The Intimacy of Symbols

These points I’ve made about freedom, about passion and desire, about active and passive pleasure, about self-imposed restrictions, about kink and porn (or the absence thereof), about truth, erotic truth, pride and loyalty, relationship push back and communication, about love and the symbols of love, all these things are ultimately about the intimacy and the desire for intimacy.

Intimacy is knowledge of a person, their interior, their love, their passion and desire. Intimacy is the sharing of our hopes, fears and dreams – all these things and thereby it is sharing of our selves. It is easier for a couple to become intimate when they have common interests and passions, because it is easier for them to understand those pathways down into the self of the other. The symbols to understand each other are already closer to adequate and accurate, and those symbols communicate their interior spaces more easily.

Those with fewer symbols in common should remember symbol commonality is not the road to intimacy, communication and understanding is. The creation and use of adequate and accurate symbols between two interiors leads to intimacy. With more accurate and adequate symbols, greater intimacy is possible, and with a wider scope of effective symbols, a greater interior space may become intimate.

And people use all kinds of shared experiences, shared histories, shared jobs, shared entertainment in music, movies, and television, and all manner of various shared kinds and types of the above, as bases for creating pathways to interior spaces, bases for the creation of intimacy. Sometimes it happens accidentally, sometimes intentionally, sometimes spontaneously, and quite often people do not become as intimate as the efficacy of their symbols might allow, perhaps by choice perhaps by chance. Yet always people become intimate through adequate and accurate symbols.

Sometimes people become intimate without love; well matched enemies may share and understand a great deal of each other. Sometimes people become intimate without much interior space similarity, and where the spaces are similar, sharing and understanding happens faster. But we share and understand, even love and appreciate, spaces unlike ourselves all the time, and often such bonds have great strength because great effort and great patience themselves are great symbols of love.

I haven’t a game plan for the further creation of intimacy with my wife, and though sometimes I think perhaps I should, we value spontaneity as an honest truth disseminator. It works, for us, and perhaps that’s the point: ‘intimacy happens’ and ‘what works, works’ – both good things, for all of us.