Un-selfing intimacy
Myths in the folklore of connection
I call bullshit on intimacy. I would like to know who among us are actually “making known“ our “innermost.” We certainly can pretend we are—with shared stories of pain, longing, and striving—but I, like you, know that it's actually pretty nasty in there. Just as what winds its way through our gut is what ends up in the toilet, there is a lot of unpleasant stuff in that innermost. We are intimacy-constipated and, in the hope of sending things through our system, let’s drink some water and move through three persistent myths about intimacy that deserve examination and will be explored—intimately, uncomfortably, necessarily—throughout this piece.
Intimacy is central to identity formation, and central to intimacy is the validation of worth. And from that stems our sharing of those lovely innermost parts of ourselves, the ones we are thrilled to have reflected back, validated, confirmed. Oh yes, your moral goodness is indeed intact. The way we perform ourselves is what we use to stimulate the connection we desire…and perhaps need. What else will hold us all together?
Well, my moral goodness is up for question. Like with everything I hope to explore, I hold my self too up to the light and know full well that I possess the spectrum of humanity, some of its divine parts and plenty of its darkness. I am not morally pure, nor do I pretend to be. I am filled with the same ugliness, anger, rage, resentment, jealousy, pettiness, and self-absorption that we all are. Yet, as Paul Bloom posits, this may be my saving grace. The most common understanding of cruelty to others is that it emanates from the dehumanization of that other. Bloom, however, argues that it may stem from moral entitlement instead. The perpetrator understands and accepts the complete humanity of the other such that:
We see other people as blameworthy, as morally responsible, as themselves cruel, as not giving us what we deserve, as taking more than they deserve. And so we treat them horribly precisely because we see them as moral human beings.
I know there are a million tropes about the two kinds of people in this world, but let me throw out mine: the kind of people who will admit to their ugly inside and the kind of people who merely project it onto others. I keep coming back to Rimbaud’s “I is another.” C’mon, we are all morally reprehensible—this may not be where the beauty lies, but it is where the intimacy resides.
Let’s be clear. I am not calling bullshit on the possibility of connection, or even on intimacy, but on our overly simplistic view that intimacy is destined to confer a coziness on a relationship, as if intimacy is a warm blanket shared by two. This is myth number one: the myth of mutual transparency.
Intimacy does not mean mutual disclosure. If you start to look at the research, intimacy is far closer to nakedness than blanket-coziness. And I don’t know about you, but nakedness is not a comfortable state for me. In a blog post on The Gottman Institute’s site, they refer to intimacy as “a tangible and metaphorical nakedness. It is the place where emotional vulnerability and sexual desire collide and it is something we co-create; we cannot own it for ourselves.” There is something of a paradox here—intimacy is required for validation of self, for that feeling of mattering in the world, and yet it is a collision of exposures creating a distinct space wherein self is surrendered and permeable, where self is “un-selfed” in some fundamental sense. The Gottman "collision" metaphor suggests intimacy might be more about productive tension than harmony and comfort.
When we think of nakedness and intimacy, we—being naturally literal—turn our minds to sex, of course. Yet, sexual intimacy can stand independent of other forms of intimacy, and certainly of love. Writing about this potential severance, film scholar Linda Williams beautifully describes a scene in Nine Songs which depicts the culmination of an affair between the two main characters:
Soon after we see Lisa alone in bed with a vibrator as Matt forlornly looks on. We can only surmise that she no longer seems to find Matt fulfilling as a lover. After Lisa appears to orgasm she weeps, perhaps mourning what she now anticipates to be the end of the affair. We may recall at this point that in most of their sexual encounters it has been Lisa, not Matt, who has been the first to pull apart. Now, Lisa clings to Matt, but it is the clinging of the partner who best knows that the end is near and is mourning the relationship’s loss.
Williams delineates how passion can open after love’s possibility has already closed, such that “sometimes the “hottest” sex in a relationship can occur after the potential for mutual love has been foreclosed, when a certain desperation has entered the proceedings.” Intimacy can be the wind-down, rather than the wind-up to potential love. There is a curious, perhaps discomforting, revelation here, that intimacy may be at its most acute during points of resistance or even dissolution of some other connection.
And I thought intimacy was supposed to feel good. Contrary to much of what is out there about baring our souls, intimacy may serve us more as a connector than a truth-teller. And what lays the foundation of connection in culture? According to Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens and Homo Deus), it is information. Our human superpower, he says, is cooperation in very large groups. And we are able to do so because of systems’ flows of information. All of the intangibles of culture—the political systems and the laws, the shared histories and the social rituals—are all tied together by information, most often in the form of stories. Harari is very keen to point out that information is not truth. In fact, truth “is the rare subset” of information, he explains in a recent Rich Roll podcast:
Truth is costly, whereas fiction is cheap [As an example, Harari uses the writing of a true history of the fall of the Roman empire and the research and resources it would take to write it truthfully. Writing a fictional history is easy—you just make it up.]… The truth is also often very complicated because reality is complicated…Fiction can be simple and people prefer simple explanations over complicated ones. Finally, the truth can be painful, unattractive. We often don’t want to know the truth about ourselves, as individuals, which is why we go to therapy for many years to know the things we don’t want to know about ourselves.
