Intimate Connections

An intimate relationship is an interpersonal relationship that involves physical or emotional intimacy.[1] Although an intimate relationship is commonly a sexual relationship,[2] it may also be a non-sexual relationship involving family, friends, or acquaintances.[2][3]

Intimate Connections

Emotional intimacy involves feelings of closeness, relatedness, and vulnerability.[citation needed] This concept has been proven to be an essential aspect for a healthy relationship.[4] Once deeper feelings of liking or loving one or more people arise, it may result in physical intimacy. However, emotional intimacy may or may not be present in physical intimacy depending on the depth of the relationship. Physical intimacy is characterized by romantic love, sexual activity, or other passionate attachment.[1] These relationships play a central role in the overall human experience.[5] Humans have a general desire to belong and to love, which is usually satisfied within an intimate relationship.[6] Such relationships allow a social network for people to form strong emotional attachments.[3][5]

Intimacy involves the feeling of being in a close, personal association and belonging together.[7] It is a familiar and very close affective connection with another as a result of a bond that is formed through knowledge and experience of the other.[7] Genuine intimacy in human relationships requires dialogue, transparency, vulnerability, and reciprocity.[7] Dalton (1959) discussed how anthropologists and ethnographic researchers access "inside information" from within a particular cultural setting by establishing networks of intimates capable (and willing) to provide information unobtainable through formal channels.[8]

Sustaining intimacy for a length of time involves well-developed emotional and interpersonal awareness. Intimacy involves the ability to be both separate and together as participants in an intimate relationship. Murray Bowen called this "self-differentiation", which results in a connection in which there is an emotional range involving both robust conflict and intense loyalty.[13] Lacking the ability to differentiate oneself from the other is a form of symbiosis, a state that is different from intimacy, even if feelings of closeness are similar.[citation needed]

Intimate behavior joins family members and close friends, as well as those in love.[2] It evolves through reciprocal self-disclosure and candor.[7] Poor skills in developing intimacy can lead to getting too close too quickly; struggling to find the boundary and to sustain connection; being poorly skilled as a friend, rejecting self-disclosure or even rejecting friendships and those who have them.[14] Psychological consequences of intimacy problems are found in adults who have difficulty in forming and maintaining intimate relationships. Individuals often experience the human limitations of their partners, and develop a fear of adverse consequences of disrupted intimate relationships. Studies show that fear of intimacy is negatively related to comfort with emotional closeness and with relationship satisfaction, and positively related to loneliness and trait anxiety.[15]

The interdependence model of Levinger and Snoek divides the development of an intimate relationship into four stages: the first one is the zero contact stage, in which is no contact between the two parties in the relationship; The second stage is awareness, which means the parties do not have any superficial or deep contact with each other, but only know each other; The third stage is surface contact, in which both parties know each other and have had superficial contact; The fourth stage of coexistence phase (mutuality), refers to mutual dependence having greatly increased, as well as deep contact existing.[16]

The study by Monroe was the first to mark the significant shift in the study of intimate relationships from analysis that was primarily philosophical to those with empirical validity.[5] This study is said to have finally marked the beginning of relationship science.[5] In the years following Monroe's study, very few similar studies were done. There were limited studies done on children's friendships, courtship and marriages, and families in the 1930s but few relationship studies were conducted before or during World War II.[23] Intimate relationships did not become a broad focus of research again until the 1960s and 1970s when there was a vast number of relationship studies being published.[5]

The study of intimate relationships uses participants from diverse groups and examines a wide variety of topics that include family relations, friendships, and romantic relationships, usually over a long period.[5] Current study includes both positive and negative or unpleasant aspects of relationships.[citation needed]

Evidence also points to the role of a number of contextual factors that can impact intimate relationships. In a recent study on the impact of Hurricane Katrina on marital and partner relationships, researchers found that while many reported negative changes in their relationships, a number also experienced positive changes. More specifically, the advent of Hurricane Katrina led to a number of environmental stressors (for example, unemployment, prolonged separation) that negatively impacted intimate relationships for many couples, though other couples' relationships grew stronger as a result of new employment opportunities, a greater sense of perspective, and higher levels of communication and support.[24] As a result, environmental factors are also understood to contribute heavily to the strength of intimate relationships.[citation needed]

One study suggests that married straight couples and cohabiting gay and lesbian couples in long-term intimate relationships may pick up each other's unhealthy[when defined as?] habits. The study reports three distinct findings showing how unhealthy habits are promoted in long-term intimate relationships: through the direct bad influence of one partner, through synchronicity of health habits, and through the notion of personal responsibility.[further explanation needed][26][27]

Aristotle also suggested that relationships based on virtue would be the longest lasting and that virtue-based relationships were the only type of relationship in which each partner was liked for themselves. The philosophical analysis used by Aristotle dominated the analysis of intimate relationships until the late 1880s.[23]

In 1891, William James wrote that a person's self-concept is defined by the relationships endured with others.[6] In 1897, Émile Durkheim's interest in social organization led to the examination of social isolation and alienation.[6] This was an influential discovery of intimate relationships in that Durkheim argued that being socially isolated was a key antecedent of suicide.[6] This focus on the darker side of relationships and the negative consequences associated to social isolation were what Durkheim labeled as anomie.[23] Georg Simmel wrote about dyads, or partnerships with two people.[5] Simmel suggested that dyads require consent and engagement of both partners to maintain the relationship but noted that the relationship can be ended by the initiation of only one partner.[23] Although the theorists mentioned above sought support for their theories, their primary contributions to the study of intimate relationships were conceptual and not empirically grounded.[5]

An important shift was taking place in the field of social psychology that influenced the research of intimate relationships. Until the late 1950s, the majority of studies were non-experimental.[23] By the end of the 1960s more than half of the articles published involved some sort of experimental study.[23] The 1960s was also a time when there was a shift in methodology within the psychological discipline itself. Participants consisted mostly of college students, experimental methods and research were being conducted in laboratories and the experimental method was the dominant methodology in social psychology.[23] Experimental manipulation within the research of intimate relationships demonstrated that relationships could be studied scientifically.[5] This shift brought relationship science to the attention of scholars in other disciplines and has resulted in the study of intimate relationships being an international multidiscipline.[5]

Donald Nathanson, a psychiatrist who built his study of human interactions off of the work of Silvan Tomkins, argues that an intimate relationship between two individuals is best when the couple agrees to maximize positive affect, minimize negative affect and allow for the free expression of affect. These findings were based on Tomkin's blueprint for emotional health, which also emphasizes doing as much of the maximizing, minimizing and expressing as possible.[30]

Apart from emotional and sexual intimacy, you can also be intimate intellectually, recreationally, financially, spiritually, creatively (for example, renovating your home) and at times of crisis (working as a team during tough times).

When forming deep, intimate relationships, we share a vast amount of personal information that we wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable sharing with others. Of course, the amount of information may differ from one person to the next; research shows that women, on average, tend to share more intimate information with their friends as well as partners, in comparison to men, who generally reserve more intimate topics for their partners. Nonetheless, with our intimate partners in healthy relationships, we feel safe sharing our deepest dreams, desires, fears, past histories, traumas, and goals for the future. Generally, this is a reciprocal and gradual process.

Care is another hallmark of healthy intimate relationships. There is a considerable amount of care each partner places in the other, and this differs from the care that one would typically display to another, non-intimate person. Intimate partners thus show concern for each other's well-being, comfort in times of distress, and safekeeping the other from harm. While the display of care can differ from one person to the next (as a function of communication style or differing displays of affection, for instance), intimate partners tend to display genuine, selfless care for each other. 041b061a72