How to Build a Deeper Connection With Your Partner
The Emotional Intimacy Rope
by Amber Dalsin, M.Sc., C.Psych.
Strengthening Your Relationship Thread by Thread
If you want the safe and secure connection, you want the emotional intimacy, but at times are baffled by how to get it, I want you to imagine your connection to your partner as a rope between you. Each positive and trustworthy action you each take, no matter how small, adds another fiber to the thread.
Sometimes an action is so meaningful it adds many threads and other times it adds just one. In the same way positives add threads, negatives remove threads. You need more positives than negatives for your connection to stay neutral.
When our emotional rope with our partners is strong and intact, they may do something irritating or hurtful, but because the rope is strong, it’s a momentary annoyance in the relationship. When our rope is thin or fraying, that same thing can cause a great deal of emotional pain - waves of emotions like feeling alone, abandoned, unloved, or not cared about wash over us.
In this short video I cover how adding threads to your rope leads to a deeper connection with your partner.
Interestingly, emotional pain activates the same part of the brain as physical pain. So when we say we have hurt feelings, we literally do hurt. Humans have natural responses: fight or flight… like the flight/ flight/ freeze response you likely learned in high school science.
Fight and Flight
What is the fight response? In a relationship it can be making demands, controlling, attacking, criticizing or literally pursuing your partner - following them around the house. The flight response is shutting down, stonewalling, physically leaving, and trying to self-protect. If you’re interested in these behaviours and how they fuel conflict, read more in How to Do Conflict.
It’s normal for couples to have conflict from time to time, to avoid each other on occasion, and even normal to have the occasional big spat. However, the couples that restore their balance, and add more threads to their rope will likely do better over time.
How to Deepen Your Emotional Intimacy
You might have already guessed, but you deepen your emotional intimacy with your partner by adding threads to your emotional rope.
This means choosing kind words or actions that your partner perceives as caring.
It could be creating positive routines, happy homecomings, connecting experiences.
This might also mean finding empathetic or neutral ways to make reasonable requests of your partner to meet your needs.
The more often that couples can come together and put threads on the rope, they see each tiny positive action adds up, creating a strong rope over time - a rope that can buffer against the occasional mishap.
In the podcast episode, Your Brain on Love, we discussed neurochemical signals and love, and why doing these nice thread-forming actions in the beginning of your relationship is so easy. As relationships progress, and the more conflict there is, the more we need to intentionally do the nice things to build the rope, create the connection.
In Stormy Weather
It may not be as easy when there is conflict or apathy. You might feel inclined to turn to your partner and say, “You need to add threads to my rope,” In a critical way… but stop, don’t. Think about being constructive and saying something different with the same message, for example, “I like when we are happy together when we get home I would like us to create a ritual that brings us closer at the end of the day, I think that would add threads to my rope.”
This blog is not meant to be a substitute for couples therapy or relationship counselling. This should not be construed as specific advice. See a relationship therapist in your area to address your specific problems.