Want to be intimate with your spouse? Day Two.

It’s Day Two of the 15 Minute, 15-Day Marriage Challenge over at Making Love in a Microwave . Dear Hubby © and I did Day One (and we’ll tell you all about it at the end of this post!) and now we’re staring down the barrel of Day Two.

The Marriage Tip of the Day is about Communication: “If you want to have effective communication in your marriage, you need to not only talk to one another. You need to know how to listen and how to be heard. It is also important for a couple to share their feelings and not just facts with one another.”

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m coordinating with the Affaircare FB page, Twitter, and Romance Calendar to all reflect one thing we can do for 15 minutes that day… to meet the challenge! Today’s topic has to do with communicating not only facts (…like, “I’ll be back around 7pm from the prayer meeting. Will you please put the load in the dryer?”) but also communicating feelings, and I thought this naturally leads to thinking about intimacy!

So often, in our marriages, we long to be loved by someone for who we truly are, and we even crave sex (which some people call intimacy), but to be truly INTIMATE with your spouse, you have to be open and honest about who you are, what you’re thinking and what you’re feeling. I call that being “Transparent” because you are being “see through” and letting your spouse see the True You–warts and all! Sometimes being transparent can be really scary because you’re afraid your spouse will be angry or because you have made assumptions about how they might react if they knew “what you really thought” or “how you really felt.” So instead you pretend. You pretend you’re okay with it when really you are not. You pretend you want to move when really you don’t. You pretend their raging didn’t hurt you. You pretend “the kids will be okay.” You pretend you are being a good husband or wife. You pretend…and by pretending you prevent the very intimacy that you crave: that rock-solid, committed, faithful, affectionate confidant who is so close to you and knows you so well that the closeness is expressed physically.

Today, for Day Two–let’s stop pretending. Make the choice to take 15 minutes or more out of your day, put everything else down, and share with your spouse one feeling that you have been keeping to yourself. Give your spouse a safe place to share one of their feelings, and thank them for being brave enough to be transparent.

DAY ONE RECAP:

Dear Hubby © and I found Day One to actually be fairly easy. I think we are a fairly unique case though, because we both work from home (by choice), and we sit right next to each other all day! Of course, I also can not think of anyone whom I’d rather be with than Dear Hubby © either. We actually are best friends and have so many common interests that it’s pretty easy.

But for our Day One we actually set aside some special time. We have a little bedtime “ritual” that we read the bible together, then we lay in bed and talk, so we used our bedtime talktime to cuddle up a little bit and review our day by saying one thing we liked…and one thing we didn’t like and how we would change it.