The Seven Levels of Intimacy: The Art of Loving and the Joy of Being Loved (20 page)

The dream gives them reason and inspiration to delay their gratification. More often than not, people who are unwilling to delay gratification simply don’t have a dream worth delaying their gratification in order to achieve. Do you?

Delayed gratification gets us thinking about the future, and in relationships that is critical. When we love someone, we think about building a life with that person and about all the exciting possibilities the future holds. When we are interested only in fulfilling our personal desire for pleasure and in instant gratification, we don’t think about the future or even about the other person. We think about now and about no one but ourselves.

Dreams extend our time horizon beyond the self-centeredness of instant gratification and into a future filled with the love, intimacy, and mutual respect for which we all yearn. Dreams, a common purpose, and the willingness to delay gratification will ignite your relationship like no pleasure the world has ever prescribed.

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reams tell you a lot about a person—not only about who he is today but also about the person he hopes to become in the future. Dreams tell us about what a person values, what he is passionate about, and what he centers his life upon. So if you are deciding if you want to spend your life with a person, knowing what his hopes and dreams are can very often tell you something about the person he will become.

The fourth level of intimacy is about discovering each other’s dreams. Knowing what brings passion, energy, and enthusiasm to the lives of the people you love is crucial if you are going to develop a deep level of intimacy.

The reason it is so important to know the dreams of the people we love is that they view their lives in relation to their dreams, and so do you. Our dreams are the lenses through which we view everything. Let me give you an example. Your wife says to you, “I saw a beautiful dress at the store today. I think I’ll go back and buy it tomorrow.” You may ask how much it costs, to which she replies, “Two hundred and fifty dollars.” It is an arbitrary amount and many people could justify the expenditure. But you may become upset because you see this expenditure as frivolous. As you see it, your wife already has fifty dresses that she hardly ever wears. But this is not the point; you are not upset because your wife wants a new dress. The real point is that you would rather see this money used for something else—that is, for one of your dreams.

Your dream may be to retire early and travel with your wife while you are still young enough to enjoy it. You may be saving relentlessly to make this dream come true, but you haven’t told your wife about it. You may have alluded to it, but have you sat down together, done the math, and determined what you both need to do to make the dream a reality? Let’s face it: if you gave your wife the choice between a handful of new dresses and traveling together after your early retirement, I think she would pick the latter. If she wouldn’t, then you’ve got bigger problems than whether or not she buys the dress.

Dreams bring clarity and focus to our relationships. If you are going to build a future together, you have to know each other’s dreams.

In
The Rhythm of Life,
I spoke briefly about my dream book. My dream book is a small journal-like book that I write all my dreams in, everything from places I want to go and things I would like to own, to books I would like to write and virtues I would like to possess. Every day I take time to flip through my dream book, perhaps while I am on a plane, or working out on the treadmill, or just lying in bed before I go to sleep.

Dreams have to be written down, and we have to take time each day to remind ourselves of our dreams. Otherwise we get distracted from what matters most by the things that matter least.

The same is true in our relationships. It is so easy to get carried away by the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives and forget to give our dreams the attention they deserve.

Isn’t it time you had a dream book?

Isn’t it time you had a dream book as a couple?

Get yourself a journal to use as a dream book. Next time you see that watch, car, or vacation you really want in a magazine, cut the advertisement out and stick it in your dream book. These are the easy ones.

Maybe what you really need is a dream weekend? Not a dream vacation—a weekend away with your significant other to do some serious dreaming.

I look at seven areas of my life when I have my dream sessions: physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, professional, financial, and adventurous.

Do some dreaming. Look at each of the seven areas and talk about what your dreams are in each of them. Write down the dreams. You will have individual dreams, and dreams as a couple. But write them down, and then start to set some goals. Goals are dreams with a deadline. Look at each of the seven areas and set some goals with a deadline one year from now.

One of your physical goals might be to lose some weight or to exercise together regularly. I hope one of your emotional goals is to have a great relationship, and in part three I am going to help you define more clearly what that means to you. You may have been wanting to read more books for years; perhaps that will be one of your intellectual goals, or maybe you have always wanted to go back to school. You may be yearning to get away on a retreat to explore your spirituality a little more. This could be your spiritual goal. If you have been complaining that you hate your job, perhaps your professional goal will be to find a new job. Have you been putting off saving? Maybe your financial goal will be to formulate a financial plan and start saving. And in the area of adventure, perhaps you have always wanted to go white-water rafting, or parachuting, or to learn to fly.

