How are you doing with your New Year Relationship Resolutions or Intentions? How are you doing with staying loving and nurturing post VDAY? Are you keeping up with your Connection Habits™?

Remember that to create change we have to keep a focus on what we want to achieve, focus on the progress and the result (not the lack of!), and how to continue to invest, tweak, and course correct to make it happen.

Creating and sustaining Connection is not easy. Partners might have a wonderful connecting moment, or intimacy, to soon after feel completely disconnected, alone, abandoned, and floundering…

The dance of connection and disconnection can become too much to bear. Partners learn to play it safe avoiding being vulnerable, intimate or close to prevent feeling let down and worse off afterwards.

Some partners work too hard at creating closeness and intimacy that they end up shooting themselves on the foot. The attempt becomes forced, inauthentic, restricting to the point that the intention to feel close is completely thwarted. We don’t want to force connection, intimacy, fun. The mere attempt has its opposite effect.

We want to be flexible, organic, real, present… When we show up with our authentic interested self, the rest is almost inevitable… Remember, your partner is just as interested in feeling loved and connected…

A lot of times the partner that needs more connection, as opposed to their partner that needs more space, thinks their partner is not interested in love and connection. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The only difference is in how they prefer to get love and connection. And, this encompasses timing, duration, intensity and so on…

Connection is impacted by how we choose to interpret moments and interactions, how we feel in our own head and body in general, how we choose Be in that moment or as a person… How we choose to do our Life… The more we have our own awesome life, the easier it is to create a joint one with our partner…

Here are 5 Tactics for Creating and Sustaining Connection:

~1~ Meet Your Own Needs ~ Too often partners have the misconception that their partner is there to meet their needs, even all of their needs! How ridiculous is this? Yes, partners can meet each other’s needs, but it’s not their job to meet the other’s needs. Partners are not to depend on their partner meeting their needs…

This might sound shocking to you. It is actually up to us to make requests, set up interactions and show up so that we inspire and create interactions that meet our needs… See the difference?

~2~ Your Partner is There to Be Loved ~ Your partner is in your relationship as a Gift to you. They are a mirror to help you continue to evolve… They are there for you to practice and enjoy giving love… They are not there for any other reason. The rest is a cocreation to have a lovely joint life and further enrich your human experience…

~3~ Find the Middle Ground ~ Relationships are usually made up of a Pursuer Partner and a Distancer Partner… One needs more togetherness (usually the more female-energy partner), the other needs more separateness (usually the more male-energy partner)…

This is actually evident in our brain structures. Females have a larger "connection" area in the brain! I’ll spare us the evolutionary and biological aspects of this. But suffice to say, that we have different needs, expectations, preferences, and such. Our job it to find a balance between both styles and preferences, and to take into account individual idiosyncrasies…

~4~ Be Strategic ~ This is where all your Relationship Tools and Skills come into play. This is where you orchestrate interactions that meet both your and your partner’s needs. Where you identify good timing for specific types of interactions. Where you approach interactions appropriately to get your needs met. Where you know how to show-up so you meet your partner’s needs. Where you have a reaching-out, checking-in, dating, intimacy, and such intentional approach so you create and sustain connection that satisfy you both.

~5~ Invest in Commonality ~ Be curious, explore, develop and invest in common interests. And, I don’t want to hear you have tried and can’t find any! Keep at it till you crack this. Having something in common to jointly play with builds connection and intimacy.

When you go about creating connection, closeness and intimacy this way, you are less likely to trigger and scare yourself and your partner and therefore minimize the need for the Dance of Connection and Disconnection…

The Dance is just a built-in mechanism to keep partners feeling emotionally safe… If you create safety off the bat, then there is no need to pull away to feel safe, regain stability… You can connect and pretty much sustain the connection…

Creating and sustaining connection doesn’t have to be so elusive and/or challenging… You can do this, just focus on how you are approaching it and what you need to adjust.

ASSIGNMENT: Take stock of how your Relationship Mindset, your believes about Connection, and your approach to connection and meeting needs are getting in the way of enjoying more connection, intimacy and joy with your partner.

Identify where you need to upgrade your believes, approach, tools or skills

Take an action to proactively address it

Create a recurring behavior around it to consistently invest in the change

Here is to another Loving week! Make every day count!

QUICK UPDATE: I’m postponing the upcoming 1day virtual Relationship Enrichment Bootcamp™ a little to allow me to create an even better experience for you. 😉 Stay tuned for the new date and how to register! I can’t wait, it’s coming out fabulously!!

Complete the Assignment, and share your takeaway, insights, and results with a note in the Comments box at the end! I’d love to hear how you are using this content.

Happy Connecting!

P.S. As always, we are here for you! If you need more support to creating your successful and meaningful life, we are here to help. I’d be honored to speak with you about how we can help you. Schedule a Get Acquainted Call to connect, and discuss how we can help you and how to get started. Look forward to Connecting with you!

P.S.S. Get the Snap Takeaways™ for this post (Stay tuned for it!)

P.S.S.S. Share Your Thoughts & Successes in the comment box at the end! Take a moment now to share below any thoughts, comments, take away, tips, and successes! PLEASE post a comment now – we grow in community! Thanks for connecting with the MetroRelationship™ Family!

Copyright (c) 2020 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.

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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.