To cultivate intimacy in the modern world is to remember how to move slowly.

You can feel deeply connected to someone who will never feel that with you. That doesn’t diminish the intimacy; it simply reveals its asymmetry. And you can be intimate with people without ever touching them - a mentor, a stranger whose story becomes part of your own, a friend with whom words are unnecessary.

Connection has become a performance art, with intimacy as its most miscast role.

The great confusion of the modern age is not that we lack intimacy, but that we have misidentified it – mistaking it for sex, proximity, or exposure. We have reduced intimacy to the mere friction of flesh, as though the soul does not demand its own form of nakedness. What passes for closeness in the era of endless sharing is often a façade, a... See more