Besides Sex What Can I Do To Win Her Heart?

Dear Agatha,

I wish to express my indebtedness to you for your kind counsel to humanity. Almighty God will endow you with more wisdom.

I am a young man in my 20s and have been in relationships with women and most time, it seems we are not really making any headway.

I have this particular friend of mine whom I love and cherish so much that I would like to spend the rest of my life with her. We have been friends for so long now, but one thing baffles me she doesn’t seem committed or open minded towards our relationship though she has always claimed to be in love with me, and also a nice friend. This has continued to be a source of concern to me.

When I told my friends about it they said there must be a level of intimacy in a relationship. Usually a physical intimacy between a dating couple for the relationship to attract the type of exchange of confidence I desire.

They are of the view that the lack of intimacy with my girlfriends is the reason they don’t confide in me. They further argued that until I learn to have physical intimacy, I could never get into the heart of the woman I cherish. Now my questions are: must one really engage in physical intimacy with a lady before she can really open up or show commitment?

Secondly, what effect does physical intimacy have on morality?

Finally, what other ways can a man get into the heart of the woman he is in love with?

Worried Guy.

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Dear Worried Guy,

Your friends are wrong. A couple doesn’t have to be physically intimate to be able to talk and share information about each other. It is an act that comes from trust and acceptance of the other person, as your own extension.

This comes from a deep realisation that a relationship has many facets, all which need constant attention and synchronisation to make it whole.

If all your previous dates have problems talking to you, then you have a problem of taking the women in your life out of their shells. Whether you make love to them every single day and hour won’t change the fact that you lack the ability to attract their trust sufficiently to confide in you.

Therefore, begin the task of having conversational intimacy by looking at your own faults. What are the issues that interest you in life? What are your interests in these women? What sort of friend are you to yourself? There is no way you can be a friend to anybody if you haven’t learnt the act of being your own friend. Intimacy with anybody comes from the type of relationship one has been able to cultivate with self. For instance, if one has the habit of lying to him or herself, there is no way, that person will be able to tell the truth to anybody.

A person who has trouble accepting the person God created for him or her, to be able to ever accept the defect in another person or the uniqueness the other person has will be a tough task.

Developing intimacy with another person is an effort that comes from accepting yourself as your own friend.

Therefore, first learn to be at peace with yourself, accepting things you can do as well as acknowledging your own limitations. This way, you will be able to recognise the needs of those close to you, their apprehension as well as the hesitation to let go.

These are challenges sex doesn’t mean love. Rather, it complicates in the sense that issues that need verbal solutions are taken to the bedroom and at the end of the day are left unresolved. This in turn piles up the bin of unattended issues, which at the end of the day destroys the future of the relationship. At this stage, not even sex can cover up the decay in the relationship, whereas a friendship that is able to talk out their differences will survive tougher challenges because it has the trust to attract loyalty. By the time sex is introduced, it simply becomes the icing on the cake.

And if your friends were right, how come sexually active relationships, including marriages are all crumbling like packs of cards? The simple answer to that is friendship and not sex is the cement that holds any relationship together.

Therefore strive to become a very good friend to your partner to be able to attract confidence and loyalty. It is always easy to confide in one’s friend than one’s lover.

Offer your woman friendship to earn her trust. Once you do that, it would be easy to get her to talk to you about herself because that way she is assured of your support, which drives away the fear of condemnation.

Many a time, dating couples are afraid to talk about themselves or their past for fear of rejection. You agree the human nature likes to project self in the best possible way especially to strangers and only opens up to those considered to be friends.

You will fare better with your date if she sees you as her friend.

There is no way your morality would not be affected if you take to building your relationship on sex. Once you begin it, it becomes very easy to jump from one girl to another and very soon a habit which will conflict with whatever moral or religious inclination you may have built over the years.

And because sex doesn’t insure against disappointment in a relationship, you end up experimenting with so many women and at the end of the day confuse yourself about the right choice of a woman.

So be careful whom you listen to. God is the only one who can direct you in the best way. To be sure, look at the success of your friends in their relationships? How many of them despite being sexually active are able to boast of stable and consistent relationship?

Good luck.