Dear Friend,
This is one of the most important things I’ve ever written.
It’s the foundation of the Chosen & Cherished Method I’ve taught to thousands of couples, the same framework Meredith and I used to rebuild our own marriage, and the heart of my upcoming book, Choosing Us, releasing November 3rd.
It’s a longer read, but if intimacy has become a struggle in your relationship, I think you’ll finish with far more answers than questions.
Let’s begin.
In solutions and strength,
Jonathan
THE INTIMACY MANIFESTO
When you wake up and realize that nothing you’ve been doing is bringing intimacy back into your marriage…
It’s discouraging.
You ask. You try. You have the conversation.
Maybe your partner promises to work on it, and things get better for a week or two…
Then you’re right back where you started.
Or maybe you’ve stopped asking altogether. The frustration got so heavy that you quietly gave up.
If that’s where you are, I want to challenge the way you’re thinking about intimacy.
Because I don’t think intimacy is the problem. I think intimacy is the symptom.
And if you spend all your time trying to fix the symptom…
You’ll miss what’s actually keeping the two of you apart.
So let me ask you the most important question I can ask a couple who’s struggling with intimacy:
How much do you actually like each other?
I was inspired to write this by a man who had written me a DM the other day.
He asked, “How do we work through perimenopause? Or menopause? My wife doesn’t want to be intimate with me. What can I do about that?”
My reply to him was very simple.
“You’ve got to restore the likability inside your relationship.”
And I would say most trouble with intimacy, when it comes to couples, goes back to how much they like each other.
So, if you’re new to my work, let me take you to the idea that it’s not that we need to feel loved by our partner…
We need to feel liked by our partner.
And the reason for that is because men and women want two different things when it comes to their relationship.
If I were to ask one hundred women what they want from their relationship and from their spouse, they’re going to answer me that they want to feel like the most important woman in his mind, or their partner’s mind.
And men, you’ll often hear them say, “I want peace.”
For me, when a man says, “I want peace inside of my relationship. I want to feel like I can come home and it’s a peaceful home,” what he’s usually talking about is that he wants to feel respected.
Men often say they want peace.
I think what they’re really describing is respect.
Respect is simply what likability looks like in action.
When I know you like me, I experience that as respect.
Women, on the other hand, usually want to know they’re still the most important person in their partner’s mind.
Both of those point back to the same thing:
Liking each other.
So it’s not as important to love your spouse as it is to like your spouse.
Liking your spouse is vastly different from loving because loving just speaks to my feelings about you as my spouse.
It doesn’t speak to what I think of you.
Because we can all love people that don’t behave well, that treat us poorly.
Our neighbor.
Our mother.
Our uncle.
Our sister.
Our kids.
All of us know how to love someone that we don’t necessarily like, or like all parts of them.
But to truly like someone means that you look inside of them, you see who they are—their personhood—and you decide in your mind that they’re a likable individual.
So we’ve got this ledger of the people that we like and the people that we don’t like.
The challenge is that, for most people—and I hear this commonly, and I felt it with my own marriage with Meredith—I would often say to her, “Why do you treat everyone else with such love, kindness, grace, and patience, yet you treat me radically different?”
And vice versa, too.
I know a thing or two about putting my best foot forward.
I’ve had anger issues basically since I was sixteen.
And while I don’t have road rage, I get impatient when I’m waiting in line, and I don’t want to wait in line.
In spite of my anger issues, to random people I meet on the street, in the shops, in the supermarket, I can be very nice and kind.
But when it comes to my wife, I treat her in a way that is harsh.
Or I used to, anyway.
My anger was quick to trigger, and so she would say the same of me.
She would say, “Why don’t you treat me the way you treat everyone else?”
It was because there were parts of us, in that phase of our marriage, in that season of our marriage, that we didn’t like a lot about each other.
The reason for that is that when you ask couples, “How much do you like your husband?” or “Do you like your wife?” they’ll actually start naming off all the things that they don’t like about their partner.
If I were to ask you to describe your partner, if you were in a couples therapy session or a coaching session with me, I would direct you to write positive things.
But most people aren’t in the room with me when they ask themselves that question.
If they can’t describe their partner in a positive light, they’ll at least attempt to describe things that their partner is no longer doing as if that’s somehow a redeeming quality.
But the only redeeming quality—the only way that we should look at our partner—is we should first look at the things we like about them, the parts of them that we like, and turn the volume up on that, and turn the volume down on the parts of our partner that we don’t like.
In the same way that we do that with our kids.
See, when our kids come home from school with their report cards and they show us a report card of four A’s and a C, we don’t immediately jump to, “Why did you get a C?”
Now, if you’re a Gen X like me and you grew up in that generation, your parents did start with the C.
