Know Thyself: The Root of Intimacy

Across the first three essays in this series, we have moved rather far from the question with which we began: Why are so many couples having less sex?

It seemed, initially, like a question about sexuality. Desire discrepancy, menopause, resentment, boredom, exhaustion, unequal labor, responsive desire, sexual technique, aging and the familiar pursuit-withdrawal dynamic all offered plausible explanations. Then the inquiry widened. We discovered that the meaning assigned to sex has changed dramatically over the last century, while the conditions of contemporary life have made it increasingly possible to live at some distance from direct sensory experience. And finally, we arrived at the body itself: not simply as the equipment with which we have sex, but as the living medium through which we receive ourselves, encounter another person and participate in relationship.

This leaves us with a different question.

Not simply, why aren't we having sex?

But: What capacities must two people possess in order to remain genuinely intimate over time?

This is important to clarify, because intimacy is often confused with closeness. They overlap, but they are not the same.

Two people can be extraordinarily close while knowing surprisingly little about what is actually happening inside either of them. They can share a house, finances, friends, children, meals, vacations, routines and a bed. They can know one another's histories, preferences and vulnerabilities. They may finish each other's sentences and still be remarkably defended against being changed by what the other person is saying.

Familiarity can create closeness. Intimacy requires encounter; meeting the living person in front of us, rather than the person we have already decided they are.” So, encounter requires two people, which sounds self-evident, until we consider how difficult it actually is to remain a distinct person in the presence of someone whose love matters profoundly to us.

Human beings enter adult relationship with nervous systems and psychological organizations that were shaped long before we had language for what was happening to us. We learned how much wanting was permissible, whether need brought someone closer or drove them away, whether strong emotion could be survived in relationship, whether dependence was safe, whether conflict threatened belonging, whether our bodies belonged fully to us, whether pleasure could be trusted, whether saying no had consequences, and whether being loved required us to become useful, quiet, competent, pleasing, self-sufficient or exquisitely attentive to everyone else.

These adaptations do not disappear because we fall in love.

In fact, love, partnership, marriage often gives our protective strategies their finest opportunity to return full on.

The greater the importance of the bond, the more vulnerable we become to what the bond can awaken. A stranger's distraction may irritate us. A beloved partner's distraction can make us feel invisible. A stranger declining our invitation may be disappointing. A partner turning away sexually can touch an ancient conviction that we are unwanted. A stranger wanting something from us can be negotiated rather easily. The desire of someone whose disappointment we fear may feel like an obligation before a word has been spoken.

This is one reason sexuality becomes such a revealing arena of intimate life. The body is considerably less interested than the social self or ego in maintaining our preferred biography.

We may think of ourselves as generous and discover that receiving makes us uncomfortable. We may think of ourselves as independent and discover that sexual rejection devastates us. We may believe we are sexually open and find that particular forms of desire produce shame. We may pride ourselves on being attuned to a partner while remaining almost completely unable to locate our own desire in their presence.

Sexuality has a way of finding and illuminating the seam between who we believe ourselves to be and how we are actually organized.

This is why I am increasingly interested in the ancient injunction Know thyself, as a foundation for intimacy.

The phrase is often understood intellectually. Know your history. Know your personality. Understand your attachment pattern. Recognize your triggers. Identify the childhood experiences that shaped you.

All of this very important and is useful.

But a person can possess a remarkably sophisticated psychological explanation of themselves while remaining profoundly defended against their immediate experience.

We can know about ourselves without being intimate with ourselves.

We can explain exactly why we become angry while remaining unable to feel the fear beneath the anger as it is occurring. We can understand that our partner is not our abandoning parent while experiencing their withdrawal as abandonment, nonetheless. We can recite our attachment history and still demand reassurance the moment uncertainty enters a relationship.

The body does not reorganize merely because the intellect has produced an accurate footnote.

Self-knowledge worthy of intimacy must include the capacity to remain present with what is happening inside us, in the body, while it is happening.

This deepens our understanding of awareness.

Awareness is not merely surveillance of the self, the body’s sensations and emotions. It is not standing outside our experience with a clipboard, identifying maladaptive responses and issuing corrections. Awareness in its depth and breadth describes the capacity to receive and hold ourselves. It is the foundation of agency and choice.

Can I recognize the tightening in my chest and regulate, remember myself, before it is disowned and becomes accusation? Can I recognize the sudden urgency to be desired before I convert that urgency into a demand for sex? Can I feel myself beginning to disappear into accommodation before I say yes to contact I do not actually want? Can I distinguish the body's present response from the meaning my history immediately assigns to it?

That last question may be among the most difficult.

The body is always responding in the present, but it responds with a history.

A partner turns away in bed. That is the present event. Within seconds, however, the event may acquire an entire psychological architecture. You don't want me. You never want me. I am not enough for you. There is no point trying. Our marriage is dying.

