185. The Power of Real Intimacy in Marriage

Transcript:

 Welcome to the Connected For Real podcast. I’m Rebbetzin Bat-Chen Grossman, a marriage coach for women in business. And my mission is to bring God’s presence into your life, into your marriage and into your business. Let’s get started. 

And we are  live. Welcome everyone to the Connected for Real podcast. I’m Rebbetzin Bat-Chen  Grossman. I’m a marriage coach for women in business and successful careers, and my obsession is the intersection between your marriage and your success, how they interact, how they affect each other, and where we can create flow and alignment.

And today we are talking to Angela and we’re talking all about health and your marriage. And Angela, introduce yourself. Tell everybody why you’re so awesome, and then we’ll get right into it.  Hi, I am Angela. Out of respect for your listeners I respect for your listeners, I won’t say my typical social media handle, but I focus all on the physical.

Tima  in your marriage and the nonphysical intimacies in your marriage. And I help women and couples  have better physical intimacy and improve their nonphysical intimacy and all of those things. Thank you. That was a good, a good way of introducing yourself. You have a book, right?  I’m working on a book.

I will hear from my publisher this week on things. And I do have lots of products on my website for helping with the physical and non-physical intimacies in your marriage. So if you want to check those out, they’re all available on my website.  Cool. Okay.  We got together because we thought that it was a really important conversation to talk about all the different types of intimacy and not just physical, so that we can create that feeling that we all want, you know, just to have a team player and to have a husband who gets us and  is on board and all those things.

So get us started a little bit with how we can improve that part of our life.  Yeah. So one of the pillars that I teach on is there’s actually 13 different intimacies that you can experience in your marriage, and that physical one is only one of 13, and that part of it is actually meant to be the celebration of intimacy that you’ve already established before you ever reach your bedroom.

And so if a couple comes to me and tells me that they are struggling.  In the bedroom. My first question is going to be, well, we need to look at these other intimacies and figure out.  If and where there’s a breakdown happening. And so just to give you a quick run through of the different intimacies, I’ll run through all the names.

These are alphabetically, not one of them is more important than the other. I just wanna make that clear. So we have aesthetic intimacy. These are like your Instagram moments, the moments of like beauty. So like, you know, the disgusting pictures of couples sitting on their car hoods with, you know, takeout coffee in front of a sunset.

Though that’s aesthetic intimacy. Commitment, intimacy is all about how far you’ve come, where you’re going, communication, intimacy, pretty self-explanatory. Conflict intimacy is one that I get a lot of questions about because couples are really threatened by conflict and they don’t understand how that is actually an intimacy.

But it is creative. Intimacy is all about how you express your creative selves Back before kids, my husband and I did community theater together, so we got to be super creative side by side, and I miss that. Someday when our kids are older and we can get back to it,  it’s gonna happen. We have crisis intimacy.

How do you function as a couple during a crisis? Emotional intimacy, very obvious intellectual intimacy. Why do they think pineapple belongs on a pizza? And what sort of psychological damage did they receive during childhood to make them think that,  or, you know, yeah. Read, reading a book together and learning something together is also intellectual intimacy, parenting intimacy. 

Every woman who has ever watched her husband hold her newborn on his chest  from her proverbial hospital bed has had her ovaries stand up and say, do it again. Do it again. Every woman knows exactly what I mean when I say parenting as intimacy. I am in a season where watching my husband emotionally regulate himself with our very dysregulated, hormonal 10-year-old is so, so hot. 

Recreational intimacy. How do you have fun together? This is usually the first one to go for couples. And this is where I find most of my couples struggle the most, is recreational intimacy because we get bogged down in the sort of everyday life things and we forget  how to have fun. Literally sort of a Peter Pan sort of issue.

Like  we forget how to be children. Then obviously the physical intimacy. Spiritual intimacy is all about the expression of your spiritual selves. Are you  in church together? Are you serving in your local faith community together? Work intimacy. Don’t make it weird. Don’t try and go to the office with him if that’s not the kind of job he has.

Work intimacy is about working towards common goals.  We are experiencing sort of a resurgence of what we would call recession hobbies. So things like gardening and canning are actually for doing that together are actually forms of work intimacy, because it could be recreational, you know, gardening and canning could absolutely  both fall in the intersection of recreational intimacy and work intimacy.

And many of the intimacies work together and they build on each other. And so when you have, especially  if you are a woman in business, building your own business, building, you know, this empire like you and I are doing a lot of these kind of get squished off to the margins of our lives. And so  using this sort of blueprint is really

not easy in the sense that like, it doesn’t take work, but  it’s an easy way  for my brain to remember, oh, I’m feeling so disconnected from him. Let me look at this list of intimacies and figure out where we’ve dropped the ball. You know, why am I feeling this  disconnection? How can we reconnect looking at this framework? 

Right? And this explains also really well why some people look like they’re thriving if they have some of them, like you have those like Instagram moments. You work really well together as a team, and you’re parenting well. You just have no you know, other parts of intimacy that make it feel really special, but it’s working.

