What Is Emotional Intimacy?

05 Oct What Is Emotional Intimacy?

You have been seeing someone for five months. You enjoy each other, the conversation is good, and nothing is wrong. You would also struggle to say what he is actually worried about at the moment.

That gap has a name, and it is the thing most people mean when they say a relationship feels pleasant but somehow thin.

A working definition

Emotional intimacy is the degree to which two people know what is actually going on with each other, and are willing to be known in return.

Not affection, which can be entirely one-directional. Not disclosure, which can be a performance. Not time served, which produces plenty of long marriages in which neither person could say what the other is afraid of.

The practical test is whether you could predict how he would feel about something before he told you, and whether you have given him enough to do the same.

Why it is harder to build at this stage of life

Three things work against it, and none of them are personal failings.

You have both become competent at not needing anyone. Someone who has run a household alone for six years has built a life that functions without input. That competence is real and it is also a habit, and habits do not switch off because you have met someone.

You are each other’s second audience. The first one knew everything, and in many cases used some of it. That is a reason to be careful, and care expressed as withholding looks identical to disinterest from the outside.

The structure that used to do this work is gone. Shared logistics produce closeness as a by-product. Two people with separate houses, separate schedules and grown children have to create it deliberately, which most people have never had to do.

What it is not

Two confusions are worth clearing, because both send people in the wrong direction.

It is not the same as physical intimacy, and the two do not arrive together. Pew Research Center’s survey of married adults found that a satisfying sexual relationship was rated important to a successful marriage by 61%, placing it near the top of what people say matters. It is clearly not nothing. It is also entirely possible to have it while knowing very little about someone, which is why one is a poor proxy for the other.

It is not constant deep conversation. Couples who have it tend to talk about ordinary things most of the time. What distinguishes them is that the ordinary talk is accurate rather than pleasant, and that the difficult subject, when it comes, does not require a special occasion.

How it actually gets built

Slowly, in small increments, and almost never through a conversation announced in advance.

Someone goes slightly first

Intimacy advances when one person says something marginally more honest than the situation required, and the other does not flinch. Then the other does the same. It is a ratchet, and it only turns if somebody is willing to be a little bit exposed before it is obviously safe.

The increment should be small. Opening with the worst year of your life is not courage, it is a test, and most reasonable people correctly decline to take it.

The reaction matters more than the disclosure

What builds this is not what you tell someone. It is what they do with it.

Someone who hears something difficult and does not immediately solve it, minimise it, or turn it into a story about themselves has done the entire job. Most people are poor at this and it is learnable.

Unremarkable time, in quantity

Dinners produce curated conversation. A Tuesday evening with nothing planned produces the other kind, because there is nothing to perform and the silences have to be filled with something real.

Couples who are always doing something interesting together sometimes find, two years in, that they do not know each other particularly well.

Signs it is developing

You tell him about a problem before it is resolved, rather than afterwards as an anecdote. You stop editing the story to come out of it well. He notices your mood before you mention it, and occasionally gets it wrong and asks. You can say you do not want to talk about something, and that is accepted as a complete answer.

None of those are dramatic, which is the point, and most of them overlap with the ordinary evidence of a relationship working as it should, set out in our note on the signs of a healthy relationship.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to develop?

Months rather than weeks, and it is not a smooth curve. Most couples find it advances in a few noticeable steps separated by long flat stretches. A flat stretch is not a failure.

He will not open up. What can I do?

Go first, in small amounts, and watch what he does with it rather than waiting for him to match you. Some people need the evidence before they move. If you have gone first several times over several months and nothing has come back, that is an answer, and it is about capacity rather than about you.

Can you have a good relationship without it?

You can have a pleasant one. Whether that is enough is a real question rather than a rhetorical one, and plenty of people at this stage of life decide companionship on those terms suits them. The problem is only when one of you wants more and has not said so.

Is it possible to be too open too early?

Yes, and it is the more common error among people dating after a long marriage. Disclosure that arrives faster than the relationship can carry it tends to produce retreat rather than closeness, which is one reason the pace of the early months is worth reading carefully, as we set out in our note on slow burn relationships.

We were close and now we are not. What happened?

Usually something went unsaid and then the next thing did too. It is generally recoverable by naming the first one, which is easier than it sounds and more effective than addressing the symptom.

Starting with people who want the same thing

None of the above is possible with someone who does not want it. A fair number of people are looking for company rather than closeness, which is a legitimate choice and a poor match for someone who wants the other thing. Establishing which of those you are each after is part of what a consultation covers, before anyone has spent six months finding out. If that appeals, you can begin with an application.