The Need for Intimacy Revisited

Revisited because I see how it has driven a lot of us (people as an inclusive) crazy in the past. I should also add, because one person made a statement that brought me to rethinking about my need for intimacy, perhaps there is a reason for you being 1st Brain.

The statement, greatly paraphrased not because of lack of memory but more for purpose was this: Why do you need intimacy, if you have everything else that you need without it? And after wrapping my brain around that for a bit, I have realized I do have intimacy. Intimacy to the level of description from our good friends at Wikipedia, the first two paragraphs are as follows:

The meaning of intimacy varies from relationship to relationship, and within a given relationship. Intimacy has more to do with rituals of connection. It is possible to compete over intimacy but that is likely to be self-defeating. Intimacy requires empathy - the ability to stand in another's shoes.

Intimacy is both the ability and the choice to be close, loving, and vulnerable. Intimacy requires identity development. You have to know yourself and your inner self in order to share your self with another. Knowing yourself makes it possible to stand for yourself in an intimate relationship without taking over the other or losing yourself to the other. This ability to be separate and together in an intimate relationship and being okay with that is called self-differentiation. Lacking the ability to differentiate one self from the other is a form of symbiosis. This too is different from intimacy though to some that kind of dependent closeness may feel the same.


I have these familiar relationships with my closest friends. What I found was that I was not lacking intimacy but that I was lacking something that I may not need in a relationship: symbiosis. I have in the past in my relationships become rather absorbed in the other person. I lost some of my own personality and it takes me a bit to recover each time.

I do know what it is that I am lacking that I do want however now with a little soul-searching (Still looking for that, huh?)... I want to feel "wanted." (Please define.) I have some amazing friends, but I don't know how much I can contribute to our relationships. (Why?) Not because I run sub-dialogue in parenthetical blips, (You do.) but because I have an obsessive need to know that what I am doing is beneficial to somebody else.

I feel badly about staying with friends' places over the weekend, not because I wouldn't do the same thing for any of them, but because I don't see what they can ever get out of the situation. It makes me feel invasive, which going back to the last statement of the last paragraph is not helping that need.

Also, there is a bit of a longing for a singular person with which I will have both a sexual and intimate connection and I think this is what I was thinking about before. I just didn't know exactly what I was missing, nor was I coping with it well.

I am not going to let my "longing" interfere with my relationships with anyone else any longer. (Yeah right.) No, really, I need you to call me out on it when it does. Further, I need you all to ask me "what's going on inside of that head of yours?" And not to accept the response of "nothing" indefinitely. Make me talk, make me ramble, make me cry... I like it. (Apparently)

Until next time, kids. I know you want more witty tales and the general tomfoolery of my days, but remember half of that is dependent on you.

1 comments:

    well said.

    o_O

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