What Happens To A Marriage Without Intimacy (Really)?
What happens to a marriage without intimacy? Can it survive? How do you get it back?
The super short answer here is nothing good. There are absolutely marriages without sex (or physical intimacy) that work fine for some people but there are a number of different forms of intimacy and, without any of them, a marriage is going to face at least some form of failure.
We’ll break down some of the types of intimacy in a marriage and what it can mean if you lose that. I would like to start with some good news though and none of this is irreversible. Just because your marriage is dealing with some temporary problems doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way.
Every marriage is going to be different in some way, shape or form. Hopefully the advice here will help give you some guidance but if you want some more specific advice then take a free marriage assessment quiz. It can help fix the underlying problems, not just address the symptoms.
Marriage is union between to individuals that intend to brave life with one another. But, what happens to a marriage without intimacy? First, we must clarify. Intimacy is not sex. Sex is an element of physical intimacy. Intimacy is the level of closeness you have with your significant other and there are several different forms that intimacy can take. The first example of non-physical intimacy is emotional, the ability to tell when something is off despite them saying, “I’m fine”. Trust is a big part of most forms of intimacy, but it’s very pertinent with emotional intimacy. Here it isn’t about trusting that your spouse is being faithful, it’s about entrusting them with your emotional vulnerability. An anonymous author once wrote, “Love is giving someone the power to destroy you but trusting them not to.” Without emotional intimacy, spouses can find themselves closing off from one another, which leads to less interaction. If you can’t share how you are feeling, there’s a lot that goes unsaid.
Recreational Intimacy
The next form of intimacy that we should address when looking at what happens to a marriage without intimacy, is recreational. Simply put, recreational intimacy is doing things together. In most relationships, shared interests are a point of connection. It’s often how people meet their spouse in the first place. However, that doesn’t mean that all of your interests are shared. One may be more inclined to enjoy the outdoors than the other, one might be big into board games. Our differences don’t take away from our relationships. In fact, they actually enrich us as individuals. The problems start to arise when there are too many unshared interests. If one person is always half-heartedly participating in an activity, it can translate to disinterest in the relationship itself. Not to mention, compromise is apart of marriage. Without recreational intimacy, you have more fun spending time with friends than you do with your spouse and that can lead to strained marriage and frequent arguments.
Spiritual Intimacy
Third on our list is spiritual intimacy. This is NOT religious intimacy. While religion plays a role in people’s sense of spirituality, it is only a piece of the pie. Spiritual intimacy also deals with personal experience, and a person’s overall outlook on life and its meaning. So what happens to a marriage without intimacy in the spiritual sense? Well that honestly depends on the individuals. In a deeply religious household, it could bring a marriage to an end. However, even in these marriages, the impact of spiritual intimacy varies. One thing is certain though, a sense of spirituality is needed for marriage to have significance. Without faith in love and a spiritual connection between spouses, it begins to feel like simply dating. Spiritual intimacy is highly personal matter, yet it is also universally essential to a sound marriage.
Crisis Intimacy
Crisis intimacy almost sounds like an oxymoron, but it is perhaps one of the most crucial forms of intimacy between spouses, especially with the world as it is today. This form of intimacy is the development of closeness when dealing with problems. With 2020 being full of horrors and atrocities, many couples are being forced to confront this issue head-on. Even the strongest people turn to someone when things seem to go bad. Your spouse should be at the top of that list. Not because you need someone to run to for answers, but because you need a tether in the storm of unknown. If all else fails you know at the end of the day that your spouse has your back and they know you have theirs. What happens to a marriage without intimacy in crisis, is a feeling of isolation and lack of trust. You have to know that when things take a turn, your spouse will be steady. Counting on them for nothing more than their presence to see you through a problem.
Conflict Intimacy
Closely related to crisis intimacy is conflict intimacy. Spouses will disagree. That is a statistical fact. The anomaly of conflict-less marriage is almost alien to those of us who are or have been married before. These aren’t necessarily big arguments or disputes, most times it’s simply a matter of differing perspectives. No matter what though, a difference of opinion should always be reasonably worked out in a healthy marriage. Again, compromise is a big part of a healthy relationship. What happens to a marriage without intimacy through conflict is pretty clear cut. Something as small as choosing where to eat can turn into a screaming match that ruins the night, the week, or even the month depending on temperaments. Couples have to have the ability to rationalize their disputes and mediate amongst themselves to some degree, or they risk living with someone that they always end up fighting with.
Work intimacy is not about finding a spouse at your place of employment. It’s more like being able to work with your spouse. This goes with everything in the day to day around the home. Chores, home improvement, errands, childcare, and all the other things that people categorize as “adulting”. Marriage is sharing a life with someone, that also means sharing the workload. If one feels like they have to do “everything around here”, they see their partner as being lazy and unhelpful. However, this links back into emotional intimacy. If you come to the point in your marriage where you feel like the only one doing anything, you have to share. Now if you speak on the issue and your feelings a validate that shows a strong sense of work intimacy. What happens to a marriage without intimacy in this area? The lazy spouse becomes dead weight, and the most dangerous question in a marriage comes up. “Why do I even need you?” A marriage where one child was born should never feel like a single parent home with two children.
Intellectual Intimacy
The last form of intimacy aside from physical is intellectual intimacy. No this doesn’t mean you both need to be rocket scientists for a happy marriage. Intellectual intimacy is simply sharing knowledge and ideas. This goes back to having separate interests. As mentioned earlier, these other interests enrich the individuals in a marriage by opening them up to new things. A good example of this is in cooking. Growing up in different households, means growing up with different menus. Sharing recipes and cooking methods is a simple example of intellectual intimacy doing its job to educate spouses about one another. Learning from your spouse is another way of learning about your spouse. The same goes for sharing ideas. When a spouse shares an idea for creating something, it not only displays trust, but also it stands as a request for intimacy in other categories such as work and recreational intimacy. Now, what happens to a marriage without intimacy in the intellectual sense, is stale conversation or lack of conversation entirely. Sharing information about things beyond work and shared hobbies allows for a change of pace from the standard “How was your day?” dinner table talk that many couples find redundant. Hearing the same things over and over, saying the same things over and over; eventually becomes soporific to the point where many people just stop conversing. Lack of communication kills many forms of intimacy all in one blow and that leads to distancing.
Physical Intimacy
Finally we come back to physical intimacy. There are so many elements of this form of intimacy that it could honestly merit an article by itself. Everything from hand holding, kissing, and of course sex are all forms of physical intimacy. We want to feel the attraction and affection of our significant others to some degree. It’s a validation of how we are seen through our partners’ eyes. The feel of being seen as physically appealing, builds self-esteem and self-confidence to help brave the often unkind world we face once we leave our homes. In fact, PDAs (public displays of affection) are more powerful in that regard than sex. Sex is behind closed doors, but holding hands and kissing in public reaffirms the attraction by showing it to the world unabashedly. Without physical intimacy, doubts begin to form in the minds of those who don’t receive it. The biggest consequence of these doubts is often infidelity, on the part of the neglected spouse.
So what happens to a marriage without intimacy? It regresses, strains, stagnates and eventually dies. However, the level of each different form of intimacy is highly personal to each individual. Some people are quite happy in a relationship that sees one spouse handling all the household chores. There are even some relationships where PDA is a no-no. It all depends on the needs of the individual spouses and their life experiences. The most important thing to a healthy marriage is knowing exactly what forms of intimacy are most important for you to show your spouse. Intimacy as a whole is essential to achieving a level of closeness that goes beyond dating and creates a lifelong bond of love, trust and understanding.
