Sex can be intimate, but more often than not it isn’t. Intimacy is closeness, and although we certainly get physically close during sex, mentally we can be miles apart.
True intimacy relies on knowledge — on knowing people just as well, if not better, than they know themselves. It’s not difficult for men to become more intimate with their women.
Not as difficult as one might think… but you are going to have to make the effort. Here are a few things you’ll want to try:
1. Tell her she’s beautiful.
There is no shortage of men who are willing to compliment women on a daily basis. The difference between them and you, however, is that when you tell the woman you love that she’s beautiful, it isn’t with ulterior motives.
You don’t tell a thousand women whatever they want to hear just to sleep with them. You are telling the woman you love that, in that moment, she is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.
When a woman knows you find her so positively stunning — inside and out — she’ll never have to worry about you straying or your feelings faltering. Trust is the most intimate thing two people can share.
2. Write her a love letter.
There’s plenty that can be said without words, but every woman wants to hear how much you love her.
Give her a physical thing that she can go back and reference whenever she misses you or feels uncertain of your love, and she’ll feel much more secure — and happier.
You don’t have to be a good writer to write a good love letter. Just put into words — the best you can — why she means the world to you. Don’t type it; write it by hand so that when she looks at the words, she feels that it’s you who wrote them.
3. Take a vacation together.
One of the best ways to become more intimate with your lover, to get to know and understand her more deeply, is to take a long trip together. Not just a weekend — two weeks minimum.
Intimacy is all about getting close to the other, and there is no better way to understand a woman better than to throw yourselves into an irregular or uncommon situation.
People are very good at keeping up façades when they’re feeling comfortable, when they’re surrounded by familiar surroundings.
Take that individual and place her in the middle of the unknown, the inexperienced, and you get to see her at her most intimate and basic levels — the level at which she is forced to take in novel information and then use that information to make real time judgements and decisions.
4. Take care of her when she’s sick and allow her to take care of you when you’re sick.
If you want to become more intimate with your partner, then you are going to have to accept her, not only at her best, but also at her worst. I’m sorry ladies, but no woman — or man for that matter — looks good when she’s coughing up a lung.
When your woman is sick, she is — quite literally — at her most vulnerable. Think about the way you feel and act when you physically feel horrible. I’d bet my life that you aren’t the jolly, pleasant person you usually are.
That’s why letting her see you when you’re at your most vulnerable is also extremely intimate. You can see how far she’s willing to go for you, and how much of you you’re willing to show.
5. Sleep with her (without having sex).
It’s easy to share a bed with a woman, whether you love her or not. The harder part is not making a move when the beautiful woman next to you says she isn’t ready or she isn’t in the mood.
Embracing a woman tenderly with no intention of taking it further means your feelings extend past the normal libidinal urges you suffer from. Cuddling a woman because you love her means needing to be close to her because it makes you happy.
This kind of happiness lasts more than a night — it lasts for a lifetime.
6. Stare into each other’s eyes for extended periods of time.
There is little in the world that makes us feel more uncomfortable than extended periods of eye contact. They say that the eyes are the windows to our souls — and I don’t think they, whomever they may be, are wrong.
Looking deep into your lover’s eyes most likely won’t show you her deepest inner secrets, but it will show you how comfortable the two of you are with each other.
The longer you’re able to stare, the more comfortable the two of you are. If you want to break down whatever barriers are left in your relationship, focus on more eye contact.
7. Meet the family.
A person is not just a person. She’s a combination of all the people she was influenced by growing up — primarily, her family. We base all our relationships in life on the relationships we have with our family members.
They are our oldest relationships, and because we formed them in our earliest years, they greatly shaped the way we perceive interpersonal interaction and relationships.
Men who watch pornography may be shrinking their brains and dulling their responses to sexual stimulation, a study has found. It is the first time researchers have found a possible link between regular viewing of pornography and physical harm. However, an alternative explanation is that people who spend more time looking at pornography are born with a certain type of brain.
Dr Simone Kühn, the study’s lead author from the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, said it was the first evidence for a link between porn consumption and reductions in brain size and brain activity in response to sexual stimuli.
But the study can’t prove porn-watching causes changes to the brain, she said.
PORN SHOULD BE TREATED LIKE DRINK DRIVING, EXPERTS ARGUE
America is in the grip of a pornography pandemic that has become so serious it should be treated the same way as teenage smoking or drink driving, activists have warned. Dawn Hawkins, executive director of Morality in Media said porn must be tackled no differently than any major public health crisis. Speaking ahead of a two-day conference on sexual exploitation earlier this month, she said, if left untreated, addiction to pornography can leave users with psychological damage.
‘There’s a lot of science now proving that pornography is harmful,’ Hawkins said at the National Press Club in Washington.
Porn sites get more visitors per month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined, a third of all downloads contain porn and the Internet now hosts 4.2 million porn websites. People who already have a smaller ‘striatum’ – the reward part of the brain – may be more likely to use pornography.
‘It’s not clear, for example, whether watching porn leads to brain changes or whether people born with certain brain types watch more porn’ she said.
‘Unfortunately we cannot answer this question based on the results of the present study’ she added.
For the study, Dr Kuhn and her colleague Jurgen Gallinat from Charite University, also in Berlin, recruited 64 healthy men between the ages of 21 and 45 years and asked them questions about their porn-watching habits.
They also took images of the men’s brains to measure volume and to see how their brains reacted to pornographic pictures, says the study published in JAMA Psychiatry journal (must credit).
They found noticeable differences in the men who abstained compared with those who regularly accessed sexual videos or images.
Dr Kuhn said ‘We found that the volume of the so-called striatum, a brain region that has been associated with reward processing and motivated behaviour was smaller the more pornography consumption the participants reported