Much like commitment, love and having a good relationship ... intimacy has eluded me. I never really understood what it meant, looked like or felt like. I mean it isn’t something that is necessarily tangible or is it? For such a small word it is certainly a loaded word. Like most people, I innocently thought it was spending as much time as possible with someone or having really deep, meaningful conversations about everything from dysfunctional pasts to whatever the mind could conjure up, but never did it occur to me that it was a feeling and had nothing to do with communicating in the verbal sense! So what is intimacy and how do your thoughts contribute to it?
Once again I turn to my friend Psychologist George Pransky PhD for an all together different perspective. In his book The Relationship Handbook George has dedicated chapter fourteen to the subject of Intimacy.
Our form of intimacy is to be distracted together
Couples say they want to be close, and they’re relieved to learn that being intimate is not a matter of time or “deep” discussions. People have trouble appreciating the simplicity of intimacy. They expect it to be more difficult, more involved. The harder they search for intimacy, the father off it seems. This chapter puts intimacy within every one’s reach.
Doesn’t intimacy require a large investment of time, talk and energy?
Have you ever noticed how you can be sitting with your partner and feel worlds apart? No matter how much dialogue passes between the two of you, you feel as if their body is present, but they are off somewhere else? Or maybe that describes you?
I know intimacy or lack of intimacy is a significant issue in many relationships. In the beginning of most relationships the intimacy levels are usually pretty high because both partners are so into each other. They momentarily take a break from their thinking, analyzing and habitual thoughts and are able to enjoy the other person. I mean we practically hang on every word they say. Then as time goes on because we aren’t aware that we think, we all innocently revert back to our habitual thinking or predisposed thinking and the closeness we felt slowly starts to dissipate and turn to distance. We blame it on all sorts of things.
I understand all to well. Knowing what I know now, I would say that intimacy or rather the feeling of intimacy is the glue that holds relationships together but in order to have it you must understand how your thoughts, moods and emotions play into your ability to experience it more often rather than less often. Many people experience brief glimpses of intimacy but not to the degree they wish.
So what is the number one issue that gets in the way of cultivating that feeling of intimacy? You guessed it ... insecurity, thoughts, and a distracted, speeded up mind. I wish I would have realized this years ago because not only was my mind so distracted and speeded up, but my partners’ minds were too. What I wanted most was that feeling of closeness and in retrospect I believe they wanted the same thing, but we just went about it all wrong. Everything I tried to do to create it seemed to leave me feeling more empty, isolated, lonely and incomplete. What I failed to realize is that these feelings were symptoms of a much deeper problem...insecurity which is a result of low mental well-being. As a result I, like most people, tried to treat this matter of the heart with my brain and put on my analytical thinking cap and started dissecting and focusing on the relationship problems or character defaults. I always came to the same conclusion: this must not be the right person. Okay, well if that is so how many people can’t be the right person? At some point you’ve got to start asking yourself that question.
