Intimate Other

Somewhere between solitude and partnership

If a relationship were the goal, what would be at its core?
For me, the answer is intimacy — not the kind built from roles or routines, but something deeper, more present, more true. In my past relationships, intimacy often disappeared beneath the expectations and performances of traditional models. As psychologist Carol Gilligan notes, many of our cultural blueprints for love are drawn from patriarchal hierarchies—privileging duty over depth, and control over connection.

At this point in my life, I’m no longer interested in performing those roles or fitting into those templates. I’m letting go of the conventional framework in favor of something that feels truer to who I am now: a connection rooted in freedom, fluidity, and self-defined meaning.

This shift is deeply personal. I spent much of my life orienting myself around the person I was in relationships—adapting, adjusting, shrinking, softening, doing whatever was needed so the connection could stay intact. I rarely brought my full self to the world. So my deepest desire now is simply not to lose myself again.

And if I’m honest, dating makes me nervous for exactly that reason. I’m afraid of slipping back into those old patterns just as I’m learning to honor my own needs and desires first. For most of my adulthood, I’ve actually been at my best when I’m dating myself: dinners alone, long baths, grooming rituals, small acts of care that remind me I am already whole. I know how to romance myself. I’m only now learning how to date someone else without abandoning the person I’m becoming.

It makes me wonder: if I hadn’t been culturally trained to want a “relationship,” a “partner,” or a “couple,” what would I actually want? What kind of connection would I choose if I started from desire rather than expectation?

Those questions matter because so many of our ideas about partnership are inherited, not chosen. We’re taught—quietly but constantly—that one person should be able to meet all our needs: emotional, sexual, intellectual, logistical, spiritual, social. A kind of all-in-one human solution. But that’s always felt false to me. Unrealistic. And honestly, unfair to everyone involved.

Maybe no single person was ever meant to be our whole world. For most of human history, they weren’t. We had families, neighbors, kin networks, and community woven around us—a broader circle that helped hold the emotional, practical, and relational weight of life. But in our fiercely independent American culture, so much of that communal fabric has thinned. We’ve been conditioned to funnel all our needs into one relationship, one partner, one person who must somehow be everything. Maybe that expectation was never realistic to begin with. Maybe we were always meant to have constellations of connection—different people illuminating different parts of who we are.

Between solitude and partnership, there’s a third thing—something less defined, but no less real. It’s the space between being fully alone and being fully bound, where connection isn’t a structure but a living current.

That leaves me somewhere between being alone and being in a full traditional relationship. Is there a middle space between solitude and commitment, independence and intimacy? If so, what lives there? Is it an existing current we can step into—or something that forms in the meeting of two people, a new kind of relationship that honors both?

For me, that space comes alive when each participant tends to themselves even as they tend to the connection—not fusing, not withdrawing, but meeting in the living space between. It’s a kind of shared presence that honors two truths at once: when we’re together, we offer our full attention and attunement; when we’re apart, we honor the path, growth, and unfolding of the individual. Connection becomes a dance of closeness and spaciousness, each held with equal respect.

That’s why I came up with a term of my own: Intimate Other.

An Intimate Other is the kind of relationship that fits where I am in life today. It might be with one person, or with several over time—each connection meaningful, each one shaped by the moment we occupy. It’s about presence, not possession. Depth, not definition.

To be an Intimate Other is to inhabit a sacred, often undefined space in someone’s life—a presence marked by emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and sometimes physical closeness. These relationships are grounded not in obligation or permanence, but in mutual curiosity, attunement, and vulnerability.

And within this dynamic, sexual intimacy holds a distinct place. It’s not about conventional commitment, but about embodied trust, energetic exchange, and desire expressed with intention. As Esther Perel writes in Mating in Captivity, eroticism outside traditional frameworks can deepen emotional truth and self-awareness. Within the realm of intimate others, sex becomes one potential expression of closeness—a space for exploration, affirmation, and surrender, without the pressure of definition.

Philosopher Julia Kristeva describes intimacy as a space of transformation—where identity can soften, dissolve, and reconfigure in the presence of another. And bell hooks reminds us that love is a verb: a daily practice rooted in care, trust, and recognition, not just structure or exclusivity.

In Buddhism, the idea of beingness offers a similar lens—a radical acceptance of the present moment without clinging, grasping, or projecting into the future. Applied to connection, it suggests a kind of intimacy rooted not in attachment or outcome, but in shared presence. An Intimate Other becomes someone with whom you practice this state of being—not fixing, shaping, or defining, but relating from awareness, curiosity, and non-grasping. It transforms connection from something we manage into something we meet.

“Let the winds of heaven dance between you.”
—Khalil Gibran

An Intimate Other, then, is someone with whom you co-create a connection that resists easy categorization yet carries deep emotional and spiritual meaning. These relationships honor authenticity over performance, presence over permanence. They are shaped not by what we’re supposed to be to each other, but by what we are—right here, right now.

These days, I’m letting connection unfold at its own pace. Not dating, exactly—more like relating and companioning in the wild, letting the moment shape what it wants to be. There’s a gentleness in meeting someone without the weight of a script, without expecting one person to become the whole container for my life. I’m learning to honor the way connection breathes, expands, contracts, and surprises. Whatever comes next doesn’t need a name—only presence.

And who knows—this path may someday lead me into a more traditional partnership. I’m not closed to that. I still welcome it. I’m simply unwilling to start from expectation or march toward it out of habit. If I do find myself in something more defined, I want it to be shaped by the journey that brought me there—by presence, awareness, self-honoring, and genuine connection—not by the gravitational pull of what I’m “supposed” to want. Whatever form love takes in my life, I want it to arise from lived truth, not inherited templates. And the only way I know how to do that is to keep listening to the moment and letting it shape what’s possible next.