Preserving Intimacy While Caring for a Spouse

The emotions of spousal caregiving can be difficult to accept and navigate. Diseases like Alzheimer’s may cause obvious changes to a spouse’s personality, while other conditions like Parkinson’s or cancer can cause a shift in the balance of the marital relationship and may lead to changing feelings towards each other.

Charmian says that when she became the primary caregiver for her husband with Alzheimer’s, she began to feel disconnected from him emotionally and even resentful about the way their marital relationship had changed.

“At a time when we should be traveling and enjoying our lives together, with the children grown up, now I have basically become a parent to a young child again,” she said. “Over time, I think I have fallen out of love with my husband. It is sad and heartbreaking.”

Although caring for a spouse might fundamentally alter the relationship, it does not need to signal the end of intimacy in marriage.

Consider these three tips to help spouses maintain an intimate relationship and view the experience as a new life chapter.

3 Tips to Preserve Intimacy During Spousal Caregiving

For many couples, the physical intimacy of marriage manifests in sexual relations, and a chronic illness can deprive spouses of the ability (or desire) to make love. But even if you have to give up the act of sex, you should not have to lose the health benefits of physical intimacy—including reduced stress and lowered blood pressure—just because you now care for your spouse. By redefining what intimacy means, you can still maintain the closeness that a physical relationship brings.

Broaden your definition of physical intimacy to include any kind of loving or affectionate touching. This approach can help to foster physical intimacy with a spouse without actually making love. You might try:

• Holding hands as often as possible
• Stroking each other’s hair
• Hugging frequently
• Giving each other a shoulder or foot massage
• Applying lotion to each other’s backs
• Setting aside private time to get skin-to-skin with each other, especially if you can still cuddle in bed

Maybe you loved the fact your wife always saw the sunny side of a situation, but now a stroke has turned her into a negative person. Or maybe you loved the way your husband always made you laugh, but now his personality has changed due to dementia and he experiences frequent angry outbursts.

Take some time to mourn the loss of personality traits you loved in your spouse when you married, but don’t let that sense of loss prevent you from finding new traits to fall in love with. You can search for new things to admire about your spouse, such as her courage to perform physical therapy exercises every day or his newfound interest in watching movies with you.

At the same time, look inward to identify new aspects of your own personality to admire. Becoming a spousal care partner offers you the opportunity to engage in self-growth. Take pride in watching new aspects of your personality blossom as you provide loving care to your mate.

If you can’t travel the world in retirement as you’d planned, then find new activities and experiences to share and bond over.

Choose activities your spouse can participate in despite his or her health and find new hobbies to share together: take up poker; assemble jigsaw puzzles; or sign up for watercolor classes. These shared experiences can help you forge new relationship bonds and might form the basis of many happy memories in the future.

There’s no doubt being a spousal care partner can be challenging. But by reframing the experience, it is possible to keep the marital intimacy and bond alive.