After a couple has been married for awhile, running the household seems to become secondary to spending time together, and as a result, the intimacy appears to have gone out of the marriage. If this is the case with your relationship, there are some ways that you can get it back, and its not as hard as one might think.
The first item on the intimacy agenda is to make a date with your spouse. Send the kids to a babysitter, and plan an evening alone. Now you can do whatever you want. Curl up on the couch, go to a movie or out to dinner, or play a game. Remember that intimacy doesn’t always mean sex, sharing moments of your life together is as intimate as physical contact. If lack of physical contact is the case, however, you can increase intimacy by getting some couples games from your local adult store, or simply setting the scene.
Candles, dim lights, a new piece of lingerie can make all the difference in the world. Letting your intentions be known by surprising your spouse when they come home from work is great, too.
Another way to rekindle the intimacy in your marriage is to do the things together that you did when you where dating. Several months before we got married, my husband and I went to the beach for the weekend. We had a great time walking along the sand, and making plans for our future. Three years later we were so caught up in buying our first home and our careers that we began to drift apart. We went back to that same beach resort and walked along the shores again, this time taking stock of how far we’d come, what we had achieved and what our future plans were. It was a wonderful way to remember where we came from in our relationship, and a good time to take inventory, keeping the good and letting go of the rest. The inventory taking did not include blame for things that did not turn out as we had planned, rather-just like a well run business-we let go of some of the things that weren’t working (like the constant overtime we both signed up for at work, it gave us so much less time together, and the extra money wasn’t worth it) and keeping the things we loved about each other (like after eight years we still leave each other little notes in the morning.) This type of taking stock vacation gave us both the incentive we needed to keep flame burning-something we never thought we’d have trouble with when we first got together!
Loss of intimacy does not necessarily mean that there is something wrong with the marriage, only that somewhere along the line your priorities have been misplaced. A little time and effort is all that is needed to bring the intimacy back into focus- and the reasons you got married in the first place.