Intimate Relationships

I read something once where a woman talked about how she met her husband. I think they were college students and neither of them had slept in the same place the previous three nights or something and it was this weird thing they had in common with each other that made them both different from everyone else.

They got married and they bought a big loft I think and had some kind of portable sleeping arrangements, like sleeping bags, and slept someplace different every night. She talked about how much she liked doing that and waking up a little confused and taking a minute to get her bearings.

That sticks with me because it's a personal, private detail, a way their private lives uniquely fit together and not specifically sexual per se.

People seem to focus on sex or on how their public lives fit, like "Do the parents approve?" Public approval seems to carry too much weight for far too many couples, often at the expense of actually establishing an intimate relationship with each other.

If two people like each, sex can be worked out. It's called emotional bonding and if you have a fetish or other overly specific "sex only works one way" thing going on, you're probably not really bonding with your lovers and establishing a genuinely intimate relationship.

It takes around 18 to 20 hours per week to establish and maintain an intimate relationship. If you spend substantial time talking with one person, they learn things about you and you also learn things about you that you didn't know previously.

A good relationship is a growth experience and without particularly trying to be sexually adventurous or whatever, simply sharing honestly with someone you trust leads places you had no plans to go because you didn't know they existed.