Intimacy doesn't happen through magic. We have to make it happen.
Many men long for intimacy. But we often crave this closeness with another person without realizing that our lives are too full to let any of happen.
In order to invite real love into our lives we need to create space both externally, on the practical level of freed-up time and energy, and internally in terms of our own readiness.
Have you been consciously longing for a mate while unconsciously holding them at bay?
For many of us, making space means reclaiming something that cultural expectations have largely robbed us of: The natural and organic rhythms of life. These rhythms are an expression of time as experienced by the heart.
This sort of time has more to do with the movement of the seasons and the days than it does the ticking of the clock. It’s hard for love to enter into our lives when everything is planned and all our hours are accounted for.
Intimacy requires unstructured time, time during which the unexpected can happen because we’ve given ourselves permission to be spontaneous.
The time to make these sorts of external and internal preparations is before we meet someone. This is a bit like the male bird building a nest in anticipation of a mate. Energetically speaking, creating the space for our love life is a way of announcing our intent to the universe.
We are acting in good faith that this space will be filled. In the meantime, we can work that sympathetic magic in another way as well.
We can create some personal rituals that in some way or other mirror that ways in which we envision sharing our life with a partner.
Where would you spend time with a loved one? The images that come to mind can give you ideas about what to do with yourself in the present. This practice serves two purposes. First, it can become a form of self-love.
Giving yourself some of the same experiences that you imagine a partner giving you can make you feel self-sufficient. When this happens, your happiness is not contingent upon having a partner, and so the search for a mate is not weighed down by overly heavy expectations.
Also, involving yourself in activities that comprise part of your “intimacy fantasy” may afford you some opportunities to meet people with common interests.
We live in a very goal-oriented culture, and such values are drilled into us to the point where we may even begin thinking of our love lives in the same kind of terms. But intimacy moves to a different kind of music. And it’s easy to lose sight of that in the speed of life.
Intimacy needs space within which to breathe – space in our daily schedules as well as space in our hearts and minds. Allow some areas of your life to remain unstructured. Create some kind of sacred space within which any concerns about productivity, deadlines and goals cannot intrude.
This is the kind of place that a love relationship can enter and make itself feel at home in.
