13 Feb Daily A’s: Building Closeness with Affirmations

This blog post was written by Recovery Help Now’s Vanessa Blaxland, MFTi.

When a couple first starts dating or even when a couple first gets married, it’s easy to treat their partner with love and affection.  During the honeymoon stage you are more likely to be more tolerant, appreciative, and praise your partner with words of affirmation and love.

Being quick to forgive and less demanding.  But after awhile when the honeymoon tingles fade, as is normal, a couple can fall into bad habits and the gentle, patient, courteous, and forgiving responses turn into demanding and criticizing ones.  So what do you do if you obviously can’t always be in the honeymoon stage?  Well, you have to be intentional with how you treat and respond to your partner.  Of course our relationships aren’t always going to be fun and easy. It’s normal for there to be ups and downs in the relationship and for there to be some days where you are not that fond of each other and being kind and courteous and gentle won’t come naturally, but you still love each other.  This is where you need to become intentional with how you communicate and show love to your partner to help increase and maintain that intimacy that you want with your partner.  One way to do this is by coming together for the Daily A’s or Daily Affirmations.

When you are in the middle of your crazy life you often forget to say thank you, acknowledge when your partner made you feel good, or convey your appreciation for them.   This quick one minute exercise will not only help bring you together each day but help grow closeness and intimacy as each partner feels affirmed and appreciated by the other partner.

First choose a time each day that you and you partner will get together for your Daily A’s, maybe it’s in the morning at breakfast or before you go to bed.  Then choose someone to go first.  Finally, simply affirm your partner by saying “I appreciated it today when you ______________”, “Thank you for _________________”, “It made me feel good when you _________________________”, or “It really helped me out when _______________”.   Then switch and reverse roles.