Love and Differentiated Intimacy

Love and Differentiated Intimacy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. of Counselling, PhD
April 2013 

     I’ve been thinking quite a bit about couple relationships recently. Why do some work really well, and why do some fail miserably? I know only a handful of couples which continue to flourish. Others are couples no longer, but single people reeling from lots of pain, anguish, fear, and disharmony. What’s going on here?

Is it magic, or is there something else at work?

     I’ve written previously about intimacy as a fundamental drive borne in all animals and present from birth. Now I want to take my thinking to another level. I want to explore it in terms of something beyond closeness where two people remain separate but somehow together, thus the title of this article.

     Intimacy, I need to be clear about, is not about sex, though sex may and may not be part of it. 

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

     When we fall in love we mostly do it blindly and we tend to fall for something in the other person that is familiar to us. Now, whether this familiarity is the basis of what we may call falling for a soul mate (someone who apparently speaks to our inner core), or responding to a projection of some part of ourselves onto the other person, is a matter of interpretation, though the modus operandi is frequently the same.

     When two people are in blind love they do not see each other clearly. Each projects an image (just as movies are projected) constructed in their own minds that conceals the real face of the person they’re looking at. Of course, each person’s hormones are working overtime as well, so there is a lot of desire mixed in there with unowned expectations, needs and judgements. The other person suddenly seems to have all those admirable qualities that oneself probably has too. You may discover later that the other person really doesn’t have those admired qualities at all. In one relationship I had years ago I discovered this for myself. He was a talker, and I’d assumed a listener as well. It took awhile to realize that I’d assumed he was a listener, because I was listener. He, on the other hand, just talked.

Blind love is a theatre of projections and here what is required is to bring conscious awareness and an attitude of differentiation to the relationship, for then, only then, can true intimacy be achieved. 

     For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13, verse 12)

     We need to see clearly, cleanly, the other person; to know, even as I am known; to love, even as I am loved. For it is loving cleanly and clearly in a reciprocal way that intimacy is truly differentiated: no longer a work of projection, in a glass darkly, but fact to face.

     There seem to be very few partnerships, marriages, and other relationships that truly fulfill both people equally. What seems to happen, more often than not, is a one-sidedness where one person is fused in an emotional symbiosis with the other person, or where one person seeks another to help them heal their childhood wounds, or where one person is there to protect the other from the complexities of life.

     In fusion, that undifferentiated dissolving of self into another, one person is effectively left outside the relationship, where the other has lost her/himself. One person is needy and clingy, and the other one provides. There is no equality here. Yes, our society promotes such unbalanced relationships with the idea that the man provides and the woman, if she is a true and ideal woman (whatever that means), gives up herself and submits. Society is less supportive of this idea when it is taken to extremes and becomes just plain even kinky, where power is handed entirely to the man, and taken entirely from the woman. [Though I’m speaking of couples as male-female relationships, I include same-gender coupling here.]

      True differentiated intimacy is not for the faint hearted. It is a growth path where conflict is neither avoided nor becomes a platform for a power struggle,  but worked on realistically. The goal is aliveness, spark, and passion borne from a mutual commitment to self and the other person. It is part of a spiritual process and an owning of each person’s self worth.

To own your self worth, and not to project it elsewhere, is the key. Appreciating self worth is not egotistical, it is putting judgments and values about others back where they arise, within oneself. Ask yourself, Does what you see in others really belong to you? Is your vision clear, or clouded by what you want to see? Knowing your own self worth then allows you to see the other person more clearly, and if, all being well, love the other deeply and appreciate them more really.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell