Love is an Action: Building Connection with Intention

This is episode is all about how love is more than a feeling and it requires intentional action.

Tune in to learn:

• Why the belief that love and relationships should just flow naturally is false,
• Some ideas for intentionally creating more love and connection, and
• Why even with this knowledge, you might feel some resistance with creating closeness.

Ready to take the next step in healing your relationship patterns?

• Book a Relationship Coaching Consultation

Transcript

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Life can sometimes feel like a lot, but you don't have to do it alone. I strongly believe that we're stronger together. Here we're gonna slow down, have real talks, make sense of things together, and explore ways to intentionally grow the life you want. We're going to talk about mental and physical health, relationships, money, work, and community. Welcome to Rooted in Intention with me, Garina Gomez. Hi, welcome back. In this episode, I'm gonna be diving into something a little bit more lighthearted to help you create more love and connection in your relationship because sometimes I think we tend to focus a lot more on the things that are going wrong. So I want to actually talk about something that focuses more on the positive this time around. I also want to note that I talk almost primarily about romantic relationships, but most, if not all, of the concepts that apply to romantic relationships also apply to other relationships in your life. So if you're working on decentering romantic relationships, or maybe you're simply looking to reinvigorate your friendships and your relationships with family members, this episode is also for you. Just extract the main concepts and repurpose them as you see fit. So, as an overview, I'm going to go into why even listen to this episode. Because you might be thinking, shouldn't love and relationships just happened naturally? And I'll answer that for you. I'm also going to be going into some ideas for how to create more love and connection. And finally, I'll go into some things that might be preventing you from extending love and connecting more deeply with your partner and loved ones. So let's dive in and get started with why even listen to this episode. And if you naturally gravitated to this episode, you probably don't need me to answer this question for you. But if someone shared this episode with you, they're probably having a hard time communicating that they're needing a little bit more from you. So either way, I'm gonna go into this because I think it's important either way, especially if you think that love and relationships should just happen and unfold naturally, because that's simply not true. Relationships require intentional thought and effort. And you know, life gets busy, which makes it easy to get lost in the daily grind. And connection is built through specific moments of connection, probably more so through the little ones than those big moments of connection. So if you aren't creating those moments, how do you expect to build and sustain the connection within your relationship? And then this is especially the case if you're going through a rough patch with your partner and having more disagreements than usual. I don't think you need research for this, but there is research that shows that you need a lot more positive interactions than negative interactions in order to have a happy and stable relationship. And not to get technical, but actually, yes, to actually get technical. Relationship research from the Gottman Institute actually found that there's a magic ratio of five to one, meaning that for every one negative interaction, a happy and stable relationship has five positive interactions. And this was the research that helped the Gottman so accurately predict which marriages were going to last and which ones would end up in divorce. So although you don't have to keep track of the interaction specifically, this really highlights how much positive interactions really helps insulate and protect a couple from negative interactions because those are naturally gonna happen again, because life happens. So if you're going through a rough patch, intentionally creating space to connect with your partner and show love is going to be essential. And I'll close out this section with highlighting again that love is an action. Good intentions are great, but if you're not showing love in a manner that resonates with your partner, then they're not gonna get the message. And that really brings me to some ideas for how can you create more love and connection with intention. So I want to start off by sharing that no one is going to be able to tell you more accurately about how they'll feel loved and connected to you than your partner. So ask them. And two questions that you can use for this are one, what's one thing I did this week to help you feel loved? And two, what's one thing I can do today or that we can do this week to help you feel more loved? And just see what they say. You might be surprised. You might have done some things that you didn't think made them feel love, but it actually did. And knowing that is actually gonna help you do that more regularly and more consistently because isn't that beautiful that you might already be doing things unintentionally, but you didn't realize how much they actually love and value that? Another fun and enlightening activity could be to learn about each other's love languages. And I know this was really popular quite a few years ago, but if you haven't already done this, I think this is a great activity. If you haven't already done it together, you can look up