Or you know, some people who are really into.  Some of the other ones. And then, you know, something happens and suddenly they don’t know how to deal with conflict or they don’t know how to deal with the catastrophe that’s happening and everything breaks down. So I really like that there is a way to  almost like, find your problem and like you can really go through these and, and see where not so much the problem, but where can I strengthen, you know, where can I, yes. 

Yep, yep. One of the things that I see a lot in my line of work, because I do tend to focus on the physical intimacy side of the equation, but what I talk about with my clients is you might have to, for intimacy issues.

but we’re actually gonna look at the other 12 intimacies first because  The physical will flow naturally if you have a strong foundation of the other ones. But what I see a lot of with my couples is they’ve been relying on that physical intimacy to create and maintain that intimacy in their marriage. And  when you enter a season where that physical intimacy becomes an impossibility, they don’t know how to function because they don’t have a foundation of strong, healthy, non-physical intimacy because they thought that all of the happy chemicals that are generated when they’re doing the physical intimacy is what is actually creating and maintaining the intimacy.

And it’s not it, it’s the happy chemicals are like the byproduct. They’re not the actual intimacy itself.  So sometimes it’s a lot of relearning what real intimacy is. And I find that a lot of couples don’t  think ahead.  You know, they don’t think about the fact that, you know, when I, I got married at 22, I was so young and dumb, and I didn’t know anything, and I didn’t think about the fact that someday I was going to be  43 years old discovering that I have a chronic disability and my body was going to start to fail me.

And there would be seasons where the physical intimacy was literally impossible for certain seasons of our life. And so what were we going to do  to keep our marriage? If that physical intimacy suddenly disappears.  Right. And people don’t think ahead to things like that.  So, I mean, even if you just caught yourself in that situation now, and you look  at this list and you say, how can I strengthen this?

Or what can I do in order to move towards this? That already gives almost like a roadmap of how to fix. Mm-hmm. The, your own problem.  You know, even if you didn’t plan for it,  there’s always a way to, you know, oh, 100%. You can always  start building a firm foundation.  One of the illustrations I use to talk about this is, if you’re relying on the physical to create and maintain the intimacy, you’re building your house on shifting sand. It’s like when you build a house, you can’t rely on just one foundation. So if you’re relying on physical to be the bricks in your house, you can absolutely build a shelter out of bricks.

But the first storm that comes, it’s gonna get knocked over because there’s no mortar holding it together. It’s not gonna be very comfortable because there’s no plumbing. Speaking of plumbing we were just discussing how my laundry room flooded a couple of weeks ago. And so you need all of the intimacies to build that foundation to build the house, and you can work on your foundation at any point.

  You know, if you think of the process of home ownership.  Something’s always breaking.  Speaking of my laundry room, flooding, something’s always breaking. Something always needs upgraded. Something always needs improved in a house, and our marriages aren’t really any different. You know, you guys might put a ton of effort into improving your emotional intimacies only to discover that your spiritual intimacy has suddenly taken a dive because you guys got into a busy season and you couldn’t make it to your faith community on a regular basis together.

And life got busy and you weren’t like, volunteering together or, or things like that. And so it is a constant like.  Well, we’re okay here oh, this other thing slipped. Okay, let’s reset.  Right. I really like that you say you can’t put all your weight on one intimacy because then it’s no longer fun.

You know, if everything is hanging by the nails on this one thing, then there’s just so much pressure there that it mm-hmm. Takes away from the fact that it’s meant to not be full of pressure. And when you realize that there are other ways to create this, and  I feel very excited about learning about the 12 other intimacies just because I am now getting all creative and thinking about, oh, you know, we could just do this, or we could just fix this, and things are gonna start moving in the right direction,  even without changing anything else. 

You know, because  I, okay. I tend to be all or nothing. Like my brain is wired to want perfection and I’ve had to really learn how to get over that. My first 15 years were in graphic design and I was, I used to work on Fifth Avenue and I was a graphic designer and did a bunch of stuff for, you know, Disney and Nickelodeon and all the great, you know, fun things that I did in my life.

And then doing that forces you to have to eventually let go and be like, okay, I did as much as I could. I’m sending it to print and I’m sure we’re gonna find a mistake when it comes back. You know? And there’s always that like, extra space or the little line you forgot there or something is like awkwardly rotated and no one else noticed except you, but you are, ah, I can’t believe it happened.

So I’ve. I had to come to terms with the fact that I’m not perfect. Sadly, I still am not perfect. One day maybe it’s so annoying. It’s so annoying,  right? I would like to be perfect, but then I remind myself that if I was perfect, then I wouldn’t be here anymore because there would be no need for me to fix anything.

And so  I make myself feel a little bit better about the fact that, you know, I still have a lot to fix.  But all that being said,  I have no idea why I started talking about my perfection. Oh yeah, I do. 

Okay, now, you know, I’m human. So all or nothing. I want it all. I want everything to be perfect. And as a marriage coach, you can imagine that my entire life is very like, we have to make sure that we’re good, right? Because if we have a fight and then I have to go and like get on a call with someone and be like, don’t worry honey, it’s gonna be okay.

You know, you could single handedly change your whole marriage. I’m like, look at me. I can’t even get my act together. Right?  But I actually found, why are you laughing?  ’cause I was,  I, I, we met this new couple in our community. We invited them over for a game night with some other friends and we were sitting at the table with friends that we’ve been friends with and I was telling them about this fight that we had had the week before because my husband. 

