Those who have most capacity to invest intimacy into their marriage and relationships love others truly through an integrity between what they promise and what they deliver.
By integrity, I mean alignment between the intimacy that’s promised and what’s delivered.
By integrity, I also mean alignment between a good heart and a resolute mind.
It’s as simple as that.
Yet there are those who feign publicly what they cannot and do not deliver privately — and some even completely betray their overtures of passion and invest their intimacy elsewhere, worst of all in the destructiveness of affairs, and many are there the variety of those.
These are the personification of dishonesty, scooping up for themselves praise from those in their sphere of influence all the while betraying those who truly know them — those who know what liars they really are.
Then there are those who promise little or nothing and deliver exactly that in terms of intimacy. Though there’s integrity here in terms of what’s promised and what’s delivered, there’s clearly no motive or desire to deliver an intimacy that a person in a relationship with them quite rightly would expect.
Think of the vision presented: a person who walks humbly on this earth serves the purpose of their being to the extent that they exist to be a blessing. Their honesty is trustworthy.
Such a person cringes at the possibility that their intimacy might fail its potential, and yet even when they do fail, they’re contrite about it and their heart is exemplified in their repentance.
Contrition or lack thereof is a test of a person’s heart. The heart of a person is visible in their capacity of contrition. Those who can be wrong, who can transact with their wrongness, have the most potential for intimacy, because they have most capacity to relate.
There is a paradox is this:
Only the person who CAN be wrong is able to be righted.
Think of a person’s ability to receive salvation — they can SEE their wrongness, and THAT sets them apart to receive God’s forgiving grace.
A person who CANNOT see their wrongness cannot receive what can only be theirs by virtue of their acknowledgement of their personal complicity.
If a person is unable to behave contritely — in other words, they can never be wrong, or they’re incapable of sufficiently sincere apology when they’re wrong — they don’t demonstrate the capacity of intimacy. They cannot move back toward another’s heart when they have wronged them. They cannot demonstrate that they’re trustworthy of further opportunities of intimacy. They bear no desire of commitment to the intimacy they promised in the first place. IF they cannot apologise in a sincere way.
Isn’t it interesting how we maintain our intimacy, and thereby exemplify the integrity of our heart for relationship, chiefly through how we reconcile our failures as much as we do when we achieve intimacy?
Integrity in intimacy cannot be ignored. There’s a direct alignment that is easy to see and difficult to deny. This is why a lack of intimacy in what was promised as an intimate relationship is so stark. This is why a vacuum of intimacy proves impossible to ignore and simply becomes louder and more pronounced the longer the vacuity is experienced.
This is how intimate relationships become toxic — what is promised is not delivered and the one who suffers the lack of intimacy experiences gaslighting.
Intimacy is the greatest invitation of all to the depths available in a relationship. The integrity sewn within it is definitively true. There is a oneness in this intimacy that is best defined as symbiosis — a connectedness of intimacy of a mutually beneficial relationship.
A mutually beneficial relationship is shared
between two who BOTH reach toward the other.
The feature is their collective capacity to sacrifice for the other.
One alone cannot achieve this on behalf of the whole.
Intimacy is the chief test of a person’s ability to relate with another in the enjoyment of a trust that is freely given and freely received. If there is any pattern of indifference to the ideals of intimacy, the relationship will be stilted, and this will be most borne out, most felt, in a lack of trust.
Intimacy is a felt thing. We feel it or we don’t. Where we feel it, we feel the other person moving toward us, and where we don’t feel it, we feel the other person resisting or moving away.
It’s very hard to sustain the intimacy of trust in a relationship where such intimacy of trust isn’t returned.
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