on intimacy

28 October, 2026 - Tags: reflections, medium length, adult themes

Intimacy is in many ways to me now an experience that is hard to put to words, though that hasn't stopped me from trying to. I've had some time to think about intimacy over the past few years with much of my reflection coming in the past year. I would like to think that the way I experience and appreciate intimacy has changed radically, being a sheltered kid from a very religious family. I've gotten to see many ways in which different individuals experience intimacy: from strangers, friends, family, and partners alike.

My original perception of intimacy was founded heavily on constraints. I saw intimacy with another as a set of restricted actions established by external convention, centred around physical and sexual interaction. I attribute this in retrospect to conservative Asian interpretations of Christian doctrines that I was introduced to up until my late teens. The prototypical example, "no sex until marriage", established that intimacy was reserved for couples who had fulfilled the criteria for such a thing: marriage, having a house of their own, and so on.

This eventually developed into a deep-seated belief that intimacy was meant to be exclusive to one individual and was, until I was married, completely inaccessible to me. Until my early teens, I was content with this understanding. I took pride in my ability to uphold the virtuousness of abstinence from pursuing intimacy. Unbeknownst to me, this false confidence arose from the simple fact that my needs were actually being fulfilled in many other ways I had been blind to see.

I was then still able to spend much time with my family, going on weekly cycling trips, having game nights every Friday, and having frequent visits to my cousins'. Public education allowed me to have a consistent and stable social circle that didn't need that much effort to maintain. I was fortunate to have a teacher who challenged me intellectually, "punishing" me for insubordination (a requirement by Asian standards) with thousand-word, well-researched essays and lengthy debates that he knew I enjoyed and found fulfilling.

It was only as these pillars supporting my early needs and desires were suddenly pulled from under me in my mid-teens that I began to experience just how reductive and suffocating that understanding of intimacy was.

Marital, health, and financial issues tore the family apart, putting an end to the activities we used to do together and causing me to withdraw and dissociate from my family. I graduated and entered a school system that had ever-shifting classmates and no guarantees of a consistent social circle. My interests developed rapidly and fell out of the scope of my classes and lecturers. I failed to find anyone who would engage with my interests meaningfully. Nobody showed as much genuine interest in what I had to say about them as the teacher who had never failed to read through, annotate, and even challenge me about every extra-curricular essay I'd written for him.

I had also had the misfortune of being exposed to sexually explicit media then, fueled by an emerging curiosity about sexual intimacy that had only been suppressed and ducked by an instance of "the talk" which consisted of "no, don't" and "it has to be with a girl that you marry", and had finally boiled over. This unfortunately further narrowed my perception of intimacy to centre on penetrative acts and the end goal of what seemed to be having an orgasm. Coupled with my then developing understanding of my now unfulfilled desires, I misattributed those desires to this narrow idea of intimacy and figured that this was probably what I wanted.

By the time I had entered my late teens, my poor understanding of my desires for intimacy eventually won out over the idea of waiting until marriage. This led me to, among other things, enter into a relationship with someone who had expressed interest in sex much quicker than I should have for someone I'd met online¹. After each sexual encounter, I found myself remaining entirely unfulfilled to the extent that they eventually became off-putting. I left the relationship confused, as I thought that I was doing things that should have fulfilled my needs for intimacy, yet felt no sense of intimacy at all.

After a period to recover from my first relationship, I entered into a second relationship. In my second relationship, I was fortunate enough to be with someone who shared some of my struggles with sexual intimacy, and was given ample space by him to process those struggles together. Though I still didn't quite understand at the time, many of my needs for intimacy were fulfilled again for the first time in a long while. I felt content and that we had a meaningful relationship.

At that point of time, my understanding of intimacy and how I experienced it began to shift. Since before we had entered into a relationship with one another, he had two others he considered his queer-platonic partners, though we still considered ourselves monogamous as we called only each other our "boyfriend" or "girlfriend". Neither of us were very clear on the precise differences between what he termed "platonic" and "romantic", albeit for different reasons. He had attributed his difficulty with describing how he experienced them differently to being on the aromantic-asexual (aroace) spectrum. I felt unclear about the boundary on a more conceptual level, as I hadn't yet formed the idea that such things could be subjectively and uniquely experienced.

Nonetheless, we were able to find certain points we roughly agreed on through conversations about boundaries and what we felt was special and unique to the love we shared between the two of us. I began to share in the idea that "romantic" intimacy involved a degree of trust and shared vulnerability of an exclusive magnitude. I eventually saw partaking in sexual activities and physical intimacy as a manifestation and display of this greater trust and vulnerability, with trust and vulnerability at its core rather than just physical stimulation.

