My Soul is Naked

I would like to be intimate with each and every one of you. Did something inside you just shudder? If so, it could be because our modern culture tends to equate intimacy solely with sex, but really sex is just one way in which we can express intimacy with another person. The truth is that unless you are with someone to whom you are emotionally connected, you are more likely to be intimate with a hug than with sex. In fact, it is quite as easy to avoid intimacy within a marriage as it is during a one-time sexual encounter. So if intimacy is not only expressed through a physical joining, it must be more than that. But then what exactly is intimacy?

The Oxford dictionary defines intimacy as a close familiarity or friendship, or a closeness. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as something of a personal or private nature. The problem is that neither of these definitions feel adequate, do they? Dr. Helene Brenner, clinical psychologist, states that “Intimacy is a one-on-one connection that involves a synchrony between two people. If you want to feel intimate, the first thing you and your partner need to do is stop all the other things you are doing and give each other your undivided, undistracted attention” (I Know I’m In There Somewhere). She goes on to describe four different kinds of intimacy: emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical. Personally, I find her description to be both inadequate and misleading. Intimacy is not something you feel, it’s something that you create and offer to another person, and those four “categories” of intimacy are really just ways in which intimacy can be expressed.

Allow me to paint you a picture, if I may, that will hopefully help to explain how I view intimacy. I believe that when we are born, we are completely incapable of protecting ourselves from our emotions, and do not even know that others might use that vulnerability to hurt us. It never seems to take long, unfortunately, for us to learn what it feels like to be hurt, and quite often not that much longer to begin to shield ourselves. I picture it as if we are onions, starting off as a fragile seed exposed to all the elements, and each time another person takes advantage of our vulnerability and hurts us, we wrap ourselves in another layer of skin. Over time, our layers build up and get thicker, until we might not even remember what that fragile little seed is like, and we might not even be able to be intimate with ourselves.

You see, I believe that intimacy is both much simpler to understand and also much more difficult to do than we typically think, because at its core intimacy is nothing more or less than a decision to peel back the layers of our onion to allow another person closer to our truest self. In that moment (or practice) of vulnerability, we offer that person the chance to hold our true self in his or her hand, and to choose to nurture it, or to crush it. Intimacy is perhaps the greatest gift one person can offer another, because it is not just a passive lack of defense. It is the moment at which we are the most vulnerable, and also the most generous, exposing our hopes, our fears, our dreams, and our scars. It also exposes our weaknesses and our flaws, which perhaps we try the hardest to hide. But above all, take this to heart - your soul is the most beautiful when it’s naked…