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What is intimacy in conversation?
It may begin with openness and trust, allowing one to leave and return without condemnation.
Intimacy presupposes a core understanding, or foundational forgiveness, from which deep security allows reciprocal exposure.
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We push to test if our standing has changed: can we change our fate, prod our stars into an alternate alignment?
If we push hard enough, will we become something more? Will we escape our own insecurity?
More complicated: Do we revel in our pain to see ourselves clearly?
By pushing and receiving pushback or encountering limits that revoke our desires, do we demarcate ourselves through pain or rejection, that is, find the shape of ourselves by encountering our limits painfully? And in retreat, when reassessing, do we lick our wounds engaged in self-pity, finding within the pity a vital core that will try again?
inspired by Albert Camus
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We believe we dislike the person because of who they are or their actions: they caused us to dislike them.
However, the opposite is true: we manufactured our dislike.
We do this because it aligns with our goals: we want to have an enemy or be victimized so we can blame them for our inability to succeed, or we don’t want to be challenged by their brand of honesty.
We reverse the causal relationship by finding a point from which to string together our narrative into what appears to be coherently rational.
Yet the unexamined point is why we cannot accept or forgive this person. Why do our likes or dislikes even matter?
This may seem abstract or untrue, but Alfred Adler points out how love often works: the tiny things that made you adore your partner, how they eat or comb their hair, go from cute to deplorably disgusting once you have decided to destroy the relationship.
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Thinking you are right is the fastest way to enter a power struggle.
Once in a power struggle, there’s always a winner or loser. Or one party decides passive-aggressively to be magnanimous while holding on to a grudge.
Your assuredness cannot help but become an interpersonal conflict, which means it was never about converting or enlightening people but about alienating them.
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Anger is a communication tool. (That means you could handle the situation with a different tactic.)
Anger gets results but is not an uncontrollable response: it is a choice to get what you want.
As a power dynamic, the angry person wants to get into a fight ultimately to force your submission or your irrational anger. Anger moves reason into emotion and forces the relationship into a dominance game.
If you respond with a ‘stiff upper lip’ or ‘grin and bear it’ but you are still angry, you are just controlling it, which can lead to resentment and retaliatory revenge.
The trick is to see their anger as a ploy that will convert you into adversaries. Anger is frustration and a desire to win to avoid fear or insecurity; it is a means to dominate or decimate through emotional manipulation.
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The crash of a bad day can lead to blaming others.
What happens to your empathy when you feel self-pity? Under the mask of outward anger, your heart is turned inward, reserved for yourself.
In this closed state, you are disconnected from loving others as much as you block yourself from the love and support of others.
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People attempt to be correct. By winning the game, you gain assurance that your viewpoint is correct, and you establish ego legitimacy or intellectual superiority: you become righteous.
The scariest thing is somebody clever and self-assured, convinced they are right. This method of engagement abandons empathy or curiosity, instead equating “rightness” with domination.
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Education today requires leaving, learning to speak in abstract idioms, which transmutes us into relating differently.
When you return home you no longer speak in the specific particulars (concrete examples) of your family and early social circle.
To become abstract means it grows increasingly hard to care for those you care about.
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We have all taken the convenient giftgiving route, and it shows.
The quicker the spend we replace thought with money, time with ease. Even a physical object that must be shipped or delivered trumps an ecard, making a gift of labor irreplaceable.
The frictionless, smooth and painless convenience of the digital age is precisely what shapes us to not care enough.
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A fight is how you confront someone in a way that they cannot avoid.
The ultimate goal is to get close, though it seems that you are agressively pushing away.
The fight is a bid for attention. The anxious person is seeking confirmation that they are worth your attention.
This is a form of intimate bonding. And while the secure person may be able to walk away (exhibit self control) to do so breaks the relationship.
There can be no closeness (intimacy) when one party is avoidant (stonewalling).
