The Importance of Intimacy

There is no connection more profound—perhaps in all human experience—than being an identical twin.  Consider this premise: at least for a few days, before the egg in a mother’s belly splits into two, the eventual siblings are, in fact, the same person.  A beautiful if somewhat creepy notion to accept, especially should you happen to be a twin yourself.  Given the remote likelihood of twinning—approximately 3 for every 1,000 births—the challenge remains for the majority of us to establish relationships similar in depth to that of being a twin.  This begs the question, How can we each find connection in others who are not related to us?  How can twinship become available to anyone choosing to seek it, whether such connection is sought in one’s community, in a neighbor, in a spouse, or in a friend? 

There may be a way for anyone to gain twinship, should he or she want it; however, that way has not been easily paved, especially it would seem for us Americans.  If intimacy is the only way towards true connection, then a recent spate of school shootings, domestic bombings, race-crimes, and such reveals the existence of much alienation among the populace and a troubling amount of anger and hatred in our lives.  Insecurity about relationships and anxiety about intimacy lead people down some incredibly lonely—and often scary—paths, paths that are obfuscated by the overgrowth of cynicism and by a skepticism that threatens to choke all hope.

To a certain degree, all of us are alien.  Indeed, we enter the world alone, kicking and screaming, the world feels so foreign.  Imagine the comfort of being initially inside your mother's womb.  A sense of wholeness literally permeates you, your body swaddled by an outward reality.  Never again will we sense with such immediacy that same degree of belonging, hence the horror of being born.  Ironically enough, all of us arrive in this world partial, as fragments, bodies aching over the loss we feel at the very instant of our becoming. 

Nobody’s spared from this fate.  It’s just that the twin feels such fragmentation a bit earlier on —at the very split when he and his brother or she and her sister are no longer one.  For all of us though, it's about healing and the struggle to connect, the rest of our lives characterized by the often-agonizing search for something or, better yet, someone, to complete us.  As a result of being separated from the very world of which we are ultimately a part, aren't we all simply walking through life trying to heal the breach and recover what was lost—oneness with a world outside the self?

Fundamentally speaking, we crave intimacy as a means for achieving this wholeness.  The very concept of “completing one's self," though overused, still bears significance depending on what we regard as self—the potential to be one with spouse, to be one with community, to be one with nation, to be one with the world.  In other words, to achieve sameness with the universe.  Sameness with the universe equates to a complete and entire self-conception.

Intimacy is the path that connects us towards the wholeness we crave.  

By now, you might have gathered that I, myself, am an identical twin.  My brother and I remain so alike in many ways, that he is, indeed, my reflection.  Every time I look at him, I see myself.  Or, to think of it in a slightly different way, I see myself in him.  And like home, I can either return or run away.  For this reason alone, intimacy is a scary prospect.  Depending on whether or not you like yourself, meeting yourself can be either a comforting or a frightening notion to consider.

Still, any time we achieve connection and intimacy, a way is paved for empathy to emerge, which only feeds the need to connect even more.  By seeing ourselves in others, we enact empathy’s very definition.

I find that the reflective properties inherent to intimacy are particularly dynamic.  The reflection works reciprocally, however, functioning to collapse self and other into one.  Therefore, not only do we see ourselves in or through others, but doing so has the reciprocal effect of allowing us to see others in us. 

With connection as intimate as, say, a twinship, the world outside becomes part of how we conceive our very personhood.  For instance, your partner becomes part of you such that if you were to ever lose the connection, you’d feel the loss as an amputee would a body part.  The lingering sensation would be that of a phantom limb—a cruel trick of the mind, deceiving you into believing as present what remains absent. 

Efforts to balance I and We are often fraught ones—pain has been known to sit right there alongside joy.  Grieving over the death of a loved one, for example, or over a romantic breakup is certainly painful for the loss of others we might feel at the time; but not to be underestimated is the agony we feel regarding the void in self, a disruption in our quest for personal unity, the unity we struggle and strive towards so willfully over the course of our lives.

Perhaps more than ever in our human history, society is full of injured people.  All our apprehensions about one another have taken their toll.  The degradation of the public sphere has sadly come to represent the diminished value we place in the quality of our shared lives together.  Consider for a moment the degraded state in which we find much of our public life—from infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and subways, to human service systems like education, health, and housing.  Major public institutions such as these are no longer reliable as the vehicles for connection and community they were initially conceived to be.   From the political to the personal realms of our lives, many of our interactions with one another remain lacking in civility and are deprived of even the most rudimentary forms of grace.  How well we treat the public sphere will always reflect the value we place on the quality of our lives together. 

We are born with the need to see ourselves in others and to see others in us.  For those who happen to be twins by nature, the intimacy needed to kick-start the empathetic process is already built-in, so to speak.  The question remains for everyone else, “How can we find our own other halves?”