Connection to Self and Other

In order to speak meaningfully about the subtle paradoxes of being in committed partnerships, clarifying what we mean when we say "we want to feel connected," or we "want a connection," or "I don't feel a connection," might be helpful.

Connection, an evolving concept in the Fluid Intimacy model, is not simply the awareness that one is feeling something. While it can be very important to register "I am angry" or "I am hurting" in a diffuse, generalized way, genuine connection moves our attention toward more specificity, beyond a kind of proximity to the experience; toward awareness of the quality of relationship we cultivate with that experience.

Connection with self involves a conscious, tender orientation toward one's own emotional, somatic, and psychic states. It means being with one's experience, not engulfed by it, and not split off from it. It is a middle path between fusion and dissociation. In true connection, there is a subtle, living discernment; a capacity to "hold" one's experience with just enough spaciousness to allow understanding, choice, and movement. Yet this spaciousness does not harden into detachment. The experience is not turned into an object to be managed or analyzed; it remains alive, unfolding, in direct contact with the sensing, feeling self.

This same principle extends to connection with others. To be connected to another is not simply to "know" that they are angry or hurting; it is to be in a relational field with them where their experience touches you, not to the point of enmeshment, but also not held at sterile distance. There is a shared atmosphere, a mutual attunement, where both beings remain subjects rather than objects. The self does not vanish into the other, nor does the other become an "it" to be solved or saved. Both maintain their integrity while participating in a shared relational field.

In the absence of this kind of connection, "awareness" can become an exercise in management or control. We might be able to label our feelings, but the felt sense of being with ourselves is missing. We might "know" what our partner is going through, but without attunement, this knowledge becomes sterile, devoid of the pulse of genuine relationship.

In the Fluid Intimacy model, connection is not a static state but a dynamic practice, a way of relating to one's inner life and the lives of others with presence, tenderness, and sufficient embodiment to stay with what is alive, without becoming lost in it or standing apart from it. It is this quality of connection that forms the necessary foundation for any genuine intimacy to unfold.