Vulnerability, Intimacy, and Love

Article • 1,135 Words • Love/Romance, Relationships, 2026 • 01/05/2026

Why is intimacy important?

I think that we are in an intimacy crisis. Traditional Masculinity doesn’t allow for men to be intimate with each other. “Nonchalance” in Gen Z dating and all of the ghosting and situationships that happen. Relationships are uncomfortable and vulnerable, which can make people try to avoid it. Without clear and open emotional conversations, intimacy cannot be formed between people.

If you think about it, intimacy is what sets apart a medium friend from a friend (In Defense of Medium Friends). You have intimate and non-intimate relationships. A relationship is not set in stone, but there are usually clear signs if this is someone who you could get along with and let your guard down to be vulnerable with them or not. If this is the case, it seems important to be able to know what factors foster (or inhibit) intimacy so that you could apply that lens to your relationships.

Intimacy as the basis for love

I also believe that intimacy is at the center of my own personal conception of love. In my article One Love, I talk about how I feel one kind of love, that kind being eudaimonic love. I think where that really comes from is the idea of nurturance. This can be defined as a warm, loving feelings and closeness, feeling supportive, and potentially having a committed connection (van Anders 2015). I believe that my feelings of nurturance can be traced back to the intimacy that I build with someone. I would bet that the attachment system is somehow involved in this tangle, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

This is not quite a new idea, as intimacy is central to other people’s ideas of love, like Robert Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love. However, I think that other models see intimacy as a part of the equation rather than the end in itself. I think that other held feelings like romantic/sexual attraction then can add on top of the intimacy, but that there is no synergistic effect or transmutation; rather there are self-reinforcing loops involved with sex and romance that can increase intimacy over time.

What is intimacy anyway?

In the paper, “Showmance”: Is performing intimacy associated with feelings of intimacy?, the authors break intimacy into four main parts:

1. Trust (e.g. a feeling of safety in being oneself)
2. Emotional Closeness (e.g. thoughts, behaviours, and emotions being interconnected)
3. Open communication of thoughts and feelings (e.g. self-disclosure, confiding deeply personal information)
4. Reciprocity (e.g. sharing one’s personal thoughts and the other listening attentively and responding)

I actually think emotional closeness is the result of intimacy, not a building block of it. E.g. you are emotionally close because you are intimate, not intimate because you are emotionally close. A subtle but important distinction, in my opinion.

I also think that to be open is not always to be vulnerable. Sharing “deeply personal information” in some ways isn’t enough, depending on how you’re conceptualizing it. I think that without both people engaging in reciprocal levels of vulnerability over time, there isn’t that much trust built up.

• What about people who are natural oversharers?
  • These people may not attach much stock to sharing information about themselves. So while you may know a lot about them, there hasn’t yet been a vulnerable space built.
• What about strategic sharers?
  • They share just enough/things that they don’t actually care about, which can make the other person feel like the other person has shared a lot which can make them feel closer to the other person, but the person who’s sharing won’t actually feel like they’ve really given too much and feel close to the other person. In other words, they have not had any reciprocal vulnerability.

You can also build intimacy without even speaking, a fact that I think is neglected by the authors. Making soup for someone while they’re sick, washing someone’s back, etc. These are all things that can help build safety and trust in times when you are vulnerable.

Taking into account my criticisms, my revised list is as follows:

1. Trust (built through the reciprocity of vulnerability and holding space)
   • That this person won’t tell others
   • That this person won’t judge me, belittle/mock me, use this against me, etc.
   • That this person cares about me and wants to hold space for me
2. Safety
   • Safety to me seems mostly physiological and this is something that can be developed by depending on someone or through emotional co-regulation
     • Emotions can co-regulate just by vibes (tone, posture, facial expressions, etc.) or by cuddling
     • Co-regulation and attachment might be related, either way they both have ancient evolutionary roots in the parent-child relationship
3. Being seen and understood
   • Trying to understand each other works, but you might feel more intimacy/a different kind of intimacy to someone who more naturally understands you

To try to neatly summarize: intimacy is a sense of closeness that is held between people who see and understand each other who trust and feel safe with each other.

Clarifications

Are there different types of intimacy (i.e. intellectual, physical, emotional, play, access)?

• I believe that these are just various facets of the ways that we trust others in our vulnerability and try to be seen and understood.
• Intimacy development/possibility frontier can be different across different relationships.
  • There are various cultural or personal familiar taboos, you might not talk about certain things with certain people.
    • Ex: You may not feel comfortable talking about sex with your father, but you will talk about it with your partner or your friends.
    • There could be a generational gap, so older people might just not be able to understand what you’re going through, how you’re feeling, etc.
  • No kind of relationship is inherently (able to be) more intimate.
    • Everyone’s relationships are different, so it doesn’t seem correct to make overarching claims about types of relationships in this way.
  • Some relationships like childhood friends or familial have advantage of time. There’s a lot of shared memory and history and the fact that they’ve seen you through different phases that gives it a different color of intimacy.

Is intimacy simply a sense of closeness?

• No, because a sense of closeness can be felt one-sided!
  • The aforementioned oversharer/strategic sharer case is an excellent example.
  • This is also the case with parasocial relationships.
    • You know certain things about someone which makes you think that you “know” them in some kind of personal sense.
      • Of course, you actually don’t know them. You have an idea and preconceived notions about this person that you’re engaging with your own model of them, but that’s not actually who they are potentially.
• I theorize that intimacy is something closer to a bi-directional sense of closeness mixed in with connection.
  • I want to draw on the idea of resonance, that something in you recognizes something in another person.