Something about intimacy, you can tell that men and women may be miles a prom the other chapter art when it comes to expectations of physical intimacy within a relationship. There may be all kinds of reason why those levels that a man wants in his marriage are not happening and it may not all be down to her. Men who are critical of their women tend to be blinded to the fact that they really ask for what they get. If you tell your wife that she is fat, she is hardly likely to want to undress in front of you. There's a difference between that kind of criticism and being reasonable in a relationship. The trouble is that she isn't the only one that's getting out of shape or aging. You both are. What I found with one couple, where the husband was hyper critical of his wife's weight gain was that she eats for comfort as many women do. Women need a certain amount of emotional intimacy and being insult by your husband isn’t the best way forward. One woman who decided to tackle the problem by consulting a marriage guidance counselor told her: "I couldn't undress with the light on any more. I felt ashamed of who I was."
However, when this was discussed with her husband, he hadn’t realized that he was the author of his own fate. By insulting his wife, or in his case what he saw as joking about her weight, he actually alienated her. She wanted reassurance and emotional support and was getting none. He wanted physical intimacy and had effectively killed it. What the couple were asked to do was to be more supportive of each other and to try another way forward. It took a while but she found that with the kind of support that he was prepared to give her, she didn’t need to comfort eat, joined a local gym and actually looked better than she had for years. He, in the meantime, learned to be a Joke more receptive to her needs that were emotional.
By becoming a better husband and a more emotionally supportive partner, he was able to change the way that she approached sex because she no longer felt that her body was being criticized all the time and was able to relax and enjoy her sex life as much as he was. In fact, I think the last time that I saw them; he was complaining that he needed a holiday! All joking apart though, if your love life has gone haywire, there will be a reason for it and you need to seek that reason and put it right.
As you can see from the above, he was finding an urgent need to have his physical needs met, while he had little in the way of spiritual or emotional needs and his commitment level toward her was unacceptably low. This is the kind of man who would have easily be tempted into a relationship outside the marriage. Can you see how easy it is for people to lose control of their relationships? It is the balancing of needs that should be addressed, rather than just trying to satisfy his current needs.
Her needs would have been the opposite of his in that she needed encouragement and emotional support. Without that, her chart would have been the opposite of his, making her emotional needs the largest area. Without this emotional support, she didn't feel that she could offer him physical attention because she feared that criticism he was so prone to give her.
You can apply these charts to many different areas of life and see where you and your partner fall short of fulfilling each other needs. They will never be in total synch but they should be pretty close. In the above case, she gradually became braver about showing off her body and being sexy while he was overly conscious that he should not criticize and should give her all the emotional encouragement she needed. They also joined a gym because the two of them needed to lose that flabby. It’s just that she had always been too emotionally supportive to criticize him while he hadn't held back with his jokes.
Physical intimacy is all about being able to have fun together. It's not about how perfect you fit your partner's vision of his/her ideal. It’s an acceptance that you are who you are and a support that allows you to be who you are. That’s important and physical intimacy is vital to a healthy relationship.
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