DIARY OF MOMENTS ❖ intimacy does not hurry

getting close and staying open

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Le Lit (1892)

I really enjoy some aspects of long-distance.

B and I have to know each other mostly through video calls. A lot of it is lacking, but weirdly you also learn a lot about someone this way? Like you see how they talk to themselves when they can’t find their keys, or if they’re willing to call you on the toilet. B noticed that I don’t take care of my belongings at all, which I thought would be easier for me to hide over long-distance format, but I guess it’s written all over me. It’s kind of like getting to gaze at each other’s everyday lives through a little keyhole.

Sex is intimate but talking to your partner while they’re pooping is maybe moreso? I’m not sure. I’ll have to think more about that.

So I like some of it, the distance. Having a remote perch to peer from (and then pounce). I’m skittish and watchful in general. I think my little nephew is really introverted, and my sister noticed how he likes to stand off to the side and observe people before he decides to throw himself in. I can relate to that.

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I once dated a guy who said he wanted to increase the speed of intimacy on all of his dates so that he could find his true love as fast as possible. He would ask more and more interrogative questions, like he was trying to get to the bottom of something, to assess whether the centre of my being was worthy or not. The opposite of long-distance, he was always eager to close the space quickly – forcefully. To make me trust him.

We were philosophically different. I was evasive of his attempts to accelerate intimacy. It was difficult to pinpoint why exactly but it felt wrong, as if there was something hidden inside that desire for closeness. Like a sword in a silk sheath.

I should define intimacy. I think it’s something like knowing your vulnerability with someone will be met with safety. Like, true “I need to be held by you in this terrifying moment” safety, rather than a minimal kind of “this person won’t use this to hurt me” safety.

So to me there is something intrusive about wanting intimacy like it is something to achieve or possess through probing, pointed questions. Why would you want to know the secrets of someone before they choose to tell you, particularly someone you care about? There doesn’t seem to be any good reasons to do this. Imagine finding a beautifully handmade trinket box and wanting to smash it open with a hammer to get the jewels inside. I feel it’s a sad way to want things.

Intimacy is nurtured carefully and slowly. It is the result of an empathetic approach to negotiating boundaries – negotiating mutual needs for closeness and vulnerability between you and another. And to approach with empathy is to be gentle, humble, and to be deeply conscious of your status as a foreign entrant:

“Empathy is perched precariously between gift and invasion … It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?”
– Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

To then ‘achieve’ intimacy, you must be honest about your intentions and patient; you must be allowed in by the process.

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A and I talked about how feeling close to someone – feeling like you know them in some meaningful way – isn’t about sharing ‘deep’ or traumatic shit but it’s about feeling like you’re uncovering layers of each other. Feeling like you thought you understood them but getting confused and surprised again.

It can’t be sped up because you have to first learn the contours of their surface layer. And when you’re meeting someone, it’s all surface. We’re all very sweetly eager to impress each other, so we’re inclined act as shiny and hollow as humanly possible.

I don’t believe that what people have to say about themselves tells you very much. We’re all play-acting at coherent, un-conflicted human beings to each other to some extent. “Oh, I’m such a people pleaser because when I was growing up my dad –” shut up. Do you see this cute little lizard sunbathing on the rock? I wanna talk about that.

I like cooking and gallery and walking dates more than dinner dates for this reason. It’s a welcome reprieve from telling each other believable stories and opinions about why you do or like such-and-such. Instead you wade in the ambiguity of experiencing each other. The best way to get to know someone is to see how they are when they forget about themselves – and whatever earnest perception they’re trying to uphold about being clever, capable, funny – and are therefore free to simply be themselves.

Getting beneath surface layer happens when you can start to recognise their contradictions – like a geologist reading the stratifications of a rock, you deduce histories of rainfall, fertile soil, strong winds. Times when a confident person had once felt shy; times when a steady person was once impulsive.

There’s something very encouraging about witnessing other people’s contradictions. They rebel against the story we had in our head about them, a story which we didn’t even know we had made up. Although I always know other people are a separate, real, conflicted and complex person in theory I don’t really get it until the first time they surprise me. I think of the word sonder which means: “The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own”.

I like it when friends, family, even acquaintances surprise me; it reminds me that I can take those liberties, too. I can rebel against the story I didn’t realise I made up about myself. We’re all still stories with open ends.

Warmly,
Marlene

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