But in this day and age, we know we want to treat kids… we want to lift them up. We want to encourage them to feel good about themselves, and we want to acknowledge their accomplishments.
So we would dive into the four A’s.
“Wow! I can’t believe you got those A’s. That’s so amazing. You’re so smart. You persevere. You’ve worked so hard.”
And we downplay that C that they got.
What we do with children, we don’t typically do with our own spouse.
So what happens, especially in relationships where there’s a lack of intimacy, is we will be downplaying the parts that we like about our spouse—downplaying them so much that we won’t even think of them, or talk about them, or name them.
And we’ll speak heavily about the things that we don’t like about them.
So when someone says to me that they find themselves in a sexless marriage, the question that goes through my mind is:
How much do you like your partner?
Because nobody wants to be intimate with someone they don’t enjoy being around.
This would be my challenge to you guys tonight.
Every marriage has two ledgers.
One lists everything that’s wrong with your spouse.
The other lists everything that’s right.
The marriage you experience depends on which ledger you keep reading.
Whatever you keep looking for… you’ll find more of.
Look at that part of yourself and ask:
“Am I noticing the things that I should be noticing about my partner? Or am I too stuck in a pain-saturated view of my relationship and my partner so that I can’t look past their mistakes? I can’t look past the parts of them that I don’t like, or the way that they show up, or their harsh tone sometimes, or their bad mood that they can be in?”
I’ve worked with couples where one partner stayed at home, the other worked. He provided really well. She took care of the home really well.
When I would ask them to describe each other, what they liked about each other, those things didn’t come up.
What came up was the pain that they felt inside of their relationship.
That’s common because I’m a therapist and a couples coach.
People come to me, and they’re not usually telling me about the things that they like about the relationship. They’re usually wanting me to help them fix the things they don’t like.
But I’m not in a session with you guys.
I’m just writing to you.
But I want to challenge you the same way I would any other of my clients.
Challenge you to think about the things that you like about your partner.
People are going say, “Yeah, but Jonathan, that’s not fixing intimacy. It’s not gonna get us back into a physically intimate relationship.”
Well, I don’t want you to focus on that right now.
Because if you think about it, we can’t typically be physical with someone that we don’t feel emotionally connected to.
Now, I use connected as opposed to safe. The buzzword everyone wants to use these days is ‘emotionally safe.’
I use it in my content, and I write about this in my book that’s gonna be published in November, so let me tell you about why I actually don’t like the word safe.
It’s because it is too binary.
To me, connected is a better way to describe our goal with our partner.
Because if I were to talk about feeling safe with my partner, then the opposite, if I’m not feeling safe, must be that I feel unsafe with them.
Now, the challenge with using safe to describe your relationship is that it’ll launch into a conversation that focuses on the fact that you don’t feel safe.
So, until that moment that you feel safe with them again, you will feel unsafe.
It’s like a switch that gets flipped.
Then my question to you is:
“Well, what needs to happen to switch a marital relationship from unsafe to feeling safe?”
At that moment, what people will typically describe is all the things that they want to see and have to feel safe with their partner.
And that’s great.
But what you’ll see in couples that are working on their relationship is they’ll make progress toward feeling safe again…
But then something will happen.
There’ll be a fight or some type of conflict, and they’ll backtrack.
They’ll take a step back.
Maybe we don’t go all the way back to square one.
Maybe we’re on third base, but we’ll go back to second.
Or maybe we’ll go back to first.
But we won’t stay at third anymore.
We’ll regress back to a further place of unsafety.
Now all we do is get stuck in this binary option of:
“My relationship is either safe, or it’s unsafe.”
Then we’ll get closer again to feeling safe.
Then something will happen again.
That pattern will rinse and repeat.
This is the problem with making emotional safety the goal for your relationship.
I encourage you guys not to make emotional safety the goal for your relationship because it’s going to keep you stuck in the binary mindset of:
“As long as I’m not feeling safe, I must therefore be unsafe.”
Some massive amount of work is going to have to happen inside of your relationship to be able to flip that switch from unsafe to safe.
I prefer to use the phrase ‘emotionally connected’… because that can live on a spectrum.
Now, safety can live on a spectrum, but typically people don’t describe feeling safe as being on a spectrum.
It’s either:
“I’m unsafe.”
Or:
“I’m safe.”
Whereas if you talk about connection:
“I wanna feel connected to my partner.”
We open the door up to this spectrum of:
“We are somewhat connected.”
“We could be more connected.”
“We could be even more connected.”
Typically, when people talk about feeling connected, they don’t automatically jump to that binary:
“I’m either this or that.”
And I want you guys to key in on those words:
Either. Or.
Those two words are your enemy when it comes to a relationship.
Now, if people were good at describing emotional safety on a spectrum rather than that binary option, I would say, “Yeah. Then have at it. Make emotional safety your goal for your relationship.”
