Couples usually end up accepting the lack of desire and passion in their relationship as a fact of life for a longterm relationship. They are not happy or satisfied with this, but their attempts at remedying their lack of (passionate) physical intimacy don’t usually succeed.
The reason for this is partners’ misconceived ideas about sex, intimacy, and each other, unrealistic expectations, body issues, attachment issues, unmet developmental emotional needs, judgement and criticism, and owning of each other instead of themselves. The resulting mindset has a huge impact on their libido and the couple’s sexual life.
In addition to addressing the above, couples can greatly increase their passion by actively monitoring and engaging their mind. “Sex is not something we do, is somewhere we go,” says MFT colleague Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity.
We usually focus on what we are doing. It’s not about technique, the motions, or the positions. It’s about Being deep inside our Selves in our body and our imagination. It’s an expression of our Self. How can we desire or be desired if we don’t exist …, show up?
It is our job to turn our Selves ON. The more confidence we feel, the better the sex. Turn the criticism and other owning buttons off. You don’t have to be perfect and neither does your partner. You don’t have to love everything about each other. You are both OK the way you are. You are both Hot!
Engage that part of you in your mind, and allow it to come out and play with your partner. Watch the video to assist you address the mindset holding you back and for practical steps for immediately creating greater passion:
5 Tips for Greater Passion
1) Lower Expectations
2) Invite, Entice …
3) Set-Up & Prepare
4) Work With Each Other
5) Expand Your Repertoire!
Every month can be a Month of Love. Start enjoying greater passion today. Watch the video to learn about these steps and start applying them now. Complete the MetroRelationship (sm) Assignment below to assist you effortlessly make changes and immediately start experiencing the relationship you want.
Surprise your Self and your partner with increased desire and passion!
Happy Desiring all Year Around!
~ Your MetroRelationship™Assignment
Set an alarm to check-in 3x/day: 1) look around you, appreciate something beautiful and add more beauty to your environment, 2) check on how your body feels, what it needs and give this to your Self, and 3) pay attention to your thoughts, accept them, and add a vision of sensuality …
Copyright (c) 2016 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
Often times couples get so hang up in the business of running their life, attending to their family and other responsibilities, and working that being together, enjoying each other and having fun falls to the way side.
This creates a terrible state of affairs where after a while couples forget how to have fun together … Too often I hear couples question whether they still have anything in common or if they ever did, wonder how to rebuild that into their relationship, and struggling with it once they do.
Our partnership, long-term relationship or marriage, cannot be all business. This is the quickest way to fall out of love, take each other for granted, not feel each other or feel disconnected, get on each other’s nerves, lose attraction, and other crippling states.
It behooves us to make investing in our relationship a priority. This can take on many forms – nurturing gestures, spending quality time together, outings and trips, sharing dreams, completing joint projects, learning and using new relationship skills, building the tolerance muscle of allowing each partner to Be themselves and bringing that to interactions and fun time …
Create space to allow fun in your relationship and a system for making it happen! Watch the video above to guide you in immediately incorporating fun in your relationship.
5 Tips for Extra Relationship Fun:
1) Embrace differences
2) Create own Wish Lists of 10+ “fun” ideas
3) Pick from each other’s lists and plan the activity you each choose
4) Stretch to gift your partner from their list …
5) Systematize for ongoing fun … !
It’s time to have fun! Watch the video to learn about these steps and start applying them now. Complete the MetroRelationship (sm) Assignment below to assist you effortlessly make changes and immediately start experiencing the relationship you want!
Enjoy your relationship like never before. Bring your uniqueness, interests, excitement and Self to your fun time. Be with your partner to have fun!
Happy Fun Times!!
