What is Intimacy: Understanding the #1 Key to Lasting Love

Exploring the answer to the question, “what is intimacy” will take you on a profound journey into the truth, power, and possibility of relationships, especially romantic ones. Understanding the answer you’re about to discover is one thing, living the answer is quite another. Whether conscious of it or not, most people crave intimacy and few have the courage to truly embody it. Even fewer invest the time, energy, and compassion necessary to cultivate genuinely intimate connections. 

Interestingly, as humans we hold many different views and perspectives when it comes to what intimacy is, especially between the masculine and feminine. In truth, intimacy is intimacy. How we embody it, desire it, and even need it can vary greatly. Your willingness to live and share intimately fully in your “language” and the language of your partner will serve you both well. True intimacy not only sustains love, it deepens it, over and over again.

Let’s begin first by defining this key quality of lasting love. Then we’ll answer the deeper question, what is intimacy in a relationship?

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What is the definition of intimacy?

What is intimacy but a pathway to connection, to union. We can try to make the concept of intimacy complicated, yet the real definition of intimacy is truly quite simple. Intimacy means that I let you see into me. In other words, I let you see who I am, including the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

Two of the most common mistakes people make when it comes to understanding what is intimacy include thinking that it means telling inner secrets, or that it’s about sex. While the true meaning of intimacy includes both sharing things about ourselves that we might otherwise hide and our physical connection, it is much more, and much less, than that. Let’s keep going… 

Intimacy actually means to be fully seen and known. It means “in-to-me-you-see” which also by definition implies I reveal myself to you. Said another way, it means I allow you to know who I am at my best and at my worst. It happens in a relationship when you let the other person into your inner world. Pay particular attention to the fact that as we define intimacy it starts with you. It does not require the other person to do anything but witness. You are the source, the ignition, the cause of intimacy.

“You are the source, the ignition, the cause of intimacy.” ~Joanna Shakti

When it comes to romantic relationships, too many people forget that. They believe the experience of intimacy depends on their partner. Yet, being intimate is a choice. Your choice. You get to choose whether you allow an intimate experience to happen. 

In that, let’s say this again, intimacy is not sex. Sex does not require being intimate and it is not inherently, in and of itself, intimate. As a matter of fact, sex can be a great way to avoid being intimate. When the physical dynamics become about the orgasm, the release, the result, rather than the shared and felt connection, you can rest assured that intimacy has taken its leave.  

Intimacy is an allowing, an offering of oneself to another. It is a genuine opening, the making of oneself fully available to another – emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually. It is not about getting something or being something. It’s not something external that you give another. It’s a sharing of what’s inside, sometimes without saying anything. This revealing and transparency of self creates the experience of intimacy.

Let’s get more specific by looking at what it means to be intimate in a relationship. 

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What is intimacy in a relationship?

Intimacy lies at the heart of any significant relationship, including the one you have with yourself. And, as simple as the practice of being intimate is, it still demands our most courageous heart. Since intimacy invites an opening of oneself, a sharing of one’s being; inherently that means it requires vulnerability. That prerequisite – our capacity for vulnerability – determines how intimacy shows up in a relationship, or not. 

Intimacy as we said is a choice. It requires risk because we cannot know how the other person will respond. When we open ourselves we risk judgment. We risk potential rejection. Yet, a relationship without risk, a relationship without intimacy, isn’t much of a relationship, is it? Without the authentic revealing and sharing of one another, a connection doesn’t have the necessary sustainability factor.  Love grows and thrives in intimacy, it withers without it.  

Intimacy in relationship has one partner, and ideally both, allowing themselves to be seen and known on all levels. On an emotional level, it means feeling your feelings and allowing your partner to witness those feelings, even the ones you judge as ugly or unconscious. This does not, however, mean blaming the other for our emotions. On a mental level, intimacy calls us to share our thoughts, dreams, inspirations, and even the self-critical stories we hold, with our partner.  

Physically, what is intimacy? It is the opening of one’s body to another. Yes, sexually, but also in our simple humanness. Bodies are bodies. They make sounds, they have failures, they get sick. They have curves and smells, and in intimacy we allow our bodies to be seen and known in all of that. The difference between having sex and making love depends directly on the quality intimacy in the relationship.

