Quotes About Intimacy

Steven Stosny observes that "if loss of power was the problem in intimate betrayal, then anger would be the solution. But the great pain in intimate betrayal has little to do with loss of power. Perceived loss of value is what causes your pain—you feel less lovable.

What is different is that modern life has deprived us of our traditional resources, and has created a situation in which we turn to one person for the protection and emotional connections that a multitude of social networks used to provide. Adult intimacy has become overburdened with expectations.

Secrecy is the number one organizing principle of an infidelity. An affair always lives in the shadow of the primary relationship, hoping never to be discovered. The secrecy is precisely what intensifies the erotic charge. "Sex and subterfuge make a delicious cocktail,"7 writes journalist Julia Keller.

By talking about sexual alchemy, I want to clarify that affairs sometimes involve sex and sometimes not, but they are always erotic.

As Marcel Proust understood, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.

These stories make a critical point—many 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.

All these discussions inevitably raise the thorny question of the nature of our erotic freedom. Do we expect our partners' erotic selves to belong entirely to us? I'm talking about thoughts, fantasies, dreams, and memories, and also turn-ons, attractions, and self-pleasure. These aspects of sexuality can be personal, and part of our sovereign selfhood—existing in our own secret garden.

In truth, we never know our partner as well as we think we do.

Sometimes, when we seek the gaze of another, it isn't our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves. Mexican essayist Octavio Paz describes eroticism as a thirst for otherness. So often, the most intoxicating other that people discover in the affair is not a new partner; it's a new self.

While emotional transparency is touted everywhere as the crux of modern intimacy, I am amazed at the paucity of real sexual communication between partners. Part of my work in post-infidelity involves direct coaching as to how, why, where, and when to talk about sex.

A Window into the Human Heart Affairs have a lot to teach us about relationships. They open the door to a deeper examination of values, human nature, and the power of eros.

A couple's emotional life together and their physical life together each have their ebbs and flows, their ups and downs, but these don't always correspond.

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it.

Sexual honesty isn't just about divulging the details of your infidelities. It's about communicating with your partner in an open and mature way—revealing core aspects of yourself through your sexuality.

And when we haven't been touched in years, we are more vulnerable to the kindness of strangers.

To quote Rachel Botsman, "Trust is a confident relationship to the unknown.

I suggest that our ability to tolerate our separateness—and the fundamental insecurity it engenders—is a precondition for maintaining interest and desire in a relationship.

Your lustiness would be an open endorsement for her own ardor.

Erotic intimacy invites us into a state of unboundedness where we experience a sweet freedom. We get a temporary break from ourselves—the legacies of our childhood, the habits of our relationship, and the constraints of our respective cultures.

For me, infidelity includes one or more of these three constitutive elements: secrecy, sexual alchemy, and emotional involvement.

The adherents of talk intimacy (often, though not always, women) have a hard time recognizing these other languages for closeness

Emotional involvement is the third element that may play a role in infidelity. Most affairs register an emotional component, to one degree or another.

Just now they kissed, with India coming up close on her toes to see if she could tell yet what there was about a kiss.

And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful.