Being afraid of intimacy is normal—no one wants to be hurt. But sometimes, to get something spectacular, you have to give a little of yourself.
When I was in my thirties, my best friend and husband was diagnosed
with stage-four pancreatic cancer. A very long story short, I ended up
losing him after a long battle and watching things that I couldn’t ever
describe even with my writer’s mind and vocabulary.
It would have been easy for me not to want to engage in a
relationship again after that experience. Not wanting ever to lose
something again, choosing never to feel love again would have been an
excellent way to protect myself. The problem is, though, that I have
never had the ability to close myself off. Although having a fear of
intimacy, I have a personality style that craves connection and needs
the warmth of someone in my life.
That does not mean that the relationships I have engaged in since
have been easygoing. Everyone has some sort of past experiences that
will inevitably come along with them into future relationships. That’s
why being fearful of intimacy is not only understandable, but also very
common. No one ever wants to be hurt, especially if they’ve been hurt in
the past.
But as the saying goes, sometimes you really do need to feel some
pain in order to find pleasure. Finding a relationship where you can
open yourself to someone wholly, and completely trust and rely on that
person is, I think, what life is all about. If we weren’t meant to be
connected to people and feel love, I am quite sure that we wouldn’t have
been given the gift of intimacy.
What is intimacy?
The best place to discuss something like the fear of intimacy is
first to define what it is. Intimacy can mean different things to
different people, but it’s defined in technical terms as either “a close
familiarity or friendship” or “closeness or an intimate act, especially
sexual intercourse.” The type of intimacy I’m talking about here is
where you allow someone to see the real you on an emotional level.
We all have more than one person within ourselves. There is the
person who we show to the world, and then there is the one who we try to
hide from it. The reason we keep ourselves back or hidden is that we
are fearful that if someone knew the real us—who we really are, what we
really want, the crazy that we are all capable of—they wouldn’t accept
us. After all, isn’t that what we are all searching for—love and
acceptance? It’s in our human DNA to not only want to be liked but to be
connected and loved as well.
The problem arises when you want to form an intimate bond with
someone, yet you are unable to let go of the fear that holds the real
you from others. It’s hard to have an intimate relationship with someone
who is keeping things from you. Keeping parts of your personality
hidden from someone with whom you are in a relationship makes them feel
disconnected. It may also give them the impression that you don’t trust
them enough to allow your real self to show.
It is this fear of intimacy that can hold us back from forming a
relationship with others. If you can’t be your genuine self and allow
someone to see all sides of who you are, then they aren’t really having a
relationship with you; they are having a relationship with someone who
you are not.
Why we hold ourselves back
There are many reasons why we might keep parts of ourselves hidden.
Maybe we have let our real selves out to others in the past, only to
find that they didn’t accept who we were, or maybe we let ourselves be
real, and the relationship just didn’t work out for other reasons. The
result of either situation is often pain and heartbreak.
Heartbreak is one of the most difficult emotions that we can
experience. It is a loss like no other. But if we allow those past
experiences to jade and guide our future behavior, it can become
extremely hard to know the beauty of loving someone wholly with all that
you are.
There is probably not a person on earth who hasn’t been rejected in
the past. That is why we all have baggage that we carry with us. But
holding yourself back isn’t going to stop yourself from being hurt; it’s
only going to prevent you from feeling the biggest joy that a person
can feel. Like everything in life, if you don’t give it a try, you have
failed before you’ve even begun.
Steps to overcoming your fear
Whatever it is that has gotten you to the point of fear of intimacy,
the key is to let go of your experience and learn to leave it in the
past. Those things that you have already experienced can’t hurt you any
more unless you allow them to. In fact, if you can’t settle old wounds,
you’re only allowing them to sit and fester.
Just because you were hurt in the past doesn’t mean that it will
happen again in the future. If you were rejected for being who you were
in a previous relationship, it wasn’t that you weren’t good enough or
that you weren’t a good person. It simply means that you may not have
been the “right” person for the one you were with.
Every learning experience that we have in life comes with both a good
and a bad. If you didn’t get a promotion at work, it wouldn’t help you
to succeed in the future if you just stopped trying altogether, right?
The same applies to relationships. If it failed once, simply learn from
your mistakes, fine-tune what went wrong, and approach the next one with
a better understanding. Your probability of success will be much
stronger.
Fear of intimacy is not just your problem
When you don’t let someone in to see the real you, you are telling
them that they are not good enough, or that you don’t trust them enough
to show who you really are. If you don’t ever open up and put yourself
out there, you are dooming your relationship from the start. No one can
live with someone who is not their genuine self. Unless you start to let
them in and open up and trust, you are going to lose many good
relationships along the way.
There are still times when I feel myself getting too close in my
current relationship, and there is a voice in the back of my head that
sends out a warning signal. It is at those times when I overreact—I find
things wrong with my relationship and I pull away to try to protect
myself. Vulnerability and the realization that nothing can last forever
are hard mental concepts to handle.
The truth is that living a life alone and never having the
opportunity to find love again like I lost is more hurtful than loving
and losing again. If you want to love, you have to let someone in enough
to know who you are and to love you.
Above all, if you make a mistake, as we all do, love is about
forgiveness. Rather than having a fear of intimacy, take baby steps,
let someone in slowly, and try to be open and honest with yourself and
with them. The more positive experiences you have, the more intimate
your relationship will become, and the more joy you will find. You just
have to start somewhere.