the quiz online and it essentially helps you understand if you feel loved through five different love languages: quality time, acts of service, gifts, words of affirmation, or physical touch. And what's interesting about the love languages is that they are a good starting point for even building your own self-awareness around what you're needing within the relationship and awareness around what your partner needs within the relationship. And although it might seem like a simple concept to identify what you're needing and what your partner is needing, the reality is that sometimes we don't have the self-awareness to really know that for ourselves, and that's nothing to be ashamed about. This is literally an area that I help people uncover and reconnect with through coaching. So to give you an example of what I mean by needs, particularly underlying needs. So to give you an example of what I mean by underlying needs, say it turns out that your partner's love language is quality time. The underlying need that quality time is going to fill is going to be different for different people. For instance, spending quality time for a person that tends to feel anxious within relationships might actually be about getting reassurance that their partner is still there for them, that their partner still loves them, that everything is okay. For another person, spending quality time together may fill the need of social connection. And yet, for another person, spending quality time may fill the need for creating moments of playfulness within the relationship. And you can have a mix and a combination of these different things, but the more granular that you can get about what it is that you're needing and what it is that your partner is needing, then you're going to be more equipped with that knowledge to then better be able to meet those needs. And meeting each other's needs is one of the best ways to create more love and connection. So if and when you're ready to take the five languages deeper, ask your partner how it would look like to have more quality time together, how many, how regularly, and what types of gifts they'd appreciate, and so on and so forth for whatever love language came at the top for them. And that's going to allow you to start creating almost like a plant care card that's going to be unique to your partner. So the whole intention behind this is to just get to know your partner more deeply. And it's also going to create that roadmap for you for how you can actually show your love in a manner that lands for them. So try those suggestions and let me know how it goes. I'd love to know what you learned in the process, how this went for you, what came out of it. And before we wrap up, I also want to touch on a couple of things that might be preventing you from showing up abundantly and lovingly within your relationship. Because as much as you theoretically want to show up more lovingly and create deeper connection, there might be some things getting in the way that a lot of people experience. So I do want to touch on those because we've all had different childhoods, we've all had different examples that modeled for us what it meant to show up in relationships. And one of those is if this is all feeling like a little bit too much, a little bit too much work, too much squishiness, first of all, I think that's probably more of a reason for why you should give these suggestions a try because it might feel odd simply because you're not used to it. But these are the types of things that build emotional intimacy and connection within relationships. And you don't have to fully jump in. You can start with one thing that calls to you and just do that. Think of your own questions that you want to try out. There's a plethora of resources on the internet. So go get some inspiration and see what things you might want to try to help more intentionally create that connection with your partner. And on another related note, this might feel odd because you might have some fear of being vulnerable and some fear around emotional intimacy. So just stick with me here. Check in with yourself. Do either of these things feel true to you? Do you have some difficulty showing up vulnerably, showing up as your most authentic self and feeling deeply connected with the partner? What are the things that are coming up for you when you think about sharing these things with your partner, when you think about asking these questions? I'm not going to dive too much into these, but I'm just I'm going to leave these questions for you to consider. But if you are sensing that you have some fear or some discomfort with being vulnerable and with emotional intimacy, just know that you're not alone. In the attachment theory world, these are actually common patterns and beliefs for people that have a more avoidant-leaning attachment style, which, if you don't know what that is and you're interested in learning more, there's a whole podcast episode specifically about attachment styles. So I invite you to go check that out. And that's it for this episode. If you have one takeaway, I hope it is that love is about intentional action and that you were inspired to create more love and more connection within your relationship. And as always, if you want support and guidance, disentangling the things preventing you and your partner from connecting deeply and working as a unit, let's connect so we can talk more about what's coming up for you and how we might be able to work together. Okay, that's it. Bye. Thank you for joining me for another episode of Rooted in Intention. Until next time, and remember to keep showing up for the life, relationships, and community you want. Now go.