Struggles of avoiding close relationships due to fear of intimacy,—doesn’t that hit a little too close to home? You see, we’ve all been there, cautiously tiptoeing around vulnerability. We get it, you’re guarding yourself against possible heartbreak. Yet, just think about it, to stumble upon something extraordinary, don’t we need to chip a bit off our protective shells?
My best friend and husband were diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer while I was in my forties. To cut a long story short, I eventually lost him after facing formidable foes and witnessing horrors that my writer’s imagination and vocabulary were powerless to capture.
After that, I might have easily decided I didn’t want to date ever again. Choosing never to feel love again would have been a great way to safeguard myself against the pain of further loss. However, I’ve never been able to shut people off because I’m too open. Despite my aversion to close relationships, I am the type of person who requires the companionship of another human being to feel safe and secure.
That doesn’t imply my subsequent relationships have been trouble-free. Everyone brings baggage from their past into their present and future relationships. It’s easy to see why so many people shy away from close relationships. Nobody enjoys feeling pain, especially if they have experienced it before.
But as the ad goes, sometimes you have to suffer a little to get a little pleasure. In my opinion, the point of living is to find someone you can trust and rely on entirely and enter into a relationship with them. I don’t think we’d have been given the capacity for intimacy if we weren’t supposed to form bonds with other humans and experience love.
What Is Intimacy?
Fear of closeness is best discussed after its definition has been established. There is no universally accepted definition of intimacy; nonetheless, it is commonly understood to refer to either “a close familiarity or friendship” or “closeness or an intimate act, especially sexual intercourse.” What I mean by “emotional intimacy” is letting another person into your innermost thoughts and feelings.
Each of us contains a number of overlapping identities. There is the persona we present to the public and the one we attempt to keep secret. We don’t want people to reject us because of who we really are, what we truly desire, or the craziness that we’re all capable of, so we tend to hold back or hide important parts of ourselves. Isn’t it true that love and acceptance are the things we all ultimately seek? The desire to belong and be loved is hardwired into every human being.
The difficulty emerges when you yearn for a close personal connection with another person but are paralyzed by the dread of revealing your true self. Having a close relationship with someone who is secretive might be challenging. Keeping pieces of yourself hidden from the person you’re dating creates distance between you. They may conclude that you don’t feel comfortable enough with them to be yourself around them.
This aversion to getting close to others is what keeps us from connecting with them. They aren’t having a relationship with you; they’re having a connection with someone who you aren’t if you can’t be your genuine self and let them see all sides of who you are.
The Reasons Behind Our Self-Limitation
We may choose to conceal aspects of ourselves for a variety of reasons. It’s possible that in the past, we’ve been honest with people, and they either didn’t accept us for who we were, or the relationship didn’t work out for some other reason. The end outcome of either scenario is usually suffering and broken hearts.
One of the most challenging human emotions is heartbreak. What they’ve lost is irreplaceable. However, it may be very challenging to grasp the beauty of loving someone with all that you are if we allow those past experiences to influence and control our future behavior.
Almost nobody on this planet has ever experienced rejection. That’s why everybody carries their own set of problems. Keeping your guard up won’t protect you from disappointment any more than it would from the greatest joy a person can experience. Like anything else, you can’t succeed unless you give it a shot.
Methods for Conquering Fear
The trick is to learn to let go of whatever it is that has caused your fear of closeness and put it in the past. Unless you let them, the things you’ve been through can’t harm you any longer. In fact, if you don’t deal with past hurts, they will continue to fester.
The fact that you’ve been hurt before is no guarantee that you will continue to experience it in the future. If you were rejected in a past relationship for being yourself, it wasn’t because you lacked value or weren’t good enough. That doesn’t necessarily make them bad, but it does mean that you weren’t the “right” person for them.
There are pros and cons to every learning opportunity we encounter. Even if you were passed over for a promotion at work, giving up now wouldn’t help you in the long run. Relationships are the same way. If you do something and it fails, you can always figure out what went wrong and do better the next time. You’ll have a far better shot at succeeding.
Intimacy anxiety affects many people.
If you don’t trust someone enough to let them in on your true self, you’re basically telling them they don’t measure up. Your relationship is doomed from the start if you never let your guard down and reveal who you really are. No relationship can survive if one partner is not being honest and open. You will lose many valuable relationships along the way unless you begin to let people in, open up, and trust them.
Sometimes in my current relationship, I get the feeling that I’m becoming too close, and a little voice in my head sounds the alarm. In those moments, I tend to overreact, focusing on the negative aspects of my relationship and withdrawing to avoid potential harm. It’s not easy to wrap one’s head around the idea of vulnerability or the knowledge that nothing lasts forever.
The truth is that loving and losing again wouldn’t hurt as much as spending the rest of my life alone, never having the chance to find love like I lost. Love requires opening yourself sufficiently for another person to see the real you and return that love.
Love is, above all else, about forgiving one another when we fall short and make mistakes. If you want to get over your fear of intimacy, try taking baby steps, letting someone in slowly, and being open and honest. You’ll grow closer together and happier due to all the good times you’ve shared. You merely need to get going.
Meaningful articles you might like: The Secrets To Overcoming Your Fear Of Flirting, Dating Anxiety: Embrace Your Fear and Return to the Dating Scene, Get to the bottom of Your Fear of Love
