Quotes About Intimacy

when two become one—connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.

We see what we want to see, what we can tolerate seeing, and our partner does the same. Neutralizing each other's complexity affords us a kind of manageable otherness. We narrow down our partner, ignoring or rejecting essential parts when they threaten the established order of our coupledom. We also reduce ourselves, jettisoning large chunks of our personalities in the name of love.

Affairs are always harmful and can never help a marriage or be accommodated. The only way to restore trust and intimacy is through truth-telling, repentance, and absolution. Last but not least, divorce affords more self-respect than forgiveness.

Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. —Anaïs Nin

All relationships live in the shadow of the third, for it is the other that solders our dyad. In his book Monogamy, Adam Phillips writes, "The couple is a resistance to the intrusion of the third, but in order for it to last it is indispensable to have enemies. That is why the monogamous can't live without them. When we are two, we are together. In order to form a couple, we need to be three.

Is jealousy an expression of love or a sign of insecurity?

The grand illusion of committed love is that we think our partners are ours. In truth, their separateness is unassailable, and their mystery is forever ungraspable. As soon as we can begin to acknowledge this, sustained desire becomes a real possibility.

What I can tell you," she says, "is that his kindness makes me feel safe, but when I think about who I want to sleep with, safe is not what I look for.

What I can see, and she has not yet grasped, is that the thing she's really afraid to lose is not him -it's the part of herself he's awakened. You think you had a relationship with truck man, I tell her. Actually, you had an intimate encounter with yourself mediated by him.

While much has been written about the aggressive manifestations of male sexuality, it is not sufficiently appreciated that the erotic realm also offers men a restorative experience for their more tender side. The body is our original mother tongue, and for a lot of men it remains the only language of closeness that hasn't been spoiled. Through sex, men can recapture the pure pleasure of connection without having to compress their hard-to-articulate needs into the prison of words.

Eventually, if desire withers, monogamy too easily slides downward into celibacy. When this happens, fidelity becomes a weakness rather than a virtue.

However authentic the feelings of love, the dalliance was only ever meant to be a beautiful fiction.

By turning our backs on other loves, we confirm the uniqueness of our "significant other." "I have found The One. I can stop looking." Miraculously, our desire for others is supposed to evaporate, vanquished by the power of this singular attraction.

Sometimes they come sheepishly; sometimes they arrive desperate, dejected, enraged. They don't just miss sex, the act; they miss the feeling of connection, playfulness, and renewal that sex allows them. I invite you to join me in my conversations with these questers as we work toward opening up and coming a step closer to transcendence.

Neutralizing each other's complexity affords us a kind of manageable otherness.

I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce. —J. Edgar Hoover

Spontaneity is a fabulous idea, but in an ongoing relationship whatever is going to "just happen" already has. Now they have to make it happen.

When you love someone, how does it feel? And when you desire someone, how is it different? Does good intimacy always lead to good sex?

In our efforts to protect ourselves from intimate betrayal, we demand access, control, transparency. And we run the risk of unknowingly eradicating the very space between us that keeps desire alive. Fire needs air.

Q: Are there any secrets to long-lasting relationships?     A: Infidelity. Not the act itself, but the threat of it. For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit. —Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life The bonds of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two to carry them, sometimes three. —Alexandre Dumas

My husband deals with pain; I deal with pleasure. They are intimately acquainted.

When I ask her if her open marriage isn't painful, she answers, "Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's not. But monogamy—which we never negotiated, by the way—was painful, too.

affairs are less about sex than about desire: the desire to feel desired, to feel special, to be seen and connected, to compel attention. All these carry an erotic frisson that makes us feel alive, renewed, recharged. It is more energy than act, more enchantment than intercourse.