~ Your MetroRelationship™Assignment
How do you like to have fun? What are your interests? Are you pursuing them? How do you spend your down time? How do you recharge? How do you feel alive? How do you feel sexy? When are you super excited? What makes you laugh? What touches your heart? What are adventurous things on your must-dos-before-I-kick-the-bucket list? If you don’t have one, make one! Ponder these things, explore, pursue, share … Give your partner a preview …
Copyright (c) 2016 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
Couples struggle the most when they have poor boundaries. When they tell each other, whether to the other’s face or in their own mind, how to be, how to feel, how to behave, what to think, etc. They are imposing themselves on their partner not allowing their partner to be themselves.
This causes the other to be cautious, unavailable, reactive, rageful, passive aggressive, flaky, and all kinds of ways that are not conducive to intimacy, togetherness, respect, peace and love.
How can they feel close, intimate, accepted, appreciated and loved if they are told not to be themselves? How can two people know each other and be intimate if they can’t show up in their relationship? The trick is to allow the other to Be themselves, to accept them as they are, as scary as that might be …
Contrary to popular belief, this is not what will hurt you in the relationship … What hurts is what partners do to protect themselves from being told not be themselves! Talk about ironic.
Take a risk, let your partner be themselves, and allow for intimacy to happen. The video below guides you in safely taking this plunge.
5 Tips for More Intimacy:
1) Create opportunities for connecting
2) Ensure emotional safety
3) Appropriately set up interactions
4) Share from the heart, share your “mind”
5) Purpose is to “get” and accept each other These guarantee a deeper connection and more intimacy! Start applying these steps now.
Complete the MetroRelationship™ Assignment below to assist you effortlessly make changes and immediately start experiencing the relationship you want! Make this Valentine Season a meaningful one. Create more connection and intimacy! Happy Connecting!
~ Your MetroRelationship™Assignment
Take a moment to think about a side of you that you don’t usually share with your partner. Think about why you usually don’t share it. What are you afraid of? What feedback, message, have you gotten from your partner (and your past…) that has created this for you? What do you imagine their fear is that does not allowed for this part of you to show up?
Share your thought process around this with your partner – check if what you imagine is their fear fits for them, approach this from a curiosity place and not a judgmental, accusatory, shaming or blaming place, pad the discussion with reassurance and safety for your partner, advise your partner that you will be taking a risk and showing more of you.
Make the request that they support you and share with you what’s happening for them as you show up more… Accept what comes up for them, don’t try to fix it… The circularity, respect and honoring of this creates healing and growth, and allows for deepening the intimacy and enriching your connection.
Copyright (c) 2016 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
Couples share one of the main issues in their relationship is their inability to properly communicate. They feel out of sync, not on the same page, disconnected, and not understood. To top it off their planning, getting things done, resolving conflict, making decisions and such are jeopardized by their lack of communication skill.
Their inept attempt at communicating makes things worse as they hurt each other’s feelings, widen the gulf between them, and feel further misunderstood and alone. Add to this all the other “funny” things partners do in their relationship that make it challenging to get along, and it makes sense they might feel in a slump …
Fear not, start getting out of the slump, addressing issues or simply creating a better relationship with improved communication. The video below gives you instructions on exactly how to do just that!
5 Tips for Better Communication:
1) Make sure you heard the message correctly
2) Show your partner you understand where they are coming from
3) Show your partner you understand how they “feel”
4) Make time to “chat” (dialogue)
5) Deal with your selves while you wait to talk…
Watch the video to learn about these steps and start applying them now. Complete the MetroRelationship (sm) Assignment below to assist you effortlessly make changes and immediately start experiencing the relationship you want.
Go for it, start the year right with new communication skills and nurturing your relationship!
Happy Communicating!!
~ Your MetroRelationship™Assignment
Identify an item that you want to discuss or address with your partner. Invite them to dialogue about it following the instructions in the video above (share the video with them so you are on the same page!).