It was late at night. We were traveling home from a weekend at a friend’s house and we had gotten Starbucks and I had ordered a large toff nut mocha. He had ordered a medium peppermint mocha. We get 20 minutes down the road and I go to drink my drink ’cause I don’t drink them like when I get them because there’s scalding hot.

To realize that he had drank three quarters of my large, not  realizing it was not his medium peppermint mocha,  you know, two different flavor profiles. So I’m telling, you know, my run friends this and then these new people that we’ve never hung out with before, walk in and they knew that I. 

Like they knew I had just gotten back and they walk in in the middle of this story and I was like, yeah. So I, I just lost it and then I reached in the back for a snack and I started opening it and I was like, oh, sorry. Did you wanna take this straight out of my hands too? And. 

I was like, oh, these new people are here. Like they don’t know us. And so I was like, follow me from our marriage content. Yeah, right. Super healthy marriage right here.  But that’s the thing that they say, not as I do.  We’re still human, we’re marriage coaches and we’re still, and our spouses are still  things and piss us off.

Make us angry or we’re gonna do something dumb and make them angry. And yes, that’s why I’m love is,  but you know what makes me so excited when having this conversation about perfection is that, and being human,  is that if we didn’t have these moments, then we would not be relatable and we wouldn’t be able to help other people because like Yeah, who wants to hear from you?

You perfect little, you know, you know. Yeah.  No, nobody wants that. Nobody wants to learn from someone who thinks they have it all put together and worked out, and they just gonna like, stand up on this, you know, some up there, high up in the sky and tell me like, yeah, just come over here and do this and that.

So I definitely think it’s important for us to be  in the trenches and, and yeah, so I like things being perfect, and when things don’t go according to my plan, then one of the things that makes me excited is that I don’t have to get all 13 perfect. For my marriage to work. You know? Yeah. That’s, no, that’s the all or nothing.

It’s like you will, you know, we’ll tend to go, oh, I need 13 things to check off and be perfect, but no, you really don’t. And like, like you said, a lot of times, a lot of seasons of life, that’s the only thing holding it together. Like the one little thing is the only thing holding it together. And it’s working fine.

It’s not sustainable, but it can be done. So maybe you don’t have one of them, but the other one’s holding the weight or maybe there’s two that are really strong and you could really lean on them for  momentum in order to get new, new ones coming in. So that makes me excited.  Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think it’s really important that we talk about living in the season that we’re in. You know, we, we have scripture that tells us that for everything there is a season, and that it, it stresses the importance of honoring the season that you’re in. If you are in a season of a rough pregnancy and postpartum obviously physical intimacy is gonna be off the table.

And so looking at the other intimacies and saying, okay, well in this season this is not an option, so we’re gonna focus on you know, intellectual intimacy right now, which means we’re gonna listen to a podcast and we’re gonna talk about it, or we’re gonna focus on spiritual intimacy and we’re gonna prioritize praying together every day.

You know, things like that.  Honoring the season that you’re in and not thinking that a season means. Your marriage is in crisis or you know, they’re gonna leave you or anything like that. It’s just a season and it’s okay to live in your season. Right. I love that. You know we tend to do this when things are bad, right?

When things are bad, it’s like, oh, it’s gonna be like this forever and I’m totally done, you know? And we catastrophize being in this bad season forever, but every season is a season and the good things are temporary too. So just like bad things are going to pass and things are gonna come instead, and everything’s gonna work out.

You know, sometimes you’re in a real high and you think, okay, this is gonna be like this forever. So I don’t have to think about anything else.  This too has to be planned for. How can I.  Help things stay as long as they can up there, and how can I strengthen my muscle of the skills to help me get back up as soon as I can when I do fall?

So being able to have these different ways of connection available to us is a gift in my opinion. Like you’re telling, you’re, you know, you were reading them off and I’m thinking, oh, I have a question about each one. Where do we start? You know?  Yes, for sure.  Yeah. So,  do you remember any of the questions?

I do. Can we go in order again, because I wanna talk about all of them.  Yeah, absolutely. So we start with aesthetic.  So let’s talk about why that’s important. ’cause a lot of people are like, those pictures are annoying and they don’t have a place in, you know, our lives or whatever. But like, people pay good money to have photographs of their wedding, or photographs of their family, or the ability to have moments like those just for the feeling, you know, for that thing that it brings up.

So   how do we get around that negative energy that we have towards it, and also the fact that we still need it. So first of all,  I use the, you know, like these are your Instagram level moments as a cute little, like, everybody knows exactly what I mean when I say that, right? 

But here’s the thing, and as a content creator, I shudder to say this.  You don’t have to post them all on Insta.  Just because you have an Instagram worthy moment with your spouse doesn’t mean you have to post it. And as a content creator, you know, my brain says, but you do, you need all that content,  right?

But it’s less about, you know, like creating a perfect shot because, and I think that, I think your question really is a great way to illustrate how all of the intimacies work with each other and build on each other. Because having those moments and taking pictures of them, whether you post them or not,  is part of commitment intimacy, because commitment intimacy is about where you’ve been and where you’re going, how far you’ve come together as a couple.

