Intimacy and Dating
Keeping intimacy up in your relationship is easy when you are first dating but what about after you have been dating awhile?
When the word intimacy is used, often people immediately think of sex. However, within a relationship, intimacy means much more than that. Certainly within a romantic relationship sexual intimacy is an important factor but without emotional intimacy, the relationship is not as solidly based as it could be. The fact of the matter is, though, most people within a relationship are more willing to jump into sexual intimacy much faster than emotional. If you are emotionally intimate, though, the sexual aspects will become a lot more satisfying and intense. You can not force intimacy in either case. It has to develop on its own, naturally.
When dating, you start off learning about one another and building a rapport and trust. As you learn to trust the other person, you are more willing to share parts of yourself with them. The more you open yourself up to someone, the more vulnerable you become and this can be a scary prospect. In a successful, trusting relationship, though, that part will not be abused or neglected. It is important not to move too quickly and get some of your intimacy questions answered first. You do want to protect yourself and have a sense of confidence that the other person is worthy of letting them in. But, you also do not want to build so many walls that it is nearly impossible for another person to completely know you.
As you get to know one another, it is important for both of you to give a little more in time. It can not be one sided and you should use your head to determine if it is. There should be balance between what you are giving of yourself and what the other person is giving. This will allow the relationship to grow deeper instead of stagnating. When it comes to sex, make sure you are both ready for it. There is no reason why you can not wait. Likewise if you feel you are ready to take that step there is no reason not to. You can have physical attraction and have sex without there being an emotional intimacy attached to it.
When you do have both physical and emotional intimacy, though, the relationship has a tendency to be deeper, more intense and more long lasting. You have both invested a lot into one another and will not be so quick to throw it away during difficult periods. Let the relationship become deeper naturally and let intimacy in dating slowly evolve as you both feel comfortable doing so, and make sure you've gotten answers to all of your intimacy questions first.