Is flexibility in your relationship hindering your ability to be intimate?
Flexibility vs closeness in relationships
First, let me say that there are plenty of ways to have intimacy in relationships that are not just about sex. When I say flexibility could be hindering your ability to be intimate with your partner, I mean emotional intimacy, intellectual intimacy, experiential, spiritual, and even creative intimacy.
Basically, “intimacies” are the different ways we get our needs met in a relationship (but that’s a different topic entirely).
Today, we’ll focus on flexibility in relationships. This can come up in ways of being overly flexible where you might have little to no opinion on what to do for dinner with your partner. Or it might look like being super inflexible and only wanting what you want, without consideration of the other person. Being somewhere in the middle can possibly look like considering the other person and having an opinion about what you’re wanting as well.
If you are too flexible, it can cause resentment and/or not feeling valued within your relationship. If you are less flexible, it can bring up feelings in the other person of not feeling seen, heard, or understood.
Not being flexible at all and being super rigid can cause stress of feeling in lack of choice or freedom for yourself.
All of this can impact the closeness or intimacy of a relationship.
The other part of this is looking at how flexibility matches up. Say one person is overly flexible and the other person is more rigid or inflexible. What do you think that will do to the relationship?
Perhaps, the partner who has more flexibility will continue on but feel like their needs are not being met, unsure why that is happening, while the other partner who is more rigid in flexibility could get frustrated with being the one to make all the decisions or be happy to be in the driver seat most of the time. Either way, it creates a distance where decisions are not being made as a team. It’s more one sided, right?
Another scenario could be where both people in the relationship are highly flexible. Can you imagine what it’s like to decide “what to do for dinner” in that relationship? Hah!
Jokes aside, it might bring up some frustration or confusion for both people as neither of them can make a decision leaving one or both without their needs met.
The key to all of this is identifying where you land on this spectrum of flexibility vs closeness (intimacy) and to communicate how it effects your relationship with one another. This is something I do with couples in my work as a therapist and relationship coach. Couples take an assessment and receive feedback sessions about where they land on the graph and given tools on how to talk about their needs and wants.
You don’t necessarily need an assessment to tell you where you land. Try having a conversation with your partner about this and see what comes up. Here are some examples of questions you could ask your partner to get the conversation going:
Who do you think is most flexible between you and me?
Do you find it frustrating when you or I can’t make a decision?
Is it easy for you to make decisions?
Do you like making decisions?
I have a strong opinion on ______ but not other things. What is something you have a strong opinion about?