And one of the examples that I often give for commitment intimacy is looking back at your wedding photos and talking about. How I was 22 and young and dumb and didn’t know anything about being married. And how much better I am now at you know, sharing a space with a person. ’cause I was raised as an only child and  20 plus years later, my husband still has moments where he’s like, you’re such an only child.

Yeah. Like,  you can, you can share Angela. And I’m like, no, actually I am not going to share.  Right. But talking about how far I’ve come in, my sharing abilities is a form of the commitment intimacy. And so having the pictures of those beautiful moments that you had together to look back on.  You know, that goes hand in hand with the commitment, intimacy.

And also it’s a, it goes hand in hand with spiritual intimacy because, you know, watching, for example, to go with the, you know, sunset illustration, watching a sunset, you may be reminded of the way that God created everything and the beauty of God’s creation and start to have a spiritual discussion  about whatever,  while you’re in that moment of creating beauty. 

Right. Yeah. It’s really beautiful, the awe of being in moments like that. And I like that you said the sunset moment because there doesn’t have to be a picture to every  aesthetic moment. Right? Right. So this morning I came upstairs, my parents live upstairs from me, and they have a beautiful balcony. 

And and it’s really a lush now, like all the greens coming out, it’s winter, everything is beautiful. And they have this little table and they were just cleaning up from eating together. And I thought, this is such a cute moment. You know, like they’re living in their little  movie in their head. Like they, you know, they have their little breakfast together and then they clean up and they sit outside and they chill and nobody took a picture of it.

And it’s not even that great of a picture, quote unquote. But it’s that moment that you can capture and see, wow, there’s all these little details that are so beautifully orchestrated to create this moment.  And I think that also brings up another super important point about how bearing witness to specific intimacies of other couples is. 

Very important for our own marriages. Right? Like that was seeing their commitment after how many years have they been married?  Oh, your parents? Probably 40, 42 or 43.  Okay. So seeing  that moment that they are still having these wonderful moments of beauty together after 43 years of marriage is an encouragement to your own marriage, you know?

Right.  You might have left your stuff in front of the coffee maker. This is like one of my pet peeves is we have a low coffee bar and my husband thinks that’s where he’s supposed to dump his stuff, but it’s not like that’s where I wanna make my fancy coffee. And so like you might have dumped your stuff in front of my coffee maker for the upteenth time, but you know, in another 22 years, I can still be having moments of beauty with you.

I think that one of the touchstone moments for me with commitment intimacy um my grandfather was in the hospital and we didn’t know it at the time, but it was the last time he was dying and he had a blood infection.  It made him delirious.  And my grandparents had been married for over 50 years  and  he kept telling my grandmother,  I’m gonna buy you a ring before I leave and we’re gonna get married before I leave. 

And  they had gotten married like a week or two  before he deployed to the Korean War,  and they were married for over 50 years. And seeing that even in his sickness and delusion, he was determined to  marry her all over again. And he was determined to see her taken care of because in that day, being married to a soldier would’ve meant that her security was assured.

Because, you know, if anything happened to him, she would get his benefits, you know, and those things.  So seeing that was a huge touchstone for our marriage. Sorry, this is like 10 years later. More than 10 years later, and I still,  I don’t cry. That’s not me. So I’m annoyed with myself. No  judgment.  Can you just accept, I know the fact that you love your grandfather and that he left such a beautiful impression on you.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I witnessing  you’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

I have one of those personalities that’s like anti  God,  my life is. 

I, I think I amuse him every day because like, I’m this, this  intimacy specialist who like hates my own emotion. Like, I’m like  my best friend and I bully. Like if one of us is crying, we’ll call each other so that we can be bullied out of being sad. Just  angry and stuff.  So yeah, it, it, I’m real, real.

I’m a mess. So anyway, having examples of witnessing these other moments of other couples experiencing commitment, intimacy, a intimacy  is an encouragement to our own marriages that, you know it isn’t just us that struggles. You know, you’re not alone in whatever struggles that you are facing in your marriage.

Other couples struggle and they still have these moments of beauty. They still have these moments of commitment. And I think that’s really important that we are. Surrounding ourselves with other couples and other healthy couples that we can encourage each other in, in the intimacies as well.  I like that.

That was beautiful. Okay, so what’s the second one? Commitment, which we kind of talked about, but did you have a specific question about it? No, I think this one’s pretty self-explanatory. I, I think we spoke about it a lot.  Yeah.  Communication, intimacy.  Oh, this is one that really,  really gets a lot of attention. 

Maybe sometimes too much attention. It’s almost like this is the other physical intimacy. Like if physical intimacy is like the only intimacy people know about, then communication intimacy might be  the second one people think is like, this is the two that everybody needs, you know? And yeah, I’m not really sure they’re doing it right. 

Yeah, communication is definitely one that can kind of make or break a couple. I think one of the reasons that it’s so big is because it very easily leads to hurt and upset and misunderstandings if you don’t have great communication. And so  I agree that it is one of the other big ones and I agree that sometimes it’s not.