But again, odds are it’s either:
“I’m unsafe.”
Or:
“I’m safe.”
It’s usually not the gray area in between.
Whereas emotional connection can live more in a gray area because people don’t automatically jump there.
So what you’re going to do for me is make a promise to your spouse, and a promise to yourself, that you guys want to make emotional connection the goal for your relationship.
Remove that word safety from your lexicon when you describe your relationship, and trade that for connection.
Then what you’re going to do is ask yourselves:
“On a scale of one to ten, where ten is deeply connected, and one is the complete other end of the spectrum, where do you guys find yourselves today?”
You’re going to get a number.
For some people it’s a five.
Others it’s a six.
Others it’s a two or a three.
Whatever number you’re at today, I want you to write that down.
Then you’re going to ask your partner to do the same.
You guys are going to define what your numbers are.
Whether that’s he’s a three, she’s a two.
You guys will split it in the middle and you’ll say, “We are currently a 2.5.”
So average them out. Add them together and divide by two.
Then, you’re going to ask:
“If we’re currently a four today, what would a five look like?”
I want you guys to write that down.
“If we’re a four today, what would a five in emotional connection look like?”
Now, the reason why I’m asking you to do that in this way (and I’ve got two other questions you guys are gonna write down) is because, right now, I’m engaging your imagination.
Examine how these questions are phrased:
What would a five look like?
If we move from a four to a five, what would that look like?
What would we be doing at a five?
Those are questions meant to introduce the possibility of a better future because they lean on our imagination.
And with imagination comes positivity.
Remember, we’re not talking about emotional safety.
We’re talking about emotional connection.
We’ve let go of those “either/or” statements:
“I’m either safe or I’m unsafe.”
“You’re safe or you’re unsafe.”
We’ve let those go because they’re negative.
And those words put us in a negative state.
Now you’re asking, “What would a 5 look like if we’re currently a 4? What would a 5 look like?”
Because I asked you in that way, you both are engaging your imagination.
See, imagination is positive.
Think about when we were kids. We all loved imagining what the first day of school was going to be like.
My daughter was imagining last month what her birthday party was gonna be like.
We all love to imagine things, right?
Imagining is positive.
That’s why, automatically, when we find ourselves making emotional connection the goal and we put it on a spectrum, it opens the door to us using our imagination.
Now, the other thing that we’re gonna do is use a past-oriented question to arrive at that 5 again.
We can ask ourselves something like:
“When was the last time we were a 5?”
Or:
“What was an early moment in our relationship when we felt like we were a 5?”
Right there, when I put it in that past tense, I’ve engaged your memory.
Typically, I know a lot of us have traumatic childhoods and we have traumatic memories.
But memories can also be positive.
I know every single time I open up my iPhone, I actually almost cry because it always wants to do the carousel of your favorite photos over the years.
I’d see Aria, or I’d see Charlotte, and they’d be super young.
Like Aria when she was two.
Sometimes a video will pop up, and I can hear her voice.
I want to cry, but they’re tears of joy.
I want to cry because I’d give anything to go back to that day when she was that young.
Either way, memory is a beautiful thing because we can decide what we think about again, and we can decide what memories we want to recall.
So I’m asking you guys to recall the good memories inside of your relationship.
I’m doing that for a very specific reason.
I’m doing that because I know if I can get you thinking positively about your successful past as a couple, what’s that going to do?
It’s going to usher in hope.
People need hope in their lives.
They definitely need it in their relationships.
When you find more hope inside of your relationship by looking at your successful past, you’ll feel hopeful that you can recreate some of those successes in the future.
Now, because we’ve traded emotional safety for emotional connection, we have that continuum of the past, that continuum of the present, and the continuum of the future.
Because we’re on that continuum, we can look to our memory, and we can look to our imagination for the answers of how we can move from a 4 to a 5.
Now I want to give you one present-tense way to ask that question.
“How can we go from a 4 to a 5?”
I want you to get together with your spouse and say:
“How could we move just one point up that scale, from that 4 to a 5?”
What I love about that question is now you and I can start brainstorming the little things that could happen today.
I’m not asking you to go from a 4 to an 8.
I’m asking you to go from a 4 to a 5.
Now, together, you can start brainstorming.
Assuming you couldn’t fail, how could you go from a 4 to a 5?
What is really nice about that question is now I’ve engaged your creativity.
And by asking you to think creatively, you’ll think positively.
So, in three questions, that past-oriented question, “When was the last time you felt like we were a 5?”; that present-oriented question, “What could we do to go from a 4 to a 5?”; and that future-oriented question, “What would a 5 feel like?”, I’ve engaged your memory, I’ve engaged your creativity, and I’ve engaged your imagination.
