It is common for partners to struggle at being partners in their relationship, specially at being partners in Love. They take their love for granted which can fizzle out if it is not frequently stoked… Partners make time for most things in their life, including going out with friends. But they are not great at making time for a self-love practice and for a partner-love practice- for a romantical practice…
When the connection and romance are not nurtured, the partners feel like just coparents and roommates. They struggle feeling the spark and aliveness in their relationship, and in their life. They might not have a joint vision and approach to life that enriches their existence, and never mind a strong sense of Us… They struggle feeling each other, feeling special and cherished, and like they really matter to their partner…
But this doesn’t mean that they should never have gotten together/married, that the relationship has run its course, or that this is what happens to mature love…
This just means that the relationship needs some TLC… It means that the essence of the couple is getting lost through the shuffle of life… It means you are too focused on the mundane, your children and/or other goals instead. It means you are operating through your titles and roles, and not You.
When your relationship struggles, it means YOU are missing from the equation… Are you showing up with your higher self, with compassion, kindness, and generosity? Are you showing up with your funny, cute, flirty, playful and loving self? Probably not…
It’s time to step up your game of investing in your relationship by delighting, wooing, and courting your partner… That’s right. If you don’t have time for the most important person in your life, then we have other issues. LOL
Decide to upgrade your relationship…
Set loving intentions
Make the time
Get in the mood
Show up with the Essence of you
It is not enough to be a We in your relationship, you need to cultivate the Us… This is where you each feel special, wanted, desired, cherished, and like the most important person in the other person’s life.
A strong partnership and a Radiant Us, doesn’t just happen. These need to be nurtured and cultivated:
The experience will help you get unstuck or get over the hump to upgrade anything that is holding you back in your relationship… And, to take your good relationship to the next level!
You CAN create the relationship you desire.
Wishing you all the joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
PS: Do you need support taking yourself, your relationship, and your life to the next level- actually living a healthy, happy, harmonious and overall abundant life?
Copyright (c) 2023 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 the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
Often I hear that it feels like all the stars need to line up for partners to be able to get to a physically intimate moment… There are many factors that impact our libido, our desire, and our ability to have a passionate relationship with our partner. Most believe it is impossible to have an epic love affair with our partner.
They believe in mature love and settling down into comfortable love. This is one of the reasons partners cheat- they still seek that passion… And where are they supposed to get it if they don’t think they can get it with their partner? But they can, you see! The secret is in what to do in between sexy times…
Having passion in your relationship is not about having passionate sex with your partner once in a blue moon, if your love making even gets that hot.
Having passion in your relationship is about having an epic love affair with your partner that is more than sex… It’s about being enthralled by your partner, it’s about getting the butterflies in your belly when they are near or when you think about them, it’s about wanting to be near them and touch them, and about wanting to please them and take care of them (not in a caretaking, codependent way, mind you).
And yes, having passion in your relationship is about wanting to be with them, to join with them, to derive pleasure from them and through them, to transcend and become one…
If this feels like a pipe dream because of what you believe about relationships and because of the current state of your relationship, don’t fret- please know it is possible, initially you just have to go on faith…
So how do we go from struggle to epic love affair when it might feel like an impossible trek?
1 ~~ First off, it takes commitment to stick with it through thick and thin, assuming you are within the range of a workable relationship, which most are! This is not a popular concept nowadays when relationships are disposable.
There are some exceptions that are contraindicated for staying in the toxic context. And of course, it is always your prerogative to not want to continue in your relationship, but don’t blame it on it not being workable… It’s OK for the relationship to have run its course for you. We are all in a Journey, and that includes the relationships we play with…
2 ~~ Then, it takes theright kind of investment in your relationship where you stop blaming your partner for everything that’s wrong and making yourself a saint. You are not. You contribute to your dynamics and cocreate whatever nonsense you might have going on. Sorry, don’t shoot the messenger.
I have seen time and again that when partners fully embrace owning their side of it, not from a martyr position but truly owning their side, that they create marvelous relationships. I have seen as well when partners struggle with this how detrimental it is for the relationship.
