Preparing the Space for Intimacy

Many of us long for physical and emotional intimacy before the space has really been made ready for us to let it into our lives. Thus, we may jump from one partnership to the next, always wondering what went wrong, wondering why we're left always with a nagging sense of disappointment. Unable to really love ourselves, for any number of reasons, we are compelled to look to others to provide us with whatever it is that we don't feel inside. There is a kind of hole, then - a vacuum created by unfelt or disowned feelings - that we look to another person to fill.

Seen in this light, shying away from intimate encounters or involving ourselves in ones that have no real promise can just be a logical extension of avoiding intimacy with self - with our real feelings, desires, and dreams. From the standpoint of fear, it may seem preferable to back off from connection, even if there may be some wonderful potential there, rather than risk stumbling upon some core wounds that we've been carrying all our lives, some land mine that only gets touched upon when someone gets too close to us.

Coming together with a partner, then, might involve us first getting acquainted with the parts of ourselves that shun real intimacy. Those parts that we don't want to see for ourselves are the same parts that we don't want to expose to another.

To accept one's self, on the other hand, is to be ready to share one's self. We can only expose the things inside us that we have personally come to know. And we can only see into others to the same depth that we've dared peer into ourselves. Confidence - real confidence - comes up from the inside when you know who you really are. This is the only really dependable source of self-assurance that there is.

It's almost as if relationships are a perfect mirror for our degree of self-acceptance. If we can't tolerate who we naturally are than we may either opt to remain alone or else attract abusive, controlling, or emotionally unavailable people as our partners. But there really is no reason to fear intimacy unless we're afraid of what we might find when we look inside ourselves. Real self-knowledge can bring along with it a certain compassion for self that enables us to then attract people who are much more likely to love us just as we are.