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Happy Valentine’s Day!

Whether you get into the “Hallmark Holidays” scene or not, it’s still very important to commemorate your relationship in some way. Not only to validate your partnership, but to cultivate more romance and to let your man know how special he is to you. So have a great evening together, and if you’re flying solo this year, do something special for yourself--indulge and pamper yourself!

I hope you all have a great month and that you enjoy this month’s edition. Keep those letters coming and thank you for all your support.

All my best,
Brian Rzepczynski, The Gay Love Coach
Certified Personal Life Coach
brian@thegaylovecoach.com

“Passion Drought: Turning the Fizzle Back Into Sizzle In Your Relationship; Part 2”
by Brian Rzepczynski, The Gay Love Coach

Introduction
This is the second installment in a 2-part article series on creating more intimacy and passion in your relationship. Please click here to read Part 1 if you missed it. In Part 1, you learned about the developmental stages that gay couples go through in their relationships and how declining passion is a normal phenomenon and indication that your partnership is growing and maturing. You also had the opportunity to complete a self-assessment to uncover any blocks that could stand in the way of your having more passion in your relationship. Part 2 will now offer some practical tips and suggestions for enhancing intimacy in your relationship to bring more life and spice to what you and your partner already share.

Intimacy-Building Strategies
An important first-step in bringing more novelty and excitement into your relationship is to lay the foundation for intimacy. Gay men can often confuse sex with intimacy. While sex certainly is important and has its place in fostering connection with your partner, there is much more that goes into cementing a sense of closeness with each other. Sex is just part of the recipe for intimacy; there are deeper, core ingredients that must be present for a relationship to be maintained in the long-term. Intimacy is a process that develops over time. It’s the ability to risk being vulnerable with your lover, to share yourself openly and to reciprocally meet each other’s needs while respecting each other’s differences. It’s about making your relationship a private haven from the world for comfort and security, a place where you can be uninhibited and free to be yourself.

Here are some tips for promoting more intimacy in your relationship and creating a foundation from which all your interactions and inner-feelings can grow.

1. Create the Backdrop: Trust. Respect. Acceptance. Honesty. Friendship. These traits are crucial for relationship success; nothing else matters without these. The ability to feel passionate can only come from an atmosphere where the two partners feel a sense of safety with each other.

2. Communication Is Key: Learn how to talk to each other “the right way”, fine-tune your listening skills, appreciate the differences between the two of you and become adept at validating each other. Become pros at the art of negotiation and conflict management.

3. Squash the Anger: Nothing contaminates a relationship faster than bitterness and resentment. Learn how to identify and express your needs and feelings directly and don’t stuff anything. Create a tone in your relationship where you each can feel comfortable approaching each other and talk about your needs, wishes, opinions, dreams, and feelings.

4. Be Fully Present: Make your relationship a priority and recognize the fact that effort is required to keep it growing and satisfying. Look at your relationship with conscious intent and be attentive to it and each other. Never take each other for granted.

It cannot be emphasized enough that these characteristics are essential for allowing your partnership to progress in a positive direction. While the behavioral strategies for increasing passion to be discussed next can help to “keep the flame burning” between you and your lover, there is no substitute for the above-mentioned qualities. The passion-building tips will be superficial and meaningless unless you have the foundation set to incorporate them into your stable relationship.

Passion-Building Activities
The following is a list of possible ideas to “try on for size” in maximizing “the heat” in your relationship. Take these suggestions at face value and don’t underestimate the fact that nothing is hotter than having a man in your life who loves you unconditionally for who you are and who is there for you physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Pick and choose the ones you like the best and make up your own. The only rule is to be creative and have fun!

• Make a “ Pleasings List”. Each of you write down what you can imagine your partner doing that would be pleasing to you and then compare notes. Make it a practice to tackle the items on each other’s lists.

• Be playful. Tickle and wrestle with your partner, crack jokes, make each other laugh. Counter the seriousness with silliness.

• Have a regular “Date Night”. Avoid getting caught up in the hectic hustle-bustle of life at the expense and neglect of your boyfriend. Plan at least one night out a week for a date, just the two of you, where you have fun and don’t discuss any serious issues. Really look deeply at your partner and recognize what attracts you to him. Mix it up with some adventure dates (eg. road trips, skiing, etc.).

• Surprise your partner. Do the unexpected. Take sexy photos of yourself and stick them in his work briefcase. Let him come home to find you naked on the kitchen table. Write him love notes, give him little gifts and cards, sing to him on his voicemail, anything! Keep him on his toes!

• Spice up your sex life with more novelty and creativity. Try new places to make love, try new positions, and share your fantasies. Let loose with ideas that you’re both comfortable with.

• Show more demonstrations of nonsexual affection: hugging, kissing, touching, cuddling, massaging, and verbal declarations of adoration.

• Volunteer for a cause that you both care about and do it together.

• Balance individual vs. couple time. It’s important that you each have your own lives separate from the relationship as well. Having your own interests helps bring more freshness and vitality into the relationship.

• Create rituals to celebrate special occasions and make them a regular tradition. These become relationship milestones that are unique to the two of you as a couple.

Conclusion
Reconnecting with the man you first fell in love with will go a long way toward enriching your relationship. Keep the courtship dance going in your partnership, no matter how long you’ve been together—it is possible! By taking responsibility for your part in the relationship and making sure that you feed it will improve the intimacy and passion in your relationship for the long-haul. It takes work, but by balancing novelty with predictability and incorporating more spontaneity and playfulness, your relationship will flourish. And remember that sex alone will not sustain a completely fulfilling long-term relationship; it can enhance it, but creating an intimate framework is what’s most crucial. Sex alone is nice, but blend it with intimacy and it’ll soar you to even greater heights of climax imaginable. Besides, sexual passion is a whole other article! Enjoy!

