I’ve spent a lot of time these past few days thinking about intimacy, not sexual intimacy, but the intimacy we feel for each other.

Intimacy will mean a lot of different things to different people. For me, at this point in time, I see intimacy as an ability to allow yourself to be vulnerable. And this means being ok with the potential of getting hurt.

As I’ve pondered this I can see why as a society we have lost touch with the innate love or intimacy we may have we had for each other as children.

The most significant reason is experience, we get hurt and we must close off in order to protect ourselves, this is often classified as maturity. As we grow, we learn that not all people have pure intentions, ourselves included.

Some people don’t even get to the point of experiencing vulnerability. It’s hammered into them from an early age that vulnerability is just another word for weakness, this is especially true for boys.

I spoke to a friend recently about this and I asked the question why it was that I felt a deep connection and pull towards women (and a few men) that have specifically come through a lot in their lives, surely these are exactly the people you would expect to be closed off to such closeness and she provided some insightful guidance – ‘they don’t fear getting hurt, they know they’ll survive’.

And it’s this ability to turn pain into love and weakness into strength that draws me towards them. When I’m in my own balance and open to these sometimes-transactional connections it’s like I’m receiving the warmest most loving hug, the feelings they trigger in me are childlike in nature.

And of course, there are plenty of people that enjoy intimacy, sexual partners, families and friends. As humans we crave intimacy, so even through our pain and conditioning we let people in, but more often than not it’s within a contained and controlled environment and then we close the door.

And the pain that we feel when someone within our inner circle hurts us is often extreme. The controlled environment when it implodes typically magnifies our pain. If we look at the roots of that pain they don’t sit with the love or closeness we experience with people but with the expectations we attach to letting them in, some unspoken contract our ego has written.

When we strip away expectations and our fear of vulnerability and we look at love or connections in their own right, it’s hard to point them in any one direction, and this is far removed from what I thought love was all about, but through this lens I see what I’m losing in the specialness and selectiveness that I had attributed to love Is replaced by the deep intimacy that I feel for humanity.

As I write I’m conscious not to build this into some utopian, hippie, let’s all fuck each other vision but equally the energy I’m projecting is the same, perhaps I’m hoping for it to manifest in other ways.

Maybe where we look towards others not in judgement, separation or suspicion but with love, respect and empathy. Life is not an easy journey, it’s time we started to all give each other a break. And, honestly now feels like the right time.

And I’m not unaware of how naïve all this sounds. There’s a voice in my head screaming, you’re an absolute idiot, you’ll get eaten alive, but there’s another more pronounced voice saying it’s ok, you’ll survive.