the time the dance of mutual unveiling stops at a certain shallow level. Some people feel a tendency to skate through a hundred relationships that don’t involve intimacy. They haven’t yet come to themselves and don’t want to. They are estranged from their inner lives. “My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem, but they don’t really know me,” Garry Shandling used to joke.
About a fifth of adults in Western cultures are afraid of intimacy, afraid of commitment. They expect abandonment to happen and take actions to ensure that what is familiar will indeed come to pass. You can spot the people who fear intimacy because they suddenly disappear for a time, just when you thought you were getting close. They dislike the words “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” or any other term that suggests an official relationship. They tend to hide behind a wall of questions; they turn conversations to you in order to avoid exposing anything about themselves. They tend to express strong opinions or lewd jokes as a tactic for driving people away. They are always positive, always the cheerful one that others turn to, but never vulnerable themselves.
But every once in a while, to everyone’s great surprise, the dialogue continues, deeper and deeper. You keep expecting it to stop where all the other conversations used to stop, but no, she’s still with you, he’s still with you. The gates keep opening, so you keep walking through. The only cure for fear is direct action. You push open the next gate.
PUSHING OPEN THE GATES
A dialogue between two people takes the form of a tennis rally. One partner takes a deep breath and provides a small display of, This is what I like. She shares her favorite movies. He volleys back with his own. She shares the playlists on her phone, and he volleys back with his own. He sends some favorite video late at night, and she sends one back.
Then comes, These are the important moments of my life: the stories, ever deepening, from childhood to adulthood, and gradually, bravely, past relationships and losses.
Phase by phase, the risks become bigger and bolder. Love is possible only if two people eventually reveal the center of their existences. If the love is to bloom, they have to get to, This is how I’m crazy. As Alain de Botton notes, we are all crazy in some way. The crucial question at the depth of any relationship is not Is he crazy? It is What are the ways you are crazy? What parts of your life have been blocked by fear? How exactly do you self-destruct? In what ways have you not been loved?
My wife and I really got to know each other over email. The steps of self-disclosure were so gradual, the progress would have been like watching a lake evaporate to any outsider. But each successive email was carefully considered to not push things too far. I’d hit SEND and wait with a dread that I had crossed some forbidden line. I once sent her an email about some completely innocent topic, some minor step forward of mutual knowing, and then got on a cross-country flight with no Wi-Fi service. I spent the entire flight in an anxiety of uncertainty, wondering if the tone had been too familiar. I can still remember the great relief I felt upon landing and finding that my volley had been returned. In any courtship, you show your trustworthiness by the safe steadiness of your advance.
And with the sensitivity of your ear. People are judged as much by their listening as by what they say, because when you think you are passively listening to others, you are actually teaching them about yourself.
“Good people will mirror goodness in us, which is why we love them so much,” Richard Rohr writes. “Not-so-mature people will mirror their own unlived and confused life onto us.” Thus, a meeting of the minds is not always gentle. When the poet Ted Hughes first met Sylvia Plath, he made a bold advance to kiss her on the neck. She reached up and bit his cheek so hard that she broke through his skin. She was saying, I understand you. I am your match.
When you choose to marry someone, you had better choose someone you’ll enjoy talking with for the rest of your life. It doesn’t work unless two people can fall into a state of fluid conversational flow. The phone calls can last hours. They can spend a fourteen-hour day