Done. You know, when we’re trying to improve it, it’s not always done in the the best ways. And I also think that it’s one of those things that you need to find  what works for you as a couple, because there’s a lot of different ways.  Yes,  there’s a lot of different ways out there to learn about and to do communication, intimacy.

But not all of them are gonna work for you as a couple. You know, I’ve seen a lot of people talk about, well you know,  text your spouse, you know, different things in an effort to communicate. And I’m like, well, that be great if my husband would ever pick up his phone. 

Des technology. So texting him is never. 

And this reminds me of my sister. My sister is an audiologist, so she is a specialist with helping parents digest and get through having a child who’s either deaf or hard of hearing. So  she’s basically an audiologist that will hold you through the process of finding out the kid is deaf or hard of hearing.

And then through all the tests and all the reading of all the things and figuring out what your options are and all that stuff, which I really love and I’m so proud of her. She’s my only sister and she’s seven years younger than me, so I feel very like she’s my little baby. But she is grown up and she is very awesome. 

She had a podcast once, you know, a long, long time ago it was called All About Audiology. And she used to talk about the fact that there are many types of communication and not all of them are verbal. So I think it’s, it brings us full circle to this where it’s like there’s many types of intimacy and not all of them are physical.

And it’s really important to remember that in the communications intimacy, where some people are not big talkers and they can understand each other with very little words. And some people are, can even communicate with no words at all.  And that’s cool if that works for you. Awesome. You know, like, I love that you said there isn’t one way to do it right.

I think we can all agree that it’s not nice to say negative things or to use, you know, bad words at your spouse and sort of attack them in that way. But some people, I’m sure would think that’s very funny and could find a way of communicating in that way that like works for them, not mine, but you know, to each his own.

But I think the point that I’m trying to make is find the thing that works for you and don’t judge other people in the way that they communicate and what works for them.  Yeah, exactly.  So  a couple of points. One is, aside from physical intimacy you can experience all of these intimacies with your friends.

 You experience communication intimacy with your friends. You absolutely do. 

I, my best friend and I, our love language is sarcasm and bullying each other.  And that’s, that’s the way that we communicate. And sometimes people don’t understand. We’re in a couple of Facebook groups together, and so if she posts something, I will comment very sarcastically and she and our entire friend group know exactly what I am saying.

But other like strangers who don’t know us will be like, oh my God. Like  why Angela? Why? Like, that’s unnecessary. How are you just gonna say that? And  one of us has to be like, no, no, no, no. Like, we’re best friends.  This is how we do life. And and  not every marriage is going to have a play fight dynamic,  right?

But some marriages do have a play fight dynamic, and that’s okay. That does not mean that the marriage is unhealthy. Some people speak fluent sarcasm. I am one of them.  You know, my husband knew that  what he knew what he was getting into when he married me. And so  if you think about how your spouse communicated before you got married and then you’re mad at them for communicating like that after marriage, who’s really got the problem here?

Now we can absolutely and should be encouraging both ourselves and our spouses to move towards health and move towards healing and move towards healthy communication and things like that. But  if your spouse was sarcastic before you married them,  to expect them to not be sarcastic after marriage is unfair.

Right? So  that’s sort of another thing I see a lot with some of my couples is well.  Being upset about a thing that they knew about before marriage. Right? So, yeah, but also sometimes we think, oh, but he’s like that with his friends, but  with me, it’s gonna be different. Or he knows that I am not one of his friends.

But here’s the thing, if that’s his language with his friends, that means that’s how he communicates in the deepest way. Because those are the people, he is going to be the most himself. So hopefully he wants to be the most himself with you. And so it’s going to end up very similar. And of course, like you were saying, we can adjust and we could say, you know, this bothers me.

Please do something, a different word or a different phrase, or try to adjust,  accordingly. And that has worked really well with my husband and me when we have certain, like communication breakdowns. And I’ll be like, I know for you, this is funny, but right now I really need you to say this.

But I think that coming from a real honest, you know, boundary type thing where it’s like, I know what I need right now and I’m communicating it, and you, you’re allowed to take it or leave it, and that’s fine, but I’m, I’m not gonna let it just slip because I don’t think you can handle my  criticism or whatever.

So I think there is a lot of play in this in this one. There’s a lot of, yeah. Really great. It’s like almost a whole episode by itself or three. Yes. Yeah. I have a story to tell you about this one actually that’s coming to me. Yes. When we got married,  my husband started calling me wife and he was so excited.

He is like, wife, come over here, wife, look at this. And my parents thought that was the worst thing ever. They thought, what a disrespectful thing to do. She has a name and blah, blah, blah. They were really upset. And one day my mother like was so upset with him when he called me wife. She’s like, you don’t talk to my daughter like that.

She has a name and an identity and a personality and whatever. And he’s like, what’s the problem? I call my mother, mother, this is a title of endearment. And my mother’s like, no, it’s not. It means you just objectified her. I don’t know what, she gave him a whole speech about why she did not like it, and he was just like so shocked. Like, he’s asking me if I have a problem. Like, no, I don’t have a problem. Like, so why do you have a problem with this? Right?  It was so comical how sometimes somebody from the outside who loves you and wants the best for you can actually get in the way of your communication that’s working. 

