Last year “Let’s keep our distance to stay close” sounded like a mantra from the mouths of many. On the one hand, there are fewer physical meet-ups and spending time together. We don’t go to the office and chat in the zoom. Instead of hugging, we do gestures. We have found new ways to express closeness.
As social beings, people need to be close to another person, whether physically or emotionally or merely knowing that you can always turn to someone. It gives us the confidence that we have our own social network.
Everyone needs a secure connection with the people who matter to them. However, the need for closeness can be a very controversial feeling. At times we want to be close, but sometimes we can’t stand it, as it seems to suffocate and harass.
Psychologists have come to understand that a person develops as a result of experience. During the development of personality, it is important what kind of experiences of intimacy the child is offered by the adults caring for the child. If there’s restlessness, fear, anxiety, or other emotional reactions, a child needs to be embraced, calmed, comforted, to be in physical contact with someone. When we have felt conflicting feelings about closeness as a child, intimacy can be frightening as an adult. Sometimes experiences teach us that if we let someone come close, we get hurt – so it’s worth to keep distance, be indifferent.
There are also many stereotypical opinions here. It is often thought that men are the ones who want more distance. Men have been raised and socialized in this way. Is it familiar to hear that a man can handle himself, men do not cry, for a man it is not suitable to do that, etc.?
You have certainly noticed that people often use the expression that I need my time and space, I need to be alone. The tension field around proximity and distance is perceived from childhood to death in many forms of relationship – parent-child, couples’ relationship, friendships, and even in work relationships.
But where do the problems here arise from? Why do we sometimes create a comfortable distance with situations or people we don’t like? Why does it sometimes seem like someone is suffocating us with their closeness? Where does true intimacy and caring come from? How does it manifest itself? What is love for a fellow human about? You have probably also experienced that when you are physically together or in a couples’ relationship, it doesn’t automatically mean that these people are close. What to do if the distance is perceived as rejection and carelessness?
How to avoid different tensions due to the need for intimacy and distance? How can true love and closeness be achieved when the fear of getting hurt pushes us away? In this conversation, Ingvar Villido points to the background of distance and intimacy in relationships and leads the way to experiencing unity with everything.