Don’t wait for your partner to own themselves first, or to respond in kind… It doesn’t matter what your partner is doing (within reason of course!) to fully own and work your side. Stop trying to prove how they are not doing their own work. All this is just keeping you stuck. Focus on your side, full stop.
I’ll even take this a step further and let you in on a little secret. Even if your partner doesn’t do anything, your work in and of itself is powerful enough to shift and transform your relationship… Just saying…
3 ~~ And finally, once your relationship is on more solid footing and becoming a radiant and successful relationship, then you are ready to step it up a notch in creating a more passionate relationship.
This has to do with playing more specifically with the Desire side of the Love-Desire Spectrum™, without foregoing the Love side… And it has to do with embracing Alluring Habits™. Behaviors and activities in your relationship that are sexy, erotic, inviting, enticing, seductive…
When you focus on Desire, more desire is easier to come by and available for play…
A radiant, successful relationship and meaningful life, and epic love affair with our partner, doesn’t just happen! We have to want this and invest in creating it.
Watch the video for what to do in between sexy times… Enjoy!
💐 Not a member? No worries, join us with a Lifestyle Membership. This Membership includes access to our private community, full access to our Member Center and previous content, and access to upcoming Masterclasses at no additional cost, all for only $29 per month.
Copyright (c) 2022 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 the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
We are responsible for absolutely everything in our life… When people struggle, they are quick to find the reasons and explanations for why things are not going as they would like. They usually end up pointing the finger at some external factor for why things are as they are…
What if they were to look at their situation instead as a growth opportunity, as an indicator of needed change, as a place for course correction? We are responsible for all our outcomes and all our experiences, what we do with them and about them… This applies also to our libido, desire, sexuality, and sex life. Personal responsibility includes turning yourself on…
I hope you didn’t do a double take when you read that, but it’s ok if you did. This is such a foreign concept for most people as we are accustomed to looking to our partner, or another person, for satisfying our sexual needs and preferences.
Yes, I get that being sexually intimate requires another person. But the sexual activity that might come from engaging with another person is actually the last gear of the physical intimacy cycle… And, there is the whole thing that happens before the gears even get going…
See, partners usually treat physical intimacy as the act of being sexual with each other, which makes sense. But I’d like us to stretch way beyond this definition to generate passionate energy in our relationship that leads to physical intimacy…
Once partners become committed, their attention turns to focus on other activities, responsibilities and concerns in their relationship and their life that mute and subdue the sexual energy between the partners… These become the culprits to low intimacy and the low desire and lack of intimacy pandemic…
The key here is to make a commitment to creating an Epic Love Affair with our partner. Because then we keep the eye on the price… Becoming committed to each other is the beginning of the relationship. Dating partners look at it as the goal, moving on to other pursuits once the conquest is made.
When we commit to creating the Best Relationship in all its aspects, we can create a map for making it happen that can keep us focused on our desired outcome in our Journey.
Foreplay Before Foreplay™
I hear often enough that intimacy between partners might feel like a duty. It feels like something that needs to be done and so the partners make sure they hit some unspoken quota to keep this going.
Some couples’ quota is a lot more frequent than others, but for the most part when partners operate this way the quota is not that frequent… And when they get down to it, it might feel contrived, mechanical, and just something that needs to be done. Partners lost the drive, the magnetism, the passion…
Low desire and low intimacy do not have to be issues in your relationship as you can be preventative against them, but they can also be reversed if they have already manifested.
The word foreplay has gotten a bad rap as women in heterosexual relationships use it to tell their partner their approach is not acceptable. They request foreplay from their partner as a prerequisite to further intimate engagement. This puts the pressure on their partner to “turn on” and “get the woman ready” for the next phase of the physical intimacy. Why is this the guys’ responsibility?
Note, in other gendered couples the same dynamics might playout regardless of the partners’ gender, gender identity and sexual orientation. The focus here is not on the gender per se or on the physiology, but on everything else that comes along from being who they are and in the relationship they are in with each other.
Feeling our libido and desire happen before we even get to a physical intimate moment with our partner. Therefore, we have to get ready for foreplay!
