Marriage and Intimacy Tips for Christian Couples: Secrets of Happily Ever After

Understanding Intimacy Death Traps that Drain Your Marriage

• Monica Tanner • Season 3 • Episode 270

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As a seasoned relationship coach and intimacy expert, I've seen firsthand how easily couples can fall into intimacy death traps, letting the initial spark of their relationship dim. But fear not! I'm here to arm you with the knowledge to identify these traps and the strategies to avoid them. 

This week's episode is for anyone hoping to breathe new life into their intimate relationship. I invite you to reflect and engage with me by sharing your experiences and challenges. 

Your stories and feedback are the heart of our community, and together, we'll overcome the traps that keep couples trapped for decades. So, if you're ready to transform your marriage from mediocre to extraordinary, tune in and let's start crafting your love story with the skill and intention it deserves. 

For ongoing support in how to sidestep these intimacy death traps, be sure to check out the Passionate Marriage Club here --> https://monicatanner.com/club

Speaker 1:

If you're thinking that maybe you've reached a point in your marriage where you're like, ah, things are okay, but I feel like they could be better. I feel like we're missing something, you're probably right and I want you to know that nothing has gone wrong. Have you ever wondered what makes the difference between those couples who absolutely love to be together and the ones who merely tolerate each other in their old age? Hi, I'm Monica Tanner, wife to a super hunky man, mom to four kids, relationship coach and intimacy expert. My goal with this podcast is to help you and your partner swap resentment for romance, escape the roommate rut and nurture a bond built on trust, communication and unconditional love. Each week, I'm sharing the secret strategies that keep couples madly in love, dedicated and downright giddy about each other, from the honeymoon phase to the golden years. I'm on a mission to craft the code of happily ever after, and I'm sharing those juicy secrets right here, because an awesome marriage makes life so much sweeter. Let's get to it. Hello and welcome to the secrets of happily ever after podcast. I'm your host, monica Tanner, and I want to dig into a topic today that I have found as I have been coaching clients and reading your messages, either by email or on messenger, of the challenges that you guys are facing and things that are keeping you stuck. I've noticed that many of the pitfalls and challenges stem from one of three scenarios, which I've lovingly dubbed as intimacy death traps. As I've gone over years of working with different clients, who all present with different presenting problems or are reaching out to me about something, I've noticed that they seem to all fall into one of these three categories. So today I want to address these three intimacy death traps as I see them and kind of set us up to talk about my five step framework for breaking out of these intimacy death traps. Now I want to keep this episode short, so today I'm going to talk about the three intimacy death traps and then next week I'll give you this five step framework for how to get out of them or how to start dealing with them. So I feel like it's important to kind of know what you're up against. If you're thinking that maybe you've reached a point in your marriage where you're like, ah, things are okay, but I feel like they could be better, I feel like we're missing something, you're probably right and I want you to know that nothing has gone wrong. So this is a perfectly natural part of any long term committed relationship, and so it's important to kind of acknowledge and see what might be causing these feelings. So I wanna set it up by just saying that no matter how long you've been married, whether it's just for a few days or a few years or even a few decades, at some point every single one of you met and fell in love and decided to spend your lives together, and in that beginning stages of your relationship you probably thought what could go wrong.

Speaker 1:

I'm madly in love with this person and you probably felt some sense that as long as you loved each other fiercely, nothing would ever stand in the way. But maybe you experienced after the idaeus that life started to happen and this perfect specimen that you married all of a sudden became extremely human. Like you started to notice their flaws, maybe some gross habits and all kinds of weaknesses that perfect happily ever after got a little bit clouded. So I wanna talk about these death traps where passion, intimacy and romance go to die, because I want you to know what you're up against. It takes effort and intention I'm saying this all the time to create a really great marriage. Now you might have a cordial marriage or a mediocre marriage or a tolerable marriage by accident, but a great marriage takes intention and effort. So if you're experiencing any of the things I'm about to talk about again, I want to ensure you that nothing has gone wrong. This is the only way to get where you wanna go. You have to go through these challenges together in order to create the type of intimacy, passion and connection that we all long for, and we're not taught these skills anywhere else. But a great relationship is just a set of skills. No one is born with the ability to be in a good relationship or not. You're not predestined to have a great relationship. We just either decide to learn the skills and apply them or we don't. It's that simple. So the first intimacy death trap that I want to address is unrealistic expectations.

