"Without the ability to create intimacy we become emotionally disabled..."
Intimate relationships play a central role in the overall human experience. Humans have a universal want to belong and to Love which is satisfied within an intimate relationship. As a verb "intimate" means "to state or make known". The activity of intimating (making known) underpins the meanings of "intimate" when used as a noun and adjective. As a noun, an "intimate" is a person with whom we have a particularly close relationship. As an adjective, "intimate" indicates detailed knowledge of a thing or person.
Intimate relationships play a central role in the overall human experience. Humans have a universal want to belong and to Love which is satisfied within an intimate relationship. As a verb "intimate" means "to state or make known". The activity of intimating (making known) underpins the meanings of "intimate" when used as a noun and adjective. As a noun, an "intimate" is a person with whom we have a particularly close relationship. As an adjective, "intimate" indicates detailed knowledge of a thing or person.
The characteristics of an intimate relationship include:
-An enduring behavioral interdependence
-Repeated interactions
-Emotional attachment
-Need fulfillment
Intimate relationships include:
-Friendships
-Dating Relationships
-Spiritual relationships
-Marital relationships
Intimacy generally refers to the feeling of being in a close personal association and belonging together.
It is a familiar and very close affective connection with another as a result of a bond that is formed through knowledge and experience of the other.
Genuine intimacy in human relationships require:
-Dialogue
-Transparency
-Vulnerability
-Reciprocity
Several stages in intimate relationships have been identified:
-The beginning or development stages (e.g., attraction and dating)
-Relational maintenance and repair (e.g., forgiveness)
-Relational stressors (e.g., conflict and betrayal)
-Relational termination (e.g., models of dissolution)
In anthropological research intimacy is considered the product of:
a successful seduction
= a process of rapport building
= that enables parties to confidently disclose previously hidden thoughts and feelings.
Intimate conversations become the basis for "confidences" (secret knowledge) that bind people together.
To sustain intimacy for any length of time requires well-developed emotional and interpersonal awareness. Intimacy requires an ability to be both separate and together participants in an intimate relationship. Murray Bowen called this "self-differentiation". It results in a connection in which there is an emotional range involving both robust conflict, and intense loyalty.
***Lacking the ability to differentiate oneself from the other is a form of symbiosis, a state that is different from intimacy, even if feelings of closeness are similar.
When reading about, thinking about, becoming fucking pissed about intimacy- I see a somewhat sad reality taking place. Intimacy is something many people fear, misunderstand, warp, try to control to only meet their needs and cause a war path that affects so many others. Then this path of destruction and devastation... mistrust, distrust, manipulation, defenses all begin to grow within us.... Intimacy does not even have a chance in the shadow of a wall that is one hundred feet high and ten feet thick. I see people standing at the top of that wall looking down on a wanting and longing to share their life with another person but unable to do so... all they do is commit emotional suicide from the top of that wall... (never realizing that climbing up that wall over and over will always give the same result)
The wall must come down...
