Enhance Your Relationship Through Your Five Senses
by Yvonne Sinclair M.A.

Spring is a great time to incorporate your five senses into your relationship enhancement agenda. Mother Nature assists you with everything bursting in bloom, soft breezes, and birds voicing joy. Using your senses is good romantic relationship advice.

Enjoying the season’s plethora of sensory opportunities with your significant other can be a wonderful relationship enhancement. Slowing down your world to smell the roses together will allow for intimacy. The comfortable weather allows the two of you to have a glass of something tasty on the patio while watching and listening to the surroundings together. Spend time and effort communicating what brings you pleasure. In California, a drive in the foothills would show the new spring green bursting from every tree, poppies growing along the road, and bright skies. Wherever you live, a day drive in spring can awaken your senses. Taking the drive with your mate can increase your awareness of each other, can allow you to learn what brings each of you joy, and can increase your communication skills. All of these advantages will also deepen your emotional intimacy. The time need not be an expensive, planned, or complicated journey. Learning to be together without an agenda allows emotional intimacy to grow.

In relationship therapy, when I give couples their four hour homework, it includes all five senses. The couples counseling homework begins with a bubble bath (if bathtub size allows). The experience offers the warm water and each other for touch, an aroma of candles and bubbles for smell, music for hearing, something tasty to drink for taste, and the opportunity to look at someone who loves you and cares to be with you for sight.

You could expand on this marital help homework idea with your creativity. Perhaps you can blindfold each other in turn, and have foods, flowers, or other items to test the blindfolded partner’s sense of smell. Cutting off one sense can enhance another sense. You could even incorporate these tactics into your love-making and achieve heightened levels of sensuality while discovering the ultimate lovemaking pleasure.

I recommend 101 Nights of Grrreat Romance by Laura Corn because it is a great book full of romantic ideas that sometimes include the five senses. Corn describes her book as “ways to make love with your clothes on.” She also wrote 101 Nights of Grrreat Sex. Both are well-done and tasteful books with dozens of great ideas to enhance your relationship. These books encourage relationship intimacy by instructing you to read the books together and share the activities as a couple.

Do you not have the time to slow down and smell the roses? Explore what is important for you. Are you taking care of yourself so you can be available to care for others? Are you taking care of others and depleting your personal resources? Relationships do not grow and glow all alone. Relationships take attention. If life, jobs, little league, laundry, and homework are taking up 100% of your time and energy, then your relationship will suffer. Sometimes it helps to actually schedule your relationship time into your otherwise full schedule. Balance the need for attending every game or practice and caring for the parents’ relationship. Give the need for relationship enhancement some serious thought. In the long run, parents taking care of their relationship will benefit the family and the children.

I also recommend the DVD, 101 Ways to Excite Your Lover, by Playboy. It is a tasteful DVD that gives you many ideas about how to incorporate the five senses into your play and love-making. It is not a pornographic DVD, but more of an instructional, fun DVD.

Have fun with the proposal of using all five senses to enhance your relationship and deepen your intimacy. Use your creativity and allow time to take care of yourself and your relationship. Best relationship advice is usually to be true to yourself and enjoy yourself with your partner. Marriage counseling often includes innovative approaches to change. Even healing infidelity and healthy anger management can include changing your thinking patterns. Sometimes these changes and different approaches can work to save marriage and can be the best relationship advice.

Have a happy, joyous spring!!!