Few human endeavors are as rewarding and potentially frightening as acts of intimacy.

In Robert Sternberg’s triad of love—passion, intimacy, commitment—the intimacy stage of a relationship predominates as the passionate stage wanes. This is hardly surprising; the quiet dedication and nuance of intimacy can scarcely emerge in the throes of passion.

Where passion feels like a merging of self and other, intimacy requires appreciation of the separateness of self and loved one. Intimacy is not a flight from the self but a celebration of the self in concert with another person. Appreciation of separateness makes both partners feel more desired, valuable, and worthy of love.

Unwritten Rules of Intimacy

To foster intimacy, partners must:

• Accept one another for who they are.
• Experience high regard for each other.
• Enhance the welfare of each other.
• Give emotional support.
• Share occasional experiences of interest and enjoyment.
• Communicate on more than superficial or practical levels.
• Acknowledge each other’s unique value.

The implicit statement of intimacy is:

“Sharing this event (a beautiful sunset, washing dishes, watching a movie) with you, enriches the experience.”

Intimacy requires self-disclosure, which means not hiding or feeling afraid to talk about what we think and how we feel. Part of intimacy is sharing the true self, not the “social" or “dating” self.

The continual process of discovery afforded by intimacy is almost entirely an emotional understanding of *how *we experience, rather than an intellectual grasp of *what *we experience. It’s more about sensitivity than facts.

Impediments to Intimacy

**Cultural and political climate: **Intimacy is harder to achieve in the current climate of criticism, negative labels, resentment, and anger.

Narcissism: Rather than share emotional experience, partners these days are prone to manipulate the emotions of their partners. Their presumption of superiority blocks the equality of value crucial to intimacy.

Narcissistic declarations are now the norm in the media. Cultural polarization has transformed terms like compassion and *empathy into *cudgels to beat those whom we accuse of lacking them, which is everyone who disagrees with us. Narcissistic injury is responsible for much of the palpable increase in anger and resentment we’ve seen in this century.

Less severe forms of self-obsession impede the processing of emotional cues from others. The ability to utilize emotional cues serves as a precursor to all genuine intimacy. (We must perceive that which we want to cherish.) The less regulated one’s feelings are, the more difficult it is to detect emotional cues from loved ones, much less accurately interpret them.

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Deficits in self-regulation: Those who lack emotional regulation skill tend to use loved ones for regulation, much like young children. Over time, this subverts the equal emotional exchange necessary for true intimacy. Rather than an exchange of emotions between equals, a kind of child-to-adult relationship predominates.

**Expectation of failure: A **history of painful experience around intimate contact inhibits intimacy.

Fear of loss: “If I never loved, I never would have cried.” Just about everyone has thought that after being dumped. But fear of loss worsens with the avoidance of loss. The avoiding heart never learns the skills needed to regulate loss, nor does it develop tolerance of it. The heart grows stronger and more resistant to hurt when it is fed, not when it starves.

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Fear of loss is a remnant of early childhood, when abandonment meant death. The toddler brain remains chained to that fear, while the adult brain learns from loss and uses it as a signal to create more value.

**Entitlement: **In our Age of Entitlement, partners are prone to expect and demand more than they give, which is a death knell to intimacy.

**Resentment: **In my clinical experience, resentment is the primary barrier to intimacy. True intimacy requires letting defenses down, and resentment, a defensive form of anger, simply does not allow partners to do that.

Resentment is rampant in our polarized world. It takes determined effort to keep it out of relationships, where it is likely to destroy intimacy.

Intimacy Test

Answer the following questions to assess the level of intimacy in your relationship.

Can you accept that your partner has thoughts, beliefs, preferences, and feelings that differ from yours? Can you respect those differences, without trying to change them?

Can you disclose anything about yourself, including your deepest thoughts and feelings, without fear of rejection or misunderstanding?

Is the message of your relationship "grow, expand, create, disclose, reveal"? Or is it "hide, conceal, think only in certain ways, behave only in certain ways, feel only certain things"?

Does the relationship offer you both optimal growth? Can you develop into the greatest people you can be?