Before the “talk”, think about what it is you want to discuss and wrap your mind around your “story” or “point” so you speak your truth in a “clean”, respectful, and mindful manner: share how your emotions, how you are impacted by their behavior, your needs, etc. without beating up your partner. Speak about you, not how much your partner “sucks”…
Copyright (c) 2016 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
It’s interesting that we seek “togetherness” in our relationship, but this is exactly what brings about its demise and our general unhappiness … As a culture, we are experiencing numbness, a lack of Desire in our Relationship … Monogamy, exclusivity, our partner-meeting-all-our-needs, marriage for love is a fairly new phenomenon in our society, a conundrum actually.
We set up the institution of marriage to fail by bringing our archaic Being into it. Our un-evolved, wounded, low frequency, disowned Self has the prime directive to feel safe through attachment, and therefore approaches “togetherness” with a reactive balancing act of clinging and distancing for self preservation …
This is an Ego approach to togetherness, relationship, and marriage which creates physical and energetic space, distance and disconnect.
All while remaining psychically fused, enmeshed, symbiotic, codependent, “together” … The death of actual intimacy, excitement and Aliveness …
Our culture’s obsession with individualism, independence and autonomy creates attachment rupture early in life and then tops this injury with inadequate launching of its young breeding the Ego approach to life and relationships and preserving the underdeveloped psyche, Self.
As a result, we buy into the illusion of being “separate” (individual) and attempting to be “together” (close) when the opposite is true. We are fused and distant perpetuating disconnect, detachment, indifference, paralyses, dissatisfaction, stuckness, ambivalence, and apathy. Definitely not Desire and Aliveness …
We mean well. We have the right idea, to pursue togetherness (intimacy, closeness) while remaining separate (individual) but we are going about this all wrong. Our unmet emotional needs prompt us to seek “togetherness” through the clinging and distancing pattern we all know too well eternalizing the status quo with its continuous recreation of rapture and disregulation.
Our psychic investment in getting our emotional needs met tromps our ability to be effectively separate creating a missing the forest for the tree syndrome …
This proximity prevents us from seeing our Partner, from knowing them for who they truly are and vise versa. This proximity prevents us from genuinely showing up, from being who we are … It robs us of the opportunity to see the Man or Woman behind the label (boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband, mother, father); to be the Man or Woman behind the label …
There is no faster way to kill Desire than by playing our everyday roles … They are familial, domestic, routine and restrictive. They are not sexy!
Further more, this level of “proximity,” trying to get our emotional intimacy needs met and following societal definitions of our prescribed roles, thwarts curiosity, mystery, and longing elemental to Desire. So, not only do we not get to see our partner, we also don’t get to miss our partner… And, we don’t even know what we might be missing! We just stew stubbornly in our unhappiness …
The key is to ride the uncomfortable edge, to straddle the line between closeness and space, with mindfulness, respectfulness, receptiveness, acceptance, openness, flexibility, compassion, forgiveness, humanity, responsiveness and progressiveness …
No longer be me- or other-focused, just Be. Bring your Self to the in-between … Expand the in-between, Play there … Now this is sexy! This unleashes Attraction, Desire, Passion, Aliveness … And, in this space you are One … Remember to look for the MetroRelationship ™ Assignment below to assist you effortlessly make changes and immediately start experiencing the relationship you want!
Happy Playing!!
~ Your MetroRelationship ™ Assignment
What makes you You? What is unique and beautiful about you? What are your interests? What grabs your attention? What’s your philosophy in life? How is your lens different? How does this manifest in your surroundings, opportunities, relationships and how you carry your Self? How do you show this to your partner? Do you show this to your partner? Does your partner get to see you? Make two “moves” that will allow your partner to see you …
Copyright (c) 2016 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
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Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT has been in the mental health profession in varying capacities for the past 20+ years. She is the Founder and Director of metrorelationship.com a psychotherapy and coaching practice specializing in working with busy professional and entrepreneurial couples who are struggling getting on the same page and feeling connected. The work helps couples create a radiant and successful relationship and meaningful life by becoming a strong partnership and increasing their connection, intimacy, and fun. Emma is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Relationship Strategy™.
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