Column: being intimate

For years now, she hasn’t been able to be intimate with her girlfriend. She finds it hard to share her most intimate thoughts with her, but most of all, she finds it hard to touch her in a sincere way. She only touches her because she knows she has to, not because she wants to. Her feelings of guilt make it even more difficult: she feels guilty that she doesn’t want to be intimate with her girlfriend, even though she does want to be intimate with other people. In recent years, there had been several people that she longed to be intimate with. She wanted to dance with them, talk with them, laugh with them and make love to them. So she did long for intimacy, just not with her girlfriend.

She missed the intimacy they used to have together: to truly be in touch with each other. To share a moment where they only had eyes for each other. But she couldn’t do it anymore.

Over the last two years she had been searching for answers to find out why this was happening. Her girlfriend had been kind to her, insanely sweet and sincere in everything she does. They love each other a tremendous amount, and because of this she finds it hard to think of reasons why she can’t be intimate with her anymore.

It breaks her heart to see the pain it causes her girlfriend, and she feels the pain herself as well. Every single day. Over the last two years she spent hours thinking of reasons that would make sense to her, and the two of them kept having the same kind of conversations, leading up to nothing. She knows she loves her girlfriend. She knows that they would have a good relationship. She knows they would have a solid future together. She knows all of this rationally.

But then all of a sudden she realized that she had to rely on a skill that she wasn’t that competent at: she needed to feel what her girlfriend felt instead of thinking of all the things that made sense to her. Because love doesn’t make sense. If you have the luxury to choose a partner, your decision is mostly based on a feeling and not on rational thoughts. And then she realized that she couldn’t recall any feelings of being in love. They might never even have been there. It made sense to them to start a relationship with each other 9 years ago, but it wasn’t because she fell in love with her. Her girlfriend did fell in love with her, and she has always been in love with her, but she now realizes that she has done everything based on logic instead of emotions.

In order to be intimate with someone, you need to be able to feel the sincerity, the attention and the love. If you know you’re good together, but you’re not feeling it, it might become harder and harder to be intimate with each other. It just took her a couple of years to realize that her feelings didn’t match her rational thoughts.