Love, Intimacy and Sex in the Second Half of Marriage: Part 2 - IntimacySample

Experiential Intimacy

Have you ever had an awesome experience without your spouse? Then did you feel frustrated as you tried to describe the experience to your spouse? There just weren’t words to describe what you experienced to someone who was not there. When we experience things together that we both enjoy, we have experiential intimacy.

Galatians 6:2 encourages us to carry each other's burdens. Marriage gives us so many opportunities to do this. Nancy and I have shared so many great experiences over the years. We held our son and then our daughter for the first time and then the same with our grandchildren. We were experiencing and celebrating God’s blessings and His goodness.

But there are also the unexpected and difficult experiences: things like medical emergencies, sickness, and depression. In these times, we benefit from the support our marriage brings. We live out Paul’s words from 2 Corinthians 13:11, which says, “comfort one another, agree with one another, live in peace.” Over time we learned that even the hard experiences did so much for our marriage. They helped us both see how fragile life is and how quickly things can change.

We cannot force experiential intimacy to happen, but this is what we can do:

• Be by each other’s side so that you have opportunities for experiential intimacy.
• Work hard to live life together and not lead separate lives.
• During hard experiences, make sure you are by your spouse’s side and on their team.
• Don’t disappear or flake out on your spouse when they need you most.
• Intentionally look for opportunities to share experiences and to be on your spouse’s side when unplanned and unexpected things happen.

Paul says in Thessalonians 5:1, "Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing." Even the hard and scary experiences can grow us closer in the end. As you work on the other areas of intimacy that we’ve been talking about, you are building a foundation where the experiential intimacy can happen.

Things To Think About:

• Each of you share a time when you felt experiential intimacy with each other.
• When did an experience connect you that took you by surprise?
• What can you do to help lay the foundation for experiential intimacy in your marriage?