Love & Intimacy

Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.
--Amy Bloom

Love simply cannot spring up without that self-surrender
to each other. If either withholds the self, love cannot exist.
--Dr. E. Stanley Jones

Henceforth there will be such a oneness between us---
that when one weeps the other will taste salt.
--Author Unknown

Though we may think we know each other well, when we neglect feelings in a relationship, we neglect the deepest and most intimate part of ourselves ... sharing feelings leads us to great closeness because feelings are very personal, the most intimate part of us. The sharing of a deep feeling is the greatest gift a human being can give to another.
--Fr. Chuck Gallaghe

Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still.
--Robert Sternberg

The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
Carolyn Heilbrun

Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding,
intimacy and mutual valuing.
Rollo May

When love is accompanied wit deep intimacy, it raises us to the highest level of human experience. In this exalted space, we can surrender our egos, become vulnerable and know levels of joy and well-being unique among life experiences. We attain a glimpse of the rapture that can be ours. Boundaries are blurred, there are no limitations and we rejoice in union. We become one and, at the same time, both.
--Leo Buscaglia (Born For Love)

For a marriage relationship to flourish, there must be intimacy. It takes an enormous amount of courage to say to your spouse, "This is me. I'm not proud of it -- in fact, I'm a little embarrassed by it -- but this is who I am."
--Bill Hybels

Oh, the miraculous energy that flows between two people who care enough to get beyond surfaces and games, who are willing to take the risks of being totally open, of listening, of responding with the whole heart. How much we can do for each other.
--Alex Noble

One of the characteristics of love relationships that flower is a relatively high degree of mutual self-disclosure--a willingness to let our partner enter into the interior of our private world and a genuine interest in the private world of that partner. Couples in love tend to show more of themselves to each other than to any other person.
--Nathaniel Branden

What does open us is sharing our vulnerabilities. Sometimes we see a couple who has done this difficult work over a lifetime. In the process, they have grown old together. We can sense the enormous comfort, the shared quality of ease between these people. It is beautiful, and very rare. Without this quality of openness and vulnerability, partners don't really know each other; they are one image living with another image.
--Charlotte Joko Beck

The most wonderful of all things in life is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a growing depth, beauty and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvellous thing; it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident, and the most wonderful of all things in life.
--Sir Hugh Walpole

You can't love a crowd the same way you can love a person. And a crowd can't love you the way a single person can love you. Intimacy doesn't scale. Not really. Intimacy is a one-on-one phenomenon.
--Hugh Macleod

Electronic communication is an instantaneous and illusory contact that creates a sense of intimacy without the emotional investment that leads to close friendships.
--Clifford Stoll