At the same time, I also began to consider emotional vulnerability as a form of intimacy. The idea that the two of us felt that we could be ourselves with one another, as weird and different as we were, felt intimate to us somehow. I began to experience the comfort of sharing my struggles with someone and opening up again. With the both of us working through our own sexual trauma, we often had difficulty actually having sex without either of us needing to stop. I often felt this to be even more intimate than the sexual activity itself. Especially during the almost year-long break from sexual activities we had, I began to appreciate how much more complex intimacy was than just constraints and sexual interaction.

Due to the nature of our relationship, however, I often found myself struggling with jealousy over our first year together. I still clung on to my deeply ingrained beliefs regarding exclusivity and found stability in not sharing in any kind of intimacy with anyone else. I began to feel value in being trusted and saw trust in things that he would only do with me. As such, I felt valued when things we did were kept exclusive and felt my value challenged when he would share in some of those activities with the other local partner of his. I felt my value challenged even more when he did things with his other partners that he didn't do with me.

Thankfully, his other partners agreed to give us some space for me to work on my jealousy. Over this period, my feelings about trust and things he would do with me and others developed further. I began to appreciate the value he personally experienced when spending time with others by listening to him speak about them. Though this did not cause my jealousy to disappear, it did give me an alternative source to feel valued when he took the initiative to spend time with me during or after.

However, I then overcorrected to avoid feeling entitled to him spending time alone with me. As a result of some of my struggles with self-worth and value, I began to feel that I was privileged to even do things with him in the first place. My understanding of emotional intimacy was poisoned by my own expectation to provide a commensurate level of comfort to someone emotionally intimate with me. I also started to feel that time spent with me was time not spent with others and doing other things, and that I had to make their time spent with me worthwhile. This would later influence the way I came to see the intimacy in the intersection of exclusivity and spending time with someone.

Over time, both my needs and our circumstances changed and they gradually stopped being fulfilled. This was exacerbated by multiple factors which drastically reduced the amount of time I spent with him and the variety of things we would do when we did spend time together. This pushed me to try to identify these incongruences and the needs that I felt were not being fulfilled, which was a process that took several months.

I eventually realised that I had believed that being intimate with one individual alone would be sustainable long term, which I came to understand to not be true even for monogamous couples. I had internalised the concept of not sharing in any kind of intimacy with anyone else to the point that I did not allow myself to be close with anyone else. In conjunction with how I struggled to form friendships and maintain them, the facts of the matter were that I had no other friends.

This was hard for me to wrap my head around, as I found it to be the product of many of my issues, beliefs, and circumstances. One common factor between them was the element of trust and vulnerability. Forming closer friendships and being intimate with others, especially for queer and neurodivergent individuals, ultimately invites a mountain of uncertainty. Uncertainty that begets vulnerability, that I hadn't allowed myself to share with others.

I started to try identifying different aspects of intimacy that I had not allowed myself to explore, which I found to often coincide with my needs that were being unfulfilled at the moment. At the forefront of my consciousness were the kinds of intimacy I had first become familiar with: physical and sexual intimacy. I first revisited a conversation on our boundaries regarding physical contact and came out of it with an understanding of how each of our boundaries regarding physical contact had changed as we grew. It, however, quickly broached the topic of sexual intimacy and what we considered to be "sex" or "fucking", which I honestly struggled to put across.

Before this, I had noticed the way I experienced and thought about sexual intimacy was vastly different from how I used to feel. From early on in our relationship, we had shared in many facets of kink when it came to sex. We had established a dominant-submissive and pet-owner dynamic between us, which I had originally seen as being immiscible with more carnal experiences of sex. For instance, I had the impression that kink often led to or set the mood for activities that more directly sought an orgasm, and shelved them as being one and the same in my mind. For this reason, I often understated the role that our dynamics played in my experience of sexual intimacy.

It was only when personal issues and circumstances caused these dynamics to fall out of our lives that I began to appreciate how much they had meant to me. They had given me space to relinquish or take control, toy with expectations in a safe space, and explore the interplay between trust and vulnerability that I had never had before. They were immensely comforting and reassuring beyond a context of trying to reach an orgasm, and served well as a medium for me to draw closer with someone and for us to get to know each other in more ways than a conversation could broker. I then realised that this was what I actually experienced as sexual intimacy, and was an aspect of intimacy that was now sorely missing from my life.

Going back to the conversation we had, I made an attempt to explain this rather recent realisation. I came to understand that we experienced sexual intimacy very differently, and had different needs and circumstances that would make each of our needs harder to fulfil. In light of this, we came to re-negotiate our boundaries over the course of several separate conversations. I gradually started engaging with others more in kink and kink-adjacent activities within a social circle that I felt safe in. This helped me not only reconnect with an element of intimacy that I hadn't been able to for months, but also allowed me to experience more of how others experienced and shared intimacy.

