Connection central: How to get intimacy back into your marriage

I've been married some years. It is normal for intimacy to diminish?-Niharika, 40, MUMBAI

A few years ago, I asked a couple who'd been married about 8 years how the intimacy in their marriage was. They looked bemusedly at me and each other, giggled a bit, shrugged their shoulders and the husband gruffly responded on behalf of both them, "About once or twice a week".

Unfortunately, this is a telling sign that we view intimacy primarily in terms of sexual closeness. We rarely think of emotional closeness as being related to intimacy and have never valued it enough to give it centre space in our minds, preferring instead to think of intimacy as something that should be experienced and expressed only in the privacy of bedrooms, not living rooms

Which therefore means that our assessments of intimacy in the marriage are subject to the vagaries of our libidos. And since our sex drives vary quite considerably, we end up feeling that we're not as close to our partners as we believe we should be. And the marital bond takes one more hit, and more distance starts creeping up between the partners. By bond, I refer to the bond of closeness, connectedness and companionship that binds two people together. Or put differently, the bond of intimacy.

The way I see it, intimacy is a special, private, and exclusive bond connecting two people-in a marriage which is built around passion; both sexual and emotional; friendship; mutual comfort; memories of shared journeys, both geographical and emotional; intellectual mutuality; some shared interests; tactile comfort with each other; and a unique sense of trust brought about by the realization that each is equally dependent on and vulnerable to the other. Intimacy is really a special feeling of closeness that can be experienced even when the spouse is not physically present; a feeling that gives one a sense of completeness, even as one appreciates that one's life is not centred around that of the spouse; a feeling that the presence of the spouse does make life feel better, even if one's spouse is sometimes maddening to live with; a feeling of inter-dependence.

Obviously for intimacy to be experienced, both partners need to be able to tune in to each other and understand the signals that each is sending to the other. While merely spending time together does not create intimacy, the growth of intimacy does need time spent together. Time spent in talking, sharing, discussing feelings thoughts and ideas, engaging in fun activities, indulging in some horseplay with each other, enjoying companionable silences, paying attention to each others' interests, and creating a space that each knows is sacrosanct, inviolable, and inaccessible to anyone other than the two partners.

Intimacy can be experienced by couples regardless of whether they chose their own partners or had their spouses chosen for them. All they need to do is to create an ambience that can facilitate intimacy by ensuring that they carve out time and space to have periodic 'date nights', take short vacations without the kids or other family members, listen to each other uncritically, not be judgemental of each other, find ways to express negative thoughts and feelings without hurting each other and most important, unabashedly express their love and affection for each other in thought, word and deed. And if we do all of these, we give ourselves the opportunity to enjoy the experience of intimacy much more often than once or twice a week.