Intimacy

Intimacy

Two people can live their entire life together. They can have sex and bear and raise children. Buy houses, move from place to place and do all the things of life. And yet never know one another. We think that in doing the stuff of life we will find intimacy. But doing the stuff of life only presents the opportunity for intimacy. We must seek and share intimately in order to find intimacy.

How often have I seen a husband and wife be so at odds with one another that they can barely tolerate being in the same room. What was meant for intimacy - sharing life together, had become drudgery, intolerance, imprisonment. And all because in the midst of doing life together, they somehow got separated. The struggles, hardships, trials and frustrations of life drove them apart rather than together.

Why is this? Are some people more inclined to relate well together? Absolutely. Are certain people more fortunate or wise in choosing their spouse and finding someone more compatible? Absolutely. Does this mean the rest of us are hopeless? Absolutely not. Intimacy does not come easy. Intimacy costs. The price is paid in many ways and at diverse times - but I believe that it is the cost of intimacy that prevents people from finding it.

There are also many cheap substitutes for real intimacy in our world. Why labor through dealing with all the emotional baggage and physical limitations of another real person for intimacy when within seconds you can have your wildest fantasy displayed on a computer screen? Why struggle with the difficulty of hearing your spouse’s story about their day, boring as it might be, laden with perceived emotional “barbs” and convoluted with rabbit trails and interruptions, when you can open a novel and get lost in a fantastical story that is carefully crafted to make you feel however you desire to feel. Pick the genre, pick the conflict, pick the outcome, click on checkout and read at your leisure. Why put up with the mundane of chores around the home or time with the kids when within moments you can be in a theater, or in front of a video game, caught up in a make believe world the does all the work in generating thoughts, feelings, rewards, all with little to no cost.

But this make-believe world comes with a huge cost. The cost is isolation. Without spending the time and the effort to share your life and discover the life of those God has put in your life for intimacy (spouse, children, parents, siblings, friends, etc). Real intimacy can never be found. We may have moments of feeling intimate. Fleeting encounters with something real that makes us feel like we are connected. But ultimately many, if not most, of us live our lives like astronauts stationed alone in a spacecraft floating through the emptiness of the universe with only an occasional transient visitor passing through as part of their lonely journey through space and time.

Make the choice to pay the price for intimacy. Invest in something real. Spend time and energy with other people.