10 Questions to Build Intimacy With a Partner

Source: Harley Marten/Unsplash

Communication is essential to all healthy relationships. It builds trust by encouraging closeness and connection. Good communication reflects honesty and self-awareness. Partners actively listen while making themselves vulnerable, paving the path toward intimacy.

Although most people appreciate the importance of communication, few know how to foster it. Communication is, unfortunately, not a skill that’s typically taught in school, and not everyone witnessed it between their caregivers or parents while growing up. As a culture, we’re socialized to believe that communication should be easy—it’s just talking. The reality is that it’s much harder than most people realize.

So how, exactly, do you start conversations that foster intimacy?

Although there’s nothing wrong with asking about your partner’s day or what’s on the agenda for the weekend, intimacy requires questions that run deeper than that. For example, healthy conversations let partners bring up concerns in constructive ways. Yet it’s also important to express gratitude. Talking to your partner about the troubling aspects of your relationship often feels the most urgent. But focusing on each other’s positive qualities provides the relationship with strength and resilience.

Maintaining intimacy in relationships also requires continuously sharing the parts of you that shift and evolve. Research shows that one of the best ways to maintain passion in long-term relationships is for both partners to foster their own personal growth. This works, however, only when partners find time to reconnect and share these new aspects of themselves. Falling and staying in love requires getting to know someone at a deeper level continuously over time.

One of the best strategies for creating these types of dialogues is mutual question-asking. People are the most likely to open up when they trust their partner truly wants to hear what they say. This all comes down to a very human desire to feel heard and seen.

The most compelling research that shows how question-asking can encourage intimacy comes from a famous experiment by psychologist Arthur Aron.

Aron paired up strangers in his lab and asked them to ask each other a series of 36 very personal questions. The questions were divided into three sets of 12, with each partner taking turns answering each question. Each set grew progressively more probing.

The results of Aron’s work showed that couples who had met just an hour ago in a lab setting reported feeling significantly closer to each other after the question session. They “fell in love.” Aron concluded that it was the personal disclosure and vulnerability created by question-asking that made way for intimacy and connection.

Although Aron’s questions forged increased intimacy between strangers in a lab, they weren’t designed for couples already in committed relationships. His questions effectively encouraged people to divulge personal aspects of themselves, but they weren’t designed to make couples reflect on specific relationship dynamics.

So, what types of questions should couples specifically be asking each other? The focus should be not just on your feelings about your partner but also on your thoughts about yourself. It’s best to start from a place of positivity. Ask about the qualities your partner thinks you both share and the parts of the relationship you both feel most proud of. Ask when it is that your partner feels the most supported by you. Ask about the future. What do they want? What do you want?

Another critical topic that couples don’t talk about nearly enough is sex. Research shows that sexual communication is essential in long-term relationships. Couples who enjoy better sexual communication also enjoy higher relationship satisfaction, higher sexual satisfaction, and increased orgasm frequency. We’re socialized to believe that with the “right” partner, amazing sex falls from the sky. The reality is that it takes communication and discovery.

The questions below are designed to foster intimacy between partners in relationships. Like Aron’s questions, they encourage vulnerability. They also encourage conversations that are the most relevant for couples by addressing the issues described above.

10 Questions That Can Build Intimacy With Your Partner

Relationships Essential Reads

5 Ways to Quit the Habit of "Kitchen Sinking" Your Partner

Why Are Friends With Benefits on the Rise?

1. What about our relationship are you most proud of? What do we do really well together?
2. What’s something you love about me that others miss?
3. What three things do you and I have most in common?
4. How have you changed in the past year(s)?
5. How have I changed?
6. What is your most treasured memory of us as a couple?
7. What’s your dream for what our life looks like together in five years? 15 years? 30 years?
8. What things can I do to make you feel more supported?
9. What’s one thing you’d like to try in the bedroom that you’re nervous about bringing up?
10. What’s the best sex you and I have ever had? What made it so good?

Facebook image: ViDI Studio/Shutterstock