Lina and Ross have been married for five years and their married life became very boring as they stuck in their busy schedules. One day while watching their old honeymoon album, Lina felt although they shared a bed but they didn’t share a romantic relationship like they used to share before.
To reignite their romantic life, Lina decided to plan a candlelight dinner in Ross’s favorite restaurant and tried to fill the night with effective communication, deep conversation, and laughter. After that evening, both Lina and Ross decided to keep a separate schedule for conversation with each other where they could discuss their feelings, goals, and plans.
That small yet intentional effort taken by Lina transformed their boring marriage life into a romantic life where they laughed more, argued less, and felt a deeper connection with each other. That candlelight dinner was the point when Lina and Ross again fell in love with each other which was missing due to their busy work schedule.
The story of Ross and Lina shows that with honest and planned actions, you can easily transform your boring marriage life into a romantic life with more intimacy. To make it happen you only need to be a little more intentional in your relationship to make it stronger.
What is “Being Intentional in a Relationship”?
Being intentional in a relationship indicates putting in some serious and honest efforts to nurture and strengthen your existing relationship with your partner. It embodies efforts such as effective communication, spending quality time together, and also appreciating each other’s efforts toward the relationship with kindness.
Intentional relationship demands prioritizing your relationship and shared growth over your individual growth and goals. In an intentional relationship, both partners must ensure that they feel valued, understood, and mentally, physically, or financially supported.
This approach helps to create stronger and deeper emotional bonds between partners alongside enhanced trust, and intimacy and fosters a long-lasting relationship.
Key Aspects of Intentional Relationship:
There are 5 key aspects of an intentional relationship that boost your relationship strength to many folds.
Communication:
Effective communication is the key to any strong and intentional relationship. If you are an active listener and validate their feelings without any interruptions, your partner can share more stories, secrets, and feelings with you.
Additionally, share your thoughts, feelings, and goals with your partner freely and ensure both of you are on the same page. It will help you to address the real problems easily and prevent them sustainably and constructively.
Spending Quality time:
Spending quality time together without any distractions and focusing only on the relationship is another key aspect of intentional love.
Schedule dates and engage in fun activities that both partners can participate in, enjoy, and create some wonderful memories. It is very important to be intentional in a relationship.
Showing Kindness:
Showing kindness and performing small gestures such as leaving notes, giving compliments, and cooking for her will make your wife feel special.
Regularly appreciating your partner for their efforts while maintaining the family or relationship and supporting him/her during difficult times are other signs of an intentional relationship.
Creating Mutual Goals:
Partners must discuss their future aspirations and goals as well as their individual aims and ensure both parties work toward the shared goals.
Collaborate with your partner on various projects and challenges to smell the sense of partnership and romanticism. Evaluate mutual progress and also be flexible to support each other’s growth.
Mutual Respect:
Partners must have mutual respect and understanding for each other as it improves the sincerity in love. Without mutual respect, your intention toward the relationship cannot be honest.
Respect must be embodied by proper understanding, care, and appreciation. Respect between partners is very essential to turn your boring relationship into a dream relationship.
What Should be Your Intention in a Relationship?
Your intention must be clear and honest in any relationship to maintain the trust. Here are some examples of how your intention must be in a healthy relationship:
Mutual Respect:
No relationship can survive without mutual respect. Hence, you must do activities that will boost mutual respect such as recognizing and accepting your partner’s personal space, opinions, goals, and boundaries. Treat each other equally and ensure both partners have an equal voice in the relationship.
Build Transparency:
Be open and honest with your partner and share your feelings and thoughts freely to build trust and transparency in your relationship.
Fulfill what you have promised, show your commitment to the relationship, and increase your reliability to your partner.
Promote Emotional Intimacy:
Try to connect with your partner at an emotional level and understand his/her fears, dreams, desires, and insecurity. Your intention should focus more on boosting emotional intimacy than physical intimacy.
Emotional intimacy can bring back romanticism again in a boring life if both partners can connect at a similar level of emotions. Having emotional intimacy also brings adventure to your romantic life.
