Most of us spend our entire life trying to understand our identity. This is especially true if you find yourself in the 18-30-year-old range. A significant part of this is trying to wrap your mind around having meaningful, lasting relationships. As well, we are sexual creatures trying our best to have great, lasting sexual experiences. Honestly, we often fail miserably in this area. Myself included! They never seem to quite live up to what we want them to be, or at the pace we would like. They can leave us feeling, dissatisfied, empty, and desiring something of more substance.
Sexuality is an integral part of you, a sacred, beautiful part. To understand our desires, and sexual intimacy, I believe we must first tackle trying to understand intimacy. I believe, and have experienced, that sexual intimacy is a bi-product of intimacy. Intimate living affects every area of your life. It is there in our desire to connect with our kids, to stay connected to our co-workers, and to spend time pursuing the partner in our lives.
There are specific tools, or ways of being intimate that allow these important relationships to blossom and be more fulfilling for the other person, or persons, and for ourselves. These tools are specific ways of communicating love that are often not something we have been taught, as we usually have never seen them modeled. As well, our culture is very negative towards intimacy and often doesn’t support this area, full of negative stereotypes that tear down both the masculine and feminine.
One of the most common things men have said is that they want a partner in life that is intimate… specifically sexually intimate…in their lives. They want to feel “magic”, but yet have settled for something far duller and mundane. We often settle for Taco Bell when we could work ourselves up to a five-course-meal. I believe this needs to be reinterpreted. Why? Because true sexual intimacy is more than just fucking. It is more than just having sex in a bathroom with a person you just met. It is meant to be more.
Our intimacy with others comes from how we see and interact with ourselves. If self-hatred is a part of our reflection then it makes it almost impossible to have intimacy in our lives. For most of us, we need a partner, or intimacy with another as a spring-board from which we live our lives. I understand this and believe it’s a process that looks like this.
- We learn to accept and love ourselves.
- We learn to love another, or find an intimate partner.
- This bleeds into all of our other relationships and we create a new person in ourselves.
Number 2 and three can be switched around, but #1 is truly #1. It can’t be moved out of order. For most of us, we have tried this and failed, placing others before ourselves and failing. Intimacy is learning to not just love ourselves, and who we are at the core, but to like ourselves as well. To like who we are on this planet.