7.3 Taking intimacy deeper, then deeper still
In my 20s, I wanted intimacy more than anything else. I didn’t know much about it, but I heard it was the best kind of love and the sweetest part of being human, so, yes, I wanted it.
I paid very close attention whenever someone talked about intimacy, especially if they claimed to be an authority, like if they were a therapist or a self–help expert. And the first thing I heard these folks talk about was the…
Fear of intimacy.
I heard this phrase repeated so many times it seemed like fear and intimacy were wedded together and that intimacy was innately, irrevocably scary.
The second thing I heard was that…
Intimacy takes work.
I’d wait expectantly for the next sentence to come. It takes work, but only for a little while. It takes work, but then it becomes a pleasure.
Instead, I kept hearing that intimacy takes work, period.
Like that was forever. Like you could never do enough work.
So I began to think of intimacy as…
A scary grind.
Which gave me pause. Then made me mad.
When I stopped listening to the trashy gossip about intimacy—the fear and the work stuff—and took a second look, a deeper look, I realized that…
Intimacy is our friend.
In and of itself, intimacy is not scary. Instead…
It’s nurturing, sustaining, and enlivening.
What might be scary, though, what I personally found plenty scary, is what it takes to get to intimacy. Because what it takes is self–development, which is deeply challenging, and thus sometimes scary, and too often too scary.
Among the lies that get told about intimacy, what angers me most is when the authorities proclaim, explicitly or implicitly…
You should be good at intimacy.
Because…
No, you shouldn’t.
Not if you’ve had a childhood that’s left you with deficits you need to repair.
I remember going to dinner with a woman I was dating, who I’ll call Sarah. Over dessert she started hammering me about my fear of intimacy and my commitment phobia. She said all the standard stuff women said about men in those days.
To my right was this crowded restaurant with the tables almost on top of each other, and to my left, I was up against a picture window, looking right out onto the sidewalk with people passing by inches away from me.
I remember Sarah implying that intimacy was just a matter of willpower, and so I was being willful in refusing it with her. But I was sure it wasn’t like that because I had an abundance of willpower. So if that was all it took we would have been intimates.
I felt trapped as she repeated her disappointments in me to drive her point home. Inside myself I was in tears, but I wasn’t going to show it with all those strangers as witnesses.
I couldn’t find the words I needed to respond to her so I didn’t argue back. But I wish I had known what I know now, because then I could have told her…
I don’t know if I’m really scared of intimacy, but I do know I’m no good at it and that’s because I have so much personal development to do before I’ll be able to be in an intimate relationship and make it work. It’s going to take me years, because when it comes to intimacy my childhood has left me disabled.
And I’m sorry, but I’m doing my best, and in this moment I realize my best is not good enough for you, and we should break up and I should quit trying for intimacy until I’ve started having success working on myself.
I wish, in those days, I could have admitted my deficit. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had found a woman with a similar deficit and we’d made a deal, like…
Let’s be self–development partners. We’ve both got a deep longing for intimacy. Let’s sign up with a really great therapist, someone who doesn’t believe the lies about intimacy, someone with compassion for people like us, and let’s do what it takes to get to intimacy.
Imagine if we’re successful, how great that will feel. That we did this together. That we got to experience a kind of pre–intimacy, first in making this deal, and then in following through.
And I wish I’d had a crystal ball so I could look into the future, because then I could have told Sarah…
I’m a failure now, but if you track me for a few decades you will see that I am dogged in my perseverance. I’m actually not commitment phobic. I’m a commitment maniac—when it comes to pursuing intimacy.
And if you track me, you’ll see me do my work, slowly, yes, but surely. You’ll see me become intimacy–ready. You’ll see me fight for love inch by inch and day by day. That’s what I want you to see, the fight in me.
It’s commonly acknowledged that if you want intimacy, you have to…
Be open and vulnerable with your partner.
You have to let her know you. You have to let her see who you are. Really who you are.
There’s that clever phrase…
Intimacy means into-me-see.
But in my younger days I got this vulnerability thing wrong.
I read the books that said if you want an intimate relationship, reveal yourself, everything about yourself, including your past. Which I took to mean I had to reveal every embarrassing thing about me—flaws, failings, and past episodes of shame. And I had so many of those.
But I already felt bad enough about myself and couldn’t imagine making that awfulness public. I couldn’t see how two people who spent their time together trading ugly stories about their defects could possibly create a relationship of warmth and love and light.
I proved myself right one evening when I was out dancing at my favorite salsa club. I got to talking with Carla, a woman who was there for her first time, and we hit it off. The band was blaring so we went up to the balcony where it was just a bit quieter.