Speaker 1:

So when I first got married, I had all kinds of crazy ideas about how I needed to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect entrepreneur and the perfect housekeeper. It all stems back to when I was growing up and I saw my parents divorce and my grandparents divorce, and a lot of my friends parents were divorced as well, and so when I first got married, while I wanted it to last forever. I kind of had one foot in my marriage and one foot out the door because I thought that if I wasn't perfect then my husband would probably leave me. It was a horrible thought to have, but it haunted me for the first several years of my marriage. Now, about seven years in, with three very small children, a growing business and a house to maintain, I was exhausted, overwhelmed and far from perfect at anything. There was very little room for intimacy because I had completely unrealistic expectations of how I should be managing this. My husband should be showing up for me and what a good marriage actually should look like. So here's what I eventually learned Almost every single incidence of divorce can be traced back to unrealistic and unmet expectations.

Speaker 1:

It's waking up and realizing this is not what I thought it would be and then not getting the support you need to fix it. In my situation specifically, I was so ashamed of these feelings that I had that my marriage wasn't perfect that I didn't ask for help and support for so long. The good news is that if you're listening to this podcast, I assume you are looking for solutions, support and the skills necessary to fix it. But the first step is acknowledging and recognizing what your unrealistic expectations are and where they came from. So here's a tip Anytime you're thinking in shoulds, woulds or coulds like my spouse should be doing this If only we could manage this, or the perfect scenario would look like this then you're probably dealing with an expectation. So your work this week, before I give you that five step framework to break free from these intimacy death traps is to recognize what are those unrealistic and unmet expectations that are keeping you stuck and miserable right now. I want you to keep a running list and then I'm going to tell you how to fix it next week. Alright, so that's intimacy death trap number one unrealistic expectations. Have you taken the intimacy level quiz yet? If not, you absolutely should. All you have to do is go to monocatannercom backslash quiz and take a three minute quiz. At the end I'll tell you what level of intimacy you and your spouse are at and I'll give you next steps to be able to increase your intimacy. Regardless of what level you're at, you can always make improvements. So do yourself a favor and go to monocatannercom backslash quiz and learn about your level of intimacy and how to improve it.

Speaker 1:

Number two is what I like to call a B state fortress. Now when I say B, I mean those little insects with stingers that buzz around. I had seen a lot of divorces in my life so I was pretty skeptical about the idea of this whole marriage thing really working out for me. Of course I wanted to have a happy marriage that lasted forever, but I had never seen it done very well or very often, so I had a hard time letting my guard down and creating intimacy with my husband. It was hard on both of us, but I had built up this fortress around me so that I wouldn't get hurt.

Speaker 1:

The reason I call it a B state fortress is because when my husband and I were getting married, my dad, who is a therapist who sees a lot of married couples come and go out of his office, warned my husband that I had bees that would eventually sting him. That was the exact language that he used. He said watch out for her bees, they will sting you. Thanks for that, dad Right, I was super offended.

