Fostering Intimacy Takes Work

It’s funny how you can spend four years with someone, learning everything about them and feeling like they know everything about you, and then realize one day how distant such an intimate relationship could be.

Like any story, mine is more complicated than that, but at its core, that was the problem. Though we were perfect together on paper, my ex-fiance and I hadn’t put in any effort to build a deep, connected relationship with one another. We had lived the part everyone else wanted us to be: The “it” couple, the ones who had it all together, who loved to travel and explore breweries.

On social media, we looked great. And even in our day-to-day lives we were fine. It’s not like we were fighting or anything. We got along well, and he was my best friend. But we rode the high of being that perfect couple for so long that we never actually put any work into our relationship. It was surface-level great, and for four years, that’s how it remained. Even our engagement story was a fairy tale (a romantic dinner at a five-star resort, Italian-themed hotel restaurant, on vacation with his family), and we had the pictures to prove it.

Over the course of the last two months, though, I began to realize surface-level wasn’t enough for me. It had been four years and we weren’t having “real” conversations with one another. Perhaps this was in part because we both worked opposite shifts, so a lot of our conversations ended up being “how was your day” and sports related rather than talking about us, the world around us or the future. No conversation was more meaningful than, “Look how the (*insert sports team here*) did today.”

We had good moments, great moments even, where those necessary conversations did come about, but, at least for me — a person who craves deep connections — it was not often enough. I tried for a long time to make myself believe it was, and it took a personal reckoning for me to realize how wrong I was.

Relationships are hard work, and you — both parties — have to put in effort to make them grow. It’s not enough to “look good” on paper or in pictures. Even if you’re both perfectly happy with one another, that doesn’t mean you can become complacent. Because that’s what we did, we let ourselves fall into a pattern and routine that was content at best.

There is a lot of context I’m leaving out here. This relationship is still too fresh for me to want to share all of the details. But it taught me a valuable lesson — too late for us, unfortunately — about relationships; you can be in an intimate relationship and still feel distant.

We didn’t share a lot of things we were feeling. We let things bubble up inside that finally came out in terrible ways. After four years, we didn’t know how to handle our indifferences because we never had to face them before. I can’t blame him. I lacked the courage to tell him about my doubts and fears as much as he did to tell me his. We had never fostered that sort of intimacy to feel comfortable sharing those with each other — what if we let the other person down? We never got past that initial “I don’t want to upset the other person” feeling that often comes about in the early stages of a relationship.

I was under the impression that because we were happy we didn’t need to work at our relationship, but I was wrong. So I encourage you to examine the relationships in your own life — familial, friendships and partners. Think about the ways you communicate and what you might need to work on. It might be uncomfortable to have some of these conversations at first, but I guarantee you’ll be happy you did later — and your relationship will be stronger for it.

Author: Katy Macek

Editor(s): Krista Douglas