Yes.  So I, I think that, yeah, for sure. It’s, it was just a comical moment. And yeah, this has almost like become a joke now, people who get really upset that my husband calls me wife, we know right away that like, oh, okay,  back to this discussion.  But but I think also once I solidified my own take on it, you know, like when he asked me, do you have a problem with this?

And I really sat with it and I was like, do I, no, I don’t. Whenever  people bring it up, I’m just like, I don’t mind. I think it’s cute. And then they’re like, oh, okay. If you think it’s cute, then fine. And then they let it go because they realize, yeah, we’re both cool with it. So sometimes just like really stopping and being honest with yourself and knowing that this is fine or not fine is going to then change the way other people see it as well.

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  And I think it’s really also important to note with that, that I talk a lot in my work about consent for obvious reasons. You know, we talked about seasons and so something that you were fine with in one season and consented to in one season might change. And so your consent for that might change in five years, and that’s okay. Just because you were previously okay with something does not mean that you have to be okay with it for the rest of your life in any area of marriage.  Yes. I love that. Ah, this is such a cool, fun conversation. Totally a different angle than I usually take and I’m loving it. What else is on the list?

We have conflict.  Yeah,  that one conflict is a big one.  That one brought up like a bunch of ideas. I’m like, whoa.  Yeah. Why is conflict so important for intimacy? People think that ideal is conflict list life.  Yeah. And I, if I have couples tell me that they never have conflict or they never fight or anything, I’m side eyeing them so hardcore because that just makes me think one of you is boundaryless or not communicating your boundaries.

Because even if  you guys have gone to therapy and you’ve done all the therapy and you’ve done all the work on your internal selves and you’ve healed your childhood traumas and you know all the good and healthy things, the nature of living with another person in your space 24 7  is going to bring conflict. 

It just is. Now, you can absolutely do conflict in healthy ways and you can do conflict in unhealthy ways. And I dunno if this is a cultural thing, exclusive to America, but I really feel like.  My generation. And so like Gen X millennials in particular have not been taught how to conflict well and we see any sort of conflict as a threat to the marriage.

Right. Because, you know, like, especially in my experience growing up, it was you just had to put on a shiny happy face and, and sort of deal with it and disagreements and come through weren’t really discussed and there would be an occasional blow up and then it would just all get swept under the rug  and you’d move on. 

And so you can, I think you can start to see how conflict is tied very closely to communication intimacy.  Right. But the thing is,  if you have a.   healthy View of conflict, you should walk out of conflict feeling closer to each other.

You should walk out of a healthy conflict feeling like progress has been made in the relationship.  Right. If it’s done in a healthy way.  Yeah.  And I think when people think of conflict, they think of a fight where you have to be screaming and yelling and cursing and I don’t know what else. And actually conflict is just, oh, I want this and you want that.

And now we have to figure out what to do because there’s only one hour we have in order to do this thing or whatever it is. Right, right. What do we do together to make it work? That’s conflict. So like you said. Life is meant to have it’s built in. Conflicts are built in because we’re two humans that have different opinions and different tastes and want different things. 

The fund starts when we’re able to, like you said, communicate and balance back and forth and say, I, you know, this is where my boundary is. This is where my, you know, his boundary is, and how do we make it work for both of us? And,  and it doesn’t always have to resolve fully, like you said, progress over perfection.

It doesn’t have to resolve fully for you to feel good about the direction it’s going in, even just feeling heard   is sometimes a really big deal.  So  I, my work is primarily with evangelical Christians. Based a lot of who I work with. I do work with other people of other faith affiliations, but that’s the primary focus of my work.

And I see a lot of toxic messaging surrounding conflict in marriage from the Evangelical church in America. And one of the things that we as women especially get told is two different things. One,  there’s so many, oh my gosh, actually there’s probably 15 that I could list. Now that I’m saying the words, all of these things are coming in my head.

But one of the big ones is the Bible says, don’t let the sun go down on your anger. So the implication is  you can’t go to bed until the fight is resolved. And I have literally had couples tell me, we have stayed up until three o’clock in the morning trying to resolve this because the Bible says.

You know, you can’t let the sun go down in your anger. And I’m like,  no one understands  things, see historical and cultural context  and things that are, are allegories and things that are poetry and, and,  okay, so first of all,  deep breath. Deep breath.  You can go to to sleep. People please feel comfortable.

Yes.  That’s not what that means first of all.  Second of all, we have scientific studies  that show us that sleep deprivation is the equivalent of being drunk on alcohol.  There is a reason that they use sleep deprivation as literal torture for prisoners of war. Okay.  It makes you dumb. It makes you do dumb things, and no one is making good decisions after midnight. 

So I think you need to have a rule in your marriage. Like you need to be able to recognize that, you know, whether it’s midnight, whether it’s 10:00 PM neither one of us says nice things after 10:00 PM so we’re just gonna, you know, if we’re in a conflict and 10:00 PM heads we’re done.

We’re tabling it for the next day,  you know, and that is healthy. And, and something else that, that women in my community are told is well, the Bible says  that wives need to submit to their husbands. And again, this is, you know, taking things out of its proper historical and cultural context, but that verse is weaponized against the women in my faith community because they’re meant. 

