Ancient Rites To Improve Intimacy
One of the things I've noticed after years of writing and talking about relationships is that couples rarely lose intimacy in one dramatic moment. More often, it gets worn away around the edges. Work runs late. Someone checks their phone during dinner. Conversations become increasingly concerned with groceries, children, bills and who remembered to put the washing on. None of these things means that love has disappeared, but intimacy needs somewhere to live, and modern life doesn't always leave it much room. This is one reason I've become fascinated by the rituals surrounding relationships in older cultures. I don't mean that ancient people had happier marriages than we do. They quite clearly didn't always, and many ancient societies operated within legal and social structures that we'd rightly find deeply unequal today. Nor should we imagine that every ancient wedding ceremony was primarily a romantic celebration between two people in love. Marriage could involve property, inheritance, family alliances and social obligation. Yet ancient cultures repeatedly did something that I think we've become surprisingly bad at: they marked relationships. They created moments in which two people's connection was deliberately separated from ordinary life and given symbolic importance. Food was shared. Hands were joined. Fires were lit. Promises were witnessed. Thresholds were crossed. Whatever else those rituals meant in their original cultures, I think there's something worth recovering from the basic idea behind them. Intimacy doesn't always deepen by itself. Sometimes we need to create a space in which we're reminded to notice each other.
Ancient Rome offers a particularly interesting example, although it's also a good reminder not to romanticize the past. Roman marriage took several forms, and the highly ceremonial confarreatio was a religious form associated especially with patrician families. It involved prescribed religious observances, ten witnesses and a cake made from spelt, from which the ceremony took its name. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0} I find the symbolism of sharing food particularly interesting, because eating together is such an ordinary act that we can forget how intimate it can be. Across cultures, sharing food turns up again and again wherever human beings want to express hospitality, family, reconciliation or belonging. We still do it, of course. We have first dates over dinner, wedding breakfasts, anniversary meals and Sunday lunches. But perhaps the lesson isn't that we need to recreate a Roman ceremony with spelt bread. It's that a meal can become something more than refuelling. I often suggest that couples occasionally create a meal that has a boundary around it: no phones, no television, no practical discussion for the first twenty minutes. Light a candle if that helps mark the difference. Cook something connected with an earlier stage of your relationship. Open the wine you drank on your first holiday together. The food itself isn't magical. The point is to say, without necessarily saying it aloud, this time belongs to us. Ancient ritual understood that physical actions can carry emotional meaning. Sometimes intimacy begins by making an ordinary action deliberate again.
Roman Wedding Traditions
Fire and light provide another lovely example. Roman wedding traditions included lamps, torches and domestic religious symbolism, and the bride's movement into a new household carried religious as well as social significance. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1} Fire, of course, appears in relationship symbolism far beyond Rome, and it's not difficult to understand why. A fire needs attention. Leave it entirely alone and eventually it goes out; smother it and the same thing happens rather more quickly. I realize the metaphor is almost too perfect for relationship counsellors, but that doesn't make it less useful. Intimacy needs both attention and air. Couples sometimes assume that closeness means doing everything together, knowing everything about one another and eliminating every private corner of life. In my experience, that can be as damaging as neglect. Desire often needs a little distance. There should still be something to discover when you turn towards your partner. A simple modern ritual might therefore involve lighting a candle together once a week and using the time it burns for a conversation that isn't about administration. Ask each other something you don't already know the answer to. What have you been thinking about recently? What are you frightened of at the moment? What would you like more of from your life? What do you miss? The candle doesn't possess any mysterious power. Its usefulness is that it changes the atmosphere just enough to remind us that this conversation is different from asking whether somebody remembered to buy toothpaste.
Thresholds are another ancient symbol I keep returning to. In Roman wedding custom, the movement of the bride from one household into another was an important part of the marriage process, and wedding traditions developed around entering the new home. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2} We still carry traces of threshold symbolism today, although we rarely think about it. We cross a doorway after getting married, move into a first home together, take a first holiday, celebrate anniversaries and recognize moments when a relationship has somehow become something different from what it was before. Psychologically, I think couples benefit from noticing these transitions. Relationships don't stay still. The person you fell in love with at twenty-five isn't exactly the person sitting opposite you at forty-five, and neither are you. Sometimes couples get into trouble because they're still trying to maintain an agreement that belonged to an earlier version of the relationship. A threshold ritual can be extremely simple. On an anniversary, instead of merely exchanging presents, each person might write down one thing they're grateful for from the previous year and one thing they'd like the relationship to become during the next. Read them to each other over dinner. Keep them somewhere private. Look at them again a year later. I like this because it acknowledges something ancient rituals understood rather well: crossing from one stage of life into another deserves recognition. Intimacy can deepen when we stop assuming our relationship is a finished object and begin treating it as something we're continually entering.
The Witnessing of Rites
Ancient rites were also frequently witnessed by other people, and I think there's something interesting here that has become slightly lost in our very private understanding of romantic love. The Roman confarreatio, for example, required ten witnesses; marriage was not simply a secret emotional agreement between two individuals but something recognized within a wider social and religious world. :contentReference[oaicite:3]{index=3} I'm not suggesting inviting ten neighbours into the bedroom whenever intimacy needs improving. But healthy relationships rarely flourish entirely in isolation. Friends, family and community can remind us who we are as a couple. They remember stories we've forgotten. They saw us when we first got together. They sometimes notice when we've stopped being kind to each other before we do. There's a reason anniversaries, weddings and vow renewals often feel different when they're witnessed. Saying "I choose you" privately matters; saying it where other people can hear it can feel surprisingly powerful. For couples who've been together for years, a small gathering on an important anniversary can serve a similar purpose. Tell the story of how you met. Ask friends what they remember about you in those early years. Toast something you've survived together. Ritual makes memory visible. And relationships need memory, because during difficult periods it's very easy to experience the present moment as though it represents the entire history of the relationship. It doesn't.
There is, however, one part of ancient relationship ritual that I wouldn't want us to reproduce: the assumption that tradition automatically makes something good. Ancient marriage customs could reflect profound inequalities, particularly in the legal and social position of women. In some forms of Roman marriage, for example, marriage could involve the wife coming under her husband's manus, or legal authority, although Roman marital arrangements varied considerably and changed over time. :contentReference[oaicite:4]{index=4} We should be very careful about turning the phrase "ancient wisdom" into a guarantee of virtue. Some traditions deserve preserving; others deserve leaving firmly in the past. For me, a useful intimacy ritual must therefore be mutual. It shouldn't be something one partner imposes on the other, and it certainly shouldn't become a test: "If you loved me, you'd do this ritual with me every Friday." That defeats the entire purpose. The best rituals create invitation rather than obligation. They might involve bathing together, giving each other a massage, taking an evening walk, cooking the same meal on an anniversary, writing a short note of appreciation, listening to music associated with the beginning of the relationship or simply spending ten minutes holding each other without trying to turn the moment into anything else. Sexual intimacy can certainly be part of ritual, but ritual can also remind us that intimacy is larger than sex. Touch without expectation can be intimate. Being listened to without interruption can be intimate. Laughing together can be intimate. Feeling safe enough to admit something embarrassing can be profoundly intimate.
What I think the ancient world can ultimately teach us isn't a collection of secret rites guaranteed to improve our love lives. I'm always suspicious when spirituality is presented as a formula: light this candle, say these words, perform this action and your relationship will somehow be transformed. Human beings are considerably more complicated than that. The deeper lesson is simpler. Relationships need moments that are treated differently from ordinary moments. Ancient cultures repeatedly used food, fire, witnesses, promises, sacred spaces and thresholds to say: pay attention, something important is happening here. We can do the same without pretending to recreate ceremonies whose original religious and cultural meanings belonged to very different societies. Choose a meal that means something to both of you. Light a candle and talk. Return once a year to somewhere important in your relationship. Create an anniversary ritual that's yours rather than one purchased from a shop. Ask each other what you're carrying into the next year together and what you'd like to leave behind. Above all, don't wait until the relationship is in trouble before giving it deliberate attention. One of the saddest things I see is couples suddenly becoming intensely attentive to each other only when they're frightened of losing what they have. Ritual gives us a gentler alternative. It says that love deserves attention while it's still healthy. The ancients wrapped relationships in ceremony partly because relationships mattered to families, communities and religious life. We can strip away the hierarchy and superstition and still keep something valuable: the understanding that intimacy needs to be noticed. Sometimes nurturing a relationship begins with nothing more mystical than turning towards the person beside you and, for a little while, treating their presence as something sacred.