Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (19 page)

Second, being honest about who you are without guaranteed validation creates a mini identity crisis. If you can digest this challenge to your self in front of your partner, you become a more solid person. Your Four Points of Balance get stretched by mapping out your own mind and letting your partner map your mind while you do it. That’s intimacy.

Third, intimacy involves being
accurately
known by your partner. This, in itself, will make you feel insecure. If you’ve depended on a reflected sense of self, you’re not sure you’re okay as you are. It’s hard to believe you’ll be loved if you are truly known. It’s hard to allow yourself to be accurately mapped, particularly if you delude yourself about who you really are. But until you finally let yourself be known, you’ll never feel secure.

Fourth, difficult important things often need to be said. You can’t do this if you depend on other-validated intimacy. But with self-validated intimacy you can. This kind of intimacy doesn’t make you feel secure, safe, accepted, cuddly, warm, or close. You have to hold on to your self while you do it, because your partner may not want to hear what you have to say and vice versa. In fact, it is often the accumulation of unsaid things that prompt people to shift to self-validated intimacy.

Struggles over intimacy, and the ensuing emotional gridlock, helped your forebears develop the best brain on the planet. That’s why you’ll go through them, too. It’s normal! Knowing this can help you not take things quite so personally.

Sharon didn’t know this. She and Thomas came to their next therapy session having had yet another argument over sex and intimacy. That was three days ago, and Sharon was still on the warpath.

“I told Thomas, ‘I have no desire to have sex with someone who shuts me out.’”

This time Thomas worked at not defending himself and managed to keep his mouth shut. When their typical bitter exchange didn’t occur, the tension in the room diminished. Sharon didn’t quite know what to do.

“See, you’re not saying anything,” she said. Thomas waited a moment.

“I’m not saying anything because I’m trying to make things better.” His voice lacked its typical cutting and condescending tone. Only later did I learn what prompted Thomas’s shift: He had found out his best friend was getting divorced.

I turned to Sharon. “You want to map his mind. That’s why you want Thomas to share his thoughts and feelings.”

“That right.” Sharon calmed down.

“But you don’t want him mapping
your
mind—particularly during sex. You want to limit the intimacy to talking. You want him only to see what you want to show him. This keeps you and Thomas from experiencing anything approximating peace and serenity when you are physically or emotionally intimate.” Sharon nodded. She was taking in what I was saying.

“This is why you freeze up during sex when Thomas asks you what you like. You want to follow his lead—and then complain about it afterward. You don’t want to do what
you
want. That would require self-validated intimacy. Even if Thomas likes what you want, you’re still revealing yourself through your preferences.”

Sharon looked at me seriously. “What if I don’t know what I like?”

“Are you saying you have no idea what you like sexually?”

Sharon paused for a moment and smiled. “I have a vague idea.”

“That’s enough. That’s all you need. If you pursue your vague idea with Thomas and approach it like a team, I’m sure you’ll clarify what you like.”

Sharon giggled, “What if I’m not comfortable with what I like?”

Obviously Sharon knew more about her sexuality than she could validate. I looked her in the eye and thought,
I know you know more than you’re acknowledging. You’re hiding the erotic part of you!
Sharon kept my gaze, read my mind, and blushed.

Intimacy inherently involves mind-mapping. Mapping out that your partner is deeply involved in the moment with you, that you have his undivided attention, contributes to the feeling of “togetherness.” Likewise, realizing there are parts of your partner’s mind you
don’t
know is also part of intimacy. That same moment in which you recognize something previously unseen in your partner’s mind confronts you with the fact that there are parts of your partner you
still
don’t know.

Intense intimate experiences are “moments of meeting.” Moments of meeting are invariably electric, but not always soothing. In moments of meeting, people map out each other’s minds. You
know
each other. Keep in mind what I told you earlier about scientists thinking your brain (re)wires itself in moments of meeting (intersubjective states) throughout your life. You’ll start to recognize a utility to intimacy you never imagined.

Reciprocal mind-mapping fits most people’s picture of intimacy. This is popularly referred to as “being open with each other.” It speaks of our highest aspirations, but it also greatly inflates our reflected sense of self. What if your partner doesn’t reciprocate in kind? Intimacy doesn’t always involve permission to map someone’s mind, or reciprocal disclosure, or even a kind word.

Thomas didn’t want Sharon in his head. He wouldn’t talk about his feelings or encourage her to disclose hers. However, Thomas couldn’t stop Sharon from mapping that he didn’t want her reading him. Sharon could tell he was shielding his thoughts, even if she didn’t know exactly what he was thinking. Sometimes Thomas tried to mask that he was hiding. Other times he wanted Sharon to know he locked her out, because he knew it hurt her feelings.

This kind of moment arose as they ate breakfast one morning. Sharon tried to engage Thomas in conversation. Thomas made a big show of reading his newspaper. When she persevered, Thomas looked Sharon in the eye and screamed, “Stop trying to pick my brain.
Leave me alone
!”

This intimate moment—two selves knowing each other—felt terrible to Sharon. Thomas didn’t want her to know him, and he wanted her to
know that. Thomas knew she’d be hurt, and he watched her reflected sense of self crumble. In that moment, Sharon saw the side of Thomas she hated. She knew Thomas knew she would be hurt by this, and yet he did it anyway. Sharon took it personally that Thomas wanted her to hurt. It crushed her. This intersubjective experience diminished Sharon’s ability to function.

In
Part One
, we said sexual desire is more than a feeling. It’s a sophisticated system permeating love relationships. The same is true of intimacy.

