theories on intimacy
to be loved or to be understood
I feel like I’ve experienced being loved in a lot of ways, being made
to feel cherished and desired, being put on a pedestal, and, funnily
enough, being told I was worth dying for, but I have never felt loved in
a way that made me feel understood. From those experiences I know that
love without understanding feels suffocating. Whenever a guy drops those
three words I love you,
I think what he really means is, "I love what I see... the idea of you I
already made in my head." More often than not, that version rarely
matches who I really am. Thus I feel compelled to perform that role to
keep being adored. While love has no stable meaning, over time being
loved has come to be compared with another feeling that can closely
compete with it, being understood.
But can anyone fully understand someone whose self‑concept keeps changing? I feel like a different person every few months, and I worry I’ve become a burden to those who love me, I can sense how hard it is for them to keep up and how they often fail to understand me deeply. I feel terrible, but I think it’s also cruel to demand fixed understanding from something that is inherently fluid. Understanding needs to be an ongoing practice of reknowing someone, relearning about them with generous curiosity.
But can anyone fully understand someone whose self‑concept keeps changing? I feel like a different person every few months, and I worry I’ve become a burden to those who love me, I can sense how hard it is for them to keep up and how they often fail to understand me deeply. I feel terrible, but I think it’s also cruel to demand fixed understanding from something that is inherently fluid. Understanding needs to be an ongoing practice of reknowing someone, relearning about them with generous curiosity.
what understanding means in an Ai-driven world
Ironically, technological advances have raised the bar for what it means
to be truly understood. You can learn almost everything about someone
by skimming their social media or personal websites. We deliberately
publish personal details of us for others to consume. Thus, Conversation
no longer requires close attention, people can check your Spotify
Wrapped to learn your music tastes or scan your IG highlights for your
hobbies. The act of knowing someone has shifted from interpersonal
tuning to data gathering and stalking. Digital information makes people
easily knowable at a surface level, yet despite being so visible online,
we've never felt more unseen. It's possible to be admired and followed
and still feel very alone. Loneliness, for me, is not the absence of
people but the absence of understanding.
Ai and data miners can stitch together remarkably accurate portraits of our preferences, habits, and personal histories. In that sense, knowing someone has become easier but emptier when technology can replicate the appearance of understanding. The only thing safe from being scraped is our intangible acknowledgment of one another, the ongoing practice of willingly paying close attention, listening, and staying for each other. Another human’s willingness to learn us anew cannot be imitated or undermined.
Ai and data miners can stitch together remarkably accurate portraits of our preferences, habits, and personal histories. In that sense, knowing someone has become easier but emptier when technology can replicate the appearance of understanding. The only thing safe from being scraped is our intangible acknowledgment of one another, the ongoing practice of willingly paying close attention, listening, and staying for each other. Another human’s willingness to learn us anew cannot be imitated or undermined.
does love require proximity
I think love cannot sustain itself without proximity, and the
normalization of distance in screen-to-screen connections has led us to
mistake access for closeness. That feeling I get from following someone
online is closely similar to following the life of an interesting
fictional character from my favorite book... Somehow that same idea
makes me sad, say for example, how despite posting my inner thoughts and
memoirs here, readers may feel close enough to observe and understand
me but not close enough to participate in my life. Given that I
voluntarily hand out a lot of information about myself, connections
flare up and dissolve just as quickly, the intensity of our first
encounter may feel meaningful, but it lacks something to sustain itself
in the long run. It lacks the slow yet crucial process of being known
and of knowing someone over time in a way that allows connection to go
further than its initial intensity. But completely unplugging your Wifi
and going analog is not the solution, I believe the solution is just to
redirect your cravings for love and connection? Perhaps go outside and
organically meet people in real life? Go to parties or treat someone to a
coffee?
intellectual vs. physical intimacy
I believe intimacy is not always tangible, like sex or constant texting.
There exists a level of seduction through intimate psychological
experience that begins with thoughts that travel between people through
exchanged words. I've always been drawn to other people's minds. I care
more about what a man thinks than how he looks, and yet somehow the more
enigmatic his mind is, the hotter he seems to me.
Looking back on my teenage years, I had a wide range of crushes and people I had mutual feelings with. I liked a teacher who was almost dying from dialysis because I loved listening to him talk about history, a gay activist I clicked with who couldn’t stop talking about political conspiracies, George Orwell, or Franz Kafka, and my unkempt, nerdy programmer seatmate who, whenever he opened his mouth, even on our dates, could not stop rambling about post-apocalyptic games and their existential meanings. What I like about intellectual intimacy is that in those interactions I stop being the object of attention. To be desired physically is often to be thought about, which reduces someone into a picture that is conditionally adored. Meanwhile, intellectual intimacy is to be thought with, listening to how each other thinks, with all the movements and contradictions of our thinking.