Create a supportive environment:
Support each other to pursue their individual goals and dreams. Also offer him/her your cheer, support, and motivation to ensure your partner never feels lonely or hopeless.
Regularly express your affirmation and appreciation to your partner to show him/her how valuable he/she is to you. If both partners are happy, it’ll bring positivity and intimacy to your love life.
Maintain Fun and Adventure:
It is advised to keep your relationship exciting and full of fun by trying new experiences together. Sometimes, you can try childish activities but if it makes your partner smile, you are welcome to do it.
Prioritize creating joyful moments with your partner rather than arguments so you can remember them later and smile.
Having such wonderful experiences together also helps build trust and know each other better as partners experience a new version of you free from any fear, judgment, and stress.
Constructive Conflict Resolution:
Being a partner, your intention must be to solve problems peacefully rather than creating chaos. Address problems and issues through communication and try to solve them constructively so both partners receive the benefits.
No one is perfect and try to forgive him/her for small mistakes. Show your partner the mistakes he/she has made and come to a mutual agreement to prevent such mistakes in the future.
Importance and Benefits of an Intentional Relationship:
There are several benefits of having an intentional relationship in your life. From giving emotional security to bringing fun and joy into your boring life are the results of having an intentional relationship.
Ensure Deep Connection:
Intentional actions in a romantic relationship usually foster a deep emotional connection between partners where both of them feel valued and appreciated.
Boost Trust:
If a couple has trust issues in their relationship, they must try to increase intentionality in their relationship. Intentionality will boost trust and reliability between partners and eventually, they’ll be emotionally intimate.
Enhance Satisfaction:
Study shows that partners who prioritize intentionality in their relationship tend to be happier and perform better in the workplace.
Encourage Growth:
An intentional relationship promotes the growth of both partners individually as well as also fosters their mutual growth as a couple. A peaceful mind and a healthy relationship are essential to maintaining growth in your personal and professional life.
Reduce Conflicts:
Intentional relationships enhance trust, reliability, and affection between partners. As a result misunderstandings and conflicts are often resolved even before they begin to escalate.
7 Proven techniques for being more intentional in a relationship:
There are many ways you can become more intentional in your precious relationship with your partner. Here are 7 proven techniques you can use to be more intentional in your relationship.
Schedule Regular Meetings:
Schedule regular meetings, and set time aside for your partner to discuss and share each other’s feelings, thoughts, and concerns.
While communicating with your partner, be open, frank, and honest with him/her and ensure problems are addressed and resolved constructively so that both partners feel a win-win situation.
Arrange Date Nights:
Plan and arrange date nights every two weeks or a month to ensure you and your partner spend quality time together despite having enormous work pressure in your everyday schedule.
Sudden dating ideas can be very exciting and interesting. Try new restaurants and dishes with your partner, go to live concerts, or spend time in late-night movie theaters can be good ideas to make your date night unique.
Show Gratitude:
Try to show gratitude more often to your partner for the effort he/she made for you and your relationship. This may seem unnecessary to you, but such little acknowledgment by you can make your partner happy and confident.
If you are too shy to express your gratitude, leave a small note for your partner or send him/her a romantic message during your work.
Your little appreciation can brighten up your partner’s day because your acknowledgment matters a lot to your partner.
Learn Each Other’s Preference:
In a healthy and long-lasting relationship, it is very important to discover each other’s preferences and love languages, such as their words of affirmation and denial, acts of service, which gifts he/she loves, the meaning of their physical touches, etc
Focus on showing love language in which your partner feels comfortable resonates most. It’ll increase your chance of being loved and appreciated even more. As the relationship evolves, continuously try to adapt each other’s love language to make the bond stronger.
Practice Forgiveness:
Remember, no one is perfect and hence you and your partner both can commit mistakes in the relationship. Whenever issues arise, address them quickly and immediately try to resolve them rather than waiting for resentment.
Try to be optimistic and focus on the positive aspects of your relationship. Forgive your partner’s past mistakes and move forward.
Forgiveness often works as the foundation of a healthy relationship as it indicates you are more interested in building a strong relationship for the future rather than focusing on the past.
Review Mutual Goals together:
As a couple, you and your partner need to set up some mutual goals such as saving money for a vacation, buying a home or car, marrying each other, etc.
