On Intimacy

 

On Intimacy

June 1, 2024

Last night I watched a PBS Great Performances program styled as the 80^th anniversary of Rodgers and Hammerstein. A great male performer, whose name I didn’t catch, sang “This Nearly Was Mine” from South Pacific. It is one of the greatest songs ever written. It has the line in it “Now, now I’m alone.” I teared up listening to that song. Then I wondered why I did. Nominally at least, I’m not alone. I live with my wife, who I love. I have my children and their children in my life though I don’t see all of them all that often. Because my wife works and I’m retired, I have a lot of alone time, but I don’t mind it. So why was I tearing up?

It occurred to me that I was tearing up because deep in my soul I feel that being truly alone is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. I thought that perhaps I fear being truly alone. At first I thought, I’ve never been truly alone. I’ve always had family in my life. But then I remembered what I and my life were like before June 2, 1972. That’s the day my first wife, Francie, moved from San Diego to Seattle to be with me. I tear up when I remember that date too. I was twenty-five years old. I had never been intimate sexually or in any other way with anyone. That ended that day so many years ago when Francie, now of blessed memory, came to share her life with me.

Before then, I truly was a loner. I’d never had a girlfriend. All of my friends were paired up. So was my twin brother. I wasn’t. I remember wandering the University of Oregon campus, where I was a student at the time, feeling horribly alone. Grieving the fact that I was alone. Praying that somehow I could no longer be alone, but having no idea how to end my loneliness. I’ve never been very good at establishing even friendships with other people. I am a strong introvert. I’ve never been handsome. I had acne. I’ve never been good at small talk. I don’t dance. I’ve never been athletic. I was a very good student but wasn’t really good at anything else. I can come up with all sorts of reasons why I was alone. I didn’t like it at all, but it seemed just to be part of who I am. I thank God that my loneliness ended that day in June so many years ago when Francie moved in with me. We were married just a few months later.

All of that reminiscing about an earlier time in my life got me thinking about the nature of intimacy. What is intimacy? For me it is being close with another person more than you are with anyone else. It is being truly, deeply close to another human being. There is often a sexual component of intimacy, but there needn’t be. Intimacy is much more than sex. True intimacy is more spiritual than physical. Intimacy is knowing another person deeply and being know by that person deeply. It is sharing every aspect of your life with another person and having that person share their life with you. It is having another person in your life who is more important to you than you are to yourself and having that other person feel the same way about you. Intimacy is a relationship between two equals, a relationship between two people in which there is no dominant partner. There is instead a union of two people, neither of whom places themselves above the other in any way.

What, if anything, does sex have to do with intimacy? I just said that intimacy often includes sex but needn’t have a sexual component to it. It needn’t, but a person feels more intimate with another when they are making love together than he or she does at any other time. Yes, sex is physically pleasurable; and there is great pleasure in sharing the physical pleasure of sex with another person. But the physical aspect of sex isn’t really what makes it important for intimacy. It is perfectly possible to feel the physical pleasure of sex without being truly intimate with anyone. Sex has to do with intimacy when two people come together with their whole being not just with their bodies. When two people truly are making love and not just having sex, there is a feeling of intimacy between them like no other. They feel truly, deeply together. They feel joined not just physically but emotionally, spiritually. And that is the best feeling a human being can ever have.

True intimacy is a joining of one’s soul with the soul of another, but how does that joining make the relationship spiritual? Spirituality is about relationship. We usually think of spirituality has something that has to do with religious faith, and spirituality indeed can and should be part of the religious experience. In faith one seeks union with a Spirit that pervades everything there is and also transcends everything there is. Spirituality is about connection. At its deepest level it is about connection with God. But other connections can be spiritual too. A connection that feeds one’s soul and rests in one’s heart is a spiritual connection. Intimacy between two human beings, then, can indeed be a spiritual connection. It is more spiritual than any other connection between people. If two people think of their relationship as only physical, that relationship contains only a shallow spirituality at best. It most likely contains none at all.

I am not alone. I haven’t been really alone, or at least not alone for long, since June 2, 1972. Yet the loneliness that I felt for so many years before that date stays in my psyche. It lurks there in my unconscious mind as a dread of something awful. Sometimes something causes it to come into or at least to affect my conscious mind. That’s what happened last night when I heard that beautiful rendition of “This Nearly Was Mine.” For many years that lyric “Now, now I’m alone” could have been talking about me, and I felt that truth powerfully last night.

My loneliness ended back in 1972 when Francie joined her life with mine. She died of breast cancer on July 31, 2002. We had been together for thirty years. In the year following her death I was alone, though what I felt during that year was more grief than loneliness. My wife Jane and I came together shortly after the end of that first year following Francie’s death; so my loneliness didn’t last for long though the grief I felt over Francie’s death has never fully gone away, nor do I want it to. Grief is the form love takes when a loved one is lost, and true love never dies. I have been blessed with two great loves in my life, the two women to whom I have been married. They have been the greatest blessings I have ever received.

I don’t know why Francie loved me and Jane does love me. I don’t always love myself all that much. But with both of them I have known true intimacy. I have known a union that is so much more than physical. It is indeed spiritual. My life of love with both of them has fed me spiritually in a way nothing else ever has. That is true intimacy. Physical intimacy yes, but so much more than that. A connection so much deeper than that. A deep, deep connection that is a human version of the intimacy between God and every single person. That’s what true intimacy is, and it is a blessing beyond compare. I wish that every person could have it. It makes life richer than life could ever be without it.