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Physical Intimacy Why is it that men can be physically intimate without letting truth about enzyte their emotions get involved? And women can hold out for emotional intimacy even if it means going years without sex? Lance brought all this up with his question, what is intimacy, anyway? His answer touches on physical, emotional, intellectual, social, and spiritual intimacy. He suggests intimacy is all about closeness, and sharing your inner-most world. Good stuff. I agree, intimacy is about closeness and familiarity. You get to know the other person’s gestures, thoughts, feelings in different situations. You become open books to each other. Deep intimacy in a relationship comes when something is at stake. It’s when you reveal your essential being to another. You say, this is what makes me happy and sad, this is the thing I want most, this is who I am and what I’m all about, and if you use this information against me, you’ll have power over me and I’ll be screwed. And yet - I still want to share these things with you. Intimacy evokes compassion and tenderness from another. And what’s not to like about that? How can you enjoy physical intimacy without an emotional connection? By revealing your essential sexual nature to another, but keeping all else private. Men tend to be able to do this more easily than women. Why do some people want/need an emotional connection on top of that? It adds depth to the physical intimacy. It’s more fulfilling. It builds a bond that can exist even when you’re not physically present. Same with spiritual intimacy – it creates more depth, and a connection when you aren’t physically or emotionally together. (Compassion works like that – you don’t have to know the person to give them love.) Back to men and women – why do women tend to hold out for this emotional connection, when men seem capable of having sex without feeling? My understanding is that women’s bodies are hard-wired to process emotions. When they feel something, their whole being feels it. (This is why women are so much more intuitive than men. If they are in tune with their inner body, they suddenly have this giant emotional processor at their beckon call.) If physical intimacy means revealing your most familiar, most essential self, you feel vulnerable. I imagine with sex, women feel this vulnerability at their core being. Men aren’t wired that way! Emotions don’t charge our entire being. They are routed to a processing center in a tiny recess of our mind. We then choose which emotions to react to. Men can learn to move from their head to their heart, and allow themselves to feel without thinking so much. But it’s a journey. We’re not hard-wired in the same way as women. Some feelings can overwhelm this process, and we break down. It’s also unhealthy if we suppress too much. (Just as it’s unhealthy to do the opposite, and overreact emotionally to every little thing.) I know readers won’t agree with everything I said. Just remember, I am being intellectually intimate with you here. I feel vulnerable! (Haha. just kidding. Fire away.) Buzz up! Cast a vote and Buzz up some intimacy for this post! If you liked this post, you might also enjoy: ShareThis | Subscribe to Dad’s House | © 2008 DadsHouseBlog.com. All rights reserved. October 31st, 2008
Ever have one of those weeks when everything seems flat? Nothing bad happens, and you’re not depressed. Nothing great happens, and you don’t get excited. Life is good, but you don’t find joy in the everyday things. You know it’s in your power to change your perspective. And all of a sudden, you realize – your mojo done up and left! Where did my mojo go? I have some theories. Rest assured, I’ve taken steps to rise from the mojo-less ashes. I’ve got some in-depth reporting planned for next week. No dirty text message will go unturned. Post-Halloween, be sure to join Geraldo and me for an investigation into the whereabouts of Dad’s House missing mojo. Stay tuned… (you can follow the search for my missing mojo through my RSS feed here) Here are some Dad’s House posts that are chalk full of mojo: ShareThis | Subscribe to Dad’s House | © 2008 DadsHouseBlog.com. All rights reserved. October 30th, 2008 As a single dad with a teenage daughter, I like to stay informed on modern dating trends, including hookups and casual sex. After all, I’m out there dating and relating, and my daughter is, too. So I was eager to check out a recent title, Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity, by Kerry Cohen. Let me just say, the book was riveting. Loose Girl tells how, growing up, Cohen used the power of her body through sex to get attention from men. She’s the child of divorce, at first raised by her single mom, then by her single dad. Motivated by a desire to stand out, and desperately wanting to be loved, but unsure how to get either, she reaches for sex. The book chronicles hookup after hookup, from her teen years through her twenties. Cohen writes with deep poignancy and shocking candor about experiences many would shy from even thinking about. With an MFA in creative writing and an MA in psychology, she brings self-awareness and insight to the telling of her story. It’s clear she’s confused and directionless as she is making choices and going through acts, but by explaining the psychological motivations for her hookups, she made me feel compassion for her mistakes. Over the course of the story, she shows a lot of growth, and the hookups don’t feel redundant. Upon noticing a new boy, she writes, almost immediately I can feel the energy between us, the promise of something to come. She seduces him at a party, and they end up in bed. After having sex, We glance at each other shyly, trying to come up with things to say. There’s no way to get around the weirdness. Sure we shared bodily fluids, our most intimate places. But we’ve barely exchanged anything else. At another point, she writes about the bar scene hookup culture: I want a boyfriend, but if I can’t have that, I’ll take this stand-in. It’s satisfying somehow – the hopeful waiting, the flirtatious exchange, and then the rapt, sudden sexual attention. I begin to enjoy the immediacy of gratification. I still feel let down later when it is over and I am left alone, but this doesn’t keep me from going back for more. Reading Loose Girl helped me be more aware of my own actions when I have coffee dates that turn into booty calls. It made me question my own motivations for sometimes choosing casual encounters rather than seeking real and lasting intimacy. (I’m still working that!) It also made me feel validated as a parent, especially for the positive attention I give my daughter. My parenting style is very different than that of Cohen’s father. I feel I’m raising my daughter in a way that she won’t be so starved and desperate for male energy to the point that she’ll make the same sort of mistakes Cohen made. Any parent with a teenager, or anyone on the modern dating scene, would do well to pick up this book. |