The pain may be completely real. The interpretation may even contain important information about the relationship. But pain and interpretation are not identical.

Fluid Intimacy calls the deeper survival-level activation beneath many of these moments The Unbearable™: the early, often preverbal experience organized around meanings such as I don't matter or I am not enough. When present circumstances touch that organization, the adult does not merely remember an old experience. The nervous system can begin responding as though the old meaning is happening now.

This is what I call a Need State™.

A Need State™ is not the same as having a need. Human beings have needs. Intimacy does not require pretending otherwise. A Need State is the survival urgency that arises when obtaining a particular response from another person begins to feel necessary in order to restore our internal equilibrium.

Sex can become extraordinarily effective for surfacing the unbearably overwhelming need state.

If you desire me, I know I matter.

If you initiate, I know you still choose me.

If you stop wanting sex, I can finally relax.

If you orgasm, I know I have pleased you.

If you do not ask anything of me, I know I am safe.

If you remain attracted to me as I age, I know I have not disappeared.

At that point, the sexual encounter is carrying considerably more than erotic desire. Each person's body has become involved in regulating the other's relationship with themselves.

This does not make the desire illegitimate. Wanting to be desired by the person we love is deeply human. Wanting reassurance, pleasure, tenderness, excitement and sexual connection is deeply human.

The developmental question is qualitatively different.

What happens inside me when I do not receive what I want and need from you?

Perhaps this is where our understanding of intimacy has an opportunity to expand.

Much of what we have inherited about intimate partnership still rests on a model of relationship in which the other person is expected, in some important way, to complete an internal circuit. We may no longer speak quite so romantically about finding our “other half,” but the underlying expectation survives in more sophisticated forms. You make me feel secure. You make me feel desirable. You make me feel loved. You reassure me that I matter. Your attention tells me that I am important; your desire tells me that I am still attractive; your fidelity tells me that I am chosen; your responsiveness tells me that I am safe.

There is nothing pathological about being affected in these ways. The difficulty begins when being affected by another person quietly becomes requiring that person to produce the internal state we need.

Sex makes this distinction highly visible.

Imagine that one partner reaches for the other in bed and hears, gently, “I don't want sex tonight.” The sexual proposition is simple enough. One person wants sexual contact and the other does not. But almost immediately, the event may become populated by meanings that neither person consciously intend. The initiator feels the first sting of disappointment and perhaps, beneath it, the much older terror of being unwanted. The partner who declined detects the shift and begins bracing for withdrawal, irritation or hurt. Perhaps that person has learned over years that saying no creates emotional consequences and begins instinctively managing the other's disappointment.

Within seconds, neither person is responding only to what is happening between them. One is trying not to feel rejected; the other is trying not to become responsible for the other’s pain. Two histories have entered the bed.

This is where self-knowledge becomes something much more consequential than psychological insight. It becomes the capacity to remain present at the precise point where experience is translated into meaning.

Can I feel the disappointment of not being wanted tonight without immediately becoming the person who is never wanted? Can I feel your disappointment in my refusal without concluding that I must abandon my “no” in order to preserve our connection? Can I allow your experience to affect me without making it the authority over mine?

Gary Zukav's distinction between external and authentic power contrasts the urge to exert external power over what lies outside the self, with authentic power, which develops through conscious relationship with one's own internal experience and choices. His conception of spiritual partnership follows naturally from this: relationship becomes not the place where another person is assigned responsibility for creating our wholeness, but a place in which we become increasingly conscious of what is being revealed in us. Zukav describes spiritual partnership as a relationship between equals oriented toward spiritual growth, and he repeatedly returns to emotional awareness and responsible choice as the ground of that development.

This represents a profound shift in the paradigm of partnership.

The purpose of intimacy is no longer to secure ourselves against the uncertainties of being human. Nor is the partner assigned the impossible task of continually restoring us to equilibrium. Relationship becomes one of the places where consciousness itself develops because another person continually reveals the limits of our current capacity to remain present, differentiated, receptive and loving.

John Welwood approached intimate relationship in a related way when he described relationship as a path of awakening. The importance of that formulation is not its spirituality but its reversal of the ordinary assumption. Instead of asking primarily whether the relationship is giving us what we need, we begin to notice what relationship is revealing about our capacity to be here.

This changes the fundamental orientation to the difficulties and challenges of relationship.

The moment when my partner does not want what I want is no longer merely an obstacle to intimacy. It may be one of intimacy's most revealing moments. I am suddenly confronted with another person who cannot be assimilated into my wishes. There you are, irreducibly yourself. Your body does not exist to settle the question of my desirability. Your desire cannot be requisitioned as evidence of my worth. Your agreement cannot be the price of my remaining connected to you.

