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A friend of ours said, “Last week I met this guy. The chemistry was so wild we made love the first night. I feel something special with him. I think this is serious.” Our friend isn’t a naive teenager. She has an amazing amount of life experience. I gave her a friendly smile. Inside, I felt like holding my head in my hands and rocking back and forth. Anyway, that was last year; recently we found out this guy is no longer in the picture. To me, relationship intimacy, the spiritual closeness between two human beings, is quite different from sexual intimacy. Intimacy in a relationship, if it happens, is a gradual coming together between two people. The more of themselves that people share with each other, the more intimate the relationship becomes. Friendship can grow into Love. People have to trust each other to open themselves up to each other, and it takes time together to achieve intimacy. I like to envision two selves as two circles. As strangers, the circles are apart. When strangers become acquaintances, the circles touch. When acquaintances become friends, the circles begin to overlap. If friends become close friends, there is greater overlap. Ideally, the self-circles of life partners are almost completely overlapped as they share their lives together. Maybe the two circles never completely overlap; maybe it’s good to keep some part of yourself totally private. This concept of the merging of selves has helped me assess where I am in a relationship. It reminds me that the trust and affection of friends is earned. Relationships are constantly changing; they require attention, communication, giving and taking. Sexual intercourse is only physical intimacy. The problem is that sex is often so physically exciting that it produces powerful emotions that can be mistaken for the love and affection of relationship intimacy. And so it goes...people are fooled, and we have the comedy and tragedy of love stories.
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Dennis E. Coates is CEO of Performance Support Systems, author of MindFrames, a brain-based personality assessment system (www.initforlife.com) and co-founder of the Train-to-Ingrain alliance (www.train-to-ingrain.com, info@train-to-ingrain.com, 800-488-6463), which delivers a reinforcement-centered approach to learning and development that achieves permanent, measurable improvements in workplace behavior and positive impacts on business results.
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