concerned friends and family - that  the other person is evidently and  

committedly ‘afraid of intimacy.’ They  don’t often talk of their emotions;  

they may find it hard to be physically  cosy; they don’t cry so often.

Whereas we on the other hand - as all our  acquaintances know - are the emotionally fluent  

ones. We long to be close to someone, we long to  discuss our feelings openly and without restraint,  

we are healthy and ready for love. It’s  simply such a pity - and so profoundly  

unfortunate - that we have ended up with  such an unyielding and resistant partner.

But however genuine our cries for intimacy  can sound, there is one incontrovertible fact  

in the way of their full credibility:  that we actually chose our partner,  

and we did so not under duress, not because of  some religious edict or familial injunction,  

but with our eyes fully open, in the light of  day, with plenty of alternative options before us.

This should at least complicate  the story we are telling ourselves  

and our concerned and encouraging  audience. There is arguably a limit  

to how interested in intimacy anyone  can be who skilfully picks out the  

kind of partner who just happens to have  precious little interest in the matter.

Furthermore, examination of our day to  day behaviour may reveal us to be too  

often acting in exactly the sort of  irritable, belittling or persecutory  

ways that guarantee that we will never attain  our stated aims of trust and connection. We  

cannot fairly claim to be on the one hand  desperate for intimacy, and on the other,  

regularly call our partner incompetent  or frigid, a blockhead or a brick for  

not being so. We must at least in part know  that we won’t be successful in securing the  

tenderness we say we so badly want - so long as  we continue to ask for it in humiliating ways.

A mature approach to the gridlock means  taking on board a possibility that we may  

until now have been shielding ourselves from  with devilish care: that we might both - in  

fact - be scared of intimacy and rather happy at  its absence, that we might both - in truth - be  

fleeing from the terrors and joys of mutual  surrender. Not because we are evil or demented,  

but because intimacy is exceptionally  daunting to those whose early experiences  

and childhood stories have predisposed  them towards guardedness and suspicion.

A sincere path to intimacy begins  with a graceful acknowledgement of  

the temptation to blame others for  what we cannot bear in ourselves,  

and the acceptance that we may have far  more in common with our partner than we  

have until now been able to concede. Whatever the  surface differences, we are - in essence - just  

as scared and ambivalent as they are, a  joint realisation with the power, finally,  

to bring about the compassion and tenderness  we have both been in flight from for so long.