Every time I open TikTok, it seems to increasingly throw “avoidant attachment” videos at me (far too specific for my liking). To the so-called psychologists on the screen, avoidance is an issue to be fixed, an unresolved trauma that should be deeply analysed and journalled about until it is healed. Yet, we only need to glance back in time to realise that people have both craved and feared intimacy for thousands of years. The vulnerability of bearing yourself to another person is possibly the bravest thing one can ever do. To fear intimacy is not about not wanting to connect with others, it is about fearing their rejection.
The great American novel, The Great Gatsby, is perhaps the most perfect example of this. It is F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote in another one of his novels, This Side of Paradise, that “they slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.” In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is obsessed with Daisy Buchanan — that is no spoiler. He may be one of the most famous yearners literature has ever seen: buying a house across from Daisy’s just so that he might catch a glimpse of the woman he loves. But, as the novel unfolds, the reader comes to question if it is truly Daisy who Gatsby loves. Or whether it is simply a crafted and idealised image of a woman — a mirage of hope and dreams in the form of a “green light” Gatsby stretches his hand out to touch but fails to reach. Is it sometimes easier to create someone to love rather than loving them for who they are? That way, we are never really hurt — at least not by another person. Intimacy is easier if you remove vulnerability.
My ForYou page also seems to be filled with teaser trailers for Emerald Fennell’s much-anticipated movie adaption of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. But before it came to the big screen, Brontë had already captured the complicated nature of intimacy down to a tee. In one of the greatest love stories ever told, the tale of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw shows how intimacy can both destroy and consume. Love is not simply tender and gentle — as it is so often portrayed. Rather, it is dangerous and powerful; it can create an intimacy so deep that it leads Catherine to famously declare “I am Heathcliff.” Soulmates offer the greatest level of connection imaginable. Catherine allows her own identity to fall away as she opens up completely to Heathcliff. Intimacy on the deepest level is terrifying and seems to defy the very nature of the individual. In order to be intimate, do you first have to let go of yourself?
After reading this, it seems almost too understandable that our world is flooded with those avoiding intimacy. To be truly known is both petrifying and all that we have ever longed for.
Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash