Intimacy — Sex without Sex (Part 2 of 4)
… her features slowly arise out of the mystery as she reveals herself to him. Already familiar as she has bared her soul to him as he has done with her — a connection built in the cycle of dawn to dusk over many days culminating in a night… this night… their night. Her hand runs through her hair as the wind glides against her body…
What is this type of deep connection?
There are some people we connect with where our trust and vulnerability allow us to reveal parts of our internal reality that no one else would see, recognise or understand.
They seem to bring out unexplored or hidden sides to ourselves.
We feel deeply safe around them — expressing ourselves without fear of judgement and negative criticism.
When we connect with someone in such a way where we are free to swim in the deep waters of their soul and they are free to do the same — we reach a type of intimacy that is deeper than physical penetration — revealing our soul in a connection that is felt across spacetime.
A connection stronger than physical and sexual intimacy; crossing borders and felt even after losing someone in death.
Beta — Emotional Intimacy
Emotional intimacy bridges trust and safety on a road where we are free to reveal our inner world filled with vulnerability in a space where our weaknesses, faults, and insecurities are treated with affection, understanding and kindness.
The fundamental attribute of emotional intimacy is sensitivity.
Without being sensitive you cannot connect with parts of yourself. You cannot attune yourself to situations that allow others to be emotionally open with you when these situations inevitably crop up.
Sensitivity is the bedrock for trust, attunement and vulnerability.
Being able to feel is a prerequisite for connecting with your own emotions before you can share them with another in the right context; alongside being sensitive to other people’s emotions to provide a safe and comfortable environment for them to bare their soul.
Rollercoaster of Emotions
Emotional intimacy is deep, difficult and fragile.
Not everyone is comfortable sharing their internal world. All people carry with them layers of trauma and pain that are uncovered when they begin to share the depths of who they are with another person.
Some people are turned off and creeped out when it comes to emotions. Emotions can be icky and discomforting. Deep and heavy. They can also be extremely jubilant and liberating filled with immense light and abundance.
Emotions are a dynamic rollercoaster with extreme ups and downs never to level on a stable straight line.
Emotions, in that sense, are contrary to logic and rationality.
Where logic seeks a linear path from point A to point B emotions want to take the garden route with detours to point F, point N, and point W before realising the point of the journey was getting to point B.
Emotions and logic, therefore, cannot occupy the same space at the same time.
Magic Emotions
I love Professor Brian Greene. He is a gifted science communicator and a co-founder of The World Science Festival. However, I recall him going on Jimmy Fallon saying something absurd:
“All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics. That to me is pretty clear.” — Brain Greene
I’m a firm believer that everything biological is psychological.
I also like Robert Sapolsky’s argument against free will.
But these men, surely, must have felt the magic of emotions at some point in their lives.
Yes, magic. The unscientific word, MAGIC, throws logic out of the window because LOGIC has the propensity to be loud and obnoxious; leaving no space to ponder the magic of our existence.
It is no surprise that an exceedingly intelligent man, like Brian Greene, looks past the relevance of emotions to merely see the logical result of how biology influences our actions, but that completely misses the point of emotions.
I believe that emotions are one of the purest forms of truth.
You can try to introduce logic and name the emotions, but as soon as you’ve done that you’ve diluted the truth of what you are feeling.
Feelings and Emotions are Different
You are feeling something all the time, but when that feeling becomes strong enough to occupy the foreground of your awareness is when a feeling becomes an emotion.
The more in touch you are with your emotions the faster you will be at regulating them to act appropriately in a moment of heat and not react to something that has evoked a strong emotion within you.
When you feel something arise with sensitivity you will know that you are no longer thinking with your logical brain and your emotional reactions have taken over. This awareness can be defined as emotional intelligence.
Logic and emotions require different cognitive time and space within our psyche. When we try to make them connect we end up having an internal conflict or an external conflict if this dynamic plays out between people.
So how can we practice emotional intimacy?
Emotional intimacy is being able to verbally or nonverbally connect with another person’s feelings and emotions with mutual safety and security.
There is no labelling, judging, solving problems, or trying to make them feel differently.
It is acknowledging someone else’s emotional world as separate from your emotional world without being reactive, reckless and careless. It is deeply personal while being impersonal.
Quite challenging and requires the development of this skill through practice.
Be nonreactive & impersonal to other people’s emotions by remembering that emotions defy logic.
It is about acknowledging that another person’s life experience is just as deep as yours but you’ll never be able to know it completely. You allow them to be as they are; in their authentic state without needing them to be someone else for your own emotional world’s sake — applying the principle of sonder.
A huge part of emotional intimacy is giving our partner undivided attention where we can share the most personal and secretive ideas without any type of fear, especially fear of being judged for who we are as individuals with weird fetishes, ideas, and opinions about the world. Our map of the world can be far outside the realm of logic and rationality.
Emotional intimacy with someone can be the foundation for safety and containment within a relationship.
Here, there is a deep connection between vulnerability and trust.
There is a chemistry mix between people where compatibility is tested.
- If there is sexual chemistry at this stage between both of you, not just one person, then there is a recipe for a healthy romantic relationship.
- If none feel a sexual attraction, great! You have a platonic, beautiful and extremely rare friendship without messy emotions.
- If one person feels a sexual attraction while the other person does not, then this relationship needs a level of maturity to exist where control of sexual urges is a basic requirement for the sexual party.
If one person cannot control their sexual energy, a recipe for destruction and heartbreak is on the horizon. It would be best for the relationship to become extremely casual to prevent any sexual tension or encounters.
Deep vulnerability and openness would need to leave the relationship dynamic.
If this is impossible, then someone needs to take the hard steps of ending a deep and beautiful connection.
Catching Feelings
A friendship where one person catches feelings and hides their true intention is not an authentic friendship.
I have noticed this with people stuck in the friendzone.
A person will alter their identity — becoming the pillar of support until proximity turns a friendship into something more — leaving behind a trail of micro manipulations.
Once they ‘get’ the girl or guy, their objective is complete and they go back to their default character.
The relationship begins to fall apart and the other person is baffled because the person from their friendship is not the person in the romantic relationship.
Hidden sexual or romantic intentions in relationships are extremely destructive and it is the opposite of safety.
It is dishonest and disrespectful.
It takes an incredible amount of maturity, effort and pain to end a friendship with someone that you deeply care about, but if they do not want more, walk the fuck away or keep the friendship casual.
I Caught Feelings
I loved someone who was in a committed relationship.
The friendship we had was my idea of a great romantic relationship, but it was her idea of the perfect friendship.
My intentions began pure — wanting a friendship — but I eventually caught feelings.
The more time we spent together the more I wanted something more than a friendship — the closer we got to crossing lines.
I realised that we don’t really choose the person we fall in love with, which is profoundly inconvenient.
Maybe we could figure things out? Maybe we could try to remain friends with strong boundaries?
No. That’s gasoline on a toxic fire — emotions masquerading as logic.
I ended up telling her about my feelings as soon as I knew my intention for the relationship shifted from friendship to something more.
I would have waited for her. A woman who did not feel the same way. A woman who did not love me back.
I knew I could not be casual with her.
I would have broken a functioning relationship if we couldn’t control desires in a moment of heat. I would have destroyed myself if we remained friends while knowing that I wanted more.
The relationship had to end even though it was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.
I am forever reminded of her in different ways because of the emotional intimacy we shared, but I had to walk away and deal with the pain.
Breaking the connection was vital. We are both better off now than we would have been if we tried to remain ‘friends’.
I needed to deal with the pain of unrequited love so I could avail my whole sense of self, with self-esteem, for my next relationship.
Not remaining caught up in the idea of a relationship, hoping for something to change, built on non-mutual hopes and dreams stemming from my limerent imagination.
Radical Honesty
When we feel something, it is vital to admit to ourselves that we are feeling a certain way.
It is not always necessary to admit these feelings to the people who created these feelings in the first place— we need to cultivate radical honesty with ourselves.
What matters is feeling the truth of these feelings and what they are doing to your internal state without judgment, reaction or self-harm.
We need to find the strength to accept these uncomfortable feelings.
Feelings are neither wrong nor right or negative or positive.
Feelings are indicators of your truth — the truth of your emotional world that is telling you something that you should pay attention to with as much awareness as possible.
Knowing when to say something or remain silent is challenging, but it becomes easy if you practice nonreactivity and add time and space as you slow down and feeeeeeeel — cultivating internal honesty.
The irony of this technique is that there is no actual control when it comes to emotions.
If your emotions overcome your rational mind, as they do because they require different internal time and space, then impulsive and dumb actions can result. We have all been in these types of situations.
Emotions make life complex and difficult, but they also allow us to experience ultimate bliss and satisfaction — elements that make us human.
Being sensitive to our emotions allows us to truly connect with the other emotionally imperfect people around us. It allows us to tap into what makes us quintessentially human and feel love in all of its existential favours.
Part 2 Final Thoughts
Americanos make me extremely hyper — coffee bliss is to be cherished, especially when you have someone who understands the crashes.
Be the person others are authentic around. You’ll find that you can be yourself around everyone when you choose and you can play the right roles in the right circumstances when you’re sensitive enough to attune to your environment to capitalise on life’s opportunities.
Cultivate some emotional intimacy and use this superpower for good, Peter Parker.
What’s in part 3, boet?
We can be attracted to someone across the room who is barely visible. We can fall in love with OnlyFans models playing a validating role without ever meeting them.
We also carry with us a spirit that is intangible but known to the people around us and it extends to our quirky habits and the things that add meaning to our lives.
Part 3 delves deeper into spiritual intimacy and all of the compatibilities and headaches that come with this form of human expression.
Bye, But Before you Go
Let me know your thoughts!
There are so many perspectives, experiences, and open-ended questions when it comes to intimacy.
Respond to areas of the article that piqued your interest.
Provide kind criticism or expand on ideas.
Let’s practice a lil sonder and have fun together, you intimacy-seeking internet traveller.
