Why should intimacy be healing?

If we're going to learn enough about the way intimacy can produce a defense against influenza, say, it might help to have a clear mental model of how that mechanism operates. Models don't have to be "right", by the way, they only need to be useful at leading to asking the right questions. Still, a model that we could run simulations on would be nice to have when we're trying to get a handle on how strong an interaction effect we might actually see in practice.

So, we might start by gathering some stories or narratives about situations that appear on the surface to be similar to the effect we're looking for. One place to look for such things is in standard idioms or folk wisdom /common sense.

For example, the phrase "I get by with a little help from my friends" makes perfect sense to us, and seems reasonable. People are motivated to join groups, associations, cults, clubs, gangs, etc. because then they can and do "take care of each other." Also, due to our particular physical design, we NEED someone else to "watch our back", because we can only see in front of us. And even if we got really clever and used mirrors, we still have a non-negotiable need for sleep, during which time we're far more vulnerable than when we're awake and on guard.

Also we know "there is strength in numbers." If nothing else, there is sheer raw muscle power in numbers. Get enough people to help, and you can lift a car and move it. Get ten thousand people to help, and you can build a rock-dam across a river. Try to answer some trivia question, with some rare fact, and odds are if you have enough people working with you that at least ONE of them knows the answer.

Also people sleep at different times, and have their "bad days" on different days, and they bring different skills to the mix.

All in all there are many reasons why having a lot of friends is helpful and empowering and strengthening. But none of these mentioned so far requires going into metaphysics to understand or model. These are all simply common sense.

The real research question is how intense this kind of friendship can become. For purposes of this discussion, let's leave sexuality out of the equation entirely, because that's a whole different set of things going on. Again, for purposes of this discussion, let's say the question is how deep, how intense a level of intimacy could possibly be achieved, on some kind of scale.

It seems to me, anecdotally, that women are far more likely than men to complain that men are mostly interested in sex, whereas women are interested as well in "intimacy", whatever that is. What it is is what this post is about.

Some words similar to intimacy are closeness, warmth, empathy, communion, affection, confidentiality, affinity, friendship, understanding, awareness, grasp, touching, and particularly "oneness" or 'being one with".

Often, in early romantic relationships at least, dancing is a prelude to intimacy, and dancing involves moving as one, being aware of one's partner, predicting one's partner's moves, focus, concentration, being entirely present in the here and now.

The "oneness" part is crucial. The Christian Bible Old Testament describes marriage as two people "becoming one flesh". Pillow talk sometimes includes awareness that each person no longer is aware where their own body ends and where the other person's body begins. It would not be unusual for breathing and even heartbeats to be synchronized, running as one.

Intimacy occurs so commonly within a sexual context that the two may be confused, but they are very separate phenomena. The same kind of intimate mutual awareness and acting in a perfectly synched way as if moved by one spirit is something that also occurs in a sports context, with very high performance teams, if only briefly. It occurs in choirs and orchestras sometimes, as everyone comes together around the music and the separateness of the instruments seems to go away.

I don't believe that this sensation of becoming "one" is a fabrication, an illusion, a false perception based on hormones -- I believe it is a physiologically real phenomenon that could, in fact, be detected by scientific equipment. There actually is a synchrony and a synergy.

BAck to the original question then, which is to ask what the upper limit is of this kind of synergy. Some people would report that this type of interaction is tremendously powerful, and rather than being exhausting, is exhilarating and liberating and empowering and nurturing, all at the same time. People speak of "making energy".

To pick up on the energy metaphor, this would be some kind of energy of fusion (bringing together) , not of fission (breaking apart.)

In physics, fusion is much harder to obtain than fission, but is also tremendously more powerful. Thus the "hydrogen bomb", a fusion device, releases far more energy by creating bonds between tiny hydrogen atoms than the "plutonium" bomb, a fission device, which releases energy by breaking heavy atoms apart into pieces. Fusion is a clean process, leaving no ugly residue. Fission is a dirty process, leaving pollution around for 50, 000 years.

