"If we admit that intimacy is one of the forces involved in the dialectic between belonging and individuation, and that for most people the need, desire, desire for intimacy are stronger than the ability to tolerate it, it follows that in in the sphere of our personal relationships, most of us are victims of human respect "(CA Whitaker, 1989).

Cross and delight of human relationships, a lot has been written about intimacy and several scholars of the psyche have dealt with it trying to explain what drives the human being to desire something that he perceives as dangerous for the integrity of his own self.

Desires and fears in the relationship with the other. The two sides of intimacy

Borrowing the abused myth of Icarus and revisiting it within the sphere of human relations, one could affirm that the need to want to push towards the alt (r) or, towards that source of heat that allows life itself at the right distance , deluding himself into having constant control of himself and his flight, does not guarantee the lucidity of calculating the risks, so that the fall becomes ruinous: he ceases to exist (the other takes over). Staying on the ground, however, would mean living in stillness, imagining something that you will never have the courage to experience.

We should get to know each other deeply e contemplate the other for who he is and not for the need we have of him that could allow to make the flight balanced. The comparison with Icarus may be a little too extreme, considering that the other is represented by the sun, but in the end it is not really theidealization of the other to make relationship stability complicated? When does a person appearing in our life stop being real and become, in fact, ideal?

The choice of the partner

Even in the most "free" relationships, the choice is made, at least in part, on the basis of a series of complex elements that condition it. For example, many of those who claim never to have felt the need for a partner may not realize that in reality it was not a lack of need, but of one conditional waiver (C. Angeli, 1998).

La choice of partner it is a strange mix between myth e family mandates, ties of attachment and satisfaction of personal needs. It is precisely this last point which could answer the above questions. Satisfying one's own personal need, which originates from deep internal dynamics, is often the basis of expectations with which the partner is invested: it is as if one forgets that the couple's relationship is made up of two people.

Your need, whatever it is, becomes the pivot on which the relationship revolves. The other must satisfy him and adapt to our needs that are often not even expressed!

The paradoxes of the emotional relationship

Good communication within the couple plays a fundamental role for the well-being of the relationship but, conversely, unclear or problematic communication can be the basis of profound critical issues. This is what happens when what we can define come into play paradoxes of the emotional relationship.

Here is one of the most common: I expect the other to understand me deeply and satisfy my implicit demands without bothering me communicate explicitly. How then can the other satisfy my needs if he does not know them?

Another that often occurs, especially in couples in crisis, concerns the mutual inability to communicate despite the partner being the person with whom you most get intimate, A kind of communicative inhibition.

The disappointment of expectations, the mutual deafness to the needs of the other (despite these being shouted), the perception of not being welcomed by those who had instead been invested with this mandate, causes a detachment it's a emotional isolation which leads to the sensation, also this paradoxical, of feeling lonely despite living in pairs.

"If you don't want to suffer loneliness, don't get married," said Chekhov (concept later taken up by Whitaker). Beyond any provocation, however, the prevailing concept could lie precisely in the ability to be able to tolerate intimacy with the other starting from the self-knowledge, From ability to enter into intimacy with oneself, to then look for it externally, to recognize itself and then to recognize the other. Identify yourself and belong.

Isabella Patrizia Perrone

* Notes on the author:
Isabella Patrizia Perrone, clinical psychologist, systemic-relational psychotherapist, legal psychologist and psychodiagnostic. Contact person of the Psy + Onlus Clinical Consulting Center. She collaborates as a psychologist in the School Area and works within the emergency psychology project aimed at the populations involved in the earthquake in central Italy.