Intimacy

Everyone wants to be loved and validated, we want to be acknowledged and known.  However, it takes courage to let people know who we really are. It takes time before we are able to share ourselves, our concerns, our dreams, and our deepest feelings with others.  It takes time to care about someone and want them to care about us, and to laugh with them and cry with them. Perhaps the biggest issue in intimacy is trust.  From past experience, some of us have found that it is not safe to trust and we bring past experiences into the present and the future.  Trust develops slowly as we reveal ourselves to others and evaluate our feelings about their responses to our self disclosure. Intimacy is having loving and warm, close human relationships where we feel we belong.  However, revealing ourselves and our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs make us vulnerable and we risk rejection.  This is another issue why intimacy with others takes time. It is important to be intimate with ourselves as well, to know who we are.  As Polonius tells his son in Shakespeare's Hamlet Act 1, "This above all:  to thine own self be true..."  We need to get to know, accept, and love ourselves, and treat ourselves with kindness and compassion.  If nothing else, knowing ourselves is an important aspect in relating to other people.  Intimacy assures one or more people being there for us through "thick or thin."  A benefit of an intimate relationship is that we never have to be alone.  Another is, that not only do we have a physical relationship, we have a mental and emotional attachment so that what is said stays with us.  Also, and most important, intimate friends are those people who help us be more ourselves and "who we are intended to be."  Being in an intimate relationship is being true to our highest and best self.