Watching Big Brother and the formation of short-term – some very, very short-term – sexual relationships, I wondered how many would last longer than five minutes after the show ends.
Five minutes might be overstating it. How long does it take one person to walk away in these circumstances? A minute? Less?
You could say it doesn’t matter if everybody knows the score, but I expect people still get hurt. And these are the ones who might, paradoxically, be better off: it means they were able to leave themselves open to the possible hurt of intimacy.
The ones who walk away without a thought may be incapable of intimacy and of close, sustained relationships. You can’t have intimacy without the willingness to be hurt: it’s as simple and unfortunate as that. That’s because it involves revealing your imperfect, hidden self to another person.
Intimacy, or the fear of it, raised its head again in the unlikely context of drug-fuelled sex orgies in London. Mark Hennessy reported (July 3rd) on the phenomenon of “men indulging in days-long orgies organised on social media, fuelled by drugs, such as liquid ecstasy, or ‘G’, in a practice known to doctors as ‘chemsex’.”
Needless to say, this has led to rapid increases in HIV and sexually transmitted diseases.
What caught my attention in Mark Hennessy’s report was this: “‘The reason so many gay men use chems is a search for intimacy. Gay men often grow up keeping a secret,’ said Dave Stuart from the Dean Street Clinic. ‘They grow up being hyper-vigilant and not sharing who they really are. That is the direct opposite of intimacy. They come of age into a sexualised gay scene where they try to navigate hookup apps, normalised drug use and risky sex. They try to incorporate intimacy, but with no frame of reference,’ he said.”
Most gay men, I should add, negotiate issues with intimacy in the usual way by working through it all in relationships and getting hurt along the way but keeping going nonetheless. Those who turn to the “chemsex” scene are, at most, a minority of a minority.
A powerful drug
But it underlines that intimacy might be the most powerful drug of all. And it’s a drug a lot of us are afraid of.
You’ll see the lure and fear of intimacy everywhere.
“I love you very much,” I heard a woman shout after a retreating man on James’s Street in Dublin one evening. “I can smell you off me.” He kept jogging across the Luas tracks towards the flats. “I’ll be back, I promise,” he said. “I just have to charge me phones.”
Something about him suggested to me he might be running, not just to go and charge his phones, but to get a break from too much intimacy. Something also suggested that he would be back after he had established a safe distance.
Towards the city centre, on Thomas Street, a woman on crutches fighting with a man on crutches hobbled to a corner, shouting extreme insults at him, while he stood calmly outside a pub. You could hear her halfway down the street. But although she kept up the stream of curses, she didn’t go beyond the corner and he didn’t take himself out of the scene.
Maybe that’s how they, too, negotiated intimacy: establishing a safe distance from which to hurl or endure insults but without breaking the connection.
I think we all have issues with intimacy because it involves letting someone see through the facade that gets us through life; that means it involves hurt or the fear of hurt.
I don’t know of any way out of that but to accept that you’re scared and to keep edging towards the other person even though you’ll still be scared and, yes, sometimes you’ll get hurt. Drugs won’t do it: and neither will celebrity, fighting or charging your phones.
In the end it comes down to you making your way out from behind whatever wall you’d rather hide behind and taking your chances.
Padraig O’Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email