With Valentine’s Day around the corner I like to look at February as Love Month!
Whether you are in an intimate relationship, or take the opportunity on Valentine’s Day to honour a special relationship in your life (your best friend, mom, dad, brother, sister or perhaps even the relationship with yourself) may the concept below support you in experience the connection we all deserve.
On some level we all crave intimacy; the need to love and be loved. Yet we have so much trouble experiencing it. The other day, I was at a friend’s place and we were working on a project together. Her husband came home and she said “hi hon” and we continued working. I half jokingly said “what if you got up and physically greeted him and showed him how happy you were he was home?”
She said “are you serious”? But then quickly said, “you know, I used to do that.” A few days later she called me and said “Teresia your comment the other day has been with me ever since and this is a habit I am going to reintegrate into my life.”
After twelve years of being in a committed long term relationship, I clearly see that it is the little things that really make a difference when it comes to the success and sustainability of a healthy, successful relationship. I am very grateful to be in a relationship where we have cultivated a rewarding, fulfilling level of what I call emotional intimacy. All of my life, on some level, emotional intimacy was always very important to me. I intently gather groups of women together and create environments where we share our most intimate desires, fears and vulnerabilities. I have confronted issues in my personal relationship until we reached our own personal breakthroughs where we could connect on a deeper level, something we were both yearning for.
If intimacy is something you crave and don’t have, what are some of the daily acts of kindness you can do to fill that void?
Here are some of the little things that have become a part of my daily experience.
• My partner is a night person and I am a morning person – so he is basically going to bed when I am getting up in the morning
. Almost daily we ensure that we have a morning and night connection, he will tuck me in and I will wake him up with a cuddle.
• Every morning I make him a smoothie and hand deliver it to him (I plan my mornings around his morning schedule to ensure we have a chance to connect before he goes off to work. (Having my own business and working from home makes this easy to do.)
• Have you seen the heart Post-It notes? I love them! I make good use of them and leave him little notes all over the place.
• When he comes home from work, I make sure that I greet him at the door (I believe the first 3 minutes you see each other sets the tone for the rest of the day – so I am pretty conscious to make this a great first 3 minutes.)
• I usually shower before him and I will often draw a heart in the steam on the shower door saying “I love you”.
• He will call me often from work to say, “I am thinking about you.” I still get butterflies when I hear his voice.
Some of you may be rolling your eyes (like my friend initially did) and perhaps even be thinking well he/she should be doing this for me. I have taken on the mantra many years ago to get more of what you want – you first need to give it.
To have emotional intimacy be a part of our relationship, these small acts of love are worth far more then any level of inconvenience and the extra effort on the days that I am feeling hurt or upset by our conflicts or when I simple “don’t feel like it”. Relationships are not always easy but a good one takes consistent effort on keeping the relationship glued.
I think Mother Theresa said it all when she said “Love does not measure, it only gives”.
All my adult life I have embraced personal growth and committed to living my best life.
