Where Intimacy Begins and Ends

Intimacy begins and ends with you being where you are. And hopefully, with another person learning and affirming where you are and who you are, and caring for you there.

There is an essential shyness to intimacy; the more sensitive what we are sharing, the more cautious and tentative we tend to be. In taking the risk to relate personal things to another, we may be learning what we feel right along with the other. That means there is something fragile, fragrant, about disclosing the just emerging feelings, the newness of being where you find yourself at that moment, with another human being, regardless of whether that person is a soul mate or stranger. And it is often easier to tell things to a stranger, from whom it is also easier to simply walk away.

Satisfying, shared intimacy offers an expansive liberation, an energizing “We disclosed something important about ourselves to each other.” The act of disclosure expanses your spirit, releasing pent-up feelings, thoughts, memories, hopes, fears, or whatever lives within you hidden, unexpressed. There is a freedom in the mere voicing of what is within you.

Yet do we want to know what is within us, awaiting expression? It takes a willing listener, who presents themselves in such a way as to invite self-disclosure, whose presence permits us to say what we really want to say, what we need to say, what we have to say. It may not be said to the person we wished we could say it to, or to the person who really needs to hear it, but at least it is said. Finally, it has become word, between us and another.

This is the heart and soul of intimacy: self-disclosure, self-revealing to another, as the other hopefully risks doing the same. Two persons revealing themselves to each other, not for any other purpose than for the sake of sharing as such, this is the stuff of intimacy.

I have long been in the business of intimacy, at least of being available for others to relate something of their private substance to another person, for the purpose of letting what is in them finally get spoken. Let me tell you, there is much, so much in all of us, waiting to get spoken and with that released, with the one speaking getting a kind of validation, affirmation, and assurance that, yes, you are alright, you too are human, like the rest of us.

There are too few persons in life who are ready, willing, and trustworthy to withstand our sharing of what we really want somebody to hear. We quietly, secretly, seek out others who could be partners in intimacy, not of the physical but of the soulful variety. It is easy to miss them, and just as it is easy to mistake them, to begin disclosing only to realize that this is not a person who can handle what we want to share.

At the core of the art of intimacy is knowing who you can tell what, and who is not ready, either for the moment or possibly ever, to hear what is within you, waiting for expression to that prepared other, who will not only listen, but gently, lovingly affirm what is heard, so that you are better for having taken the risk to be intimate, to share what you hold closely as the tender tentacles of your being. Strangely, such sharing of where you are opens the door to change, made possible by the risked freedom of sharing itself.