To believe that means they cannot express their opinions, that their husband gets the final say in any fights.  That they need to suppress their own, wants, desires, opinions  in favor of his.  But the Bible actually says, we are to be as iron sharpening iron. And if you think about the process of iron sharpening, iron, sparks fly.

It’s not a sweet and gentle and submissive process.  And, and also I like that you say iron. Iron sharpens iron means that both of you have to have the ability to stand up for the things that you believe in, and you know your opinions, your thoughts. Yes. Because if you’re a butter, then it’s not sharpening anybody, you know?

Yeah. It’s not, not helping anybody out if you don’t actually have you know, a backbone.   In a lot of situations, conflict is essential to growth. Conflict is the impetus for growth. And so  you have to stop being threatened by conflict in your marriage and realize that it’s an opportunity for growth, it’s an opportunity to know your spouse on a deeper level,  all of those things. 

So yeah, that was a lot.  This is, this is great. I think even though we’re just touching on them very lightly, and we can go into a whole episode just on each one,  there is something really powerful about just getting the sparks rolling so that you know, the wheels in your mind start to get more creative about where this can be tapped into.

 I was once in a class where the woman did a meditation  and midway through the meditation, one of the girls got up, went towards the bathroom and just fainted mid meditation. It was really weird. And then it turned out that whatever the thing was like, she ended up working with her and, and helping her through a bunch of like, you know, healing and things.

But like as a child, her parents never spoke to each other. They never fought, they never had conflict. They just parallel lived. ’cause she needed both parents to be, you know, there for her, quote unquote. So, oh, I can go into a whole rant about staying married for the kids’ sake. But anyway,  they were living in the same house, speaking to the child, but not directly to each other and never having conflict.

And that is probably the most damaging thing more than. Anything else because it means that there is no connection at all.  Right. But also, how do you expect your child to learn about conflict if they don’t see it modeled? Right. You know, it’s really funny, I saw my parents fighting all the time.  I’m the oldest, so I get a lot of like the, you know, the young young version of them.

Like my sisters grew up a little bit later. So we have different experiences, but I always thought it’s great that they always figured out how to like make it work. And,  and my brother was in the same exact fights ’cause we’re a year and a half apart. He, he would say, I don’t understand why you guys just don’t get divorced.

Like, why are you fighting all the time? And, and they would turn to him and say. It’s very healthy to fight, you know? And he’d be like, no, it’s not. This isn’t supposed to be this way. You know? So, so I, I heard over and over again, it’s healthy to fight. You just, you need to know how to fight. You need to know how to, you know, communicate right.

And whatever.  I, now that I’m an adult, I may not agree a hundred percent with the fact that it’s healthy to fight or you have to know how to fight. But you know, you need to know how to do conflict. ’cause it doesn’t have to get to a fight. It doesn’t have to get to a fight.  You can learn to make it, you know, unravel it respectfully without a fight.

Without a fight, but without at least fight. If that’s the only thing you have. Like fight it to the Yeah. To the,  to the time where it starts to get progress. ’cause that’s really fun.  Yes. Yeah. Yep. And that’s the thing is really making sure that that. The conflicts are productive. If you reach a point where it’s unproductive, stop, drop it.

You know, you can agree to come back to it later, but don’t  get on the merry-go-round of crazy and just write it until one of you passes out from exhaustion. Yeah, that’s not, that’s not healthy. You know, recently I told my husband. Something I was like really in a bad mood and I was telling him how I feel and whatever.

And then he was like trying to fix it. And I was like, I just need you to say some nice words because my love language is words. And he said something and I was like, no, that’s not good enough. He goes, you know what? I’m just gonna walk away and do my love language and then come back to this. And he went and made food because his love language is acts of service.

So it was a very good strategy. He communicated what he was doing. He’s like, I’m gonna pause this here. I’m gonna do the thing I actually know I do well and then I’m gonna come here and try again. But I don’t think I can right now push myself to use Chinese when it’s not coming out. You know? There’s like a language barrier that I’m expecting From him, something he’s not comfortable doing when he can really very easily go and do something loving in a different way.

So by the time there was food and it was Ready and you know I had taken a nap. I came outta my Nap. I’m in much better shape. I’m in much better mood. My husband made food. We’re all like, life has just become so much better. And the, the, the way he said that, I’m going to love you and the way I know how, and then we’ll come back to, this was such a great illustration of the five love languages, of just the understanding of what comes naturally to us versus what is hard for us to do.

And sometimes we expect things that aren’t at the right time or in the right mind space and, and then it doesn’t come out the right way and then we get upset, whatever. So the, it’s a real skill to be able to walk away from a conflict just as much as it is a skill to unravel a conflict itself.  Yeah. And I also think that there’s a very important lesson there for husbands that if your husband doesn’t know what to do or why you’re upset or whatever, he to just tell you to take a nap and make your food. And that will go a long way to fixing whatever the problem is. Because I see a lot of husbands that are like, I don’t know what she wants from me, A nap and food. Really? Honestly, that it’s just a nap food. Tell me. I’m pretty, that’s  really, it’s, it’s really is that simple sometimes.

