giving intimacy its real meaning

Having read several articles from Dr Jenn Jackson, this last one on Asexuality & Intimacy gave me food for thought and pause.

When you look up the word intimacy on Google, it’s defined as “close familiarity or friendship” followed by “Euphemistic - sexual intercourse”.

We’ve been heavily socialised to believe that intimacy is either sex or something that moves within a sexual direction, but the opposite is true.

Based on Maslow’s theory of self-actualisation, we need to fulfill different types of acceptance and love to reach our true pinnacle best selves.

And of one of the reasons that has been proposed by many sources as to why there are more single women is because we reach the point of self-actualisation first, through building intimacy and close friendships.

Long story short we tend to want our partners rather than needing them, whereas for men intimacy is bound in their sexual partner as male friendships tend to be functional rather than intimate.

Looking at it through this lens shows that we have been given the responsibility to fill a need that isn’t a sexual one, but has become one and this responsibility has been perpetuated in books and media. Women have a group of girlfriends for support who they’re vulnerable with and men have friends to play sport with.

Society rewards men who “play the intimacy game”, meaning most men understand that women connect with men who can express their feelings, but it’s used as a ploy rather than something they actively work on. Intimacy and building it because part of their attraction arsenal, not a part of their lives.

What happens next? He opens up and talks to the women he’s dating and then she falls for him and soon they’re in bed.

Intimacy is used as a tool.

Some men don’t understand that intimacy shouldn’t be a euphemism for sex because they also haven’t been taught to believe that they are lacking anything. They’ve been taught, just as much as we have, that we should complete each other.

It’s not surprising that there are sexual expectations during dating because we have been misguided into thinking that sexual contact is the only expression of closeness, yet Intimacy is so much more. It’s part of foundation building to all relationships - platonic or not.

The truth is we have intimacy in close friendship. The ability to share, to be vulnerable, but it doesn’t have to be limited by physical proximity and touch, yet language has also dictated how see the words intimacy and intimate.

“I was intimate with him/her”, doesn’t mean we grabbed coffee, yet you can have intimacy in friendships that between men and women that has nothing to do with ever becoming more than friends.

Knowing what intimacy meant to me, meant learning what brought others closer to me and what made me want to draw closer to them.

My life is deeply rooted in music, books and food and how I express my love and I build intimacy is probably through one of these three.

Sometimes we mistake intimacy for affection, sometimes we mistake intimacy for being tactile. We may look to family members to be role models and think we haven’t seen intimacy, but we were looking for sexual or obviously outward signs.

When intimacy could have been playing Scrabble, cooking dinner together, listening to a particular radio show.

Coming closer together and building that bridge is the game. Life without intimacy is hard, but the question is, what are you defining it by?