Getting Ready for Foreplay
The foreplay before foreplay is how we choose to be, show up and do our life and ourselves… This is what creates energy, vitality, radiance and sparkle. This is what makes us attractive regardless of our outward beauty. This is where the chemistry between partners happens. This is what is alluring and inviting about us.
Most people are doing their lives through the grind. They are forever exhausted, run down or not feeling well, too preoccupied, and muted because all they do is the minutiae of life and put out fires. There is no vibrant energy or aliveness here. This is not attractive, inviting or seductive. If we are going through our lives with this blah energy, not for nothing this translates into blahness in the bedroom…
Our focus is then to:
Transcend the grind
Shift more from doing to being
Detach from the noise
Create more spaciousness
Pursue inspiring and engaging outlets
Embrace interests that integrate and expand the self (not the ego!)
Explore your likes and preferences
Seek different kinds of pleasure and joy
This way of doing our life ensures that we don’t squander our energy, mute ourselves, and atrophy our sexuality which would leave us wondering how come we have low libido, little desire and might feel unattractive or unattracted to our partner… When we are Alive these things don’t happen!
We get out of our relationship what we put into it…
It is our responsibility to create the relationship we desire. We have to address our side and work our side, we have to mind and cultivate our own energy. When we start generating new energy, magical things start to happen. When one part of the system changes, the whole system changes- when you change, others will change in response to you for you will be inviting different stuff from them…
The trick is to take full personal responsibility and not wait for the other to do something or change…
Playing full out in our life makes us feel alive, full of energy, sparkly and turned on… This is the foreplay before foreplay…
When we’ve had our own foreplay before we interact with our partner, now we are ready to fully be with our partner. The joint foreplay is to derive more pleasure and truly enjoy being with each other. It is not a necessity to get the gears moving… This different level of engagement makes for more passionate encounters and a more passionate relationship.
Our radiance and sparkle infuse the interactions with our partner seducing them into our Epic Love Affair…
Watch the video on Foreplay Before Foreplay™… Enjoy!
APPLICATION: Decide that you will embrace becoming more sparkly and alive, and that you will take full personal responsibility for turning yourself on… In your Journal:
~ Explore how you currently do these in your life- -Transcend the grind -Shift more from doing to being -Detach from the noise -Create more spaciousness -Pursue inspiring and engaging outlets -Embrace interests that integrate and expand the self (not the ego!) -Explore your likes and preferences -Seek different kinds of pleasure and joy
~ Select one of the above to target with more attention to help you shift your energy…
~ Identify three activities, habits, and/or tactics that you’ll implement around your selected item to start generating more radiance, energy and vibrancy… And, integrate them into your lifestyle- add to your routine and calendar.
Bring your new swag to your relationship! Enjoy!
Wishing you all the joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
PS: Masterclasses
💐 If you missed our recent Masterclasses, you can still get them through our Member Center:
~ A Self-Love Strategy for Creating Your Best Life – Designing and implementing your personalized self-love practice
~ Relationship Enrichment Mini Retreat – Reprogramming and shifting for connecting more deeply and creating the relationship you desire
~ Feeling Stuck and Spring Cleaning is NOT Cutting it – Deconstructing and reconstructing yourself to unleash the radiance within
They include gorgeous workbooks of transformational processes
💐 Not a member? No worries, join us with a Lifestyle Membership. This Membership includes access to our private community, full access to our Member Center and previous content, and access to upcoming Masterclasses at no additional cost, all for only $29 per month.
Copyright (c) 2022 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 the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
If we know anything about relationships, we know that as time passes the passion in a relationship fizzles out, right? Wrong… This is such an erroneous belief. And experts reinforce it by talking about Mature Love- how we move from infatuation and being in love, to mature love with more sensible feelings…
What a load of you know what! When we are in a long-term relationship it doesn’t mean that our attraction and passion should dwindle over time… People are looking at this all wrong, when they should really be looking at this as love and desire are on opposite sides of the spectrum…
For you see, Love is about feeling security, having stability and safety, being known, valued, respected or protected, being a couple and having togetherness.