So ladies,  tell your husband that the two marriage experts say, just give me a nap in food and tell me I’m pretty,  there you go.  All if you heard this podcast, just so you can know this is all you need. No. Sometimes, sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes he needs to go take a nap and I need to go do something that yes.

Gets me outta my,  my, you know, get some, some movement going. So yeah. Let’s go through them. There was one question about spiritual connection. Yes. Which I felt needed to be addressed, which is what to do when  you’re not on the same page spiritually. And this comes up a lot. So you said you work with the Christians.

I, I’m Jewish and I work a lot with Jews. Some Christians, some non-affiliated, God centered people. Women. I only work with women,  but really a big thing that comes up is I’m more religious than my husband, or I’m more spiritual than my husband. I have a better connection than he does, and I want to, you know, pull him along, help him or whatever it is, like sort of nudge that he should move up in his spiritual experience. 

Sometimes the belief that it has to be even like we both have to be on the same page spiritually  is something that is really not true and causes a lot of problems. A lot of problems. I find that  one of the biggest things is he’s not as committed as me. He’s not as religious as me, he’s not as observant as me, he’s not as spiritual as me.

That’s a big deal.  And I think that that sort of attitude is unfair to him.  I also see a lot of that sort of in my work, especially because of here.  Messed up. But it  just, we, we just need to, I just need to stop there. I think that’s unfair to him because can you imagine  if the closest person in your life kept telling you, you’re not good enough, you’re not doing enough, you’re not this enough. 

You would be offended.  You would be offended.  And so it’s unfair to him, you, there are ways that we can share a spiritual intimacy that don’t involve trying to change our husbands. You know, it can be as simple as, oh, hey you know, I read this verse today, I really loved it. Or it could be you know, one of the things that we do is we pray with our son before bedtime.

Like.  That has nothing to do with like how good a Christian we are, you know, for my husband or I, it’s, we are sharing our faith with our child. You know, or it could be,  and it does, we, it doesn’t have to fit the, the strict definition of spirituality or religion or faith or whatever. It could be you guys volunteering as a couple for some, like at the animal shelter or something, you know, because that, for you could be a spiritual practice of  I am volunteering my time as, you know, a way to honor God with my faith. But  he doesn’t have to have that same motivation, right? He’d be doing a good thing because he wants to go play with puppies. You know, you know also when you were talking about the sunset. Just being in, in, in that moment of awe is enough. Sometimes we, yeah, we make it about the observance or the religiosity of a person, you know, and in reality it’s so not about that.

And yeah, when we  really strip all the external,  blah blah from, from the spiritual connection, really there’s something really  plain and pure in that.  And,  and I’m a verbal processor, so as I’m processing all of this, it occurs to me that when you are, in a way, it could be sort of weaponizing the intimacies and saying, well, he’s not spiritual enough, he’s not religious enough, or whatever.

And that is undermining the goal.  Because the goal is intimacy. And when you break intimacy down, like the word itself, it’s into me, you see?  And so it’s not about the for, for spiritual intimacy. It’s not about the the, you know, is he good enough?  It’s about seeing his deepest self in this framework of spirituality  and not trying to change him.

He not trying to change his deepest self, but seeing his deepest self and honoring that for who he is in this moment. Because would you want someone looking at your deepest, most vulnerable self in your spirituality and saying, you don’t measure up?  No, that’s not intimacy, that’s judgment and condemnation.

And so to frame it as well, he’s not enough.   That defeats the whole purpose of.  The intimacy.  It’s the holding,  I hate to use the term, holding the space for him to  such a bad internet meme right now. For, for him  to be  who he is spiritually  and honoring that.  I’m so glad we brought this up.

And you know, even though we went over time, it was so worth everything we said until this point  into me, you see,  because it’s really about being and the ability to contain the other person where they are  without judgment, without trying to change them, without trying to make them who they’re not, without thinking that you are any better

 just being, you know, and the oneness  and the connection that happens when you’re able to do that. And, you know, when I think of it,  there’s always going to be a weaker one, right? There is no way, no way that we are exactly on the line in the, you know, same place. And also, you know, back to the seasons of life, there are times when you’re more connected and times when you’re less connected.

So to judge someone on their less connected times is really not fair because all of us go through those ups and downs in the connection that we experience with God. So  all of all of what we said just sort of became so  perfect, right in this moment, you know, where we’re talking about different ways to connect, different ways to be. 

The importance of getting creative and trying different ways to connect and different angles to try so that you don’t put all the weight on one way. And if it’s not working, then it must be broken and now there’s a problem and blah, blah, blah. And really just pausing and being able to there. So grateful that you’re here. 

Thank you so much for having me. This has just been amazing. Tell everybody where they can find you and get all your amazing stuff.  Yeah. My website is thechristiansexpert.com, and you can find all of my products on my website and that has the link to all of my socials as well  awesome. Thank you for coming and thank you all. Thank you for having me.  This was such a fun conversation. I did not expect it to go this direction, but I also think it went exactly as it needed to be and everything is exact. So thank you, God. And thank you for the listeners for listening to the end and come back for more amazing episodes next week.

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Can you share it with them?  I am Robinson Bat chen Grossman from  connectedforreal. com. Thank you so much for listening and don’t forget you can be connected for real.