Periodically review and adjust the mutual goals after discussing them with your partner. Ensure these goals don’t hinder you and your partner’s individual growth or success.
Celebrate milestones or achievements together and show your partner how happy you are for his/her success. These little actions will build a sense of trust and security in your partner’s heart.
Show Support:
In a relationship, both partners need to show support for each other’s aims, aspirations, and pleasure. Sometimes your partner’s hobbies, interests, or opinions may not aligned with your personal choice, but you mustn’t prevent your partner from pursuing their hobbies or sharing their opinions.
Try to adopt new activities or challenges that both partners can relate to and enjoy together such as fitness goals, yoga, or learning new crafts or languages.
There is a big chance you are aware of all of the above-written tips but you weren’t interested in trying these little actions or efforts till now. Once you try these little steps in your relationship, you’ll definitely feel how they strengthen and enrich your partnership over time.
7 Practical tips to be intentional in a long-distance relationship:
Many couples struggle to maintain their long-distance relationship due to improper knowledge and experience. But a long-distance relationship can be as exciting and interesting as a normal relationship if you know how to maintain it.
Long-distance relationships often struggle through some unique challenges but they have a success rate of approximately 60% which is not as bad as you imagine. If you can make your long-distance relationship exciting, it can be more adventurous than a normal relationship. Here are 7 practical tips to make your long-distance relationship exciting and better:
Regular Communication:
Schedule regular communication with your long-distance partner and keep some time aside regularly for him/her. Be updated and connected with your partner always to show you care for him/her.
Use different types of communication such as video calls, emails, phone calls, texts, or even send him/her letters to make your communication style unique. Focus more on effective and meaningful heart-to-heart communication rather than arguments.
Plan Surprise Visits:
Plan surprise visits to your partner to give your relationship more excitement. Celebrate special events like birthdays, achievements, and anniversaries with your partner.
You can also try virtual dating using a green screen, it’ll be something unique and interesting for your partner. But remember such visits should be short, don’t treat them like vacations, or negative consequences may arise.
Be Active Listener:
When your partner speaks, listen to him/her carefully and without interrupting. An open and honest expression of feelings will enhance understanding between partners.
Regularly engaging in activities where partners listen to each other’s hearts out, will also boost empathy, emotional intimacy, and reliability.
When your partner feels heard and understood, he/she will be more comfortable sharing more secrets with you despite having a long-distance relationship with you and your partner.
Don’t Doubt:
One of the biggest problems in a long-distance relationship is partner’s doubt each other over small issues. Be positive in your relationship and focus on strengthening it rather than creating issues.
It is essential to build trust and honest intention in a long-distance relationship, otherwise, that relationship will fall like a house of cards. If you don’t have enough proof against your partner, avoid creating issues just based on assumptions.
Share Similar Hobbies:
Both partners can start to pursue similar hobbies to push your relationships such as baking cakes, yoga, fitness, or listening to songs together. Similar hobbies often help partners to match each other’s wavelength and understand better from each other’s point of view.
Additionally, sharing similar hobbies will also help partners to understand each other potential better. A better understanding of a long-distance relationship helps in boosting trust between partners which results in fewer conflicts.
Play Question and Answer Games:
Long-distance relationships often start from social media and partners don’t get enough opportunity to know each other better. Also, there are plenty of questions that one partner wants to know but hesitates to ask.
To avoid such hesitation, play question-answer games and ask any questions that you want to know as a part of the game. Such games on the one hand prevent misunderstanding and conflicts, and on the other hand, help the partners to know another partner better.
Show Your Support:
There will be multiple instances you’ll find your partner feels low and depressed over many personal or professional issues.
Do something that makes him/her feel confident and better and also encourage your partner to overcome such a difficult situation.
If necessary, support your partner mentally, physically, and even financially to fight against difficulties. Your support and care for your partner will definitely boost the romanticism between you and your partner.
Long distance relationship is similar to any other relationship where both partners cannot see each other often. If you try to make your long-distance relationship exciting and adventurous, it’ll also increase intentionality in that long-distance relationship without any question.
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