Intimate Other {v2}

Many of us learned to ask, early on:
What are we?
Dating? Exclusive? Committed? Headed somewhere?

Structure can feel stabilizing. Naming something can quiet uncertainty. There’s comfort in knowing where we stand.

But I’ve been wondering about a different question.

Instead of asking, What is our relationship?
What if we asked, How are we relating?

Relating is something happening now. It isn’t a title — it’s an action.
Are we meeting one another with honesty?
With attentiveness?
With curiosity rather than control?

It’s easy to tighten around a connection — to reach for definition as a way to feel secure. Most of us have done that. But loosening our grip doesn’t mean loosening care. It means allowing intimacy to breathe before we ask it to harden into form.

Presence first. Shape later.

In Buddhist thought, there’s an emphasis on being rather than grasping — on meeting what is here without clinging to what we want it to become. I’m not always good at that. But I’m learning.

Fluidity isn’t vagueness. Intention still matters deeply. So does consistency. Commitment, as I understand it now, isn’t about locking something into place before it has grown. It’s about how we show up while it is growing.

There’s something quietly powerful about letting connection unfold — about staying present without grasping, about meeting what’s actually here rather than rushing toward what we hope it becomes.

These days, it feels a bit like dating in the wild — meeting people without trying to steer the connection toward a predetermined outcome. There’s a gentleness in that. A willingness to let the terrain reveal itself before deciding what it should be.

Somewhere between solitude and traditional partnership, there is a middle space. A space where two people tend to themselves and to the connection at the same time. Where intimacy leads, and structure emerges naturally — if it does.

I sometimes wonder what we would want if we weren’t handed a ready-made definition of what a relationship should look like. If we weren’t measuring ourselves against timelines, titles, or inherited templates. What would we choose — slowly, honestly — if we were choosing from the inside out?

When the living of it matters more than the naming of it, something shifts.

And maybe this isn’t only about romance. The practice of relating opens between any two people, at any moment. We often rush to decide: Is this a potential partner? A friend? A colleague? A resource? We categorize quickly, sometimes before we’ve even listened. But what if we allowed the encounter itself to lead — without needing to sort it immediately into purpose?

I think of the person in that space as an Intimate Other.

An Intimate Other is someone with whom there is emotional, intellectual, spiritual — and sometimes physical — closeness, without pressure for the bond to harden into a predefined role. The connection is shaped not by category, but by presence — by how we show up, how we care, and how we allow it to unfold.

And maybe this idea isn’t limited to romance. An Intimate Other could be a partner, yes — but also a friend, a former love, a neighbor, even a stranger across a table. It is anyone with whom we are practicing presence instead of possession — anyone who invites us to ask not What are we? but How am I relating right now?

Not a title.
Not a possession.
A practice of closeness.

Maybe the place to begin isn’t with What are we?

Maybe it’s simply:

How are we relating?