Intimacy requires bravery, and not everyone is up to the challenge. In order to be close to people we have to be willing to bare ourselves. I don’t recommend you do this lightly or quickly; it takes time to know someone. Your heart is tender and precious, and not something you want to treat recklessly, but if you’re building something real with someone, whether it’s a friendship, or a romantic interest, or the developing and always growing relationship with your children or your parents, speaking from your heart is always the way.

In order to be seen, known, understood and cherished, we have to be real about who we are, how we feel, what we want, what scares us, excites us and inspires us. We have to know ourselves, we have to be intimately acquainted with who we are, before we can share our hearts fully, and we have to feel safe in order to do that. Let me just say that many people struggle with the underside of intimacy—the messy, in-your-face realities of being human that we must acknowledge and lean into, in order to heal and grow. Some people run screaming from that kind of work. Timing has a lot to do with this stuff. Most people don’t get up one morning and decide this is the day they’re going to face their demons head on. Most of us have to be pushed to do that, and when I say pushed, I mean we have to get to a point where it becomes obvious that avoiding this work only prolongs the pain.

If you try to force someone to face their stuff before they’re ready or able, no matter how loving your approach, do not be surprised if they lash out or take off. It’s never our job to manage another person’s path. We may want someone to be ready to get right with themselves so they can be right with us, we may want that desperately, but if they don’t want that, our job is to get out of the way. If a person wants to walk away from you, let him, let her. I know it’s heartbreaking. When we love people, and truly love them, we want them to be happy. That’s natural and beautiful, but we don’t get to choose the timeframe, or manage the way it happens. Everyone has to do their own work in their own time. We never know what another person needs to learn and grow, and sometimes in our attempts to alleviate a loved one’s pain, we also rob them of an experience that would have helped them make a shift. It’s brutal to watch someone we love as they suffer or make mistakes or pick roads we don’t understand, but sometimes that’s exactly what love asks of us.

It also hurts when we offer someone a chance to come forward, when we reach out a hand and let them know we’re there and we see them and they’re safe to open to us, and they say no. It’s so hard not to take that personally, but usually in those cases, a person is saying no to the work of being intimate. It feels like too much. Being close to people is not like it is in the movies. It’s not all fun and light and running through fields of flowers. Some of it is deeply uncomfortable. A willingness to reveal the places that aren’t so pretty, to fight back when old coping mechanisms arise that don’t serve us, to say we’re sorry when we blow it, or allow our past to come crashing into our present—none of this stuff is comfortable or easy. Love is the most beautiful, freeing feeling in the world, but sometimes you have to get on the battlefield so you can fight the barriers you’ve built to protect yourself, because those walls might prevent you from getting hurt, but they also block the love. If a person can’t meet you on that field, they don’t belong there with you yet. Maybe the timing will never be right, and maybe it will, but what we have is right now, and the least painful path is opening to reality as it is, which is not always as we’d like it to be. Nonetheless, I’ll take truth over fiction any day. I want to know the people in my life so I can love them fiercely, and I want to be loved that way, too. Life, in my opinion, is too short for anything else.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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