Intimacy, not fusion

Intimacy, not fusion  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD
June 2011

     I often hear people talk about their partners, husbands, wives, as “their better half” and words to the effect that “the other person completes them” and find myself drawing back in horror. Even more repugnant to me are the requests some men make  regarding the women they supposedly love to subordinate themselves to them, and for women to believe it is right that they give up their hopes and dreams in order to be there for their men 24 hours a day.  Here is a lack of understanding of  what intimacy  and love is.

     The wonderful writer Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet, 1954, writes thus, 

Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen… it is a great exacting claim. 

     Our work is not to dissolve into another person, but be clear and clean in our authentic contact with the one and ones we love.  Rilke’s idea of love as a ground for ripening of self speaks of an interaction between persons that is rich, full and not needy or clingy.  Partners who cling to each other and attempt to exclude  a multi-facetted world shrink from life itself. 

     Society has shaped our expectations about intimacy in the following ways. Many women are brought up to consider normal “losing themselves in a relationship” while many men think of intimacy as unmanly or just another word for sex, but intimacy is a subject much more complete than this.

      Intimacy is a substantive relationship between two  or more individuals of equal status. It is a deep reciprocal closeness and it is, as someone described it to me,  like a bridge over the silence of the universe joining people on either side.

     I believe that most  people yearn for intimacy, though some neurotically crave fusion (an undifferentiated disappearing into another person). Intimacy has a number of distinct characteristics that distinguish it from fusion. 

      To be intimate with another  (man and woman, woman and woman, or man and man) is to engage in closeness, time together, nurturance, physical intimacy, communication and consistency. Intimacy is shaped by an ability to face conflict and not shirk away from psychological, emotional or physical rupture. Intimacy distinguishes itself from fusion through a lack of intrusiveness: no separation anxiety, respect of another’s need for privacy, lack of possessiveness and jealousy, lack of overreactivity to the other person’s life problems; a distinction of minds (little mind-reading), lack of thinking we know what the other person wants or needs better than he/she does, lack of aggressive criticism, blaming, hurtful attacks, or a desire to diminish the other, and a lack of attempt to dominate the other in disagreements. To be fused is to see the physical absence of the other as a threat to our very existence. It is to think as normal to walk into the bathroom while the other person is on the toilet (as the husband of a client of mine did on a daily basis). It is to want to sit inappropriately in on an exam with one’s partner or attend an interview between a wife’s boss and one’s wife. A fused relationship may be one in which arguments never take place, or when they do, both parties are convinced that the relationship is crumbling. Fusion in a relationship may express itself when the man “knows” exactly what his partner wants for her birthday, without actually ever asking her (or vice versa). Fusion is found when one member of a relationship dominates, belittles, and undermines the other on a regular basis and thinks it is his/her right. When individuals leave these fused relationships they often go into crisis because they no longer know who or what they are, for they have identified themselves totally as an appendage of  the other person. When people leave healthy intimate relationships (and they are free to do so, for healthy intimacy is permeable and not an end itself) they  ripen further as the individuals they are made to be.

      Intimacy is a choice and not a neediness; it may be a yearning but it is not a craving. It is a natural desire for closeness in an environment where one can express oneself clearly and authentically with another person; it is not a place where one dissolves oneself in the greater powerfulness of the other like a sugar cube in a glass of water. To be intimate is to know and be known by the other as a separate and beloved self. Two (or more) people in relationship.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell