Sex can both reflect intimacy in our marriages and create more intimacy. It can help you and your husband experience oneness physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
I want to suggest one thing that can help you take that intimacy even deeper:
Look into your husband’s eyes during your orgasm.
Why eye contact?
When you look into your husband’s eyes, you see him and you know that he sees you.
You can’t be hiding away, focusing only on what you are experiencing physically like you can do when your eyes are closed. (In fact, if you’ve struggled with fantasizing during sex, opening your eyes can help ground you in your actual experience rather than your imagined one.)
When you open your eyes, your mind is filled with the image of your husband. It connects your feelings of pleasure with him in a powerful way. It expresses your complete presence in that experience with him.
It turns out that there’s some research behind all this. Eye contact does more than we realize.
- Eye contact can be a factor in falling love due to feelings of connection.
- Some research suggests that eye contact creates arousal.
- Prolonged eye contact (at least eight seconds) releases oxytocin—the hormone that is also released during orgasm and that bonds us together.
- Eye contact can actually synchronize the brain activity of the two people looking into each other’s eyes.
Feelings of connection, arousal, bonding, and synchronized brain activity? Sounds like oneness and intimacy to me!
How to open your eyes
Opening your eyes may not be an easy thing. In part, it can be scary to feel that intimate and vulnerable.
Fortunately, you can take some steps to ease your way into it.
- Add more frequent and prolonged eye contact with your husband outside the bedroom. If you aren’t used to doing this, it might feel weird and vulnerable—but it can help you adjust to the knowledge of seeing your husband and seeing him see you.
- Open your eyes at other times during sex—when you’re giving or receiving oral sex, when you’re kissing your husband, when you shift positions, and so on.
- Look into your husband’s eyes during his orgasm. You may find that eye contact during that moment of his intense pleasure contributes to your own sense of intimacy with him.
Many women prefer to have their eyes closed as they approach orgasm, to help them better focus on what their bodies are experiencing and reduce potential distractions. If this is the case for you, you might wait until the very end of your orgasm to open your eyes—or at least open them immediately afterward.
Experience more oneness.
If the idea of looking into your husband’s eyes during orgasm sounds a bit scary to you, you aren’t alone.
It can feel extremely vulnerable. With your eyes wide open, you may feel like everything about you is visible to your husband in that moment.
At the same time, looking into your husband’s eyes at your most vulnerable and pleasurable moment can create a deeper sense of oneness with him than you have experienced before.
Reach for that deeper intimacy and give it a try.
“The eye is the lamp of the body.” Matthew 6:22a
More readings about eye contact
- 5 Secret Powers of Eye Contact (Psychology Today)
- The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings (Society for Personality and Social Psychology)
- Neural substrates of shared attention as social memory: A hyperscanning functional magnetic resonance imaging study. (Neuroimage)
- This Is the Amazing Thing That Happens When You Stare Into Each Other’s Eyes (Glamour)
- To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This (New York Times
Image credit | CristiYor at pixabay.com
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I think all what you say is 100% true. With potentially one caveat. A caveat that you address up fromt that the blog is intended for normal, generally healthy relationships.
The one thiught I had would be if the woman was sexually abused. And the past abuser “forced” her to keep her eyes open during sex or at his, or her own unwanted orgasm. I which case this would be an extreme triggering event for her. (If unwittingly asked by her husband).
On the other hand, having her eyes open during sex so that she can literally see it is her husband and NOT the past (flashback) abuser, it could add comfort to her.
The idea here is for a woman to choose to do this. If a husband “commands” her to do this during sex, it might remove some of the feelings of mutuality and intimacy.