It is not just information that unites people, but fictions. For fictions comprise most of our information. In this world, where misinformation is not a new phenomenon, intimacy reveals itself to be more about connection than truth-telling and yet may simultaneously (and not in the way we would predict) be our greatest vulnerability—the Achilles heel where, not only other humans can injure us, but where information overload may drown out the possibility of meaningful connection. Even more concerning, artificial (or alien, as Harari argues the “A” in AI should stand for) intelligence can take advantage of our fundamental need for intimacy and weaponize it against us. Harari again:
Intimacy is not a liability—it is the greatest thing in the world—but it is also potentially the most powerful weapon in the world. If you want to convince somebody to buy a product, if you want to convince someone to vote for a certain politician or party, intimacy is the ultimate weapon. So far in history (and also in social media), there has been a great battle for attention. And there were ways. In Nazi Germany, Hitler could force everybody to listen to his speeches on the radio, so he had command of attention. But not of intimacy. There was no technology for Hitler or Stalin or anybody else to mass produce intimacy. Now with AIs, it is technically possible to mass produce intimacy. You can create all these AIs that will interact with us and they will understand our feelings because feelings are also patterns. You can predict a person’s feelings by watching them for weeks and months and learning their patterns and facial expression and tone of voice and so forth. Then, if it is in the wrong hands, it could be used to manipulate us like never before.
Here, we arrive at myth number two: the myth that to be fully seen is to be loved. Intimacy can be stimulated, like sex, by the veneer of feeling seen. If this kind of intimacy still serves to connect us, is it any less “authentic”? What kills the intimacy in Adele’s song, When We Were Young, is not the failure to be seen, it is the being seen as “just like a movie, just like a song” where aging or restlessness or even recklessness are not options allowed to be photographed “in this light.” Being fully seen or seeing fully can, in fact, incite separation or even horror. Jason Houser, chief of staff for ICE under the Biden administration, recently spoke on an episode of This American Life about what potential mass deportations under a new administration might look like:
I think the first 90 days is going to be hell. You're going to see the buses. You're going to see the migrants in your home-- not just blue cities, red cities-- Miami, Houston, Charlotte-- like, red states-- Kansas City, St. Louis.
You're going to see kids not in your schools. You're going to know where they're at because they're waiting in a detention cell and they have cell phones. You're going to see it in social media. You're going to see businesses not be able to open up because their workers didn't show up. You're going to see businesses being raided. And it's going to become more intimate.
Participation in this version of intimacy exemplifies its exposure of the appalling no less than the attractive sides of the human beast. And here we arrive at myth number three: that intimacy offers comfort rather than collision. While we long for the cozy warmth of connection, intimacy is proximity above anything else. The touch of a lover’s hand skimming across your skin traces all of your wrinkles, fleshiness, scars, and bony protrusions upon its journey. Does this make you any less appealing? If anything, it makes you more so. I don’t know about you, but I’d far prefer to caress something real than something ostensibly perfect.
This intense nearness to someone can also be an intense nearness to something. As described in a recent New Yorker article by Jill Lepore, Alexander Graham Bell’s mother, who was nearly deaf, was able to hear piano music by holding a stick between her teeth and touching it upon the soundboard in the back of the piano where the vibrations emanate from. Indeed the “innermost” of music, its guts so to speak, is merely the vibrations produced pushing air molecules towards our ears (or lips or teeth) in different patterns.
Feeling each other’s vibrations could help dispel the magic we project onto another’s being. The irony that Bloom identifies—that seeing someone's full humanity can lead to cruelty rather than connection—finds its echo in Rushdie's reading of The Wizard of Oz. In an essay titled, “Out of Kansas,” from a collection of works (Step Across This Line), Salman Rushdie explores the powerful and lasting influence that the film has had on him. Rather than a film about coming home, The Wizard of Oz, according to Rushdie, is about an escape from an immense emptiness (rewatch the early scenes of desolate Kansas to see what he means) where Dorothy’s deep and moving rendition of “Over the Rainbow” is “a celebration of Escape, a grand paean to the uprooted self, a hymn—the hymn—to Elsewhere.” There is a commonly quipped cliché message of The Wizard of Oz that we have unthinkingly incorporated into the culture—"that we already possess what we seek most fervently." Watched over and over, though, Rushie has recognized a subtler, less hopeful, but more intimate message—”that there is one final, unexpected rite of passage. In the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic, exposed conjurers, with only our simple humanity to get us through.”
This final exposure—becoming 'magicians without magic’—returns us to Bloom's insight about the recognition of full humanity. Just as Bloom suggests that cruelty stems not from dehumanization but from seeing others clearly but not so fully seeing ourselves, Rushdie implies that intimacy's power lies not in magical mutual understanding but in our shared recognition of human limitation. The myth that being fully seen leads to being loved dissolves into a more complex truth: that seeing each other's complete humanity—magical and mundane, cruel and kind—is what enables genuine connection. This very exposure, this recognition of our shared fraudulence and frailty, is what enables true intimacy. It's not that being fully seen leads to being loved, but that acknowledging the impossibility of being fully known (yet seeing completely and always the fully human in each other) while still choosing connection defines the intimate relationship.
We land in Oz, or perhaps back in Kansas, having dispelled these three myths about intimacy: that it requires mutual transparency, that being seen ensures being loved, and that it offers comfort rather than collision. But perhaps most unsettling is the revelation that intimacy might be more about recognizing patterns than it is about sharing truths. This raises uncomfortable questions about our future: If intimacy is primarily about patterns rather than truth, does that make it more democratic or more dangerous? Is the discomfort of intimacy—that collision the Gottmans describe—perhaps related to the gap between pattern and truth, the awareness that we're being 'read' but not necessarily understood? Or even to the gap between performative self and unseen self? And finally, if intimacy can be reduced to patterns, what separates the warmth of human connection from its algorithmic simulation?
Yet there might be hope in this very discomfort. Just as Bloom suggests that recognizing our shared capacity for cruelty might save us rather than doom us, perhaps it's our awareness of intimacy's limitations—its patterns, its collisions, its exposures—that makes it authentic rather than artificial. The discomfort isn't a bug but a feature, reminding us that true intimacy lives not in the perfect understanding we seek but in the imperfect connection we choose.
In discomfort and authenticity,
Katie