The thing about dreams is that the more you define them, the more likely you are to achieve them. Dreams don’t just happen to come true. People make dreams come true.

Goals drive us. Goals bring the best out of us. Goals and dreams challenge us to look at the world and ourselves in a different way. Goals flood our lives with passion, purpose, and energy. And goals will do all of this for your relationships also. Stop coasting along; dream, and set some goals that will lead to the fulfillment of those dreams.

As human beings, we are most fully alive when we are changing and growing and stretching our boundaries in our quest to be all we can be. As a result, we respond very well to goals. The art of goal-setting means choosing goals that are challenging but attainable—that is, not so easy that you are not challenged, and not so difficult that you become discouraged. If you have an enormous dream, you may need to break it down into several stages, each defined by its own smaller and more manageable goals.

Take yourselves away on a dream weekend; if you can’t get away for the weekend, for whatever reason, block off a couple of evenings, or a Sunday afternoon. And make it a goal to go away for the next dream-making session one year from now.

Come up with a plan. Identify the goals and dreams you want to achieve in the next twelve months. Some dreams take longer than one year to bring to fruition, but define what part of that dream has to be achieved in that first year. Write the plan down. Make two copies. Carry it with you so that when you have a few moments in the middle of your day you can read through it. Perhaps on the last day of each month the two of you could take some time to talk about how you are progressing.

If you have children, encourage them to dream: get them a dream book and take some time as a family to write down your individual dreams and talk about them. There is something powerful about helping the people we love chase and fulfill their dreams.

Too often, we live in the miscredited fantasy that one day we will wake up and everything will be exactly as we have always wished it would be. It won’t. You know that, somewhere deep inside of you. And that is the difference between a wish and a dream.

If you truly want to be intimate with the people you love, you need to know what drives them. In different stages of our lives we are driven by different things; that is why it is so important to make this an annual exercise with regular review throughout the year. If you asked your spouse what his or her dreams were when you first starting dating and you haven’t spent much time on the subject since, you will likely discover that he or she has a whole new set of dreams now. If this is the case, may I suggest you ask this question of your significant other as a starting point for the renewal in your relationship: Which of your dreams got lost along the way while I was too busy pursuing my own?

 

 

 

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he fifth level of intimacy is the level of feelings. Feelings are defined as “emotional reactions” and we have thousands of them every day. A blue sky when you first wake in the morning may cause an emotional reaction: a feeling. A dreary, cloud-filled sky may provoke a very different feeling. What was your last emotional reaction? What are you feeling at this very moment? Some feelings come and go and we pay very little, if any, attention to them. Other feelings have strength that can possess us if we allow them to.

Knowing our feelings and sharing our feelings is an integral part of intimacy. The fifth level is about exploring how we feel about different people, places, things, and events, and learning how to share those feelings in a way that allows the people we love to know us on a deeper level.

At this level of intimacy, we come face to face with the fear of rejection that we discussed in the opening chapter of this book. The facts of our lives say something about who we are. Our opinions say something about how we have responded to the facts of our lives. Our hopes and dreams say something about how we want to live our lives and the persons we are striving to become. Each of these reveals something about us, and to the extent that we reveal ourselves we become vulnerable. Our feelings are the raw emotional nerve endings that very often reveal our brokenness, our humanity, our need to be held, listened to, and loved. The revelation of our feelings makes us extremely vulnerable.

The challenge of the second level of intimacy is, Are you willing to move beyond the cliché and say something about yourself? The challenge of the third level of intimacy is, Are you willing to reveal your opinions and offer the gift of acceptance to those with opinions different from your own? The challenge of the fourth level of intimacy is, Are you willing to set aside instant gratification in order to build a future together?

The challenge of the fifth level of intimacy is, Are you willing to make yourself vulnerable? If you are not willing to let your guard down, take your mask off, make yourself vulnerable, and tell your significant other how you really feel, then you will not have intimacy. At every point in the journey to deeper and deeper levels of intimacy, a price must be paid. The price the fifth level asks of us is that we make ourselves vulnerable.

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evealing our feelings makes us vulnerable, but we endure risks in order to reap rewards. The reward of making ourselves vulnerable is mental health. At the heart of all successful psychotherapy is a relationship in which a person can say anything, tell everything, and reveal the very core of his being, just as a little child will tell his mother everything. Isn’t this what millions of people go to therapists for every year? Could it be that if we all had just one genuinely intimate relationship, there would be no need for therapists?

How beautiful and liberating it must be to have nothing to hide. When people are willing to reveal themselves to each other in a spirit of honesty, acceptance, and reverence, they liberate each other from the insanity of isolation and loneliness. Who doesn’t want a relationship in which they can tell everything?

We all have so much bottled up inside us. It is this emotional coagulation that makes us mad. And it causes disease in ways that, I suspect, we have not even begun to understand. We all sense that we have something to say, but don’t know quite how to say it or whom to say it to.

Intimacy is a risk. It should not be taken lightly, but we must take it. No man or woman can live a full life without being known by at least one person. Intimacy is a prerequisite for all those who wish to live the abundant life. The only true reason to delay the adventurous and risky pursuit of real intimacy is the absence of a confidant freely chosen and worthy of our trust.

But we cling to safety and idolize security, all the time overlooking the fact that safety and security are just illusions. You are only safe until you are no longer safe. You are secure only until you are no longer secure, and our illusions are ripped out from under us quickly and without warning. What good are your safety and security if you or a loved one is tragically killed in a accident tomorrow?

If you gave an unborn child the choice between staying in her mother’s womb and coming out into this extraordinary world, the child would choose the womb every time. The child knows the womb, and we love what we know. The womb is safe, secure, and warm, and the child thinks she has everything she needs in the womb. Given the choice, and knowing nothing of what is outside the womb, the child would choose the world she knows.

Sometimes when it comes to intimacy, you and I are that unborn child. We don’t see the world that awaits us. After all, it is only by truly experiencing intimacy that we come to realize what a great need we have as humans to be really listened to, to be taken seriously, to be accepted, encouraged, and understood. Only those who have experienced the new world of intimacy know how important it is to move beyond the world of self. Unable to comprehend the powerful ways that intimacy can move us, challenge us, energize us, and liberate us, most people cling to the little that they have and convince themselves that they have too much to lose. Too often, too many of us settle for crumbs from the table of the most exquisite banquet of all times, the banquet of intimacy.

If you are unwilling to embrace the challenge of making yourself vulnerable, intimacy will elude you until circumstances or necessity convinces you to change your mind. Intimacy is unattainable for those who refuse to take the risk of making themselves vulnerable in their high-level relationships, and particularly their primary relationship.

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e all have a legitimate need to express our feelings, but there are a number of factors that contribute to the healthy expression of feelings. As with most things, it may help to ask ourselves: Who? What? When? Where? How? Why?

Who? is perhaps the most important factor, but we should start with Why? because what we hope to achieve determines everything else.

If you just need to say something out loud, almost anyone will do. In fact, if you just need to say something out loud, go into an empty room, close the door, and speak.

If you need to express feelings about a certain person, then that person is probably the best person to hear whatever you have to say. But remember, if your feelings are critical, be sure to express them with the spirit of helping him become the-best-version-of-himself.

But assuming that your feelings are of a more complex and intimate nature, and that what you are really looking for is someone to listen to you and try to understand what you are feeling, then there is a good chance your primary relationship is where this communication belongs.

Expressing your feelings to an infant child is unlikely to produce the response necessary to make you feel that you have been heard and understood. It may be unfair to express your feelings about a serious matter to your adolescent child, who is unlikely to be able to support you in the way you need and who may be prematurely burdened with the worry of a certain situation. The person bagging your groceries probably isn’t the right person, and neither is the new neighbor across the street.

The What?, of course, is entirely up to you, though when expressing our feelings we should try to use “I” statements that focus on the facts (or specifics). This is the How? For example, “I am angry because you came home late from work and you missed dinner with the family.” In this way, you are expressing the way you feel (“I am angry”), giving the reason and describing the event that provoked that feeling (“because you came home late from work”), and explaining the effect the event had on your relationship (“and you missed dinner with the family”). It is also important to note that even if you are angry, you don’t have to choose to express you feelings with anger. If you are hurt, you should try not to express your feelings in a way that is hurtful to another (even to the person who provoked your feeling of hurt).

