The Seven Levels of Intimacy: The Art of Loving and the Joy of Being Loved (22 page)

Our journey toward intimacy means trying to understand why people have certain feelings and why they react to certain people and situations as they do. But, again, we will likely discover these truths about the people we love only if we restrain ourselves from judging feelings or being critical of them. Acceptance is one of the keys to further intimacy in the fifth level.

Desperate people will reveal their feelings even when they know that they will be judged and criticized. But normally, we reveal our feelings only in the confidence that we will be accepted for who we are. We are willing to make ourselves vulnerable when we believe that we will be neither judged nor criticized but rather accepted and listened to.

Allowing the people we love to freely express their feelings is one of the greatest gifts we can give them. We all have feelings that are disordered or the result of paranoia, illusions, assumptions, and misunderstandings. It seems that the best way for the human psyche to be freed of these is the opportunity to express them in a loving and judgment-free environment, to people who truly care about us.

Tell me what you know and you entertain me, but tell me how you feel and you will intrigue me.

I N
EED
H
ELP
! I’
M
A
FRAID
! I M
ESSED
U
P
!

T

In the level of feelings (the fifth level) we certainly make ourselves vulnerable, but in the sixth level we expose ourselves. Level six is the emotional equivalent of nakedness. This emotional nakedness is usually appropriate only in our primary relationship. You may be able to expose yourself in this way to some degree in a number of your high-level relationships, but obviously it’s appropriate to be around more people in your swimsuit than it is to be naked.

It is in the sixth level of intimacy that we finally let down our guard and take off our masks enough to share our faults with our significant other. He or she has known many of your faults for years, so the mere fact that you are now ready to admit to them does not produce any great advance in your relationship. The advance is made when you are willing to turn to the one you love and say honestly and humbly, “I need help.”

We all do. We all need help, and a great many of our faults can only be overcome when we have help in our moments of weakness. The key, again, is acceptance and a belief that the other person has our best interests at heart. When we are convinced that our significant other is dedicated to helping us become the-best-version-of-ourselves, we become willing to lay bare our faults and ask for help.

Here, at the sixth level of intimacy, we have also finally arrived at the place where we are able to say to our significant other, “I am afraid.”

I am afraid you will leave me. I am afraid we won’t have enough money to retire. I am afraid I am going to lose my job. I am afraid our children will get mixed up with the wrong group of friends. I am afraid they won’t get into a good college. I am afraid they won’t marry for the right reasons. I am afraid of my parents dying.

Our fears are many and complex, but at the sixth level we have developed a level of comfort with our significant other that allows us to freely express them. Similarly, our partner now realizes that it is not his or her job to fix those fears, but rather to walk bravely with us.

You are right in wondering why fears are not simply included in the previous level along with all the other feelings. The reason is that fear is much more than a feeling; it is a determining factor in many of our decisions and a driving force in many other areas of our lives. For these reasons, and the others you will discover as this chapter unfolds, fear overlaps the fifth and sixth levels of intimacy.

The third component of this sixth level of intimacy is the revelation of our failures. For many of us, this is a history lesson. Your significant other probably had a good twenty or thirty years of history before he or she met you. And most of us have had some significant failures by the time we find the person we want to spend the rest of our lives with. That is not to say that we all have great shameful secrets, but we all have failures in our past. And if we look closely we will discover that those failures are affecting our present.

The sixth level of intimacy involves owning up to who we are, who we have been, what we are capable of, and how we have failed. The journey through the first five levels of intimacy empowers us and liberates us to be able to say, “I messed up!” This is a significant advance in any relationship, because if we are unable to admit that we messed up in the past, we are unlikely to be too good at admitting when we mess up today.

The ability to admit that you need help, that you are afraid, or that you messed up is a sign of great maturity in a person. The ability to accept each other’s faults, fears, and failures reflects great maturity in a relationship.

D
YNAMIC
C
HOICE
M
AKER OR
V
ICTIM
?

I

The acknowledgment of our faults, fears, and failures puts us in the position of being a dynamic choice maker. Fully aware that the past can never be changed, we are faced with a choice about the future. Are we going to continue to allow our past to determine our future, or are we going to begin to make choices that will produce a future richer and more abundant than the past?

When I say “richer,” I am of course not referring to something financial (though finances may be part of it), but rather to something more exhilarating and rewarding, rich in every sense of the word and therefore rich in every aspect of your life. Most especially, I want to encourage this richness in your relationships.

If you study history, you discover that the heroes, leaders, legends, saints, and champions of every age were dynamic choice makers. They were not victims. Even religious martyrs saw themselves as choosing death and a better life. They didn’t think of themselves as victims.

The sixth level of intimacy is very much about being set free from the shackles of victimhood and becoming a dynamic choice maker. When we say, “My father used to yell at me and that is why I am this way,” this is the voice of a victim, not a dynamic choice maker. We have all had experiences that wounded us deeply and caused us to react to certain situations in certain ways. But we can change. That is the glory of the human person—our extraordinary ability to change, to grow, to become better-versions-of-ourselves.

