BENGALURU: Love, all said and done, is a way to experience intimacy, and if we knew there is not going to be any intimacy at all, people will typically advise us to move away and let the love go so that we don’t suffer the lack of intimacy, and the pain that comes from a desire for intimacy that does not get met at all. Any kind of love that is unrequited keeps us in deep distress.
For a while, we might be able to hold ourselves up with the idea of the purity of our feelings of love, and that we love because we want to love and it does not need any kind of reciprocation, but sooner or later, even such feelings of deep devotion come up against feelings of despair at the lack of a mutual intimacy.
In Indic mythologies and stories, there are a ton of such kinds of devotion and love that a devotee feels towards a God which often goes unheard, and in the pain of unrequited love, such devotees often sing of their exquisite pain. Then again, when there is the rapture of any kind of intimacy, an explosion of emotion occurs. Some of our greatest classical music is based on both the longing for intimacy with the beloved and when that intimacy finally happens, the ecstasy of such a moment.
Love is longing for intimacy and, with some luck, experiencing of such intimacy. It is not that this intimacy needs to be one of bodily pleasure. Many times, it is about just being in the presence of each other, a sense of deep awareness and a connection to each other, strong and focused attention to one another, maybe some degree of physical contact, a shared moment of reading even. Intimacy can mean many different things to each of us at different times, and we might want any of it with our partners or all of it.
Sometimes, we make the mistake of thinking intimacy is one homogeneous entity. We might even use the word loosely as a synonym for conjugality when asking someone how their intimate life is. When we stop to think about it, even physical intimacy is not just one thing. We might place a much greater emphasis and experience deep intimacy in just being held, rather than experiencing an orgasmic moment at the same time with each other.
We might feel a vast intimacy with someone we share a knowing look and a smile across a room, and feel nothing much at all with the person we are living with. Intimacy can be many things. We can experience so much of it so differently in so many different circumstances.
Think for a second, and ask yourself what are the different intimacies you wish you could experience in your life? We don’t need to constantly search for the greatest or the deepest or the longest-lasting intimacy. Making our life about that search for the best intimacy ever might take away from what is here, what is real and what everyday love brings.