That doesn’t mean we stop understanding each other because our mutual focus is on something outside of us. It’s the opposite. To be understood requires the same habits that cultivate intellectual intimacy. Eventually seduction seeps in through remembering small details from what we said, the inside jokes born from those conversations, and citing each other’s ideas from past talks. Two people tracing the contours and charting the landscape of each other's minds. It sidesteps the performative trappings of love. As while I can shape how I present myself, I can never fake the forms of my thoughts. Our physical vessels may change over time, but the ideas that rearranged my inner world remain. Unlike disputes that stem merely from physical closeness, which are addressed only through practical adjustments, disagreements in intellectual discourse deepen intimacy, as they do not require two people to share the same opinion. There is something intoxicating about opposite thoughts rubbing against each other and ideas intertwining like fingers, debating while eyes linger a bit longer on each other. Arguments help both people learn something new and widen mutual perspective.
Intellectual intimacy is like a sanitized version of erotic closeness, there is no such thing as mind count as there is body count. Society doesn't place much attention on how many people have dismantled your beliefs and your worldview more than they care how many dicks you shoved in your pussy. However, both kinds of intimacy have something in common: how someone can fall out of it. The mind is only attractive when it is inconceivable. The moment you fully understand (or at least assume to fully know) the architecture of someone's mind is the moment they stop being attractive.
Looking back on my teenage years, I had a wide range of crushes and people I had mutual feelings with. I liked a teacher who was almost dying from dialysis because I loved listening to him talk about history, a gay activist I clicked with who couldn’t stop talking about political conspiracies, George Orwell, or Franz Kafka, and my unkempt, nerdy programmer seatmate who, whenever he opened his mouth, even on our dates, could not stop rambling about post-apocalyptic games and their existential meanings. What I like about intellectual intimacy is that in those interactions I stop being the object of attention. To be desired physically is often to be thought about, which reduces someone into a picture that is conditionally adored. Meanwhile, intellectual intimacy is to be thought with, listening to how each other thinks, with all the movements and contradictions of our thinking.
That doesn’t mean we stop understanding each other because our mutual focus is on something outside of us. It’s the opposite. To be understood requires the same habits that cultivate intellectual intimacy. Eventually seduction seeps in through remembering small details from what we said, the inside jokes born from those conversations, and citing each other’s ideas from past talks. Two people tracing the contours and charting the landscape of each other's minds. It sidesteps the performative trappings of love. As while I can shape how I present myself, I can never fake the forms of my thoughts. Our physical vessels may change over time, but the ideas that rearranged my inner world remain. Unlike disputes that stem merely from physical closeness, which are addressed only through practical adjustments, disagreements in intellectual discourse deepen intimacy, as they do not require two people to share the same opinion. There is something intoxicating about opposite thoughts rubbing against each other and ideas intertwining like fingers, debating while eyes linger a bit longer on each other. Arguments help both people learn something new and widen mutual perspective.
Intellectual intimacy is like a sanitized version of erotic closeness, there is no such thing as mind count as there is body count. Society doesn't place much attention on how many people have dismantled your beliefs and your worldview more than they care how many dicks you shoved in your pussy. However, both kinds of intimacy have something in common: how someone can fall out of it. The mind is only attractive when it is inconceivable. The moment you fully understand (or at least assume to fully know) the architecture of someone's mind is the moment they stop being attractive.
the intimacy of being forgotten
I think there is a certain level of intimacy in forgetting someone and
in being forgotten. I have a habit of deleting traces of the people I
interact with every day, including texts, call history, and emails. I
delete all of them. As a “forgetter,” this is my way of giving mercy to
the people I care about, by erasing their image in my mind and not
objectifying them in my memories.
Jean-Paul Sartre, more accurately, talks about this as “the Look,” which describes how encountering another person’s gaze makes you aware of yourself as an object for them, provoking feelings like shame or vulnerability. Personally, I feel very self-conscious about the Look, the idea that a version of me exists in other people’s minds, and that this picture of me is out of my control. Maybe it is outdated, maybe it is inaccurate, and God, I wish I could delete it. Therefore, forgetting someone is my way of giving them grace, to at least lessen their self-consciousness too. It is also a useful exercise to actively remember someone and re-know them, and to practice constantly understanding someone while being ready to accept new versions of them. I like racking my brain to remember and know them again. It is shocking how often relationships and friendships are sustained by narrative and habit rather than by deep understanding and unbreakable bonds.
Jean-Paul Sartre, more accurately, talks about this as “the Look,” which describes how encountering another person’s gaze makes you aware of yourself as an object for them, provoking feelings like shame or vulnerability. Personally, I feel very self-conscious about the Look, the idea that a version of me exists in other people’s minds, and that this picture of me is out of my control. Maybe it is outdated, maybe it is inaccurate, and God, I wish I could delete it. Therefore, forgetting someone is my way of giving them grace, to at least lessen their self-consciousness too. It is also a useful exercise to actively remember someone and re-know them, and to practice constantly understanding someone while being ready to accept new versions of them. I like racking my brain to remember and know them again. It is shocking how often relationships and friendships are sustained by narrative and habit rather than by deep understanding and unbreakable bonds.