I want you guys to think about this.
This is all under the one very important umbrella called curiosity.
The opposite of resentment isn’t forgiveness.
It’s curiosity.
All three of those–the past, present, and future–were positive WH questions.
They weren’t the negative one.
I explain this in my book as well, so definitely go to Amazon, look it up. It’s called Choosing Us, and you can order it on Amazon. It’s gonna be out November 3rd.
In the book, I talk about the power of curiosity in a relationship.
All the questions I ask are meant to be the WH questions:
Who.
What.
When.
Where.
How.
But not the why.
Why don’t I want you guys asking the why question?
If I ask you guys, “Tell me, why aren’t you intimate today?”, that’s gonna connect you to all the reasons why your relationship doesn’t feel safe, or worse, why you don’t like your partner.
You’re going to start building a case in your mind.
And if you’ve already probably built the case in your mind, you’re going to want to articulate it to me.
So, at all costs, avoid the why question inside of your relationship.
Focus on the who, what, when, where, and how.
I arrived at a very powerful conclusion today with a couple that I was working with.
I asked them:
What is the underlying message you send and receive when you show up with curiosity inside of your relationship?
What is the underlying message you receive when you ask each other using these five WH questions?
The underlying message is this:
“I’m deeply interested in what matters to you…
…so I can take aligned action to help you get what you want.”
That’s it.
That’s curiosity.
I want you to remember this.
If two people wake up every morning asking,
“What matters to you?”
and then spend the rest of the day taking aligned action to help each other get it…
Neither one of them will ever want to leave.
That’s a Chosen & Cherished marriage.
To me, that is the warm blanket that keeps me sleeping soundly every single night.
It’s also the precursor to liking my wife, and vice versa.
Because how can we not like someone who is deeply interested in helping us get what matters to us?
Now, if you’ve done all of that and your spouse still doesn’t want to be intimate with you, then I think there are either two things going on.
Either you skipped too many of those steps and you moved too quickly through them, so you’ve gotta take it a little bit slower.
Or there’s what’s called a bad-faith actor present.
They’re not wanting to be in your marriage with good intentions, with good faith.
They don’t want to show up and make you feel chosen and cherished as much as they expect you to make them feel chosen and cherished.
Now, just because they don’t have good intent—good intentions—doesn’t mean you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It could be that there’s pain there.
There could be hurt there.
There could be resentment there.
Well, to me the cure to all of those is curiosity, again.
Because you’re going back to that place where you’re asking them:
“What matters to you?”
And you follow up with: “I’m deeply interested so I can take aligned action and help you get what you want.”
That may take some time, which is why I tell you to go back and run through that whole exercise again, and again, and again.
With that aligned action, and that curiosity coupled with time, you will wear down that wall between you guys, and you will restore the emotional connection inside of your relationship.
The nice thing is, because it’s not emotional safety, where it’s this binary switch from “I’m unsafe” versus “I’m safe,” we can see it on that spectrum of seeing our emotional connection grow.
The verb most often used when it comes to emotional connection is grow.
It’s not be.
It’s not:
“I am unsafe.”
It’s:
“Our connection can grow.”
Right?
That verb to be, leaves room for either, “I’m unsafe,” or, “I’m not unsafe.”
So we don’t use it.
We ask:
“Can our connection grow?”
So put your relationship back on a spectrum.
Take it off that binary switch of, “I’m this,” or, “I’m that.”
Open yourselves up to use curiosity to bring it back inside your relationship, to heal those wounds, and restore that likability inside of your relationship.
At the end of the day…
Nobody wants to leave a marriage where they feel deeply understood.
Nobody wants to leave a marriage where someone is genuinely curious about what matters to them.
And when two people wake up every morning asking,
“What matters to you?”
…they create the kind of marriage neither one of them ever wants to leave.
That’s a Chosen & Cherished marriage.
That’s all I have for you.
I know it was a lot. And I hope I didn’t move too quickly.
And if you want to go deeper into everything we talked about today, my Chosen & Cherished Method and how to build a marriage neither of you ever wants to leave, I wrote this book for you.
Choosing Us is available for preorder now through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, and wherever books are sold.
When you preorder your copy, send me a DM or an email and let me know.
Because this November, when the book launches, I’m personally leading a six-week Chosen & Cherished Marriage Intensive, and everyone who preorders the book gets a spot completely free.
You’ll also receive all of the preorder bonuses we’ve put together to help you start strengthening your marriage long before the book arrives.
I’m incredibly excited to share this book with you.
You can pre-order your copy here.
Thank you for being here, for trusting me, and for allowing me to be part of your marriage journey.
Helping couples build marriages where they both feel chosen and cherished isn’t just my work…
It’s my calling.
In solutions and strength,
Jonathan