Why Honesty Is Essential For Intimacy
By Pegi Burdick. Posted on .
How big is the elephant in your living room? The things we avoid talking about will keep us away from the nectar of life: intimacy. In our marriage vows, we mention loyalty down to our passing: "to have and to hold, till death do us part." But what about respect, honesty and acceptance? Do we really know that person we are committing ourselves to for a lifetime?
How well do we even know ourselves? What happens to that mis-matched "luggage" we bring into that key relationship? Those behaviors and attitudes are functioning all the time, sometimes visibly and sometimes covertly. But they are cookin' all the time.
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It's like having a wooden leg inside your slacks … not visible to the next person. Felt acutely by the owner but hidden. Then, something forces you to run really fast and jump. Well, you can't do the fast part or the jump part ... the day of reckoning is here.
Your partner in the race confronts you with, "Why didn't you tell me you had a wooden leg?" You feel shame and all of your fears come tumbling out of the proverbial closet. Your worst fears become known but you can't even use the appropriate words to explain why because you feel like you are five-years-old again and terrified. You feel like crying.
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Where do you go from here? He's furious and feels you have not been forthright with him. You're silent and totally self-conscious with your exposed shame about money. But here's the good part: marriage gives us rights and entitlements. We have physical options, we have the social acceptance of being put first, we had good reasons or so we thought, to fall in love and marry; we chose that person over someone else. Keep reading ...
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