Work on a Project together in your Marriage

Ahh, fond memories of building the wall in our kitchen – it also helped us build intimacy with one another… Enjoy another post from the Marry Blogger archives!

Build a Wall together and build intimacy

My Beautiful Wife™ and I built a wall.

It was pretty amazing.

Not the wall, the experience.

What you should 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.

What we are is lucky to fix anything — let alone build a wall in our house.

Yet, she needed an office, and wanted 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 soon-to-be wall.

I have to give her props. She sketched out the plans, drew it all out on a napkin and went to Home Depot. She told the guy in the orange apron that she was going to build a wall. He drew more sketches for and pointed her toward the supplies we needed.

The project was ON.

It took the 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 just stop and enjoy 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.

Building Intimacy

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 Intimacy 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 assumed intimacy was just 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’s much more to it.

Find a project to work on together

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 the 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.

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.)

If you would like to read the book on Intimacy by Howard and Charlotte Clinebell, you can find it here: The Intimate Marriage online. I am looking forward to giving it a read.