Being Known: The Seven Levels of Intimacy

Matthew Kelly wrote the classic relationship book The Seven Levels of Intimacy: The Art of Loving and the Joy of Being Loved. The book is simply written, easy to read, and has some really interesting ways to begin thinking differently about some of your closest relationships.

Kelly believes that the purpose of the healthiest close relationships is to help you become your best self, and encouraging people that you love to evolve, develop, and become their best selves as well. If you are in the right primary relationship, it should be challenging you some. We want to spur each other's development along to become the best version of ourselves.

Intimacy isn't needed in all relationships. We all do better, though, if we have real intimacy in some of our relationships. Intimacy takes mutual disclosure and self-revelation. Lower levels of intimacy are fine with people you don't know well or want to get close to, but with people you want to go deeper with the lower levels of intimacy are just a warm-up.

Here are Kelly's seven levels of intimacy:

1. Cliches: at this level, we are having flat, brief conversations with others, with very little disclosure or significance. Think of how most people interact with the grocery clerk. It's boring, monotonous, and repetitive. An example would be asking how work was and getting the reply "fine." These are fine conversation starters and may be appropriate with strangers, but are unsatisfying if this is the level your closest relationships stay at. If you hang out in clichés, it's a sure fire way to avoid intimacy.

2. Just the Facts: We discuss sports, current events, the stock market, weather, celebrity gossip,and what we did today. It's safe to discuss facts. It pretty much guarantees that there won't be conflict. Facts are usually impersonal.

3. Opinion: You don't have to make yourself vulnerable at all to announce your opinions. It can lead to conflict. Arguments can occur here which reveal a lack of maturity, inability to transcend self and empathize with another's view, and a shortage of self-awareness. Getting stuck on this level can cause disagreements, demonstrate a lack of a common goal, and cause people to downshift back into clichés and facts. As we mature, we should be able to agree to disagree and to accept differences.

4. Hopes and Dreams: Sharing our vision for our life, what we are hoping to accomplish and experience is far more personal, and takes us deeper with the other person. We need to feel fairly safe to do this. I can't imagine sharing my hopes and dreams with anyone who I experience as critical and judgmental. Revealing your dreams and learning about those of the other person charges the relationship with energy. Building a dream together with an intimate other is a powerful connection between you. Dreams give our lives focus and purpose.

5. Feelings: Going beyond facts and events to share the more personal elements of how you feel about your life, your day, your work, your relationships, will take you still deeper into knowing and being known. One catch is that you have to be able to identify your own feelings before you can share them. You can deepen a close relationship by asking about how the other person feels. Listen intently from the heart. It takes being willing to be vulnerable to share feelings, but that's where all the good stuff is in relationships. It's a risk, but what is life without a little risk?

6. Faults, Fears and Failures: You don't have to be perfect to be loved or loving. It is in sharing our misadventures, mistakes and mess-ups that people often feel closer to us. These flaws make us real.  Kelly describes this level of intimacy as emotional nakedness. if we can take down our guard at this level with those we are closest to, we help them also feel safe to reveal more. It's a mutual thing. Asking for help also comes in here. Being able to put down your pride and admit mistakes also allows the other person to be imperfect. We all have fears and a shadow self. It's normal.

7. Legitimate Needs/Dynamic Collaboration:  We all have legitimate needs in the four aspects of life: physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. Expressing your legitimate needs and asking to understand those of the other person leads you into a thriving relationship. The highest level of relationships require that you also have the heart to try to help meet the other person's needs. There should  be both people giving and receiving. The needs must be legitimate, not superficial, manipulative or unrealistic.

Kelly also has a lot of valuable tools to suggest to making relationships intentionally closer. He suggests creating unstructured time together, which he calls carefree timelessness. It might just be spending a day with someone you love and doing whatever you both feel like. He encourages giving up criticizing others, and avoiding gossip. He suggests we be mindful of the words we choose and that we practice self-discipline and forgiveness.

The Seven Levels of Intimacy is a wonderful gem of a book. It will inspire you to be better, love more, go deeper, and be more aware of what you are co-creating with others. Not only will it help you learn how to develop more meaningful relationships, but it will also inspire those of you who are parents about how to help teach your children to creating intimate relationships in a healthy way.

Tiny Beautiful Things

On a recent cross-country flight, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Cheryl Strayed's new book, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar (Vintage Books, 2012). Strayed is the author of the current New York Times list bestseller, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Rim Trail. This book is a collection of her heartfelt responses to letters she has received as the advice columnist for The Rumpus, an online literature community.

Strayed deeply absorbs, wrestles with, and responds to the life and relationship dilemmas her readers write in with. She bravely opens up and shares some of her own personal tragedies and triumphs as well. People write to Sugar, and open up about dealing with the death of a loved one, betrayal by their partner, their career dreams and aspirations, settling for things and relationships for security, family troubles, sexuality, and a myriad of other topics. It's an anonymous forum for deeply personal dialogue and soul-searching.