Timing is everything, they say. There are three times when nobody should ever try to have a conversation with me that requires any level of active focus and deep listening: when I first wake up in the morning; when I first arrive at my office for the day; and when I first arrive home from a trip. I don’t need hours; I just need ten minutes to get settled. The people around me have learned to allow me that time before they ask me to address any matter that requires a clear mind and my undivided attention.

We should learn which times are best for intimate conversations with the people we love. Sometimes timing alone can determine whether we have a level one or a level five communication with a person. And so, even when we need to express our feelings, we should avoid reducing that need to another form of instant gratification. Otherwise our expression of our feelings becomes no more elevated than a child’s tantrum in a shopping mall, or a teenager shouting expletives because he lacks the vocabulary and maturity to genuinely express his feelings.

One very powerful tool may be to say, “I really need a few minutes to talk some time today.” Because the other person elects the time, she will usually be at her most attentive and receptive. All of this assumes that there is mutual respect between you, and that you are both trying to help each other become the-best-version-of-yourselves. Where this common goal cannot be established, the pursuit of intimacy at every level is significantly more difficult.

This leaves us with the Where? My own generation spends so much of its time in environments filled with deafening music that it comes as no surprise to me that many of my peers, even those in long-term relationships, have little intimacy.

If you want to have a conversation that advances the intimacy between you and your significant other, child, parent, or just about anybody, the place to do it is not in front of the television, in a bar where you can hardly hear each other, or in a group. Certain environments encourage intimacy; usually these are quiet places where you can have time with each other and not be interrupted by other people.

Learning to express our feelings in healthy ways takes time. Different people respond in different ways to the What?, When?, Where?, How?, and Why? Part of the process of intimacy is getting to know the most effective times, places, and ways to communicate, so we can optimize our chances of successful and fruitful communication.

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t first, sharing your feelings with each other may be like pulling teeth, but in time this will become a habit and eventually it will become second nature. If we are really attentive to each other, over time we will begin to notice that the people we love are feeling a certain way before they tell us, and sometimes even before they have become consciously aware of it themselves.

When I have something on my mind or am feeling a little stressed, I whistle. It is usually a very light and happy tune, and strangers probably think, “He must be very happy today.” The people who know me well know better. I don’t remember ever deciding consciously to whistle, and more often then not I don’t realize I am doing it until someone who knows me well asks, “What’s on your mind?” And that’s when I become aware that I was whistling. Similarly, you get to know the people around you, and as you grow in intimacy, you’ll become aware of certain signs that reveal how they are feeling.

We can master the different levels of intimacy only by practice, and in the case of the fifth level that means taking time regularly to express our feelings. If I were to say that it was necessary to do this at least once a day, or several times a day, many would cringe, because at first the expression of our feelings can seem so unnatural and uncomfortable. I suspect it is like riding a roller coaster: at first it is frightening, but in time you become comfortable with it and even learn to relax, let go, and enjoy it. (Needless to say, intimacy has some significant advantages over riding roller coasters.) Now, you may never become comfortable expressing feelings of hurt, but you will develop the courage to express them nonetheless. You may never enjoy expressing your anger, but you will develop healthy ways to express it.

In the fifth level of intimacy, we once again come to understand the central importance of the acceptance developed in the third level. Acceptance gives us the courage to make ourselves vulnerable by sharing our feelings. Confident that they will not be judged or criticized but rather accepted for who they are and where they are on our journey, most people will open the doors of their hearts. We keep those doors so tightly closed mainly out of fear of criticism, judgment, and rejection. If you can convince the people you love that you accept them for who they are, that you are not out to change them at every turn, and that you will try to understand them as well as you can, they will respond by revealing themselves, and you will both enjoy the mystery of intimacy.

Over time, as we become more and more comfortable with each other, as we become more and more convinced of each other’s commitment, the sharing of our feelings begins to flow much more spontaneously, and often effortlessly. Now we can sit with the person we love and say, “You know, I had a wonderful day today. I don’t know why. I think it was just because the sun was out, and that made me feel more joyful, more alive. I guess I am just happier when the sun shines.” It is amazing how something as simple as the weather can affect the way we feel on any given day. Or perhaps, “I had a great day today. At our staff meeting Mr. Robinson talked about the project my team has been working on and how it is changing the industry. We needed to hear that—I needed to hear that—and his encouragement put me in a wonderful mood. It is just good to feel appreciated.”