Intimacy – What Is It Exactly? Part 1
What comes to your mind when you read this word? Is it a physical act between two consenting adults? Or is it something more? Intimacy can be the mutually satisfying act of sharing your bodies and yourselves with someone else when there is love and care in the relationship. It can also be a consensual, mechanical act that is just for a physical, egocentric release regardless of who the partner is. Of course, there are many, many variations between these two extremes. However, It is important to understand that if we are in relationship with someone there can be a certain emptiness, an aloneness, if things are simply physical and there is a lack of the other, different forms of intimacy between partners.
So, then, what is intimacy? I believe that intimacy is a heart deep connection that can occur on the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual levels between family, friends, lovers, and life partners. It is a kind of an energetic blending of two or more people that speaks of trust, understanding, admiration, mutual respect, kindness, love, and loyalty. It can be a wordless connection, but it truly needs to be spoken aloud and reinforced for human beings, even if we feel vulnerable saying the words. Vulnerable is a difficult word to say, feel, and to remain in a state of being with for many of us. I have learned that being vulnerable and close with another human being is one of the richest experiences we will ever have of real intimacy on this planet. Intimacy is worthy of our focus and attention and needs to be nurtured on a regular basis. Silence and neglect do not feed our, or another’s, soul. Silence creates distance, confusion, and separation, causing harm to an intimate relationship. Neglect of intimacy leads to emotional disconnection and a sense of being devalued and unloved. What was once beautiful and important can wither and die on the vine without regular reinforcement and attention. Harsh, judgmental words and bad attitudes can equally destroy a loving connection, just like salting the land can cause nothing to grow.
So, it might help to think of an intimate relationship as a garden that needs daily tending by everyone involved. It’s best to pull out the weeds of discontent when they are small and manageable than to let them grow and spread amongst the flowers. Remembering that a relationship needs to be tended with care and love will absolutely help it to continue to grow and to blossom. So, what are the ways to tend to an intimate relationship? In this blog, I am going to offer some generalities, as we are all very complex human beings and have widely differing interests and needs. Let’s start by considering intimacy from the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical perspectives. By doing so, I hope this will inspire you see what that specifically brings to mind for you and where you feel strong and where you feel you need to invest more of your time.
Mental intimacy would be the sharing of our ideas, our hopes, and our dreams with our significant other, our families, and friends. It might be a simple as talking about a book or a movie that interests us or as deep as a thought-provoking conversation about a philosophical concept that challenges how we see the world around us. It’s whatever interests and excites you the most to think about and to explore through casual conversations or formal education and anything in between. The point here is to share our innermost thoughts, to communicate from our hearts and minds, and to actively listen to each other’s responses. To really hear and be heard by each other with love, appreciation, and acceptance is a deep need within us all. To do so with your closest and dearest will nurture ad nourish you all. We can help each other to grow and contribute to the world around us with this form of intimacy at its highest level. On the personal level, it gives us wings beneath our wings.
Emotional intimacy is trusting our vulnerable hearts and our innermost, emotional selves with another person, whether it is a family member, friend, intimate partner, or even a therapist. At its best, we can trust that we will be accepted, heard, and understood when we share what makes our heart sing, cry, or even go up in flames. And when we are emotionally wounded, they support us and have our backs by keeping the wolves that would devour us at bay. When we are joyful in our successes, they celebrate with us as if our joy were their own. This form of intimacy can be crucial to our sense of emotional wellbeing. It allows us room to bloom and to grow over and over again.
Spiritual intimacy can be a sharing of a religious system of belief. It is a sharing of holidays, history, prayers, doctrine, music, dancing, spiritual celebrations, and life passages in a community of like-minded people. This can feed the souls of the community and the individual alike and will set down deep roots of intimacy throughout them all. But spiritual intimacy can go far deeper than this. When it does, it is a sharing of our soul substance, our eternal beings made of that which we have always been and will always be. It is when a frequency of our energetic souls resonates in harmony with theirs and both works to raise the other up as much as humanly possible. I personally have found that this connection is the deepest intimacy of them all and when you can feel it, you know it for what it is. It is like having the ability to hear perfect pitch in music, which is also a vibrational frequency gift. Someone with perfect pitch can hear when all the musicians are playing in harmony and if there is someone who is not, they stand out clearly in their dissonance. Those souls that you are most in harmony with will be the ones with whom you will have the most intimate and soul satisfying relationships. These are the relationships to actively seek out as they will sustain us each and every day. Please know that this level of intimacy is a precious and rare gift to be honored and carefully maintained throughout a lifetime.
And then there is physical intimacy, the maintenance of which can be dependent on all of the preceding forms of intimacy. Intimacy in an adult relationship can be very complicated or easy and free flowing depending on the level of intimacy in the other aspects I discussed the above paragraphs. If both partners tend their relationship together, meaning their mental, emotional, and spiritual depths of intimacy, physical intimacy is a positive reflection of those connections. If they have lost sight of these foundations of intimacy and have gone off in different directions, intimacy can become mechanical and empty. All is not lost, especially in a solid relationship. They may both just need to step back and assess together where to create more opportunities for intimacy throughout all the other aspects of their lives so that the physical will have a chance to rekindle.
In a healthy family, intimacy takes the form of hugs, holding hands, pats on the back, kisses on the check, puppy pile snuggles, and silly tickles and laughter. All these and other innocent, loving gestures reinforce the bonds of love and connection in a family. And the same goes for our closest friendships. We humans communicate with touch just as much as we do with our other physical senses, and how we touch matters deeply. A lot of information passes through a touch or a look someone gives us. It indicates something about that person’s mood or that person’s intentions towards us. It can be good, bad, or indifferent, but we can definitely feel it and respond to it. Being mindful of how we touch each other and respecting each other’s boundarys concerning touch is very important in establishing and maintaining trust and connection to each another.
So, with the understanding of what intimacy is on these different levels, how do we maintain and tend to our most intimate bonds? In my next blog, we will dive into the work of relationships, both with ourselves and with our significant others. I will tell you here and now that it is always a work in progress, no matter who it is with…. See you next time!
Namaste,
Jean 🌱