Love can’t arrive without intimacy

thoughts on love and intimacy, and how they are inextricably linked in nourishing relationships.

My name is Allie Leilani, I am a professional matchmaker, dating coach and love professional based in New York City. Welcome to my Substack!

Here, I will be blogging, storytelling, writing - more or less regularly, about my work, my personal research, my penchant for the areas of love, intimacy and connection. Today, I will be exploring the concept of intimacy in romantic relationships.

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I work with people who want to find love. Love - that which, to me, is a culmination of blind faith, generosity, compassion, friendship, romance and intimacy. 

What is intimacy exactly?

Intimacy should not be mistaken as being synonymous with sex or the erotic. Because while intimacy can be sexual or erotic, not all intimacy is such. We can be intimate with friends, with our parents, with our children, with our pets, with our plants. In my training as a relationship and intimacy coach, intimacy is most often defined as a “feeling of closeness and connection that can be physical, mental, emotional, developmental and spiritual…. It plays an important part in identity and a sense of wholeness” For the sake of this piece, when I use the word “intimacy”, I will be referring to emotional, intellectual, and spiritual closeness. 

You can certainly experience intimacy without love; an intimate moment with an old acquaintance over coffee, for example, but you cannot have love without intimacy. Intimacy is a crucial psychosomatic component of a love that is healthy, empowering, and nourishing, yet it is my experience that so many people are afraid of or disconnected from the experience of intimacy. 

Intimacy comes from the latin intimus, meaning innermost. 

To be seen, held, and accepted by someone who sees our innermost self, which is certainly not perfect but rather splotched with shadows, shortcomings, contradictions, unpleasantries - this, to me, is the most worthy endeavor we can embark on on this Earth. 

In my work as a matchmaker, when a client first comes to me, our initial work is to get clear on why we are speaking to one another in the first place: why matchmaking? Why now? What hasn’t worked for them, and how are they feeling about their journey thus far?

What bubbles up when I initially pose these questions is something like:

“Everyone in my life has a partner except for me, and I want to get married and start a family in the next few years”

“I am so exhausted from the dating apps, and I just don’t have the time to spend on them anymore”

“I am not meeting anyone at my level, and I want to meet the kind of person I imagine myself with”

What follows is where the real discoveries flow. I begin to ask, to any and all iterations of these questions:

“Why is that important to you?”

When I receive the next answer, I may ask again: “great, now why is that important to you?”

When we peel back the layers of our supposed “why”, we begin to find ourselves at the root of the desire. When the layers are peeled back, what lies beneath is often the same desire in different language:

The desire to be seen and known.

The desire to have a witness to one’s life.

A desire to have someone to build a history with. 

And, when I ask the final reason, I realize that the desire for and positioning of love, intimacy and connection is universal: it is the most important thing we can experience in this lifetime. 

I am on a journey to help people find partnership, meaningful, aligned partnership. In a perfect world, life partnership. But achieving an extraordinary and enduring partnership is merely a byproduct of the ability of two people to become emotionally, intellectually, and energetically intimate with one another. 

The twofold risk of intimacy

To really become intimate with someone, you first must be willing to curiously and compassionately see; to allow another person to become, mistake, trial and error, achieve and fail, layer by layer in front of you. You must be willing to see someone as deeply imperfect and ever changing, which may bring up difficult emotions and conflict. Secondly, you must be willing to open yourself up to learn about yourself; the parts that you avoid seeing, that you don’t like to shine a light on. You must be willing to be seen as deeply imperfect and ever changing, which may bring up difficult emotions and conflict. In the crawl spaces of this revealing is where intimacy can arrive.

While we shouldn’t allow or invite a partner to push our buttons, rub salt in our wounds, or aggravate the things about ourselves we don’t like, this is, again, a byproduct of cultivating closeness in a relationship. You cannot expect to remain unstirred when your energy intertwines with another’s, but rather, acknowledge that relationships are fertile grounds for our unresolved, unhealed, and untended to shit to come up, and this is okay! This is the twofold nature of the thing we all most desire: love and intimacy. When we finally allow ourselves to experience true, reciprocal intimacy in our romantic connections, we will exist on a continuum of discomfort, difficult conversations, unpleasant emotions, conflict, etc, but also joy, peace, safety, closeness, meaning, and aliveness. We cannot have just one side of the coin. 

How do we begin to cultivate true intimacy as daters?:

Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Notice your assumptions and judgements, let them melt away. Be open to being surprised by someone’s humanness. Allow yourself to see without a pre-invented story. In my years working as a matchmaker, it never ceases to amaze me how I can find something I love, admire, or am inspired by in every client I work with. When I started my career, I would challenge myself to “find something I loved about every client I worked with”, especially the ones I felt were most difficult to understand. Now, I don’t find it challenging, but rather second nature. When we intentionally take down our judgements around or assumptions of others, we allow them to show us who they truly are, and this allows us to see - a pillar of intimacy. 

2. One dates, be present with yourself, how you are feeling, and the unique person in front of you, and be willing to go off script. You are more than the story you package up about yourself. Let yourself be seen. 

3. Ask the questions that mine for gold. Actively listen and respond in a way that creates room for discovery, play, vulnerability, and moments of intimacy (soon, you can visit my website where you can find a Free Guide on having extraordinary conversations and asking meaningful questions on dates!).  

Closing thoughts:

Intimacy and love are inextricably linked. We will find ourselves in a love that endures when we can achieve true intimacy with another. I speak from my own experience in a partnership of ~6 years, where intimacy hasn’t always been easy. It can be hard to show someone every facet of us. It can feel like we are giving them infinite reasons to inevitably judge or reject us. But to me, the wholeness, aliveness, and closeness that intimacy invites into a relationship outweighs the cost of not allowing intimacy in, everytime. My partner is my greatest teacher. My relationship is my greatest mission. My partner has also seen the most ugly frayed edges of me and loves me not in spite of them but because of them. Intimacy has allowed us to let ourselves be seen by one another. To be seen as two people with countless selves. I only wish to help others feel this sense of seeing and being seen, too.