Intimacy Is A Value
I’ve been thinking about the difference between wanting something and valuing it.
Most people want intimacy. They want to be known, to feel close to another person, to have somewhere to put down the performance of their daily life. The wanting is almost universal. But wanting something and valuing it are not the same thing - not even close.
This has been a deep question and inquiry of mine, over the past year, immersing myself in the field of dating again; and in particular, exploring outside of my normal dating pool.
I have discovered that to value something is to organise your life around it. To make tradeoffs for it. To let it shape not just what you hope for but how you actually spend your time, your attention, your willingness to be uncomfortable.
Career-focused people understand this instinctively: about their careers. They make sacrifices. They delay gratification. They practice. They put in the hours not because every hour feels good but because they’ve decided this thing matters, and they act accordingly.
Intimacy requires the same orientation. And almost no one treats it that way.
There’s a reason for this, which is largely cultural.
We are trained, from early on, to perform. To present a version of ourselves that is capable, together, low-maintenance. Vulnerability gets coded as risk- as something that could be used against you, something that makes you less competitive, less desirable, less safe.
The skills that make someone successful in a career, ie. strategic thinking, emotional regulation, a certain productive distance from feeling, are often the exact skills that make real closeness hard. You get very good at managing yourself and very unpracticed at actually being with someone else.
And so people arrive at relationships already shaped by all of this. They want intimacy the way they want to travel more or read more- genuinely, but abstractly. As a thing for later. As a thing that doesn’t require the same seriousness they bring to everything else.
What would it mean to actually value intimacy?
I think it would look something like this: choosing depth over comfort in a conversation, even when comfort is available. Staying with something hard instead of redirecting. Being willing to be seen in a state that isn’t impressive. Making space, regularly, for another person to not be okay, and not trying to fix it immediately.
It would mean treating your inner life as something worth developing. Not because it’s therapeutic (though it might be), but because you can’t offer closeness you haven’t cultivated in yourself.
It would mean, sometimes, choosing an evening of real conversation over another hour of work. Not as a treat. As a priority.
This is countercultural in ways that are easy to underestimate. In a world that rewards production and punishes softness, choosing intimacy as a value - not a want, not a goal, a value, is a quiet act of resistance.
Intimacy isn’t a reward for getting your life together.
It’s a way of being in the world. And you either decide to practice it, or you don’t.
