Couple Skills to Create and Sustain Intimacy

1. Confide in one another regularly with emotional openness and empathic listening.

2. Complain to one another regularly (without attacking) including requests for change. Can listen to complaints without defensiveness.

3. Resolve differences and conflicts by seeking to learn rather than to prevail. Use fair fighting that involves confiding, empathic listening, complaining with requests/recommendations for change, and contracting, effective win-win solutions, all without manipulation or dirty fighting.

4. Agree upon areas of autonomy, areas of consultation, and areas of mutually shared ownership and decision-making.

5. Clarify hidden assumptions and unspoken expectations to minimize misperceptions and misunderstanding.

6. Help one another heal pains and disappointments, resolve emotional allergies, and clarify hidden assumptions. Conjointly heal and resolve emotional allergy infinity loops.

7. Meet basic needs for sensuality, appropriate sexuality, physical closeness, bonding, and intellectual and emotional sharing with one another.

8. Follow clear, equal, negotiated boundaries regarding what is private and not shared with others outside the relationship.

9. Initiate change when the status quo (division of roles, responsibilities, and privileges) is not satisfactory. Follow through on negotiated changes.

See also:

Emotional Literacy

Strategies for Successful Relationships