© 2005 Brian L. Rzepczynski

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Brian Rzepczynski, Certified Personal Life Coach, is The Gay Love Coach: “I work with gay men who are ready to create a road map that will lead them to find and build a lasting partnership with Mr. Right.” To sign up for the
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Dear Gay Love Coach:
My partner and I just bought a house together. We are very excited about it and feel like it is a new exciting phase in our relationship. However, we can’t seem to agree on design choices for the house. Conversations about the subject lead to what seems like a competition over who has more free time to get projects done, and we both seem to think that the other wants to take over the house as our own. We’re acting like Alpha Males trying to mark territory and split it down the middle instead of thinking of it as a joint project and expression of our journey together. How can we get past these defensive feelings of entitlement and enjoy our new home together?
Thanks,
Frustrated Homo-ner

Dear Frustrated Homo-ner:
Congrats on your new home! What you’re experiencing is a very common and normal consequence of moving in with someone you care about and living together. “Merging” and “nesting” with your lover will most certainly bring up a host of issues that you’ll each need to address, such as privacy, allocation of household chores, relationship roles, and personal space, to just name a few. You each bring to the relationship different quirks/nuances and systems for doing things that will sometimes clash, and accommodating to each other’s habits and personal styles can be quite an adjustment indeed! Particularly if you’ve been single for any length of time, adapting to a new way of life in which considerations for another in your immediate living space need to be made can stir up quite a lot of defensiveness and resistance. You’ll be wanting to stake your turf and become territorial!

As men in this society, we’re socialized to compete and aggressively fight to win at all costs. We can have a strong need for control and independence. Put two men in a gay relationship together under the same roof, and all those primal masculine instincts get activated. While these traits may be beneficial in other parts of your life, it can cause significant distress in building an intimate relationship with your partner. While it’s not easy, communication and compromise are what’s needed most in situations such as this.
Communication will involve both of you having a chance to express your needs, expectations, feelings, and hopes with each other about living together in your new home. Acknowledge the pangs of difficulty you’re feeling and share them with each other using “I feel” statements. Stifle your need to defend your position and really listen to each other. It’s ok to get angry, but don’t let it get unproductive and call a Time-Out cooling-off period if needed. This is not about power and control now; it’s about teamwork and cooperation. Mirror each other’s preferences and concerns, empathize with each other’s feelings, and validate each other’s adjustments and uniquenesses as you approach this transition.

Compromise involves seeking win/win solutions to where you each sacrifice and gain in a balanced way to reach a common goal. Accept each other’s differences and that neither of you is right or wrong and develop the view that your home and the decisions made within it are “ours” and not a “yours and mine” mentality. Compromise means letting go of being in a power struggle and seeing each other as you are, not as you want each other to be. You cannot change or coerce your partner into doing anything, so learn to be there for each other in as supportive a way as possible.

Lighten things up with humor and when you find yourself “digging in your heels” on an issue, check your motives. Why won’t you budge? Is it really a genuine disgust of his decorating tastes, or are your defenses for control and independence kicking in? Any other reasons? Perhaps review with each other how your prior living arrangements in the past with others went—what worked and what didn’t? Identify the strengths that each of you bring to the table and see if you can channel these accordingly into your domestic life so there’s balance. Other possible solutions might include devising a system where you each divide the house by room regarding who’s in charge of decorating that particular space; agreeing to disagree; each of you only choosing items for the house that you both like—if one of you doesn’t like something, then it immediately is shelved no matter how much the other one likes it, etc.

Whatever compromising tactic you use, remember that it will require some give and take, listening will be key, and remember to remind yourself of the things that are going well in your relationship if your domestica struggles continue to “burn you up.” It’s also a good idea to check in with each other periodically to see if you’re still “on the same page” with decisions that have been made in the past as people’s needs, preferences, and expectations can change over time.

I wish you the best with your new adventure, Homo-ner! Living together is a great way to learn about yourself and your lover, and it’s also a great way to learn how to resolve conflicts with each other. If handled with care, your relationship can become more intimate and fulfilling than ever before! Good luck!


-- The Gay Love Coach

This section is dedicated to you members/subscribers where you can offer your own tips and insights, as well as make announcements for resources pertaining to gay dating and relationships that you know of that would be of benefit to us all! Please feel free to forward these for possible inclusion to brian@thegaylovecoach.com.

Have any other ideas or suggestions for creating more passion and intimacy in your relationship other than those presented in this month’s article? Or how about any other suggestions or tips for our advice column question? Please send these to brian@thegaylovecoach.com for possible inclusion in a future newsletter. Thanks!

For gay couples who are either currently living together or are in the process of thinking about “taking the plunge”, it’s very important to legalize your relationship to the extent you can with such things as wills, power of attorney, etc. We in the gay community don’t have the same kinds of protections in the financial, medical, and insurance worlds as our heterosexual counterparts and it’s vital to set these things up to avoid future problems.
A good book that I’ve run across is called J.K. Lasser’s Gay Finances in a Straight World: A Comprehensive Financial Planning Handbook (1998) by Peter M. Berkery, Jr. and Gregory A. Diggins. It’s a good resource for such things as setting financial goals as a couple, budgeting, retirement planning, insurance policy acquisition, tax issues, and other legal matters. It’s affiliated with the popular gay and lesbian newsmagazine The Advocate. Check it out. It’s a good read for both gay singles and couples and can be found at any bookstore or online book distributorship.

Disclaimer: The Gay Love Coach does not represent or endorse the quality of any products, information, or materials displayed, purchased, or obtained by you as a result of its mention in this newsletter. It’s common sense to do your own due diligence before purchasing a product.

Copyright © 2005 Brian L. Rzepczynski. All Rights Reserved.