While the responses are at times peppered with blue language, the answers are real, deep, and show her warmth and hard-won wisdom from being informed by her own life experiences. Strayed lost her mother to illness as a young adult. She married young and was divorced by 26. She remarries later, and survives her husband’s affair. She struggled to become a writer, with waitressing jobs, mentoring at-risk teens, teaching anger management to low-income families, teaching memoir writing, and lots of other adventures along the way. She is the mother of two children.

Strayed strikes just the right tone of radical compassion, acceptance, vulnerability, and challenge. She understands, but she encourages the writer (and us as readers) to stretch to become our biggest self.

Take this advice Strayed gives to a man after the end of his 20 year marriage, when he is struggling with whether or not to love the woman he is involved with a few years later, “Do it. Doing so will free your relationship from the tense tangle that withholding weaves. Do you realize that your refusal to utter the word ‘love’ to your partner has created a force field all its own? Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel...Don't be strategic or coy...Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word 'love' to all the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will...We're all going to die. Hit the iron dinner bell like it's dinner time.”

Strayed's admonitions to her memoir writing class are profoundly true on multiple levels. “You get no points for living, I tell my students. It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It’s the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by what the story means.” I feel the same way as a therapist and life coach, as I help clients try to integrate their experiences into their current life, and cull the meaning from their own life's chapters.

There are a number of bittersweet sections in the book, like when Strayed reflects on her sense of wonder about life. You never know who will be in your life forever, and who will just be there for a while. As she points out, sometimes the people we start out thinking are going to be there with us forever don't end up being there. It’s also very surprising the people that show up in our lives and play a meaningful role when we didn’t expect them.

The final letter in the book, written by a 22-year old, is worth buying the book for. The writer asks for wisdom from Strayed about what she would write to her younger self, if she got the chance. It's funny, but it's also very honest. Stop worrying about being fat. Don't lament about your career so much; you have a life, not just a career. You can't convince people to love you. Either they love you or they don't. Resolve what childhood wounds you can in your 20s, knowing you'll have to go back and resolve more of them later as your life evolves. Watch your assumptions about other people, as they are often wrong. Do the work you’re supposed to be doing. My favorite, the very last piece of advice in the book, is to take the winter coat your mother bought you. Don't critique the coat. It may be very precious if it’s the last gift she gives you, because, in an autobiographical note, she may be dead by spring. Say thank you.

I fell in love with Sugar. I think you might, too. Cheryl Strayed's perspective is funny, honest, and speaks to the best self in each of us. The idea of writing a letter to your younger self is a particularly valuable one that just could help us offer ourselves guidance from our own earlier life lessons.

The Outsourced Life

A new book by Arlie Russell Hochschild, an ethnographic sociologist, really gets you thinking about the details of your daily life, tasks, and relationships, and how outsourcing might not be progress. Sometimes more is not more; it is a bit empty and disconnected from our human spirit. Hochschild's book is The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, 2012).

As people work more hours and are less connected to family and friends, they outsource more help for personal things, like:

child-care/nannies

chauffeuring

care of elderly parents

wedding planning

holiday cards

planning and preparing meals

shopping

cleaning

gardening

washing the car

love coaches

home organizers

holiday decorators/light installers

tutoring

college planning

surrogates

dog walkers/doggy daycare/pet waste clean-up

window washers

The writer has a non-judgmental style as she interviews both business owners and people who purchase these personal services because they are busy, aren't sure how to do them, or feel they are not good at them. Clearly, people are more disconnected from these hands-on tasks to daily living than they were in previous generations. Paying for services that are very personal adds a different element, and Hochschild is sympathetic to both sides--overworked consumers and the personal service workers who provide these services to create their own living.

The book raises interesting questions about whether we are creating social stratas that are different economically and experientially, with order-barking, fast-paced directors and entrepreneurs at the top, and emotionally attuned, patient, and human-paced mediators at the bottom. Hochschild interviews surrogate mothers who offer a "womb to rent" in disadvantaged circumstances, as well as the people who hire them. She interviews nannies and child-care and elder-care workers, and the busy, hassled employers who hire and depend deeply on them. It is a relationship which is both economic and emotionally intimate with the most vulnerable family members. There are often regrets from the employers that they can't afford to take the time to be with the baby or the aging parent themselves.

This is an interesting book that helps us examine the emotional costs of outsourcing too much in the personal areas of our life, the labors of love. While not everyone has the family or friend support to get through certain life tasks without professional help, this book is a good reminder that there is inherent value, joy, and meaning in the little tasks of caring for our children, helping our elderly parents, gardening, cooking our own imperfect holiday meals, etc. These are the little things that make us connected to those we love and care for, and make our lives both richer and deeper.

There is more to life than speed and efficiency, and we need to be aware of outsourcing too many essential life functions that make our lives more real and grounded. Don't miss out on all the messy stuff which will fill your life with more color and experiences. Work can be too demanding, and rob you of far too much if you don't set some limits. I guess this explains how pulling weeds and planting things in our garden is one of the bright spots of bliss in my week.