Whereas Desire is about feeling passion, having fascination and yearning, being wanted, taken, devoured or consumed, being an individual and having separateness.
When couples struggle in their relationship, it is first how they do Love that needs attention. The partners are not feeling secure, stable, safe, known, valued, respected, protected- strong as a couple. They feel so insecure that they power-struggle to be known and get their needs met… Their relationship is riddled with fighting, disagreement and/or disconnection.
When partners first meet, they have Desire as all the characteristics of desire are present. But as the relationship settles down and further levels of commitment come about, the same characteristics cause insecurities and triggers moving the couple from the infatuation stage of their relationship into the power struggle stage… This is when they join the ranks of the low desire and low intimacy epidemic…
This is why affairs with other people are hot, until those involved dump their partner and make the affair person their new partner and then that hotness goes out the window!
Couples can get stuck in the power-struggle for a lifetime or not make it as a couple unless they are proactive and intentional about getting through this stage. At this juncture the couple is trying to mitigate the triggers and feel Loved. In this quest, all the characteristics inherent in feeling Desire get lost… The couple moves from one side of the spectrum to the other…
Marriage counseling, couple therapy, and relationship coaching usually come in at this point. The couple is not getting along, their intimacy is in the toilet, and all their attempts at remedying this is making the situation worse… Once the couple addresses getting along and feeling loved they are content in their relationship, they feel happy and are satisfied.
The problem here is that once this is achieved, the partners feel good to go and stop exploring the possibilities and synergy inherent in their relationship… This is when the possibilities are endless… And, when continued attention on evolving the relationship helps the partners create their Epic Love Affair that not only is secure and meaningful, but also passionate…
When the getting along is achieved, the couple is ready to explore playing along the spectrum… Now they can bring back characteristicsthat create Desire without them being triggers in their relationship as security has been established, you see?
They can create and enjoy a passionate relationship, an epic love affair, by integrating tactics into their lifestyle and intimate repertoire that help them generate Desire at will…
Depending on where you are in your relationship, and if you are ready to generate more Desire, start by exploring this:
What do I do to become / be- healthy, fit, energetic, alive, attractive, fresh, inspiring, interesting, playful, frisky, alluring, enticing, inviting, risqué, welcoming, open, adventurous, receptive, receiving, giving, generous…
Get ready, get out of your head, play, let go…
Watch the video for how to play with the Love-Desire Spectrum… Enjoy!
APPLICATION: Decide that you’ll play at Love and Desire… That you’ll intentionally nurture your Spectrum to create your Epic Love Affair with your partner…
~ Discuss with your partner going on a Real Date- not just Date Night…
~ Do your personal work to be ready… Do all the pampering. Do all the letting go. Bring your best person with all the swag.
~ Play at going on a Real Date- plan an epic date, leave the roles at home, almost make believe you don’t know each other and start from scratch when the date starts…
~ Bring your A game to win your conquest… Do the mysterious, be risqué, bring a different side of you, play all out!
~ Make playing like this part of your lifestyle… Add this tactic to your repertoire…
What we focus on grows… Let’s focus on creating Desire and Passion…
Wishing you all the joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
PS: Masterclasses
💐 If you missed our recent Masterclasses, you can still get them through our Member Center:
~ A Self-Love Strategy for Creating Your Best Life – Designing and implementing your personalized self-love practice
~ Relationship Enrichment Mini Retreat – Reprogramming and shifting for connecting more deeply and creating the relationship you desire
~ Feeling Stuck and Spring Cleaning is NOT Cutting it – Deconstructing and reconstructing yourself to unleash the radiance within
They include gorgeous workbooks of transformational processes
💐 Not a member? No worries, join us with a Lifestyle Membership. This Membership includes access to our private community, full access to our Member Center and previous content, and access to upcoming Masterclasses at no additional cost, all for only $29 per month.
Copyright (c) 2022 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 the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
We are all super busy. We have hectic and full lives. As we very well know, it’s so easy to lose sight of our partner and for our relationship to be at the bottom of our priority list. This is a real sad situation as our partner is our Partner, our life partner- and, by definition, the most important person in our life.