And the same is true in the other direction. My autonomy does not absolve me of relationship. I cannot invoke the sovereignty of my own experience as a reason to become indifferent to yours. If my withdrawal has left you lonely, that loneliness matters. If my anger has made refusal frightening, your fear matters. If years of avoiding a conversation about our sexual life have left you feeling unwanted, I do not have to accept your interpretation of me in order to become genuinely interested in the experience you have had with me.

This is the more demanding middle ground that mature intimacy requires. I do not disappear into you, and I do not retreat into myself.

The old paradigm tends to give us only two choices. Either I make myself responsible for your internal state, or I insist that your internal state is entirely your problem. I accommodate or defend, merge or separate, submit or control.

But living systems are inherently relational and thus, capable of something more sophisticated.

Zach Bush often speaks of life in terms of relationship and exchange rather than the isolated organism. The cell offers a beautiful example. It must remain distinct from its surroundings while continually exchanging with them. Sealed completely, it cannot live; without a boundary, it cannot remain itself. The cell membrane preserves integrity not through isolation, but through selective permeability. Its boundary makes relationship possible.

Human intimacy requires something remarkably similar. I must be able to receive you without becoming you, to experience what happens inside me in response to you without making you the author of everything I feel. I can recognize my effect on you without imagining that I control everything you experience. Your desire can move me without becoming my obligation; your disappointment can matter without requiring me to abandon myself.

Differentiation, then, is not greater separateness. It is the development of a more intelligent boundary, one that allows us to be changed by relationship without being erased by it.

This is not independence. It is interdependence without fusion.

And once we understand intimacy this way, sexuality begins to look different as well.

Sexuality that is sustainable over years therefore requires more than attraction or technique. It requires the capacity to remain ourselves while allowing another person to affect us.

This is at the heart of the fluid-part of Fluid Intimacy. Living systems do not remain in one ideal state. They contract and expand, activate and rest, approach and withdraw. Sexuality, inherent to all living systems moves in the same way. Desire rises and subsides; attention narrows and opens; the body moves between excitement, receptivity, tension and release. Health lies not in maintaining any one of these states, but in retaining the capacity to move among them.

Long-term intimacy also depends upon a similar mobility. Partners will disappoint one another, become defended, lose interest, misread signals, retreat, pursue and occasionally become convinced that the person they love has become impossible. The danger is not the contraction itself. The danger is when a temporary state becomes a permanent relational position: disappointment becomes resentment, protection becomes withdrawal, familiarity becomes assumption, and a sexual lull becomes an identity for the relationship.

Rupture, then, is not necessarily the opposite of intimacy. When a relationship can metabolize what has happened, rupture introduces new information. Each person discovers more about themselves, more about the other, and more about the particular system they create together. Repair does not simply restore what existed before; at its best, it allows the relationship to reorganize around what has been learned. Growth is movement made conscious.

This has important implications for sharing a long-term erotic life. Early attraction benefits from mystery because so much of the other person is unknown. Over time, familiarity can tempt us to believe that mystery has disappeared when what has actually disappeared is our attention to it. The person beside us remains a living process. Their body changes, their sexuality changes, their fears and desires change, their relationship with aging and mortality changes. The erotic problem may not be that we know our partner too well. It may be that we have stopped perceiving them because we believe we already know who they are.

The same danger exists in our relationship with ourselves. Know thyself cannot mean arriving at a final definition of the self. A living self is not a conclusion. Desire changes. Pleasure changes. What once frightened us may become possible; what once felt liberating may reveal itself as protection. Knowing ourselves means becoming intimate enough with our own experience to recognize change rather than defending an identity that has become obsolete.

This gives us a different paradigm for intimacy. Intimacy is not sustained by two people remaining the same, nor by maintaining a particular level of closeness or sexual frequency. It is sustained by two people capable of continuing to encounter themselves and one another as living, changing beings.

This is missing from much of the conversation about sexless relationships. We keep asking how to get sex moving again when the more consequential question is whether the relationship itself can still move.

A sustainable erotic relationship is not one in which desire never disappears. It is one in which disappearing desire does not automatically become a conclusion. There remains enough curiosity, differentiation and permeability for desire to change form, for new information to enter, and for two people to become unfamiliar to one another again.

The opposite of separation is not fusion or merging. It is relationship. And relationship is alive while there is flow, fluid movement, receiving and transmitting across the boundaries that shape two distinct people.

That may be the deeper promise of intimacy: not that another person will complete us, but that in continuing to encounter them, neither of us has to become finished.

That is the paradox of a sustainable, fluid, erotic life. Desire thrives when it is an outcome rather than a driver, or a pre-requisite; desire is the natural consequence of two people who are lovingly, authentically alive . . . ever-changing . . . and who keep discovering that neither of them has become, or can be, entirely known.