Intimacy evolved along with humankind’s emerging sense of self. Your forebears learned through trial and error that exchanges of factual and emotional information created an intersubjective state that made them feel better. Given that we start life with a reflected sense of self, it was virtually guaranteed humans would develop other-validated intimacy. Just as being LDPs and HDPs led to a people-growing process, so did other-validated intimacy and self-validated intimacy. You’ll discover other important similarities and differences when you consider who controls intimacy.

In
Chapter 1
you learned the low desire partner always controls sex. Intimacy operates much the same way:
The LDP for intimacy always controls it—as long as partners don’t develop their Four Points of Balance and remain dependent on other-validated intimacy
.

Let me explain how the low desire partner for other-validated intimacy always controls it. Once again, this arises from the process of elimination: As you and your partner become a couple, you disclose things you have in common, plus things your mind-mapping suggests your partner will accept. Eventually these disclosures are “used up.” Redisclosing them doesn’t create the feeling of intimacy. Intimacy requires disclosing new information as your relationship progresses.

In due course, you and your partner are faced with disclosing information and confronting issues where your partner’s acceptance and validation is not guaranteed. You reach a fateful point when the low desire partner for other-validated intimacy doesn’t want to go further. He doesn’t want to hear the things his partner has to say. He stops disclosing and won’t validate his partner’s disclosures. This is how the low desire partner controls the level of intimacy.

Now we’ve arrived at the point where sexual desire and intimacy operate differently. With sex, the LDP always controls it. As partners develop their Four Points of Balance they handle this much better. But whether you are highly differentiated or still emotionally fused, the LDP always controls sex.

Intimacy operates differently because the dynamics of other-validated intimacy and self-validated intimacy differ. Your level of differentiation changes how your relationship operates. For
other
-validated intimacy, the LDP always controls the level of intimacy. But as partners develop their Four Points of Balance, they begin to explore
self
-validated intimacy and everything changes: The partner with the greater desire for
self
-validated intimacy, the HDP, controls its timing, frequency, and depth.

In other words,
other
-validated intimacy operates just like sex: The partner with the least desire always runs the show. But
self
-validated intimacy gives control to the partner who wants it the most. When you have a solid flexible self and can soothe yourself, you are able to validate your own disclosures and can say anything you need to. Your partner no longer controls you or the level of intimacy in your marriage.

Yes, the LDP for intimacy can always get up and walk away, just as the low sexual desire partner can always stop having sex. But in both cases, there’s a limit to how far you play that card if you want to stay married—particularly happily married.

In
Chapter 3
, we discussed how, besides controlling sex, the low sexual desire partner usually controls the HDP’s adequacy too. This stems from the HDP’s sense of self being based on having sex and being desired.
Well, when it comes to intimacy, the low desire partner controls their partner’s adequacy, too—for similar reasons.

If you depend on other-validated intimacy, your self-esteem craters when your partner won’t talk. It’s just like when the high sexual desire partner crashes because his mate won’t make whoopee. Sharon felt good when Thomas revealed his feelings and thoughts, and let her read his mind. She felt rejected when he stopped. Thomas stopped because he didn’t want her to ferret out things that might offend her.

Of course, Sharon didn’t see it this way. She believed Thomas had problems with intimacy. She just wanted to be close with him. In her mind, Thomas focused on sex to keep from being intimate.

This created serious gridlock. When your Four Points of Balance aren’t well developed, there are real limits to how much intimacy you can handle. As much as Sharon complained about Thomas being incapable of intimacy, when he was intimate she didn’t want to hear things that weren’t flattering and reassuring. She also hung back when Thomas wanted to be sexually intimate.

In truth, Sharon was uncomfortable being known sexually. She attributed this to needing to feel more secure with Thomas. (Read:
Thomas
was supposed to make her feel more secure.) Sharon hid during sex because it was too revealing, too intimate. This was beyond the limits of her Four Points of Balance. Sharon fended off Thomas’s attempts to map out her secret wishes and sexual fantasies. It was the same as Thomas fending off her prying into his feelings.

Sharon was able to control their sex because she controlled Thomas’s feelings of adequacy, too. But eventually this caught up with her when Thomas finally took hold of himself. There came a time when instead of getting loud and counterattacking, Thomas just looked at his shoes. Then, with a sad and somber face, he quietly said, “You know, I just don’t have the heart to fight about sex—or talking—anymore.”

Sharon had never seen him act like this before. She watched a stranger slowly rise from Thomas’s chair and go to bed. She read his mind: He was telling the truth, and he wanted her to know it. She could feel she was losing control of him. That frightened her. In both intimacy and sex, the LDP loses control of the relationship as the HDP develops a more solid flexible self.

There isn’t something inherently wrong with other-validated intimacy, or the fact that Sharon wanted it. Given her reflected sense of self, it made perfect sense. The rub is that after a while the well runs dry. Your partner fights to keep his own autonomy, and that shows up as refusing to validate and soothe you whenever you want. That’s how marriage works.

You probably love the fantasy of losing yourself in a love relationship. It sounds so romantic at first. But if your Four Points of Balance aren’t well developed, the stage is set for a battle between autonomy and attachment. Your own dependency and autonomy needs trigger the differentiation process. Your or your partner’s need for separateness surfaces when dependence on other-validated intimacy runs its course.

Your dependence on acceptance, validation, and empathy from your partner—and feeling entitled to it—cause emotional gridlock. In long-term love relationships, other-validated intimacy is inherently time-limited.

Reciprocity is a beautiful thing. But if your relationship hinges on it, you’re in trouble. Many couples temporarily establish a high level of intimacy through reciprocal validation and disclosure, but invariably they can’t maintain this level once borrowed functioning collapses. Relationships built on other-validated intimacy crater when one partner won’t accept and validate the other or disclose in kind.