For thirty minutes, we told each other hard truths about ourselves. At first we were a little giddy, I guess about being so bravely honest, but then we became somber, and finally grim.
Afterwards, I thought of it as parallel emotional vomiting. Once we were done we couldn’t stand to look at each other and never spoke again.
We didn’t understand what we were doing, but it was this: we were wallowing in our despair.
I wish instead we had told each other about our longing for intimacy and how we were trying our best to fight our way forward toward it. That would have given us something positive to hang onto.
Self–development is an essential prerequisite for intimacy, because intimacy is not a given, you don’t get it through easy steps. If you’re lucky, your childhood and your teen years prepare you for it, but that entails a lot of learning and at least one person, if not several, teaching you about intimacy.
And it’s not fair for those of us with problematic childhoods to condemn ourselves for failing at intimacy when we’ve never had the kind of preparation it requires. It’s like telling a first–year piano student that something’s wrong with her because she’s not doing concerts in Carnegie Hall. I want us to feel the kind of compassion for ourselves that shoulds do not allow.
And speaking of shoulds, let’s return to the lie that you should be good at intimacy. And again I say…
No you shouldn’t.
But this time the reason is…
Because you’re human.
I only understood this after I started studying evolution. The better I got to know the human operating system as it really is, the more I understood that…
Intimacy does not come as basic equipment on humans.
It’s an aftermarket add–on which requires sustained and strategic effort.
Here’s how I see it now. Intimacy is not a feature of our genome. Instead…
Intimacy is a moral project.
The fact is…
Evolution doesn’t give a fig for intimacy.
It only wants us to survive long enough so we can reproduce and send our genes into the next generation.
This human thing we call intimacy is not natural. Our DNA doesn’t provide it for us, because…
Intimacy has never been necessary to human survival.
So evolution never made it a priority. That means if we want it, we have to call on the twist of grace, we have to call on our moral imagination, we have to make a moral decision to work for it and fight for it.
And this is something the self–help books don’t really talk about.
But it gets worse. Not only is human evolution not supportive of intimacy, it’s actually an adversary, because…
Intimacy undermines tribal allegiance.
And from the earliest days of our species, allegiance has been the key to our surviving and thriving. Tribal fundamentalism can’t work without vigorous tribal allegiance.
Deeply personal intimacy is inherently at odds with that allegiance. And this is why…
Intimacy is dangerous.
Earlier I said intimacy is our friend. I said in and of itself it’s not scary. Am I contradicting myself now when I say it’s dangerous? Not at all.
Intimacy does not have to be scary to us as individuals who are seeking love with a partner.
But it is a threat to anyone who’s committed to tribal fundamentalism. It’s a threat to their way of life. So they’re not going to welcome it. Or those of us who are dedicated to it. Because…
Intimacy will cause you to put the needs of your partner first.
It will cause you…
To make her a priority over the demands of your tribe.
And in the bigger picture, intimacy is actually a threat to our species. If intimacy had dominated our OS instead of tribal loyalty, we probably wouldn’t have taken over the world. Maybe we wouldn’t even have survived up to the present.
What our intimate relationships ask of us is different from what our survival relationships demand.
Intimacy asks us to take deep dives into our individual psyches. Tribalism has never asked that of us. It’s never wanted that from us. All it wants is that we follow the rules mandated by our group. It wants conformity, not individuation. It wants us to stay within our roles as members of a survival team. It doesn’t want us to have deeply personal desires and aspirations.
Allegiance can give you an endorphin high because there’s a scintillating thrill to standing by each other when under attack. And there’s a thrill to identifying as an inseparable part of a team. And a thrill to the merging of identities that goes with allegiance.
The tribal thrill can be mistaken for the personal thrill of intimacy, but those are two very different things.
If we believe we should be naturals when it comes to intimacy, this damnable should is going to hurt us. Because if everyone’s always supposed to be great at intimacy, then anyone who does the hard work to actually become great, gets no credit…
“What are you crowing about? You’ve just gotten to where you should have been all along.”
In this context, intimacy is the zero point, which means there’s nothing special about it…
But intimacy is special.
I want anyone who takes the journey to intimacy to see themselves not as remedials, playing catch–up, but as proactive fighters, even heroes.
And I want to say to you…
If you and your partner have gotten to a deep and delicious intimacy, honor yourselves. It doesn’t matter how you got there. If it was through hard, conscious work, celebrate!
If you did your work intuitively, not even knowing what you were doing, so what? Celebrate!
If you got there by luck, if you were born into a family that brought you up on intimacy, celebrate!
If you and the one you love are on the road to intimacy, but you still have a long way to go, honor that you’re on the road.
If you have friendship intimacy, honor that, even if you don’t have a primary partner.
