Rebuilding Lost Emotional Intimacy With Your Husband

If you often look back on the days when your marriage was happy and you felt like your husband loved and appreciated you, your relationship may be suffering from a decrease in emotional intimacy. Read on to explore what healthy emotional intimacy looks like, what you can do to rebuild the connection with your husband, and how couples therapy can help you identify and address issues in your marriage. 

What is emotional intimacy?

Emotional intimacy is often defined as the complex connection between two people in a romantic relationship, making them both feel loved and secure, with unreserved trust and open communication. 

Healthy emotional intimacy may look like:

• A constant source of emotional support where you empathize with each other
• You both enjoy spending time with each other and prioritize your time together.
• The relationship makes you feel understood, loved, seen, heard, valued, and secure. 
• You are both emotionally available and comfortable being vulnerable with each other. 
• Both partners show consistent interest in what the other thinks, is interested in, and experiences.
• You share meaningful conversations about your future together, discussing your hopes, ambitions, fears, goals, and feelings. 
• You make time daily to talk about the others’ experiences, validating their feelings.
• Both of you are concerned with your partner’s happiness, health, and well-being. 

Do you feel like a piece of meat around your husband?

Is the only time you connect with your husband during sex? Does his behavior make you feel more like a sexual object than a living person? Are your sexual needs being met? You shouldn’t have to feel like you don’t matter, and a marriage without emotional intimacy is usually destined for trouble. Thankfully, there are many techniques you can use to increase the bond you share with your husband. 

• Value the emotional bond you share
• Foster a connection that goes beyond sex
• Make romantic gestures
• Foreplay before sex, at least most of the time
• Gentle, intimate touches
• Kissing and hugging
• Playful, fun physical touches
• Show that their motivation isn't sex

Sex and physical intimacy can be a crucial part of your marriage—but many couples maintain loving, attentive relationships without sex. Without the deeper emotional connection tying you together, sex alone is rarely enough to keep the marriage alive.  

Intimacy vs. sex: What’s the difference and which matters more?

Studies show that men and women tend to define intimacy differently. Men often use it to mean sex, while women consider it to be the complex emotional connections typically surrounding and leading to sexual activity. Both can be vital to a successful marriage, but emotional intimacy often has more influence over long-term relationship satisfaction. 

How to get your husband to care about your needs

Feeling like your husband doesn’t care about your emotions and needs can be a painful and confusing experience. Try some of these techniques to reignite the spark of interest in your marriage and rebuild the emotional connection you used to share. 

Examine his behavior—is he intentionally hurting your feelings? 

Does it seem like your husband is trying to hurt your feelings on purpose? Is he ignoring your needs or unaware of them? Have you told him what was bothering you or waited for him to notice something was wrong?

Explain that he isn’t entitled to your body…

Being your husband doesn’t entitle him to treat you like an object unless you consent to it. You do not owe him sex, and he doesn't automatically "deserve" it because you're married. 

…But more intimacy often leads to more sex

However, if he makes an effort to build up the emotional intimacy in your marriage, it will likely lead to more sex—Probably of a higher caliber because both of you will be engaged and aroused. 

Talk to your husband about how you feel

Communication, understanding, and compromise are at the heart of most successful marriages. If you get nervous and forget things, try making a list of your concerns before approaching your husband. Talk to him. You’re married, so he presumably loves you and doesn’t want you to be unhappy. He may have been preoccupied with other things and didn’t notice you were struggling. Reestablish open lines of communication, check in with each other frequently, and get back into the healthy habits of talking to each other about your daily experiences. 

Plan regular date nights

When you’ve been married for years—especially if you have children—it can be easy to let the other roles you play take precedence. However, when you stop making time to spend together as a couple, your marriage may suffer from fading intimacy. Plan a regular date night and make it a priority. Dedicate time to spend alone together. Keep your phones put away so you can communicate face-to-face and feel like the sole focus of their attention. 

Tackle mundane tasks together

Part of the joy of intimacy is the ability to turn mundane tasks into something more by doing it with someone you love. Try spending a day tackling chores around the house together. Go grocery shopping together, cook dinner side-by-side, flirt while you clean up, and retire for “dessert” when the kids are in bed. Intimacy is often the strongest when the everyday parts of life become interesting simply because your husband is with you. 

Discuss your sexual needs

Chances are that both of you have grown and matured quite a bit in the years since you first got married. If sexual interactions with your husband aren't meeting your needs because what you like has changed, set the mood for the conversation, and talk about your desires, fantasies, curiosities, and boundaries. 

Many couples can fall into a rut over time because they stop doing anything new. Research toys together and buy one to experiment with and discover if that’s something you like. It’s okay not to know what you want; there's plenty of information available, and a big part of the fun is exploring together. 

What does he treat as a priority?

If you feel like your husband doesn’t consider you a priority, it may help to examine what he does think is important. Perhaps he’s occupied with problems at work, financial worries, family issues, or something else. Studies show that many couples get caught up in the day-to-day chaos of life and don’t realize the emotional intimacy in their marriage has declined until it’s already a significant problem. 

Recognizing when it’s time to let go

As much as you may want it to, there’s a chance things aren’t going to work out with your husband. While only you can tell where your threshold is, these signs may help you know when to let go. 

• You’ve repeatedly expressed your desire for more intimacy and care from your husband, but he shows no willingness to communicate and compromise or make efforts to meet your needs. 
• Spending time with your husband leaves you feeling drained, stressed, and on edge. 
• You spend a lot of time reminiscing about how good things used to be with your husband, and you’ve been hoping things would change for a long while. 
• Despite your efforts to connect, you feel more like distant roommates who have sex than husband and wife. 

How couples therapy can help your marriage

Numerous marriages face trouble with decreased emotional intimacy and maintaining a meaningful connection after years of being together. Thankfully, many couples also overcome their issues and rebuild their bond with the support and guidance of a mental health professional. If you’re experiencing a lack of communication, intimacy, and essential care in your marriage, consider working with a licensed therapist online through a virtual relationship therapy platform like Regain. Couples therapy can help you identify the issues creating distance between you and your husband, develop practical ways to address the problems, and establish open lines of communication to share your emotions and needs moving forward. 

Recent studies indicate no significant difference in online and in-person therapy outcomes. Both groups involved in the study showed measurable improvements in relationship satisfaction and decreased symptoms related to depression, stress, and anxiety. Teletherapy platforms provide access to a vast selection of mental health professionals, making it simple to connect with a therapist who fits your personality, situation, and therapeutic needs well. The data also shows that individual therapy is equally effective online and face-to-face.

Counselor reviews

“Sessions with Natalie are very insightful and give practical advice on implementing new habits and changes. Be prepared to engage and be challenged to think in a different way. I know that my partner and I can already see improvements in our relationship and feel more positive about working through our issues together.”

“Austa has been wonderful thus far. She has helped my partner and I during an unimaginably difficult time... She has also guided us in communicating effectively and setting appropriate boundaries in our relationship. I was hesitant to pursue counseling at the beginning, but I truly believe that it is making a difference for our relationship. Austa is easy to talk to and she is a great listener. I would wholeheartedly recommend her as a counselor.”

Takeaway 

It can be challenging to know what to do when you feel like your husband only wants you for sex and doesn't care about how you feel. Thankfully, there are research-backed methods to help you address the issue and rebuild a healthy marriage. The information provided in this article may offer insight into what you can do to rebuild emotional intimacy with your husband so you feel seen, heard, and loved in your marriage.