Then why do we not treat them as such? Why do we struggle investing in our relationship? There is no need to rack our brain about it. Let me just show you the easiest way to invest in your relationship…
I developed the Relationship Verb List to help us along… The idea is to embrace Relationship Verbs, actions, that nourish and nurture our relationship. See, we might overcomplicate our “relationship work”, working on the relationship, and how to go about creating change in our relationship…
Hey, don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of factors that are at play in our relationship. And when we struggle, it is very easy to be at a loss for how to go about creating change. Sometimes we might even know but, yet we get stuck. There is a lot that can be done when a relationship is not working, and it doesn’t have to be complicated…
So today, I wanted to keep it simple and yet powerful. I wanted to offer you something fun and easy to implement and play with to seamlessly “work on your relationship” without feeling like you are working on your relationship. Cool? Cool.
Let’s keep it nice and light but impactful nonetheless- let’s do it.
Why Relationship Verbs
We know it’s too easy to deprioritize our relationship once we are committed. We let all the wooing, romancing, and impressing fall to the wayside.
Then it’s no wonder that connection and intimacy decline, that we might no longer be attracted to each other, or that it might feel like we fell out of love. All this can be prevented and even undone!
Relationship Verbs is a nice phrase for capturing the essence that our relationship requires us to be proactive about it. Our relationship needs tending for it to thrive- Love is a verb…
When we nourish and nurture our relationship, we make it resilient, stable, secure, strong, and durable at the minimum. When we tend our relationship and invest in it consistently, it Flourishes…
A relationship that flourishes has a very different flavor than a relationship that struggles… The partners focus on very different things…
In a relationship that struggles the partners are intent on proving their partner wrong, on making the case for how they’ve been wronged and on making their partner change…
In a relationship that flourishes the partners don’t focus on their partner’s imperfections, instead they focus on how they themselves can be the best partner they can be. They invest in tending the relationship and cherishing their partner…
The difference in focus makes all the difference… Partners have no control over who the other is and what they do… They do however have control over who they themselves are and what they do… This is empowering in that they can choose how much or how little they put in, and therefore what they get back…
These partners are proactive about being in a great relationship with their partner… They do Relationship Verbs, they consistently invest on the relationship and on nurturing their partner.
What are Relationship Verbs? Relationship Verbs are actions in the context of our relationship that serve to build, strengthen, and bedazzle our relationship. They foster the good stuff in the relationship…
Relationship Verbs range in focus from collaborating and creating a strong partnership, to having a blast, to expanding your intimate repertoire. I did add some erotic verbs to our list, but feel free to expand it making your own more adventures version! (wink)
Whoever said investing in our relationship has to be tedious and boring?
Watch the video for embracing Relationship Verbs for nurturing your relationship… Enjoy!
APPLICATION: Make a recommitment to making your relationship the best relationship ever! Decide that you will invest in your relationship to create your epic love affair with your partner…
~ Invite your partner to play with Relationship Verbs with you
~ Make a list of Relationship Verbs, or use the one I created– you can track the verbs you embrace as you go!
~ Keep going until you have embraced all the verbs…
Give this a fair shake. Keep it light. Make it fun. Get creative. Have fun!
Freshness is in the air, it’s time for new beginnings… Harness the potential, mold the surge of energy to create what you desire… Start your relationship anew…
Wishing you all the joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
PS: Masterclasses
💐 If you missed our recent Masterclasses, you can still get them through our Member Center:
~ A Self-Love Strategy for Creating Your Best Life – Designing and implementing your personalized self-love practice
~ Relationship Enrichment Mini Retreat – Reprogramming and shifting for connecting more deeply and creating the relationship you desire
~ Feeling Stuck and Spring Cleaning is NOT Cutting it – Deconstructing and reconstructing yourself to unleash the radiance within
They include gorgeous workbooks of transformational processes
💐 Not a member? No worries, join us with a Lifestyle Membership. This Membership includes access to our private community, full access to our Member Center and previous content, and access to upcoming Masterclasses at no additional cost, all for only $29 per month.
Copyright (c) 2022 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 the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development 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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