INTIMACY

(To be published in the September 2010 edition of the East Bay Psychiatric Association Newsletter)


Human nature is pretty clear in some areas. Our species seeks affiliation with other human beings, we desire closeness, warmth, physical attention, touching, sex, communication, understanding, and relationships. We need to share our most intimate feelings and thoughts and we need to feel understood. In short, people need people.

Our modern technological society appears to be conspiring to interfere with these basic needs. There’s e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, cell phones, and i-phones to help us communicate with people instantly and from afar, but what about the actual face-to-face “intimacy” that real relationships provide?

I read recently that nearly half of the teen-age girls in this country are turning to alcohol to help them cope. This suggests that they don’t have others to help them with all of the complex issues that they are flooded with at this juncture in their lives. Where are their mothers, sisters, friends, counselors, and other confidants? Apparently they are nowhere to be found. So the next best thing is to find some solace in getting high or drunk on booze—it’s legal, it’s available, and it works—but only for the briefest of time, at which point the exact same concerns continue to trouble them.

A friend of mine who has been active in AA for over 30 years still puzzles over why this institution works so well, but recently we hit upon an explanation: AA provides “fellowship”. Go to an AA meeting and you are with people who support you, listen to you, call you by name, and make themselves available to you when you are down and out. Where else can you find that? Fellowship is just another aspect of intimacy. It’s not just recovering alcoholics who need an AA model. It’s just about anyone.

People cannot survive well emotionally when they are treated anonymously all the time. The increasing anonymity that characterizes human-to-human interactions in our modern society, including with one’s physician, is unappealing and unpleasant. It recently took my wife 20 minutes to make an appointment for a yearly examination, and when she had finally completed the task through anonymous phone mail and then a nameless person filling in a computerized form for her, that nameless person gave her a “confirmation number” for her appointment. Mind you, she wasn’t making an airline reservation, she was making an appointment for a mammogram!

This abhorrence for anonymity is the same reason, I believe, that people are shopping increasingly at farmer’s markets where they get personal attention, social interaction, and food that is grown by someone they actually meet, and they get to visit with friends and neighbors who may also be at the market. The reasons go well beyond the desire to buy fresh, locally grown food. It’s the same reason that people may prefer to frequent small local banks whose tellers know your name rather than national mega-banks who find creative new ways to charge you suspicious fees. People would rather interact with someone who actually speaks to them as an individual, than with someone who seems to have his hand in your pocket.

Most of us lead excessively hectic lives which can drive us to try to shorten our conversations with others, to communicate as efficiently and remotely as possible with others, and to actually “digitalize” much of the commerce, interactions, and relationships that we engage in. But this lack of intimacy is wearing thin, and I predict we will experience a return to simpler ways sooner than later as people figure out that being anonymous is far less appealing than the closeness and intimacy that is possible with a minimum of effort.