At the same time, I spent a while reflecting about the lack of closeness I was beginning to feel. I realised one major contributing factor was the sheer magnitude of how little our interests and passions aligned. This was not actually something that I hadn't been aware of, as we had known ourselves to be interested in different things since the start. However, while we had been able to bond over our differences and through the paucity of interests we shared earlier in our relationship, I found this to no longer be the case.

One way we had bonded over our differences earlier was facilitated by the both of us still being in school. Being more inclined towards other subjects, he tended to struggle with topics that aligned with my interests rather than his. Through this, I spent much time with him teaching him and helping him. I didn't recognise how big of a role this played in terms of how we connected through our differences until we both graduated and entered into tertiary education where we each pursued our interests. With no other opportunities to connect over our different interests, I started finding it difficult to share about my interests in a way that he was able to interact with and didn't also overwhelm him. Likewise, while he continued to share about his own interests, I found it hard to interact with them in ways that I found meaningful.

At first, I felt it somewhat immature to have identified this to be a reason that we were growing apart. Even after identifying this earlier in the year, I did not accept that these interactions or lack thereof constituted "intimacy" for several months. Acceptance came as I gradually began to spend more time with others in social spaces that aligned more with my interests. I saw how others interacted with each other over hobbies, interests, and things they were invested in together. I observed how they were intellectually intimate with each other over these things and began to understand how not being able to experience these things impacted me.

Finally, I began to reflect on how my experiences with emotional intimacy had changed. In truth, I find it difficult to word how I struggled with emotional intimacy in my relationship. In the first year of our relationship, much of our emotional intimacy came from us navigating our trauma and struggles together. However, I found that we were not emotionally intimate with one another nearly as often by the third year of our relationship together. We had each healed and grown and started to have our own peers to talk to, which was not a bad thing in and of itself.

The reason why I struggled with this in our relationship was likely a combination of multiple factors. In retrospect, much of our connection at the start of our relationship rested on codependence on one another. In addition to that, I found that the way we were emotionally intimate in terms of how we shared our struggles and how we lent a listening ear to one another did not align very well with my needs.

At the tail end of the relationship, I began to question many ways that I referred to myself and many aspects of my identity. Eventually, after much discussion with others I had become close with, I realised that I no longer experienced attraction to masc-identifying individuals. This is in part due to how I realised that many ways that they tended to (in my personal experience; I don't mean to generalise) experience and express intimacy were not aligned with what I could see myself sustainably interacting with long term.

Additionally, I realised that much of how I felt about relationships aligned well with the concept of relationship anarchy. As my understanding of how I experienced intimacy grew, I became disillusioned to traditional labels with regard to relationships. In particular, I disliked how they tended to be so reductive as to not express how I felt about relationships to the granularity I held to be important.

It became important to me to be able to talk about specific things in a relationship being important to me and even specific things I wanted to be exclusive about. At the same time, I observed how this form of directness and transparency tended to be absent from relationships that tended to be labelled as "monogamous". As such, not being in such a relationship eventually also became important to me.

In the end, after realising how all of these things important to me were absent from my relationship, I made the hard decision to end my relationship.

I must say that I struggle to feel like this was a turning point that allowed me to understand my feelings and simply have healthier relationships and a healthier understanding of intimacy. Intimacy, as I now realise, is an immensely nuanced concept. It is fascinatingly diverse, and I would not arrogate to say that I understand it or things that surround it well. There is still a great plurality of things regarding intimacy I do not understand, especially with respect to how I experience it, and many ways I struggle with it. Even as I begin to recognise the many ways my understanding of intimacy has changed over time, I see how I continue to learn more about it and experience more of it in all its forms with others.

One way in which I continue to experience more of it and learn about it is the simple concept of spending time with someone. As I continue to make efforts to allow myself to be intimate with others, I have indeed begun to spend more time with others. Naturally, this has opened my eyes to many new experiences and feelings, which I have honestly not yet reconciled or understood in much capacity.

Day by day, I am beginning to see how the many different forms of intimacy and experiences of it are present as I spend time with someone. Still a foreign experience to me, being able to share in the company of someone else has been indescribably comforting. Rather amusingly, I do believe that learning Dutch and learning more about the cultural notion of "gezelligheid" has facilitated this in some capacity, though I could not venture to explain why in concrete terms.

To my friends, I am very grateful to all of you for continuing to be with me as I navigate intimacy and all its nuances. I am thankful for your trust in allowing me to experience intimacy with you, in all of the wonderfully unique and touching ways that you feel comfortable expressing with me. Though I may still be unsure about how best to be a steward of your trust and your time, thank you for letting me be unsure about it with you.