Emotional Intimacy

 

Emotional Intimacy

Do you ever feel left out among your friends with whom you have been together since childhood? While some might say that you have become a recluse who can’t even get along with your close peers, to me it is normal to feel a little lost especially if you strive for emotional intimacy but are deprived of in your friendship. Now the question may arise, what exactly is emotional intimacy and how important is it in a relationship?

According to Sanam Hafeez, a neuropsychologist emotional intimacy is to allow oneself to connect more deeply with his/her partner through actions that express feelings, vulnerabilities, and trust. Much like physical intimacy, emotional intimacy is variable with time as well as from one relationship to another. It allows us to feel closeness with others thereby enabling sharing of personal feelings that go along with expectations of understanding, appreciation and demonstration of caring.

Emotional intimacy can be expressed in both implied and direct communication. I hope you can relate implied communication to how you wish for your partner to hold your hands while he/she is quite busy walking or how a child wants his/her mother to show affection while she is occupied gossiping with her friends. In order to become emotionally intimate with each other, it is important that the two people express their deepest feelings, thoughts and emotions regardless of how vulnerable they are to them because this very intimate communication is the foundation for developing understanding, mutual support and a sense of compatibility.

Although sharing our deepest thoughts can be uncomfortable or anxiety-inducing in some, with time and practice it will be easy. Now some of you might wonder how a relationship might sustain when you confess things about someone that should not have crossed your mind at first place. However, acting ideal by only sharing your positive feelings might not be sustainable in the long term because people might not love and support you when you will stop behaving perfectly.

As important as it is for us to communicate spontaneously and profoundly, it is equally paramount to accept the person with their shortcomings and forgive them too. To become intimate with somebody is also to give them the privilege to hurt you because as Gaur Gopal Das, an Indian lifestyle coach once quoted, the potential to do the greatest emotional damage is people who are the closest. When you are hurt in a relationship, you should always analyze the deposits vs the withdrawals. Forgiveness for someone is only possible with the memory of the good things they have done to us and believe me it will be much easier to tolerate people when we realize that they tolerate us too. This analogy for forgiveness is only generic and cannot be applicable for all cases since every individual’s capacity to let go is different along with the emotional damage that they incur. But, to love you have to make an attempt to forgive sooner or later as Bryant McGill once put it, ‘There’s no forgiveness without love and there’s no love without forgiveness’.

 

As we tend to seek for emotional intimacy even on implied communication, how about we care for keeping our loved ones emotionally intimate as well? Thank you for your time to read my article. I hope you a great day ahead. Much Love <3