Skip to main content

Intimacy



Intimacy is rooted in understanding. It is impossible to live without at least one intimate relationship. As John Powell says in The Secret of Staying in Love, “No one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.” Intimacy is that mirror.

Understanding each other leads to the discovery of each other’s inner beauty. It heals the wounds that inevitably mar that beauty occasionally. It can remove scars too. Intimacy has the tenderness of a soothing balm. Intimacy is a melodious poem that keeps on composing itself endlessly. Its rhythm is like the flow of a mountain brook; there are occasional stumbles and rumbles too.  

“Is physical intimacy the only thing which matters in a relationship? Can you live without it and yet be happy?” Blogger Anushree Aggarwal raised the question. Why can’t one live without physical intimacy and yet be happy? There are plenty of people who do that; priests and nuns, for example. Real intimacy may have nothing to do with physicality.



If we consider ordinary relationships, physicality is not an issue at all. I have a few intimate friends with none of whom I have any physical relationship and won’t ever have.

The physical aspect is not a part of intimacy, in fact. That is a mere biological need which has certain emotional trappings. My hunch [since I have no experience in this matter] is that physical intimacy is undesirable in healthy friendships except with one person. Yes, that fidelity is crucial when it comes to physicality. Otherwise, relationships are likely to be shallow affairs. Moreover, does sex play any role in friendly relationships?

Real intimacy is a sacred experience, as John O’Donohue says. Intimacy belongs to the soul, not to the body.


Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. Jyotirmoy SarkarAugust 25, 2018 at 7:08 PM

    Beautiful writ up, good to go through the quotes and the view points(Logic) you have shared.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nima DasAugust 27, 2018 at 11:15 AM

    Agree with you fully. Intimacy gives you insights into your soul but also to sustain a relationship itimacy is not the only factor.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 27, 2018 at 11:38 AM

      Only a few relationships can be intimate for any individual. Among them physical intimacy should be a guarded affair, limited by marital or similar fidelity. That's my view.

      Delete
  3. Arvind PasseyAugust 29, 2018 at 3:52 PM

    Yes, I agree that real intimacy is a sacred experience... but then we have maverick hormones doing the unexpected all the time. The mind too remains helpless when hormones decide to strike. Do read about the link-up of intimacy with hormones in my post.

    Arvind Passey
    www.passey.info

    ReplyDelete
  4. Datta GhoshAugust 29, 2018 at 5:18 PM

    I kept nodding throughout the post. I agree, companionship transcends the boundaries of physical intimacy. And again, the definition pf physical intimacy varies from person to person. Over all there is something sacred in relationships that really matter.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnuSeptember 11, 2018 at 12:57 PM

    i believe sometimes the intimacy with your special someone does need the physical touch!
    agree with you, that discovering inner beauty is a beautiful journey by itself.

    thank u for writing such a nice post for my idea:)

    ReplyDelete
  6. sumita sofatApril 29, 2019 at 10:40 AM

    Nice Blog! Thanks for sharing information .Sofat infertility & women care centre provides the best fertility treatment at a reasonable price. Dr Sumita Sofat is the best gynecologist and Infertility specialist. Sofat Infertility Clinic is the best IVF centre Ludhiana.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Kanishka GuptaNovember 27, 2020 at 2:46 PM

    Types of intimacy depend the type of your relationship.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
6 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more

Five Microtales

1.        Development             Chamar, Lohar, Mehtar and many others stood at a distance, along with their families, and watched their huts being pulled down by a bulldozer. They were asked to leave the place where they had been living for decades. “The government has taken over this land for development works,” an officer said. Chamar, Lohar, Mehtar and the others spread their bedsheets under a flyover over which flew opulent vehicles of development.   2.        Impersonation             The old woman went to the Women’s Welfare office. She wanted to register herself for the Prime Minister’s monthly welfare scheme for the old and unemployable women. She placed her thumb on the scanner for Aadhar authentication. “Not matching,” the officer said. She was arrested for trying to impersonate. Sitti...
8 comments
Read more