Dynamic choice making is the way of all great men and women. Excellence in any field is defined by a person’s ability to make dynamic choices. Mediocrity is almost always accompanied by attitudes of entitlement and victimhood.

The first step toward becoming a dynamic choice maker is taking ownership of our faults, fears, and failures.

T
HE
D
ARK
S
IDE

I

The key word in all of this is “trying.” We are trying to become the-best-version-of-ourselves. People often accuse me of being a hypocrite when they come face to face with one of my faults. “How can you talk and write about becoming the-best-version-of-yourself, and then do that?” they will say to me.

But the message is that we should be
striving
to become the-best-version-of-ourselves, not that I am the-best-version-of-myself and you should be, too. It is the
striving
that brings us to life; it is in
trying
that we discover our passion and purpose in life.

The question that normally follows is, When will I know that I am the-best-version-of-myself? You don’t wake up one day to discover that you are now the-best-version-of-yourself, and the job is done. As you look back on your life, or upon any day in particular, there are probably moments about which you can say, “When I did that, I was the-best-version-of-myself.” There are probably also a number of moments in which you know you were not the-best-version-of-yourself. In one moment, you can be your best self; in the very next moment, you can abandon that best self. It is the striving to be all we can be that animates the human person. It is the trying that breathes enthusiasm for life into us.

The point is this: we all have a dark side. Myself included.

So, everybody has a dark side, and everybody knows that everybody has a dark side, but most people go around pretending that they don’t have a dark side. This is just one of the many games that we play in our social interactions with other people. In a world were nobody thinks they are average and many people think they are better than most of the people they know, is it any wonder we have trouble relating to one another?

The simplest example is this. If you take one hundred people and ask them to raise their hands if they consider themselves to be above-average drivers, more than eighty will raise their hands. Then ask everyone who considers himself an average driver to raise his hand; the rest of the one hundred people will raise their hands. Ask the same group to raise their hands if they consider themselves to be a below-average driver, and nobody will raise a hand.

I do this exercise in some of my seminars from time to time. But we all know that 80 percent of people cannot be above-average drivers, and that a significant portion of the hundred people must be below-average drivers. It is simply a statistical reality—or maybe my seminars attract only above-average drivers!

We live in our self-deceptions and they distort our character; intimacy comes to set us free from these deceptions and distortions. But in order for intimacy to do her job, we must be willing to admit to our darkness. Otherwise we will go on hiding our dark side, and the more we hide it the more powerful it will become. The more we try to hide our dark side, the more power it comes to have over us.

It is a little like alcoholism. Many alcoholics try to hide their problem, and the more they try to hide it, the more powerful it becomes. And not only that, but the more they hide their alcoholism, the more power it has over them. In time, they start to live their lives around their drinking. They plan their days around their next drink.

We, too, start to live around our darkness. It begins to direct our lives. We start to plan our days, weeks, months, and lives around our faults, fears, and failures. Until our lives become paralyzed by our darkness, until our lives simply become unmanageable.

We all have addictions, cravings, disordered desires, and an incessant selfishness, all of which constitute our dark side. They can be the chains of the past or the keys to a richer, more abundant future. The choice is ours.

The genius of intimacy is that when we bring our dark side out into the light in the context of a loving relationship, our darkness loses its power over us. Darkness cannot abide the light of love. It is intimacy that will hold our hand and walk through the dark rooms of our past and present. It is intimacy that has the power to set us free from our faults, fears, and failures.

W
E
A
LL
H
AVE A
P
AST

T

A couple of years ago, a good friend of mine was getting married. He is one of the most genuine people I have had the pleasure of knowing, and his wife is also a remarkable person. They were very happy and I was very happy for them. But as the wedding day approached, they hit a bit of a speed bump. My friend called me about six weeks before the wedding and I could tell by his tone that all was not well, so I asked him what was going on.

It came down to this. He had had a wild youth—not over-the-top wild, but wild compared to that of his fiancée. Among his exploits had been a number of sexual encounters; his fiancée had been saving herself in this way for marriage. They had talked about their sexual histories much earlier in their relationship, and my friend had been honest with his fiancée, but as the wedding approached it became an issue.

Eventually he asked me to speak to her, which I was more than happy to do. As it turned out, her concerns were many and varied—she worried about not meeting his expectations, and she wondered how his values could have been so different in that earlier period of his life. I tried to listen to her, and when she asked me what I thought of the situation this is how I replied: “If you love him for the person he is today, then you have to realize that it is all the experiences of his past that have made him that person. If he had not had those experiences, he would not be the person he is today. If he has grown from those experiences, then he is a better man because of them, but you cannot pick and choose from a person’s past between the things you like and the things you do not. However uncomfortable you are with those aspects of his past, they have contributed to making him a warm, loving, sensitive, and caring man today.”

Finally, I asked her whether she had anything in her past that she wished she hadn’t done. She began to blush. We all have a past.