If you have a desire for intimacy and all you’ve met with so far is failure but you’re still persevering, honor that.
In my childhood, in my church, what I was taught about intimacy was…
Nothing.
But I did get taught a lot about marriage. Tribal marriage, in fact. I saw lots of those marriages. And I took in the church’s tribal message, below the level of consciousness…
When I was 28, I took a woman named Becky out canoeing from the Bay up along a broad creek lined with banks of lush weedy tangles. At lunch time, as I had planned, we arrived at a grassy spot I’d scoped out beforehand. I laid out a picnic and opened a split of champagne I hoped to impress her with.
Now, I thought she was Jewish. And at that time I was fascinated with Jewish women. But as we talked during lunch, she happened to mention that she had grown up Presbyterian. Like me. Because we Calvinists called ourselves Presbyterians.
And in that moment, I swear I heard my Dad’s voice coming down out of the sky, telling me, “Son, you could marry this woman.”
So yes, I had learned my lesson well.
Here’s how a tribal marriage worked. You found someone inside the church community to be your wife. Both of you then followed the rules of the church faithfully and you made a deal to keep following them for the rest of your life. Till death do you part. There was to be no growing or developing or changing.
So this was a static relationship. And it remained superficial. Which maybe doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, but it has serious appeal. Because if the two of you never change, if you stay on the prescribed straight and narrow, you’ll have minimal conflicts and probably they’ll only be about minor things. Mostly you won’t have to negotiate with each other.
This was the kind of relationship I saw around me, and the kind I was being trained to undertake when I grew up. Relationship by rote.
This kind of marriage seems like the very picture of safety and security. But there’s a risk to it. You’re not developing the kind of resilience that comes from working things through, or the resilience that comes from doing self-development. So you’re not prepared to deal with the stressors and storms that life can bring.
The best you can do is hunker down and endure the onslaught when it comes.
And there’s another problem. The two of you have not so much married each other, but the church. You’ve married the tribe.
And maybe that never bothers you. But maybe over time it does. And you start to resent the discipline of following the rules. And maybe a fighting impulse stirs in you. And maybe the more you live with your partner, the more you want to be in deep with her in a personal way. And so rebellion against the straitjacket of the relationship stirs.
And then let me throw in one more problem for good measure. The two of you have merged. You’ve become homogeneous. You’re like peas in a pod. And maybe the endless sameness of your days begins to get to you and you get bored and feel stale, which is something that happens in so many marriages.
So what’s the alternative? It’s deeply personal intimacy. Based on both partners doing serious self–development and coming to appreciate and enjoy that. That, plus the two of you doing serious development of your relationship together.
Compared to a static relationship, this is indeed risky.
If the two of you keep growing, it could happen that you’ll grow apart and have to let go of your relationship.
And there’s risk in that you might wake up in the morning wanting to cruise through an easy day, but at breakfast you find out your partner is taking on a new challenge and now you’re suddenly deep into it with her.
And there’s risk, too, in that you will not be appreciated by people who are committed to tribal allegiance as their way of life and will see your relationship as a threat.
But this kind of deeply personal intimacy is not just risky. There’s safety built into it, because…
Both partners have an inner compass based on nurturance not allegiance.
And…
Both have a deep moral resonance with each other.
So yes, they will grow and surprise themselves and each other. But this is what keeps a relationship fresh and exciting. This is what makes a relationship a satisfying adventure. And this is crucial to making a relationship sustaining. And sexy. Because risk and surprise pump up desire.
Ultimately intimacy minimizes the risk of the relationship falling apart, because the more you and your partner risk going deep together, the more you’ll be rewarded, and the more you’ll want to hold onto each other.
It turns out then, that studying evolution and pursuing the mission to upgrade love, allowed me to understand intimacy in a way I couldn’t otherwise have understood it. And this brought me a special surprise. I call it…
Moral eros.
Let me explain.
If intimacy is a moral project, then it seems to me that the heart of upgraded intimacy is morality. And please remember that when I say “moral,” I mean the morality of mutual nurturance and mutual advocacy. Not the punishing, righteous, condemnatory kind of morality.
Imagine this. Your partner says…
I love you because of how you make your people decisions.
That’s a lovely compliment in and of itself, but it’s also a moral statement.
And imagine your partner goes on to make what he’s saying more explicit…
I love how you treat people, and how you treat me, and how you treat yourself—with so much love and care.
I love how this is not just a thing you do, but that it’s the very core of who you are.
Which again means this is a moral stand.
And what if you partner continued…
Not only do I love you, but I believe in you.
I’m taken with the quality of your character.
You’re the kind of person this world needs many more of. You’re the kind of person I most admire.
And now he’s on a roll with much more to say…
I love that you don’t traffic in shoulds. And that you hate shoulds as much as I do. And you know how much they hurt people. And that you’re morally opposed to them. And that you don’t ever lay a should on me.
And…
I love the stand you take, that if you’re going to do a relationship, you’re going to do it really well, you’re going to give it everything you’ve got.
And….
I love how every evening you tell me the key stories of your day. How you narrate them play by play. How you take me inside them. And how real you are. How you don’t dress them up. How I get to see the real you. And how some stories you tell with chagrin and some you tell with delight, but all of them with affectionate self–regard.
And…
I love that when I’m wrestling with a decision and ask you for help, you don’t try to make my decision for me. Instead you ask me questions, you take me deeper into myself, and you push on me to make the decision that’s most true to who I am.
And…
I love that you’re your own person, that you’re flexible and adaptable with people but you don’t compromise on your moral core. You stand by your values no matter what. I find this thrilling. I get so jazzed by you when I witness you staying true to yourself in tough situations.
And…
For me, “eros” means more than lustful sexuality, which of course is the core meaning of the word. But I think of eros as total aliveness—body, soul, heart, and mind. I think of it as full–blooded engagement.
And I like thinking of it that way, because it’s not fair that our bodies should get to have all the fun. I think hearts and minds and souls deserve to get in on eros, too.
Add all this up and I can tell you that I find the totality of you to be a turn on.
This kind of relationship, this is what I mean by moral eros.
And if that word eros is feels like a bit too much you can talk about having a moral crush on your partner if you like.
But I love using that word eros, because it’s so very much the opposite of the severe and somber Calvinism I grew up under. Eros is the perfect antidote to those deadening years.
And I admit I get a kick out of how eros gives the moralistic moralists conniptions.
I love this thing we call intimacy, but there are some days when the word “intimacy” feels too fraught with old struggles and sorrows and I can’t warm up to it.
So on those days I use the phrase affectionate communion.
Feel free to adopt this phrase yourself if you like it, but maybe you’ll come up with an expression of your own to personalize intimacy.
For me, communion means we’re deep into each other, but we’re not merging. We’re not clones of each other. We’re not co-dependent. We’re not acting out psychological distress.
Instead, we’re vigorously independent people who are vigorous fans of relationships. We’re not together in obedience to any should or any sense of desperation. We’re with each other because we have a deeply personal desire to be partners.
This kind of togetherness means that…
You’re able to keep someone in your heart while remaining true to yourself.
The thing about a relationship where each of us keeps developing and deepening is that we have more and more to give each other. A static relationship can’t begin to compete with this.
And why do I like to partner affectionate with communion?
Because I love affection. I love giving those little touches that can make a day so sweet. I love being able to give holding–on hugs. And…
I love being able to give to a partner something she wants but didn’t know she wanted till I gave it to her.
I love that kind of surprise which can only come from being in deep with each other.
Of course I understand it’s possible to fake affection. Though I’ve never been able to do that because I’m too transparent, even when I’m trying not to be. But I like to think of affection as a spontaneous gift. As grace. Something that brightens up communion.
I’m crazy about love stories. I’ve seen dozens on TV and in the movies and I’ve read bunches more in novels. But I’m always eager for the next one as long as…
It’s fresh and surprising and messy with personality.
As opposed to yet another tired Hollywood template with one–dimensional people plodding through it.
I want to see characters rich with idiosyncrasy who ignite their own special chemistry that only the two of them can ignite together.
Because whenever two people take the journey to love, struggling through all the obstacles that real humans come up against along the way, I’m interested. It doesn’t matter how different they are from me, I want to learn from them, I want to discover what they’re discovering, I want to understand love in ways I haven’t before.
I’m especially want to see how they might be upgrading love, because there’s so much more I want to learn about this journey.
And there’s so much more to enjoy. Do you know that old movement song “Bread and Roses?”
I think of deeply personal intimacy as bread in that it’s so nurturing and sustaining and so very good for us.
At the same time I find an exquisite, yet down–to–earth beauty to this kind of intimacy. Which makes me think of roses.
And as the song says, “We need bread…
But we need roses, too.”
The beauty of nurturance is not a superficial decoration. It reaches down into the very heart of the best kind of intimacy. It’s not an afterthought…
It’s essence.
The way I see it, we want our intimacy not just to be useful, but to have a touch of radiance.
And I wish for everyone to have this kind of intimacy in their life.
And to have a partner where…
The two of you get to enjoy long years of giving each other rose after rose after rose.
PS:
For my first book, I wrote a dialogue for a chapter called “Intimacy Against the Odds.” I’m adding it here, in case you want to check it out, because I like how it shows off…
