Dear Readers,

Lori and Jeff: For many couples, Valentine’s Day is a fleeting moment marked with a nice dinner or a pretty present. This year we encourage you to embrace the day as an opportunity for a relationship restart. Coming off the whirlwind of holidays and the beginning of the new year, many couples find themselves in the fog of February. Instead of going through the motions of trying to artificially create romance, commit to truly nurturing your bond.

Lori: What is the current quality of your connection? Every couple has room to repair rifts or enhance intimacy. The challenge I pose to you today is to shift your lens of relationship responsibility. It’s not uncommon for partners to fall into a pattern of focusing on the other’s shortcomings while developing blind spots to their own challenges. This week, make an effort to highlight and appreciate your partner's positive actions and efforts. Reflect on whether there are areas in which you could contribute 10% more to actively loving your partner or strengthening your bond. To make this a richer exercise, consider the following five elements that we’ve identified as the keys to healthy relationships:

• Trust and emotional safety: Feeling secure in the relationship, the ability to rely on your partner and to feel safe in sharing your feelings, wants and needs.

• Mindful communication: Making efforts to express yourself with centeredness, thought and intention, the willingness to validate each other’s felt experience, and creating collaborative conversations to solve challenges.

• Interdependence: Maintaining balance between togetherness and individuality.

• Intimacy: Sharing deeper parts of self with one another, having the courage to be open, vulnerable and seen.

• Partnership: Approaching life as a team, sharing responsibilities and supporting each other for the greater good of the relationship.

If you notice that you’ve been holding back or feel resistance to leaning in, recognize the feeling as an opportunity to explore what’s behind it. Couples who have been through challenges or who are carrying unhealed hurts or resentments often land in stalemates. Each partner is feeling vulnerable waiting for the other to reassure them that it’s safe to connect. Repairing and deepening romantic bonds often requires partners to love fearlessly. This doesn’t mean that you dismiss the fear, but rather you acknowledge it, face it together and choose to love actively despite it.

Jeff: A great way to nurture your connection is to find new ways of creating intimacy. Think beyond sexual chemistry and emotional closeness. Undoubtedly, these are both important to the health of most relationships, but the challenge with over-emphasizing these two areas of intimacy—especially with the hyper-focus on Valentine’s Day—is that both the erotic and the deep emotional are places that tend to create a lot of vulnerability. This year, try something new by focusing on the more foundational aspects of intimacy.

• Playful intimacy: A lighter or more adventurous kind of connection. Plan on a hike or a weekend adventure. Go to a comedy show or watch a funny movie.

• Non-sexual physical: Cuddling, hugging and just being in physical contact are all great ways to connect without the pressure of sexual performance or of setting the right mood.

• Intellectual intimacy: The sharing of ideas, values and beliefs. Pick a book to read together, listen to a podcast or find an interesting seminar to attend.

• Spiritual intimacy: The exploration of more existential concepts or things related to a sense of higher consciousness. You could meditate together or go to a faith service. Try something a bit more outside the box like a shared breathwork session.

If you nurture these less vulnerable aspects of intimacy, you’ll find that a more safe and collaborative space is created, paving the way for a deeper sexual and emotional connection.

Lori and Jeff: If celebrating Valentine’s Day feels like a chore or a routine that’s grown stale, shake things up by using the time to be curious about the quality of your connection and by integrating some alternative forms of intimacy into your relationship.