• Exploring the analogy or metaphor a little more, can we gain some insight or raise some interesting questions by looking at what exactly happens when two hydrogen atoms are squished together to the point where they give up their individual identities as hydrogen and turn to become "one" "helium atom, from that point on?

First, this union is initially resisted. In fact, it is quite hard to get the two hydrogen nuclei to get anywhere near each other. The harder you push, and the closer they get, the harder they push back. This is interesting, because intimacy between two people is not "automatic" either, and is often resisted and difficult to achieve.

But if we look at the human body, we find cells that have given up their initial identity as separate cells and taken on a much more intimate relationship with each other as "part" of the "same body". This wholeness or one-ness is in fact what the word "health" refers to.

Health care, if we strictly looked at the word, should be primarily about achieving or re-achieving wholeness, or oneness of the parts of the body and the parts of subsystems of the body. They should become harmonized, unified -- which is not the same as homogenized and uniform. A body composed of all big-toe cells would not work. There is no "best" cell, only a best working arrangement and harmony for many different and disparate cells.

Cutting through all that, then, maybe we can say that there are natural processes that work as follows. If WE, through our puny human efforts, can take down barriers and walls and get CLOSE to someone else, then natural processes will be activated and kick in that do more than get close, followed by separating again (something a near-miss bullet might achieve).. they actually bond and bind and link the physiological, mental, and spiritual identities of the two people into something that can be described with one equation as "one" being.

Or, if we believe as I do that relationships have a life of their own, then a new living being or entity has been created by the transient closeness of the two people, a "living vital relationship", that both people participate in, but is not the same as the people -- it goes beyond the people.

That process is, I believe, "unbounded upwards". It has the same limit as the complex exponential equation governing the "vector product" of two vectors -- which is finite in the usual world, but is unbounded upwards in a world with "imaginary" components to the angle between the vectors. Imaginary in this sense does not mean "pretend" -- the components are completely as tangible as "real" angles -- but in a different dimension that unfortunately has been called "imaginary."

So, an intimate encounter, or an intimate-and-sexual encounter, between two people can create a persistent living entity in its wake, which continues after the encounter is "over." Interestingly enough, the sexual encounter can also create a persistent living BIOLOGICAL
entity in it's wake, a child. I think it's no accident that these events, the creative power of intimacy and the sexual creation of a child, are related. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me at all if scientists one day discover that the degree of intimacy in the sexual activity has a very strong effect on WHICH matching up of DNA of a billion billion possible combinations ends up being created as a child.

Children produced by an intimate union, and surrounded by an intimate relationship during pregnancy, are almost certainly different from children produced by a neutral, hostile, or violent union (rape), taking shape in similarly neutral or hostile context during fetal development.

I suspect that the children of intimacy have far better health during their lifetimes, and longer lives, than children of rage. I suspect the shadow of the event of conception extends all the way to their death, if not continued on in THEIR children to some nth generation.

I need to make a comment that people who are not professional programmers will find baffling. It is my experience, and the experience of other life-time professional computer programmers, that the computer systems developed by a person or team have similar traits -- they seem to embed and carry within them either a persistent grace of operation from a healthy conception and birth, or a persistent flaw and almost original sin, continued flaky operation for their entire computer program lifetimes, if they were developed at haste in a climate of fear and violence.

I feel the same way in fact about certain cars I've owned, specifically an early Volkswagen "beetle" and a recent Honda CRV -- the cars seem to have a supportive grace that held them together when you would have expected them to fail and fall apart.

I suspect, and now think it would be interesting to dig out track records on this, looking at software systems developed by very-high-performance teams operating in the intimate range of intense emotional support for each other, that these systems not only work well when released, but that they continue to work well, better than expected, in fact, almost impossibly better than expected, for a very long time after they have been released.

It is as if the team has achieved not only unity with each other, but unity and oneness with the nature of Nature, and created a beloved offspring which even the world can read the signature on and nurtures instead of breaking.

I'd love to hear other people's experience in this regard. Do you have any stories of products of work efforts that seem to take on a grace and life of their own that lets them continue to live on a healthy life long after less-graceful products have all died off and been replaced?

Wade

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