Closeness

It is remarkable what we can discover when we stop to think about things that once seemed too simple to need an explanation. Sometimes all it takes is a word, an ordinary conversation, or a memory that appears without being called upon to realize that we have spent much of our lives confusing one thing with another. Lately, this has happened to me with intimacy.

It is curious, because we tend to associate intimacy with companionship, love, or sex. As if the closeness of two bodies, the years spent together, or the habit of seeing each other every day were enough to truly know someone. But the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that intimacy is something far stranger and much harder to find.

You can spend your entire life surrounded by friends, have a large family, fall in love several times, share a bed for years, and yet never experience true intimacy.

Because there is an enormous difference between someone knowing who you are and someone truly knowing you.

There are people who know where you were born, what you do for a living, what you like to eat, what you believe, and even how you behave when you are in a bad mood. They know your habits, your routines, and your favorite stories. They may even be able to predict some of your decisions. And yet, there is an immense territory within you of which they know absolutely nothing.

They know nothing of that irrational fear you have carried since childhood, or of an embarrassment that still comes back to you when no one is watching. They have never heard the joke you have never told because it would take twenty years of explanations for anyone to understand it. Nor do they know about the small victories you celebrated in silence, the times you pretended to be fine, or the wounds that changed the way you see the world.

And it is not necessarily because you wanted to hide these things. Sometimes, quite simply, there was never an opportunity to reveal them. Or perhaps you never found someone willing to look that far.

I think getting to know a person is very much like getting to know a city.

You may have visited it many times, know where it is, how to get there, what the weather is like, and what its people are like. You may recognize its avenues, visit its monuments, and speak confidently about its virtues and flaws. You may even live there for years and believe that it has nothing left to teach you.

But perhaps you will never discover that little shop, hidden away on an unremarkable street, where they sell the best ice cream in town. Nor will you know from which corner the sunset looks most beautiful. You may never learn that there is a square where old men gather every afternoon to tell the same stories, or a street that, after the rain, carries a scent found nowhere else.

The city was always there. What was missing was a different way of knowing it.

Something similar happens with people. We grow accustomed to walking along their main avenues and eventually convince ourselves that this is all they are.

And perhaps the most unsettling thing is that we, too, contribute to this distance. From childhood, we learn to present different versions of ourselves. One for our family, another for our friends, another for work, and yet another for the person we love. Not always out of dishonesty, but because life in society seems to demand a certain caution. There are thoughts we keep to ourselves to avoid causing worry, feelings we conceal to avoid making others uncomfortable, and memories we hold back because we suspect no one would know what to do with them.

And so, little by little, we can become people who are perfectly familiar to everyone and deeply unknown to anyone.

Yet I do not believe intimacy is simply a matter of sharing secrets. You can confess something deeply personal and still feel like a stranger. Nor is it about laying your soul bare all at once, like someone emptying every drawer in a house to prove there is nothing hidden inside.

There is something more delicate to it.

Perhaps intimacy begins when we can reveal a part of ourselves without feeling the need to justify it. When someone understands not only what we did, but something of the long road that brought us there. When a peculiar habit no longer requires an explanation, a weakness does not change the affection we receive, and silence can be understood without turning into suspicion.

It is the possibility of being seen without having to play a part.

And this does not necessarily require years of living together. There are people with whom we spend decades and never manage to open certain doors. Others appear on an ordinary afternoon and, for reasons we could never quite explain, make it possible for us to speak about things we have kept to ourselves all our lives. Not because they are extraordinary, but because, for a moment, the constant vigilance with which we usually face the world simply disappears.

Perhaps this is why intimacy also requires a certain kind of courage. It is not enough to find someone willing to know us; we must also be willing to be known. And that means accepting that someone else may discover our contradictions, our clumsiness, and those parts of our history that even we have not yet fully understood.

That is no small thing.

I have come to believe that one of the deepest forms of loneliness is not having no one around, but having no one who knows exactly where we are. We can receive affection, companionship, and attention, and still feel that something essential within us remains without a witness.

And perhaps that is why losing intimacy hurts so much. Because when someone with whom we have shared that particular kind of closeness disappears from our lives, we lose more than their company, their affection, or the routines we built together. We also lose the only person who knew certain corners of our existence. There are memories left with no one to share them with, jokes that no longer make sense, and little stories we can no longer tell without starting from the very beginning. It is as though part of our life has been left without a witness.

But there is something sadder still. With that person, a certain way of being ourselves also disappears. Not because we cease to be who we are, but because some parts of our identity only find expression within particular relationships. There are gestures, words, and ways of looking at the world that were born in the company of someone else and that, when that person leaves, seem to remain suspended in time.

And perhaps that is why intimacy is so difficult to find again. Because meeting someone new is not enough, nor is loving them deeply, nor even being willing to tell them everything. There is a kind of understanding that cannot be demanded or hurried, a trust that does not always emerge, no matter how much we long for it. Not everyone who enters our lives will come to know our city, much less learn to love its forgotten corners.

Perhaps what we are searching for, deep down, is not someone who will accompany us everywhere, but someone who will one day reach those places within us where we have never taken anyone before.

Someone who will know our main streets, of course, but also the narrow alleys, the abandoned houses, the squares that no longer exist, and the places we return to only in memory.

And who, after discovering them all, will still want to stay.

Because perhaps intimacy is precisely that: not having to hide a single part of our city for someone to find it beautiful.