Excerpted from the book Road Warrior by Stephen Arterburn and Sam Gullucci
There are six external activities that can help you build a strong intimacy in your marriage and sustain you while you are on the road.
1. Laughing Together
Laughter is a doorway to intimacy. It is like an instant vacation in a marriage and the best way to keep perspective when things go wrong. If you laugh together, you can cry together, and thereby feel more ready to trust each other when communicating feelings. If you can find humor in everything, you can survive anything. Do not take things so seriously. Learn to stop yourself when you are ready to get angry and instead use the love language of laughter. If this is your behavior at home, then you can take this behavior on the road through phone calls and little creative things you can do while you are away.
2. Encouraging Each Other
Become each other’s cheerleader. Learn how to encourage and support your spouse’s activities. Listen and really take an interest in the things your spouse likes to do. Express respect for your husband. Every chance you get, compliment him in public and in private. Build up your wife in front of others and give her honest credit for your family’s successes. Let your spouse truly know you appreciate him or her. The more we build up our spouses, the more they will feel valued by us and build us up in turn.
3.Touching Each Other
The power of intimate touch cannot be underestimated. You must develop a healthy habit of touching each other beyond just the bedroom. Intimate touch is the love connection of holding hands, cuddling, stroking each other’s hair arm or leg, and other ways of showing physical affection. Too frequently I run into couples who do not touch each other, especially in public. Touch is the basis on which couples develop a healthy desire for each other. Touching your spouse protects you from wanting to touch others in a world of many lonely people. Touch protects you from finding a substitute for what God has designed for your marriage—Intimate touch does not have to include sexual touch, but we must develop a language of sexual touch with our spouse as well. If you learn to touch your spouse, you will lose your desire to touch someone else.
4. Talking About Your Feelings
One of the biggest barriers to growth in marriage is the absence of discussion. Couples must talk about their feelings. Life is not perfect, and marriage is not perfect. Your spouse is not perfect and neither are you. You need to talk to your spouse about how you feel and what you struggle with. Traveling with unresolved issues can actually cause a heart to grow colder. Set aside time each week for just the two of you to go out and talk. Tell your spouse what happened each day and what challenges you had personally. If you learn to invest time together while you’re at home, your time on the phone will increase in meaning and depth while our on the road.
5. Forgiving and Being Forgiven
We must not let resentments build up in our marriage; we must learn to forgive our spouses and ourselves. Conflicts in marriage happen, and we need to give our spouses permission to tell us what they are struggling with. Everyone’s feelings are valid. We must get to know how our spouses feel on issues that cause conflict between us. If you do not share and forgive, you are not in a place to see your spouse or yourself properly. We cannot express love and receive love properly if we do not forgive.
6.Protecting Your Image of Your Spouse
This is the biggest vulnerability to attack you will face when on the road. Intimacy with your spouse must not only be developed, it must be protected! Our images must be real, not make-believe. What we see on per-per-view or over the Internet is not a real source of intimacy. If we look at other images as sources of physical intimacy, we set ourselves back and block our view of seeing things clearly. If we think about them and meditate on them, we rob ourselves of true intimacy’When you begin to find true intimacy with your spouse, you will lose your desire for substitutes and instead try to protect your relationship. The goal must be to seek and search for those things in your spouse that will grow your love and intimacy. Your spouse must be the most important person in your life.
For more help on this topic please see Road Warrior.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008, 2:00 am and is filed under Balancing Your Life, Creating Boundaries, Marriage, Sexual Integrity (Every Man's Battle).
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#1 by Mr_Sherief - April 22nd, 2009 at 08:26
it so good steps to build intimacy in our relationship ,, I tried to translate it into arabic as much as I could ,, and soon I will put it in my website’s articles in arabic …… thanks so much
#2 by Melissa - September 18th, 2009 at 08:25
my husband and i struggle with this in our marriage now and have for the last fifteen years. I have noticed a difficulty in this area in the 6 years previously to our marriage and tried to communicate and understand our differences. I developed an insecurity and trust issue in my marriage very early due to my husbands unwillingness to change his ways after i voiced my discomforts, and in his mind and communication is he’s not hiding anything and that’s the way men are. I was young and tried to deal with these issues with voicing my dislikes and how i felt these are not appropriate for a married man and father, needless to say and long story short: i feel i was robbed of a healthy intimate relationship due to the lack of respect from my husband to live in a godly healthy marriage and my lack of respect to give myself what i new and felt i needed. As well as continue to give myself and my love the best i could and continue living life as a wife and mother. I had to continue living and loving because “isn’t that marriage.” I am angry with my self that i robbed myself and listened to my husband ,because i loved him and felt he was helping me, instead i feel now that was, his either unknown abilitiy to connect or selfish reasons of getting what he wants without connecting on a emotional level. This has been a big part of our marriage difficulties as well as not being able to connect in the same focus in our life. I’m still trying make this marriage work, but running out energy.
I feel like i’m the one doing all the work, not good. My husband is very difficult because he feels i blame him for everything,i told him i’m not perfect and have faults, he has the larger faults with the most conflicting damage to the marriage. Being able to have a intimate relationship, you have to be able to give real love. I feel like i have lived in a fantasy world with my husband to meet his sexual needs and desires early in our marriage. Since i voiced i’m not comfortable with all of this and since we have had our children we have not been able to get on the right track. I just continue to hope to some resolution, but i can’t change him, that is evident. Doing things for each other is okay,but it needs to be done with genuine heartfelt LOVE. When infidelity,trust, resentment, anger and other life stressors enter its makes it difficult to get in the right focus. Please pray to god for the resources and education we can give the future husbands and wives to live a healthy marriage.
#3 by Snipercatt - January 13th, 2010 at 10:33
Melissa makes several interesting points. Particularly her closing sentence about raising our children to live in healthy marriages!
Sins of our generation pass unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate God.
We become our own idols when we “do what feels good.” God commands us to obey his commandments. When we don’t, we replace God in our life with ourselves.
If sons and daughters are raised in marriages that contain infidelity and adultery they will learn to perpetuate, or tolerate, that in their own marriages.
Melissa makes the point about a spouse either being unable or unwilling to connect on an emotional level. Many have studied this and ponder if this is nature, or nurture? In reality, it doesn’t matter, because through prayer and a willing heart, things can change.
My husband entered our marriage with the full intention of infidelity. He chooses to live with the demons of Satan through sexual sin.
I am learning to love my husband as a Christian loves their enemy. In reality, this battle is with Satan, not with my husband. I can not control the wind, but I can set the sail.