What's Your Intimacy IQ?

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How emotionally close are you to your intimate partner? Do you sometimes wish you were closer but you're not always sure how to go about it? Worse, do you ever feel disconnected, cut off, or miles apart from the person whose love you want the most? If so, how do you explain this and what do you usually do about it?

On the flip side, what opens the door to an intimate connection with your partner? Is it merely random? And importantly, aren't these coveted times of closeness some of your best, if not your most cherished, moments? So, how can you make them happen more often?

What Is Intimacy Intelligence?

Simply, intimacy intelligence refers to our ability to create and sustain emotional, mental, and physical closeness with our intimate partner. However, paradoxically, can we be any closer to our partners than we are first close to ourselves? This implies that intimacy with our partner is predicated upon how deeply aware we are of our basic needs and feelings, and the best way to manage them. This is the "first intimacy," and again, it is a necessary precondition to having a meaningful, sustainable, emotional connection to our partners.

On the Couch

In couples therapy, I often hear partners complain that they don't feel close. Instead, they feel emotionally distant and resentful of each other. Not infrequently, partners will express a bewildering regret for having become passionless roommates who inhabit separate worlds while living under the same roof. Envenomed by their lackluster routines and safe but stultifying habits, I'll often hear partners bemoan, "We care about each other, but we're not in love with each other as we once were."

Part of my efforts to help these couples includes asking unlikely, unanticipated questions like, "How much do you like the person you are when you are with your partner?" After a moment of befuddlement, their answers are often, "Not as much as I'd like..." or, "I'm often on guard, defensive, resentful, withdrawn," and the like. In an affirming way, I'll respond, "Given what you've just said, it's not surprising how difficult it is for you to create and preserve emotional closeness, much less increase it." After a painful nod of agreement, I'll state what's become a glaringly obvious question, "So, how then can I like who I am in relation to my partner?"

It's Not Selfish

As the couple continues to digest these points, I'll highlight the fact that vintage-quality closeness with our partners begins with a depth of closeness to ourselves. Now, with this fresh in mind, I'll ask partners how well they identify their most important or basic needs and feelings, especially those they feel most often and most intensely, vis a vis their partners. Moving forward, I'll ask, "How well do you manage these identified needs and feelings?" I'll emphasize that effective personal need management is the equivalent of good relationship hygiene, in that it can prevent or rid the couple of the nasty accrual of resentment and the sundry animosities that can insidiously erode the quality of their emotional connection to each other.

Importantly, I'll underscore that this particular way of thinking about their relationship is not as "self-centric" as it might first appear. When partners like who they are within their intimate relationship, they help ripen and preserve a savory couple atmosphere in which optimal emotional connection can occur. Moreover, they occupy an elevated, mature emotional ground from which selfless partner care is more likely. In brief, self-love begets partner love.

A Quick, Personal Intimacy IQ Assessment

To get a sense of your own intimacy IQ, take the quick self-assessment below:

1. Self-Knowledge. "Know thyself," preached Socrates. How well do you know yourself? Identifying our needs and the feelings orbiting them cobbles together our sense of who we are in relation to our intimate partners. Anything short of this begs these questions: With whom do our partners connect? Or, how complete or meaningful is the connection? With this said, what are your most predominating needs? What feelings are associated with them?

Certainly, partners who achieve a high intimacy IQ are willingly self-transparent—a healthy, illuminating sunshine scatters light over their needs and feelings, making them fully visible, as opposed to an unilluminated, opaque, or fragmented self. Keeping a well-constructed self through need and feeling identification makes us fully known to both ourselves and our partners. As a bonus, we achieve an enviable psychological integrity, and with it, a well-earned boost of self-respect and partner respect.

2. Need-Approbation. How accepting/approving are you of your fundamental needs and feelings? Crowning our basic needs and feelings with legitimacy bestows a positive status upon our needs that readies them for active management. This, in turn, makes us more knowable, trustable, and easier to connect with. Equally important, approval of our needs and the feelings enshrouding them, breeds self-compassion that can grease the wheels of partner connectivity, and with this an expected and commensurate upgrade in the quality of our intimate relationship.

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3. Need Representation. How effectively do you represent your needs and feelings, especially your deepest, most self-revealing ones, those that expose your vulnerabilities, and thus, your most real, authentic self? Revealing the breadth and depth of who I am, as defined by my needs and feelings, again, makes me a known entity, one that attracts closeness and partner trust. Moreover, effective personal need management is another means by which I can grow esteem for myself, as well as garner esteem from my partner.

4. Risk-Taking. "I risk, therefore I am intimate." What is your appetite for risk-taking? By taking the calculated risks involved with expressing my deepest needs and feelings, I strengthen the definition of who I am, which grows my self-esteem and the esteem my partner has for me. Further, I help create a new norm consisting of a safe, inviting, couple atmosphere wherein my partner is encouraged to join me with their own self-disclosures—"self-disclosure begets self-disclosure." With this comes an expected improvement in the quality of partner connection.

5. Making Friends With Fear. Intimacy's chief nemesis is fear, which can be overcome with the right knowledge and practice. Granted, fear is not easily vanquished but the empowering knowledge that intimate partner connections breathe life-prolonging and life-enhancing energies into virtually every aspect of our lives can and should serve as a motivator, an engine for raising our intimacy IQ. And, of course, practice makes us better, it improves our personal need management skills and, expectedly, the quality of our connection to our intimate others. The only failure is the failure to practice.

So, how did you do? What is your intimacy IQ?