5 guidelines for cultivating intimacy (Part 1)

Please Touch

• Proper stimulation of the skin is essential for organic and behavioral development.
• Universal longing to be touched
• almost every animal enjoys being stroked or otherwise having its skin pleasurably stimulated.
• We now know that small children become irritable and hyperactive without adequate body contact. In various experiments with normal and sub-normal youngsters, those who had the most physical contact with parents or attendants learned to walk and talk the earliest and had the highest IQs.
• Both men and women confide often that the thing they long for most is to be able to go to their mate and be held for a while.
• Physical gushing is as offensive as verbal gushing, but when it is a genuine expression of your affection, touch can bring you closer than a thousand of words.
• In the passion of making love, many of us are able to communicate a profundity of love that words cannot carry. But it is a mistake to limit our physical contact to basic sexual intercourse.
• In our work with couples who have some sexual dysfunction - most commonly now a decrease in libido in one or both of the partners - my colleagues and i almost always find that the husband and the wife are literally "out of touch" with each other. That is, the caressing, fondling, embracing, and kissing that once were central to the bond between them have gradually diminished.
• Use your body to demonstrate warmth

The Art of Affirmation

• Be liberal with your praise.
  
• Children will increase whatever behavior gets them attention, even if it is negative attention.
• Lincoln often repeated the saying, "A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall."
• So-called intellectuals have had lots of fun attacking such techniques as dishonest and manipulative.
• But what's simpleminded or manipulative about tellign people something you like about them? Affirmation merely for the sake of making another person happy can be a most pleasant activity.
• If you train your mind to search for the positive aspects in other people, you will be surprised at how many good things you can observe in them and comment upon.
• The art of affirmation is enhanced if we learn to express praise when it is not expected.
• "Applaud a man's speech at the moment when he sits down and he will take your compliment as exacted by the demands of common civility; but let some space intervene, and then show him that the merits of his speech have dwelt with you when you might have been expected to have forgotten them, and he will remember your compliment for a much longer time than you have remembered his speech."
• regular messages of acceptance and love are highly important in establishing a child's self image.
• Most of us have been fortunate enough to have someone early in our lives - a teacher, a grandparent, a friend - who took a particular interest in us, passing over our foolish weak aspects and drawing into the light those strong aspects that no one else had looked quite far enough to find. If you affirm others around you in that way, you will put them forever in your debt, and you will linger in their minds long after you are gone.

A Coffee-Cup Concept of Marriage

• For reasons that are not altogether clear, many of us have a tendency to stop talking to those we love the longer we have known them.
• "loneliness," says Germaine Greer,"is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
• Talk is cheap, they say, but it is an essential ingredient in the best relationships.
• There are many kinds of talk, and the mere flow of words between two people does not guarantee intimacy. Nevertheless, there can be no intimacy without conversation.
• Schedule leisurely breaks for conversation.
• Time for talk is equally important with your children.
• One reason we avoid regular periods of sustained conversation with our intimates is that it sometimes requires a great deal of energy.
• If we get so busy with our sewing projects or corporate meetings that we do not have time to visit with our children, we are too busy.

--- Quoted from "The Friendship Factor" by Alan Loy Mcginnis.