Reciprocal Intimacy (via Empathy, Sympathy)

At the level of our common essential humanity, empathy and sympathy are wonderful tools to generally understand people – and on a general level of social interaction our actions based on reciprocity work wonderfully well. However, once we venture into a loving intimate relationship with a specific individual whose interior thoughts, feelings and motivations are specifically different from our selves and from other people, general level reciprocity through sympathy and empathy will work far less effectively. (I’ve talked about relationship reciprocity before here and here.)

Both sympathy and empathy have at heart the “another person’s shoes” concept of reciprocity, though sympathy is more related to an imaginative or intellectual understanding of another person’s situation and interior, and empathy is more related to an emotional and passionate understanding of another person’s situation and interior. Yet because emotion and passion (see also passion addiction) are what drive and motivate everyone’s interior spaces and choices (and therefore their exterior actions), people generally understand empathy to result in a stronger, deeper bond. People who empathize are more likely to act on another person’s behalf*, and empathy as a tool will usually bring a person into a more intimate relationship than sympathy will.

However, every tool, no matter what kind of tool it is, is only as useful as the manner in which it’s employed. And the tools of sympathy and empathy, and even of reciprocity itself, are used differently on the specific level in an intimate relationship than when used on the general level in general human social interactions. On the intimate level one must attune their sympathy and empathy to what they already know of their partner, attune with what they already know about the specificity of their partner’s interior spaces, thoughts, emotions and motivations. Tools are only adequate substitutes for knowledge to a certain degree, and only to a certain degree will sympathy, empathy and reciprocity be qualitatively equal substitutes for knowing one’s partner well enough to know what is specifically happening on their partner’s interior, and know exactly how their partner’s interior differs from one’s own interior and from the general interior of other people.

On the specific and intimate level relationship, I think the tool of reciprocity is only most effective when using sympathy and empathy to determine what your partner specifically desires. It is better to reciprocate specifically to our partner’s passion¸ rather than falling prey to the fallacious assumption that they will generally want what we want in the same manner and symbols we want them. “Just as I want to have the things I want and in the manner and symbols I want them, so too does my partner want the things they want in the manner and symbols they want them.“

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* The relationship between emotion and motivation is why people often “play on other people’s emotions” in order to get them to (re)act in desired ways, and why doing this is often deemed ‘mere’ sophistry, rhetoric, or propaganda compared to addressing an issue intellectually and answering it ‘head-on’. Emotion and motivation are even related etymologically in Latin: to move, shake, stir one’s interior (feelings), and such an interior movement as a cause of our actions.

 This is not to say one can’t intimately understand how a person thinks (as opposed to how they feel) through sympathy. Academia is probably rife with such examples, might even be itself an example. Yet even such intellectual sympathetic intimacy is also based on a kind of familiarity with what makes someone unique.