I’d be engrossed with my system rushing to crush deadlines.
I even took on jobs to help friends, extra work that drew me farther from the love of my life.
Coming to terms with my workaholic self was a rude shock but with the support of my husband I started to make compromises like having a time I officially close from work.
I also started practicing being present with him in those moments.
7. Mindlessly scrolling on social media
Being a workaholic didn’t stop me from spending time on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.
Sometimes just scrolling mindlessly felt therapeutic and the plan to just check my chats for fifteen minutes may turn into three hours of mindless scrolling.
This was fast becoming a weakness because unknown to me, this habit was stealing time for my husband and I to be intimate and hurting our marriage.
We found that some weeks we went through the week and missed many events in each other’s lives even though we were so close.
This is the façade and trade off of social media.
The more social you are there, the more anti social you become in real life.
I started to intentionally regulate my social media time and invest heavily in spending time with my husband without our devices.
This in turn turned things around for our marriage and made us grow in intimacy.
8. Nursing past hurts and traumas
Do you want to know why the past is called past?
It is because it is behind you… and in the past.
Nursing past hurts and traumas can hurt your present and cast a cloud on the beautiful thing you have going.
Many times we nurse the past through lingering fears and sustained thoughts and this was the situation for me.
I had all sorts of fears because of my parents marriage and past episodes of rejection that had traumatized me.
However, because I always kept them in my subconscious they affected how I felt about my husband’s extravagant love and how I responded to it.
These posed a huge threat to physical intimacy in our marriage until I received sense and opened myself to the process of healing.
A wise woman once said “Energy flows where attention goes”.
I engaged gratitude and engaged my mind in beautiful thoughts about our present and our future.
This was a game changer for us and I hope it is the same for you too!