Has it been ages since you and your partner were intimate? Why is intimacy a distant memory?

If you’ve found that intimacy with your partner isn’t what it used to be, it’s likely that the desire you once felt before, has disappeared.

In a way, it’s gone into hiding.

Most people spend years thinking this is normal. But it's not. You can reignite the intimacy. You just have to learn how.

 If intimacy feels like a thing of the past in your relationship, my guess is that from the outside, everything looks fine. You’ve who have worked hard to build an incredible life together. You have a home most couples would envy. 

You've made it. You have the wealth, the success and kids you adore. It feels like it should be time to settle in and really enjoy it all. 

But instead, at 10pm the house goes quiet, and you find yourselves on opposite sides of the bed trying to ignore that awkward space between you. 

You lie there awake. Both scrolling on your phones trying to pretend that this silence is normal. 

You rationalize it. 

We're both tired. We had a long day. We're wiped out from dealing with all of the tasks of the day. 

But deep down, you know you're just making excuses. 

This disconnect you’re feeling has grown over the years.

You live a great life, but you've become absent from each other.

And you know it's not good, so you’ve tried to fix things. 

You’ve scheduled date nights on the calendar. 

Maybe you’ve listened to podcasts, planned weekends away, bought lingerie.

And none of it has worked.

Well, this is largely because the actual problem has never really been addressed. It’s not a technique problem or matter of date nights or lingerie. It’s deeper than that.

The real problem is that most high performers have spent decades being rewarded for the exact opposite of what intimacy requires. 

To be a truly top performing individual, you have to get really good at staying composed, powering through, leaning into performing certain roles in certain places.

You have to put your own needs, wants, and desires aside to show up in very specific ways and be a very specific person.

You become fantastic at hiding what you want, because trying to be vulnerable or saying what you really need isn’t going to go down well - whether that’s rest, some time off, a break, more reassurance, whatever it might be. 

You’ve necessarily learned to walk into a negotiation without letting anyone see what you needed from it. 

You learned to sit across from a board and act like you have total conviction on a day you deep down aren't feeling that confident at all.

All of these skills have made you exceptional at work. 

But brought home, these very same habits make you quite distant to the one person you actually want to connect with.

Your spouse learned the same lesson. 

Often from watching you do it first.

So before anyone can rebuild real intimacy, there's a deeper piece of work that has to happen first.

And the problem is almost nobody does it, because almost nobody knows how to.

How do you become vulnerable and practice real intimacy?

How do you know what you really want and need and desire?

How do you reconnect with all of these hidden pieces after so many years of performing the strong, responsible, dutiful one who’s got their life together and has unwavering confidence?

Well you begin by going looking for your own patterns. 

The places you've trained yourself to hide your real self, and not to want, ask, share, because somewhere you learned it’s not safe to. 

You have to look at your own blind spots, and get really honest about where you’re holding back your real self in your relationship. 

Where you have your own walls up and where you’re afraid of being seen at the risk that someone finds out you’re not as confident and self-sufficient as you make out.

It’s vulnerable and scary to have needs - I get that.

And this isn’t easy work - when you're spending your days managing uncertainty at scale, there's no spare capacity left to connect with your real self and spend time in vulnerability. It’s hard to notice something as subtle as your own desires and needs. All of your needs gets drowned out by everything louder and more urgent, and lately, even societally, it does feel like  everything is louder and more urgent.

Which is why the work has to start with reconnection. 

Specifically, reconnection to yourself. 

What do you actually want, need, and desire - now?

Not what you wanted at twenty five, not what you were supposed to want given the life you've built, not what would look right if someone were watching….

But really, what do you want, right now, today, in the actual life you are currently living?

That question is not one you answer once and put away somewhere. You have to ask yourself this again and again, over weeks, and months.

The person you are at this stage of your career, this stage of your marriage, this stage of your life, is different to who you were before. 

And the desires underneath all that performance and provision will have changed too.

In a way, you have to rediscover yourself in this present day moment - and rediscover, who am I now?

What do I desire? What do I need? Where do I want to go next?

This is not a matter of digging up something buried decades ago and dusting it off. 

This is a live, ongoing, present tense practice of discovering who you are becoming and what that version of you actually wants from the people closest to them.

Most people never go here because going here requires admitting there's something to look at in the first place…and admitting that feels, to a lot of successful people, like admitting failure. 

It isn't. It's the only honest starting point there is. And only when you’re honest with yourself can you have real intimacy, and only when you have real intimacy can you have a thriving physically intimate relationship. This is the starting point. 

I work with executives and founders who've built extraordinary success and are now dealing with the uncomfortable truth that their home life doesn't match the empire. 

I help them get honest, get clear, and build a real strategy so the relationship they're in, or the one they choose next, actually gives them the intimacy, freedom, and love they've been too busy building everything else to go after.

If that's something you’re navigating right now, my inbox is confidential and only read by me. Tell me what's going on for you.