The Fear Of Intimacy

Greetings beloved being of love and light. I hear so many people say they’re afraid to get too close to someone in case they get hurt. I wanted to talk about this today, and what the solution for this fear of intimacy is.

We all experience many different interactions and relationships throughout our lives, from friendly encounters with a shopkeeper, to deep friendships and romantic relationships. Each interaction and relationship is there to teach us something and help us grow in the ways that we need to grow at those times. Society tells us that for a relationship to be successful, it must last a long time. That seems to be the accepted rule. If a relationship doesn’t last long, it is seen as unsuccessful. But that isn’t true at all. When you remember that life is a school to help you learn more of who you truly are, rather than just a place where you try to seek as much comfort and security as possible, you will realise that a successful relationship is simply one that offers you the opportunity to learn something. Even very brief interactions or hostile conversations can be very good opportunities to learn.

But when you believe that success of a relationship is measured by its longevity, you end up having goals and expectations of long relationships, particularly with friendships and romantic partners. When you have expectations and goals, you are always setting yourself up to experience suffering. When a relationship doesn’t end up lasting longer, you become frustrated. You may blame the other person and say that they “hurt” you. But in actual fact, you were hurt because you had expectations of the relationship lasting longer. The other person has the freedom to end any relationship that they want, but your expectations have made an enemy of them. You would rather force them in a long relationship with you that they don’t want, than for them to do what makes them happy. Your expectations take you away from truly loving the other person, and they motivate you to try to control the other person.

So when someone says they’re “afraid too get too close to someone in case they get hurt again”, what they really should say if they’re honest is “I’m afraid of my expectations not being met again”. Of course, the easy solution is to enter relationships with no expectations. That’s the only way that relationships can surprise you. In fact, true love cannot blossom unless you have no expectations of the other. But what many of us do instead is to try to find someone who better meets our expectations. Even if you do find someone who initially meets most of your expectations, people change all the time, and so, inevitably, many of your expectations will no longer be met, at which point you will experience suffering. Alternatively, some of us enter into relationships with people who don’t meet our expectations with the intention of trying to change them so that they do eventually meet our expectations. Do either of these scenarios sound like true, unconditional love?

Most relationships are entered into out of a desperation. Most people are associated with their egos, and egos are afraid of being alone. When you are alone, your ego starts to seem less real. Your ego is who you believe you are in comparison to those around you. Without people around you, your ego naturally weakens. Therefore, egos aim to have a consistent partner and group of friends around it so that it can feel secure and comfortable. This is what has given rise to the idea of marriage. And this is why most people have expectations of people they like staying in their life for a long time. But if a relationship is brief, does this necessarily have to be seen as a bad thing? If you enjoyed some brief moments together, then how can it be bad? If you learned something from your interactions, how can it be seen as unsuccessful?

So many relationships are very superficial. Because people do not want to allow themselves to be vulnerable with others, people only connect based on things that both their egos agree on or have in common. All ego relationships are fake relationships because they are based on the illusion of an ego. This is why you may have a partner and many so-called friends, but you do not feel close to anyone. You may still experience loneliness. Your soul is craving true connection. A true connection is when you feel at one with someone. This can only happen when your egos are out of the way. When your egos are out of the way, you will realise that your oneness with the other person has always been there, and that the only thing that obscured you from seeing this was your ego. By doing this, you can connect so deeply with anyone, even if you have absolutely nothing in common and don’t agree on anything. Your oneness with all beings and all of life is already there, you simply have to drop your belief of separation in order to experience it.

Therefore, for you to connect deeply with someone and experience true love, you must become vulnerable. And being vulnerable means dropping your association with your ego. There is no other way. Both parties must lower their ego walls, so that you can both become one. When you are fully present and enjoying doing something, or whenever you are so in love with someone, there is no notion of a “you”. All your focus and attention is on the other or on what you’re doing, and there is no attention on “you”. Without any attention directed towards “yourself”, “you” no longer exist in those moments. An illusion only seems real if you put attention on it. This individual “you”, your ego, resists intimacy because it essentially fears its own death. For you to connect deeply with someone, your ego must not be there. Your ego may justify its resistance by telling you that “you’ve been hurt in the past, so this person will hurt you if you get too close to them”, but in actual fact, your ego just wants you to keep believing it is real.

If you truly want to experience the joys of true love, intimacy and oneness, you must do two things: 1) Drop all expectations you have, and 2) Disassociate from your ego. This will not only allow you to experience deep love, intimacy and oneness with another person, but with all of life. Your ego and its expectations are the only things standing in the way of you experiencing permanent, unconditional bliss.

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