Understanding The Fear of Intimacy

The feeling of disdain is widespread for those who are said to be, behind the smiles, ‘afraid of intimacy’, or struggling with a fear of closeness in relationships. Why on earth be scared of something so obviously delightful and profound as a relationship? Why take fright at an unambiguous good? We speak of such types with pity and sorrow and can count on ready sympathy when narrating the story of the end of a relationship that seemed to founder on their caution. The problem feels as withholding as being afraid of dancing – and as cowardly as running away from a moth.

But to anyone who has come close to love, who has been deeply invested in someone and then had to watch the scaffolding of their existence fall apart, there is nothing at all surprising, or even momentarily worthy of contempt, in the idea of being very scared indeed at love’s approach. Why not be really quite afraid, or even – frankly – terror struck?

When Love Reveals Its True Cost

The only people who can speak lightly of a fear of intimacy are – ultimately – those who haven’t had to pay the due price for intimacy: those blessed, blithe or reserved people who, by luck or discernment, have always been treated gently by those they adored. Or who have kept themselves protected from intensity. Or carefully and cannily chosen people they could bear to lose.

But those who aren’t afraid of love haven’t magically acceded to a superior degree of wisdom; they may simply never have met anyone they profoundly cared about.

Love, when it unfolds in its full potency, is no game; it is necessarily impatient with all our claims to independence, self-sufficiency and sanity. It makes a mockery of our judicious plans and serene pronouncements. When we love deeply, the beloved isn’t just an entertaining adjunct or diverting roommate; they aren’t someone we have fun with on weekends and share the pain of friends’ weddings with. They begin to structure the nature of our being; they are given the keys to our sense of self-worth.

If this were to go wrong, it wouldn’t be a little issue to be mopped up after a few tearful days. If – after those holidays to Corfu, the trip to Paris, the renovations of the flat, the long evenings in discussion about their career and their parents, the tenderness and the vulnerability, the confessions and the sweetness – if, after all this, they walked away, said they needed something else, worried that they might become restless if they settled down at this stage, and sent a brief or curt message about relocating to another continent, the universe would crater.

The Origins of a Fear of Closeness in Relationships

What we’re talking about here – therefore – is not a minor hurdle that can be mastered with a little therapy and a few uplifting books of advice or reminiscence. To be heartbroken is to approach psychic annihilation. The wards of the world’s psychiatric hospitals have a not negligible number of patients in them who could not be sensible about loss – and why should they be? Poor souls (numb with lorazepam or haloperidol) who were not, in the end, afraid enough of love.

For those of us who are, in our depths, scared of intimacy, the problem might have started because of the relationship at university, or in our second job, or with the person we married. There might have been one lover who made us forever timid about giving ourselves again.

But for many more of us, we cannot put a finger on any heartbreak that rendered us cautious. We can’t – consciously – recall any particular disaster. And yet we too are timid; we too take a very long time about going on a date and are panicked the moment anyone seems to develop feelings for us.

Probably our hearts were broken too, just very long ago, in years that have entirely vanished from memory. We can no more remember it than we can remember learning to walk or tell the time. But someone will also have broken our faith. Maybe mother left or father shouted, someone died or someone acquired a new family. And so we learnt that to love is to lay ourselves open to a catastrophe that we never want to experience again – and will do a lot to avoid.

Rethinking the ‘Avoidant’ Personality

We, those who are scared of love, may well be the villains of modern romance: written off as stingy and odd, as if a fear of closeness in relationships were a trivial defect. But what if our plight was in fact hugely understandable, very logical – and a sign not of cowardice, but of having fully and deeply surrendered to love already? We, the timid and avoidant ones, have been punished as the optimists never have been. We aren’t unacquainted with love; we may just know it very well – too well – already.