How to Play with your Partner
The importance of safe exploration and how to invite it into your relationship
To Play is to Survive and Thrive
“Play” is word that brings up memories and thoughts of being young, innocent, and carefree. But believe it or not, defining “play” and its purpose has stumped geniuses for centuries. The world of psychology is still learning about the role and power of play across the entire lifespan.
Imagine your favorite animal at play. With a safe place to explore from and return to, the animal begins adventuring. Learning and practicing new skills creates bonding experiences. Improvisation and creativity flow. The rules, roles, and language for engagement emerge as play evolves. The more the animal engages with play, the more developed its identity is. This confidence in identity is essential to survive, mate, and better its chances at enjoying a full life. Whatever animal you just imagined playing, now imagine that animal without play. That animal wouldn’t be able to develop the skills or security in itself or others needed to survive.
This is why we need to engage in play in our most intimate relationships. Safe exploration helps us build and expand our relational awareness and the shared experiences that bond us and give our lives deeper meaning. To play is to survive and thrive.
Inviting Play Into Your Relationship
Create Safety:
If you think about when you would play as a kid at recess, think of who you would play with. Kids don’t go looking to play with someone who bullies them, they look for their safe friends and avoid the unsafe bullies. We can only engage with play when the environment and relationship is safe enough.
Safety is the most important and most difficult aspect of any relationship. Emotional safety is built with trust. The best way to start if you don’t feel safe to play is to establish boundaries that would allow you to feel safe and express those boundaries to your partner. Advocate for what you need to feel safe and constantly express those needs as those needs shift and change. For those who are working through some kind of betrayal or ‘attachment wound’ in their relationship, it is likely that you feel emotionally unsafe in general. If you are working through some kind of betrayal, safety, or trust issue, I recommend developing emotional safety and trust with the guidance of a Marriage and Family Therapist.
Embrace Failure:
This is all about embracing failure in the safe space that you have created for your relationship. This is NOT about accepting abusive or unsafe behavior. Once your relationship feels safe and you feel confident about advocating for what is safe for you, expand your adventure. Having it be okay to fail in a safe relationship allows both partners to learn, create, and grow. Failure becomes improvisation.
When I say “failure” it can freak people out because we’ve all heard “failure is not a option.” We can equate failure with “giving up.” But it’s more true that failure is inevitable and it’s also essential to fail if you want to learn and grow. So, let’s reframe the word “failure” as “experiment.” Experiment (fail) with new activities, new hobbies, new ways to check in with one another, or new ways to say “I love you.” Because we’re playing with and embracing failure, we want to start as small as possible and expand from there. Allow yourself and your partner to totally get things wrong and celebrate attempts as the risks get bigger. Here’s the bottom line: when you are safe enough to fail you will have less to fear to take the risks needed for intimacy. One of my favorite couples therapists and educators, Michael Morgan LCSW, says it like this: “There’s a big difference between playing it safe and being safe enough to play.”
Build a Culture of Appreciation:
Share when and how things go wrong and express gratitude for the risks. If you build a culture of appreciation for taking risks, taking a risk becomes part of the fun. With your culture of appreciation, work together to shape new playful activities and shared experiences by combining your different personalities, hobbies, and dreams.
Sometimes it can be fun to experiment with role reversal: if someone typically initiates a date, explore together with your partner how and when the other partner can initiate a date. Use this idea to role-swap with grocery shopping, planing vacations, sex, and parenting.
Give Compassionate and Curious Feedback:
Compassionate and curious feedback is how you form the rules and language to your new dance. If two people start dancing with each other and there’s no feedback between them, neither could possibly know what is happening or what move is coming next. This is honestly where many couples get stuck. Couples learn a dance move or two but haven’t learned how to offer compassionate feedback so they practice the same dance moves, get bored or discouraged, and stop dancing. It’s the loving feedback that gives the new dance life and lets improvisation flow.
If something is fun, feels good, or is deeply impacting you, your partner should know about it. If something isn’t fun, doesn’t feel good, or isn’t all that meaningful to you, your partner should know about it. Use compassion, gratitude, and curiosity to redirect play towards the experiences that both people will love.
Here’s a compassionate, grateful, and curious redirect: “I see how much of a risk you took in planning this and I am so glad you did! Even if it wasn’t what we thought it would be, I still feel really important to you. Now that we know what this feels like, what do you want to try next with me?”
Play with the Barriers and Blocks:
During play, there will be swings, there will be home runs, there will be misses, and there might even be moments when someone completely drops the ball. These barriers are so important to play with. Vulnerable emotions will likely be activated when play is difficult or when someone doesn’t fully show up to play.
When a vulnerable emotion gets activated, pay attention to what “cued” you in. Maybe you felt rejected when your partner didn’t seem engaged. Maybe you felt like a disappointment knowing how hard you tried still having your partner only seem to see the “screw ups.” What “cued” that emotion? Was it your partner looking at their phone in the middle of an important moment? Was it a critical look when you were reaching for support or comfort? When you can identify the “cue,” and what vulnerability it triggered in you, share the impact and the barrier from that vulnerable place. If you’re on the receiving end, try to respond with validation and openness. This way, even the blocks to play become safe. In Emotionally Focused Therapy, we call this de-escalating. When you can de-escalate the cycle that stops you from playing with each other, you re-establish the safety needed to play. And every time safety is re-established intimacy deepens.
Celebrate the Impact:
If you have just shared an incredible moment with your partner, do not let it go unspoken. So often I see surprise on a partner’s face when their spouse describes how special they felt in a moment of their relationship. The partner may have had no idea! When the impact is celebrated, it echos powerful messages like “I am making a difference! I am doing a good job! He/she sees me and how much I care! I feel so special! We are making progress!” Emphasizing the impact positively reinforces playful exploration for everyone involved.
Invite Future Experiences:
Make future planning part of play. Before the fun is over, get curious about what’s next: “I wonder what trouble we will get into next week! What’s something we’ve talked about but haven’t ever tried together? Since this was my idea, what ideas do you have for our next adventure?”
Is Play Sex?
Absolutely! Why not? If you’re not following, just play the “fortune cookie game” with all the headings of this blog (you know, when you add “in the bedroom” after everything). I’m saying that play will impact so many areas of your relationship and will naturally deepen all kinds of intimacy. So it’s not a leap to assume that if your romantic relationship becomes more playful in general, the sexual part of the relationship is going to shift too. Once you get the idea of what play is and what it does, it starts to make sense that play is dating, flirting, getting to know yourself and your partner, talking, adventuring together, and sharing meaningful experiences. All of those qualities describe good sex. So, if you want to enjoy really good sex with your partner, get really good at playing.
So, now that you know how to do it, go play with your partner! I’d love to know your thoughts and reactions to this post so please comment below. If you enjoyed this post, share it! Are you wanting to dive deeper into creating the relationship you want to have with your partner? Click here to get the ball rolling. Thanks for reading!