Speaker 1:

But the reality is is we all have bees from our childhood and past relationships that can come out and sting our spouses and us if we don't learn to identify and put those bees to rest. So many of us build up walls to keep our bees from stinging others and many of us have walls around us to keep other people's bees from stinging us. Either way, intimacy can only be present when those walls start to come down appropriately Not with everyone, but with an intimate partner. It is essential that these walls, or B state fortresses as I call them, also known as boundaries, are appropriately applied. Sometimes they need to come down, sometimes they need some strengthening and, like everything else, it is a skill set to use boundaries appropriately, and it often helps to have a neutral third party who can see what you can't see most of the time, help you identify those bees and create appropriate boundaries and teach you the skills necessary to keep both the bees and the boundaries from destroying your relationship. So just a side note about boundaries, which I'm calling B-state fortresses here, those boundaries that are thick, but the way I like to describe boundaries is like you think of an orange. We have protective boundaries, which is like the orange rind around the orange that keeps things from coming in. Then there's the white part, which is a containing boundary that keeps our juices from flowing out onto everyone else. So boundary work is kind of complex but really, really crucial. When you're talking about creating intimacy with your romantic partner, it's important to understand your boundaries both the protective and containing boundaries and how they both facilitate and hinder the intimacy you're creating with your partner.

Speaker 1:

Last but not least, the third intimacy death trap I see most commonly is complacency and avoidance. So once we've been married for a longer period of time, we start to get comfortable with each other. We think we know everything there is to know about each other. We start to get bored and we stop making meaningful efforts to connect with each other. Sometimes there's been breaches of trust or resentment building and we decide it's easier just to avoid those tough conversations rather than use them to get closer to one another. This is what I like to call roommate syndrome or resentment, both of which is where intimacy goes to die.

Speaker 1:

Now, I was thinking about this idea of complacency and avoidance, and I was thinking about my husband and I's relationship, and one of the things I value most about what we've created together is this idea that we're constantly challenging each other, that we're always asking for more of what we want, which you can review, that how to ask for and how to ask for more of what you want, in a way that you're most likely to get it in episode 252. But I really value that. We're both constantly looking to be better ourselves so that we can be better for and with each other. And this means a commitment to having those tough conversations, to leaning in when something feels off or not right or not as good as it could be. And the way I like to think about this is when you think about your children.

Speaker 1:

Do you want your children to be in a relationship like that of you and your spouses? So if your immediate answer is absolutely, I want my children to be in a relationship exactly like the one that I'm in, then you're probably on the right track. That doesn't mean you don't have room to improve, but that's a good thing. Now, if any part of you is thinking, no, I want my children to have a relationship that's way better than what I'm experiencing right now with my spouse, then that's a good thing to recognize as well. It means that you've got some work to do and the only way to create something better is to recognize that you probably have gotten complacent or you're avoiding some tough conversations and you just need to A gain the skillsets to be able to have those conversations well and B the courage to start asking for and fighting for what you really want, what you want and what you wanna pass down to your children.

Speaker 1:

So that is my three intimacy death traps. Number one unrealistic and unmet expectations. Number two boundaries or B-state fortresses. And number three complacency and avoidance.

Speaker 1:

So my challenge to you this week is to think about which of the three you may be experiencing or resonate with most. I guarantee over the lifetime of your relationship you are going to encounter one, two or all three of these intimacy death traps, and it's by acknowledging them and working through them that you will create the type of connection, intimacy and passion that we long for. So I don't want you to shy away from them. I want you to recognize what they are. And then I want you to join us next week, same time, same place, where I'm going to give you my five step framework to address and overcome all three of these intimacy death traps.

Speaker 1:

And after you've listened to this episode, I would love for you to jump on social media or send me an email at monie, at secrets of happily ever after, and let me know which one, two or three intimacy death traps you resonate most.

Speaker 1:

I promise to read every single message or every single email that comes my way and to respond with something helpful. So thank you, guys, so much for spending this time with me, and I hope that you will take a real and honest look at your relationship and which intimacy death trap or traps you're most likely falling into, and I will see you next week. Same time, same place and, until then, happy marriage. If you had as much fun as we did just now, I hope that you'll head over to your favorite podcast player and leave a rating and review for the show or share it on social media. That's how other people can find this awesome content and we can spread the message that happily ever after is possible. Feel free to check out my website, monicotannercom, to find out more ways you can work with me and, as always, thank you so much for spending this time with me. I'll see you next week.