Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (22 page)

Perhaps this explains why couples find such events truly transformative. Sharon and Thomas’s sexual encounter didn’t change everything, but it gave them a solid start. If you string together a whole bunch of similar transformative experiences, you’ll think and feel differently, one way or another. If that’s what you want to do, pay attention to two things that determine the intensity of an encounter:

The importance of your partner
. The more important your partner is to you, the greater the challenge to your selfhood, especially if her immediate response is not warm and fuzzy. This vulnerability increases your sense of intimacy. Openly acknowledging caring for your partner also increases the intensity.

Depth of self-confrontation
. Self-confrontation is a core part of intimacy. The more you reveal to your partner who you really are, without masking or misrepresentation, the greater your experience of intimacy will be. Conversely, the more your disclosures involve self-presentation, rather than self-confrontation, the more intimacy will seem superficial. If you want to increase the meaningfulness of intimacy, let your partner map your mind while you take a good look at yourself.

Here’s one final related point: Just because intimacy is an intersubjective state, that doesn’t mean both people feel it equally. If you heed these guidelines, and your partner doesn’t, then you will have a profound experience, and your partner won’t. This will involve more self-validated intimacy for you, because you’ll have to validate your experience when it differs from your partner’s. It takes two to create intimacy, but only one partner may feel it.

Sharon and Thomas went through difficult experiences of self-validated intimacy on their way to getting the marriage they wanted. Sometimes one confronted and revealed himself, but the other didn’t move forward. Sometimes it took five or six exchanges before the other came around. Occasionally it took days. But now they knew the benefits of self-validated intimacy. They knew it could get them out of gridlock, and it made them more willing to persevere.

The process of knowing yourself and letting your self be truly known, without demanding acceptance, involves powerful self-confrontations. Mastering these challenges strengthens your Four Points of Balance. A solid sense of self is a more flexible self. You have more room to compromise because you’re clear about who you are. This creates new options for resolving gridlock.

Why does self-confrontation develop your sense of self? Challenge strengthens your self, like lifting weights challenges and strengthens your muscles. Questioning your behavior or motives, instead of justifying them, challenges your picture of who you are.

This involves asking yourself tough questions like
Was I really correct about what I told my partner?
or
Am I really as patient (or considerate, etc.) as I think I am or think I should be?
or
What am I dodging?
Answering these kinds of questions involves difficult soul-searching and not settling for easy answers.

Self-confrontation lies at the heart of self-validated intimacy. Self-confrontation is a vital part of developing a solid flexible self, because a solid self develops from self-confrontation rather than internalizing validation from others. If you won’t confront yourself about who you really are, you’ll stay dependent on how you think you look to other people (reflected sense of self).

Self-validated intimacy often happens outside your comfort zone, far beyond the boundaries of warm “closeness,” “togetherness,” and “
weness
.” Adult intimacy smacks you with the reality that you and your partner are separate beings. You become acutely aware of yourself, your partner, and your relationship.

Intimacy satisfies your attachment needs but it can stomp on them as well (and often does). You can end up being known by your partner in ways that make you uncomfortable. You can become more self-aware than you really want to be. Intimacy in love relationships requires meaningful
endurance. Sometimes that means controlling mammalian fight-or-flight responses, and muzzling the reptile in you that wants to bite your spouse.

Intimacy and sexual desire don’t necessarily go hand in hand. There are people who find intimacy diminishes their desire. For some, intimacy diminishes focus on sheer eroticism, and this is the only level on which they want to connect. Others can’t share intimate sex with someone they love. Some people’s desire evaporates once they are in a relationship and intimacy deepens.

But lots of people find increased intimacy during sex (and outside the bedroom) creates a potent cocktail of other-validated and self-validated intimacy that ignites desire. A mix of both types of intimacy works best in long-term relationships. If you’re only capable of other-validated intimacy, your desire and your intimacy will fade away. Self-validated intimacy is crucial for curing sexual boredom and keeping desire alive, because this is how you introduce new behaviors. However, other-validated intimacy endows sex with
we
-ness, romance, and nurturance, and many people’s sexual desire withers without this.

Intimacy during sex combines two of humankind’s most powerful intersubjective experiences. It’s no wonder profoundly intimate sex impacts us so greatly. This doesn’t always have to involve tender loving sex. Quickies and raunchy sex can be intimate too, if this isn’t all you ever do.

Intimacy during sex can make
you
more interesting, more desirable, and more desirous. That’s because intimacy makes us grow in ways that make us beautiful. There is no inherent beauty in sex. The beauty comes from the people involved. You have to bring beauty to sex if you want it to be beautiful. You have to find that beauty within your self. Daring to let your self be truly known, warts and all, is one big way to do this.

Intimacy leaves an indelible impression in your mind and brain, which you carry for the rest of your life. It’s where your partner lives, long after he or she is gone. Some of intimacy’s power comes from accepting this.

One night, as Sharon and Thomas started to make love, this thought
arose between them. They were lying on their sides, looking into each other’s eyes. Thomas’s fingertips brushed Sharon’s cheek. Thomas saw she was letting herself appreciate him, at the same moment he appreciated her.

“I don’t want to lose you,” Thomas croaked, his voice thick with emotion and his eyes brimming with tears.

The synchrony staggered Sharon’s brain. The thought went through her mind:
We’re thinking the same thought at the same time!

IDEAS TO PONDER

Intimacy is a system, just like sexual desire.
Intimacy involves mapping your own mind in front of your partner, and letting your partner map your mind too
. Your Four Points of Balance determine your tolerance of profound intimacy.

Intimacy problems create low sexual desire, and gridlock over intimacy is virtually inevitable. Other-validated intimacy is time-limited in love relationships. Self-validated intimacy hinges on the strength of your Four Points of Balance.

To resolve gridlock, you have to deliberately get out of step and dampen negative reverberations in you relationship. You have to stop responding in kind and author new behaviors.

Realizing there are parts of your partner’s mind you
don’t
know is also part of intimacy.

K
aren spat the words at Julian: “Did you think I would wait forever?”

“I thought we had an agreement to be monogamous,” Julian countered.

“
I
thought we had an agreement to work on having sex five years ago!” Karen retorted.

Julian and Karen were so locked into each other they were almost oblivious of me. He was on the attack, and she was defensive. They had obviously been over this many times. It was a great demonstration of gridlock, but they were both too far gone to notice it.

“I can’t believe you’d do this!” Julian thundered.

“It’s natural to want to have sex,” Karen parried. “And I’ve heard monogamy may be contrary to our basic nature. Everyone screws around. Get over it.”

“I can’t get over it. I didn’t screw around. You did!”

“That’s because you wouldn’t screw me!!”

Julian turned to me. “You tell her, Doc. Tell her that not everyone screws around.”

Karen picked up Julian’s challenge. “No, Doc. Tell him that monogamy isn’t natural. Tell him it’s not natural to never make love to your wife!”

I didn’t say anything for a moment to cool things off. “You two don’t want to mess up your fight with facts, do you?” I replied. “There’s a whole lot of human nature going on between you, but you seem more interested in pounding on each other than studying it as it plays out between you.”

There was no point in going into detail while Karen and Julian’s emotions were out of control. Their emotional intensity, coupled with what they were saying, screamed that they were living with emotional fusion and borrowed functioning. At least one of the three of us was learning something in their therapy.