What does intimacy mean to you?

Great thread, lots of refreshing replies

I view intimacy as the ability to open up completely and connect on an emotional level, mutually. For this to happen, mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual understanding are paramount for both people present. This is necessary, because being intimate requires letting down all of the walls and defenses that have been established to ward off threats to emotional health.

The only type of people that can be intimate are people who are able to genuinely care about the emotional wellbeing of others (necessary mindset, because this is exactly what occurs during intimate connection). People who always prioritize their own wants and needs without regard to those of others will never experience intimacy, and thus get destroyed on the emotional level, slowly, over time (quite a fitting punishment eh? I have seen it happen to selfish people). The beauty of this is that the emotional destruction occurs in response to the nature and actions of people, not what they think. For example, if someone thinks they are being respectful and trustworthy, but in reality they are not, they will still be destroyed.

 

Intimacy to me is much like CS Lewis writes in The Four Loves. It is not just baring your naked body before your lover, but rather that plus baring your mind before them as well. He writes that when you love a person you think more about them than doing things to them. Intimacy is sharing little moments with each other that nobody else can with either of you. It's the whispers in your ears late at night and the gut wrenching sobs of mourning. It's seeking their good first, before your own, knowing that they would do the same for you. Anyone saying sex by itself is intimacy is a fool. Sex is an expression of love to your lover, in a way nobody else can give them. It is about giving more than getting. There are many ways of being intimate and sex is only a fraction of the actual time and love you will spend on that person, as you find new ways to love them.

 

Sometime go back and look at where you were 3 months ago & where you are now.

You should be really fucking proud of yourself.

Monumental growth. Well done

 

You can make excuses for the rest of your life, or you can get therapy to learn how to move forward.

Remember that intimacy doesn't necessarily include sex. You can be intimate with your brother, sister, mother, father, or closest friend, even temporarily with a stranger. None of these involves sex and doesn't even have to involve touching.

This thread was (presumably) aimed at intimacy with a lover, but it sounds to me as though you first need to learn intimacy, period. Intimacy with people.

Therapy will help you with that.

I think that your previous use of porn has (unfortunately) blinded you to what intimacy really means, confusing love with sex acts. They aren't the same thing at all. In porn, everything is about sex, from the initial meeting (if it even bothers with a "plot") to the final ending. Nothing else counts. Nothing else exists.

When sex acts flow from a desire for raw sex and nothing else, you have an empty sexual experience, devoid of all meaning, with nothing but an eventual forgettable orgasm to remember. People who engage in such empty experiences don't have a satisfying love life.

When sex naturally flows from a mutual connection, attraction, and sharing, it becomes love-making, not just sex. The sexual experience becomes just one of the many memories, and not even the most important.

So.

Learn how to become intimate with people, forgetting about sex for the time being. You are already over 5 months into no-PM (well done!), so that will help. Once you have learned how to be intimate, only then can you learn to have an intimate relationship with a lover.