Spiritually, if a couple integrates this dimension of their relationship, intimacy looks like the sharing of the imperfect, sometimes messy, human self as well as the brilliant, amazing, and deeply wise higher self.

When any, or ideally all, of these aspects of self are shared, revealed – especially together in partnership – they can lead to exquisite experiences of divine union. 

Suffice it to say, in a nutshell, intimacy happens through seeing and being seen in genuine acceptance. 

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5 Keys to maintaining an intimate relationship

Our intentional practices of intimacy create the glue that seals and bonds a relationship. It becomes the strength of the foundation that holds and supports two people in love. Consequently, making a conscious practice of intimacy itself while also learning the key ways it serves to deepen love and strengthen a relationship, simply makes sense. Let’s look at the top five keys to creating and sharing an intimate relationship…

1. Be authentic. If intimacy means being seen, what is intimacy without authenticity? This also points to the fact that you have to have an intimate relationship with yourself before you can have an intimate relationship with your partner. If you don’t know and accept yourself, in both your greatness and your not-so-greatness, you won’t actually reveal yourself, or allow yourself to open and be truly seen. Therefore, no matter how much you want it, you won’t have access to genuine intimacy or the unconditional love that accompanies it without authenticity.

2. Learn to feel. While we’ve clearly said that intimacy arises from a union with, and revealing of, all aspects of ourselves, and yet feelings lie at the heart of intimate connection. As a matter of fact, emotions are the language of intimacy. Have you ever noticed how much closer you feel to someone who, while not dumping their feelings on you, allowed you to see into their inner emotional world, especially the most vulnerable aspects of it? That’s intimacy in action and that means being skillful requires a real comfort with emotions, both yours and theirs. 

3. Learn to fight consciously. Yes, every relationship will have challenges and conflicts. Working together through those uncomfortable times creates some of the most vulnerable, and therefore the most intimate, moments in a relationship. Yes, conflict is intimate. Very intimate. If you learn to practice, sharing both feelings and desires, you will find that your upsets actually end much more quickly. You’ll also see, as those on the Soul Love journey have, that when there’s true intimacy conflict becomes communion. 

4. Embrace your partner’s differences. We are different. Setting the stage for intimacy in a relationship requires great listening and witnessing (seeing) skills. If your partner courageously chooses to offer and reveal themselves to you, you will want to have the presence and ability to actually see them, to receive their intimate expressions. When you see and listen to your partner, when you take in and remember what matters to them, when you know and honor their preferences, you put intimacy into action once again. Closeness deepens. 

5. Pay attention to where and when you hide aspects of yourself. Pay attention to how willing or not you are to reveal yourself, how much willingness you feel to be seen and known – emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually. When you hide a part of yourself, you block connection and make intimacy impossible. Here’s where the courage and commitment to get to know yourself comes in. As we say all the time at Ecstatic Intimacy, the strength of your relationship with you determines the strength of your relationship with another. Recognizing, and then removing, your barriers to intimacy, while learning to trust yourself first, truly matters.  

Over the years, we’ve seen it validated and verified time and time again, every human being craves being seen, being known. Each of us wants to be known for who we truly are. We don’t want to have to pretend. Everyone wants to be able to let down their walls and be accepted just as they are authentically. 

This longing to be seen is a longing for intimacy. The question is, will you let yourself be known?

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“We’re only as seen as we’re willing to reveal ourselves.” ~Joanna Shakti

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Living intimately is living ecstatically. If we want to understand the real answers to the question, what is intimacy, then we must know those answers in our cells, not just our minds. We must live intimacy and practice it consistently throughout our days. 

Intimacy is not just for the “I feel like connecting” moments. In soul connections, it wants to happen in the everyday day moments in between. Every interaction, every moment, holds an invitation, truly a desire, for intimacy – with yourself and anyone in your presence. 

Intimacy is a way of life… and the key to lasting love. 

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Since 2006, highly conscious men and women, with a commitment to extraordinary relationships, have chosen Ecstatic Intimacy to find and cultivate Soul Partnerships from their bedrooms to their boardrooms. We believe in coveted relationships, for all. 

You too, are invited…