Think back to the beginning of a relationship. The spark, the anticipation, the stolen glances, the pull towards someone before you could explain why.
That feeling is neither trivial nor silly. It is one of the most powerful experiences available to us, and it is what draws two people close enough to build something lasting.
Why connection deserves attention
Intimacy is not a decorative extra in a romantic relationship. It is the pulse of it. It creates a kind of closeness, vulnerability and passion that has no real equivalent anywhere else in life. You can be respected at work, adored by friends and loved by family, and none of it does quite what being genuinely known by a partner does.
That is worth saying plainly, because intimacy is often the first thing couples quietly deprioritise. It slips down the list beneath work, children, admin and exhaustion. Not through any decision. Simply through neglect.
It is broader than you think
One reason it slips is that we define it too narrowly. Intimacy includes sex, but it also includes the hand on the small of a back, the conversation that goes somewhere honest, the shared joke nobody else would find funny, and the comfort of sitting together saying nothing at all.
All of it counts. All of it feeds the rest.
It changes shape, and that is fine
The intoxicating spark of the early days is not built to last in its original form, and its fading is not evidence of failure. What replaces it, when a couple keeps paying attention, is something less frantic and considerably deeper: a connection built on years of being known.
The couples who keep that alive are rarely the ones who got lucky. They are the ones who kept treating connection as something worth tending, on ordinary weeks, when nothing was wrong.
Which is the good news hiding in all of this. The spark arrives on its own. Everything after it is something you get to build.