Building a Wall, Building Intimacy

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My Beautiful Wife™ and I built a wall.

It was pretty amazing.

Not the wall, the experience.

What you have to know is that neither one of us are renovation ‘gurus’.

Guru would be the complete opposite of what we are when it comes to renovation.

We are lucky to fix anything, let alone build a wall in our house.

Yet, she needed an office, and desired a laundry room. So, since we had some extra space at the end of our kitchen where our laundry ‘closet’ was, we decided that was the place for our fabulous wall.

I have to give her props. She set the whole thing up, drew it all out and even went to Home Depot and told the guy that she was going to build a wall. He drew sketches for her and told her the supplies we needed.

The project was O-N.

We took a weekend to get the frame up. I was so excited that we actually cut wood, made it stand up, and framed out the wall, I didn’t want to go any further, I thought we should have just stopped and enjoyed our framed out wall.

Yeah, that didn’t fly. So we added sheet rock and drywall mud…. We even painted the thing so it matches our kitchen.

A Big WOO HOO! for us.

How can building a wall help your marriage?

Good question. Glad you asked.

While I was reading “God Knows Marriage Isn’t Always Easy” by Maureen and Lanny Law, There was a section on intimacy in marriage that really made me think.

In a quote by Charlotte and Howard Clinebell, they suggested that there were several layers and different kinds of intimacy.

Here are the types of I-N-T-I-M-A-C-Y they suggested:

Emotional: Sharing of significant meanings and feelings with one another

Intellectual: Sharing of ideas with one another

Aesthetic: Sharing of deep beauty like movies, plays, music, concerts, sunsets, etc

Creative: Shared creativity – working on a common goal to see it come to fruition

Recreational: Sharing “Stress relieving play” – walking, biking, working out…

Work: Sharing common tasks – maintaining a house, raising a family together, earning a living, or community projects

Spiritual: Sharing a common relationship with God

In my lack of knowledge, I always just assumed intimacy meant getting to, or having the S-E-X.

There is so much more to intimacy than just S-E-X. Sure, a good roll in the hay is intimate, and done right, builds intimacy; but there is much more to it.

Build a wall, build intimacy in your marriage

Looking at our wall building experience, I realized that we shared several types of intimacy during this project: Intellectual, Creative, Work, and Aesthetic (if you believe a wall is something of deep beauty – and in our case it was, because we didn’t think we could do it!!)

It seems that this experience helped our intimacy within our marriage on several levels… we were working together, solving a problem, creating something from nothing, and building it for the future of our work and family.

I never thought that building a wall with my Beautiful Wife™ would grow us in our intimacy with one another, but it did.

Levels of intimacy, and ‘The Intimate Marriage’

It seems to me that many of these types of intimacy can overlap. Going for a walk can be recreational, and Aesthetic while allowing you to connect emotionally and intellectually.

(If you actually talk with one another on the walk.)

(P-L-E-A-S-E talk together while on the walk. This is the point.)

While looking back through my notes to write this post, I did some research on the Clinebells…(Howard and Charlotte, that is).

I found their book The Intimate Marriage online. I am looking forward to giving it a read.

What about you:

Question: How do you define intimacy in your marriage?

Question: What kinds of things do you do to grow your intimacy (other than S-E-X?)

!~I would love to hear your thoughts~!

Photo by muzicman82
Music from the Podsafe Music Network, from Boom Boom Beckett

Tagged as: intimacy in marriage, Marriage Advice, marriage tips, married life