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GIVING
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How
exactly do we give and receive? The first way is a
simple/difficult technique: Ask for what you want and listen
to your partner. Asking for what you want combines the most
crucial elements of intimacy. It gives the other the gift of
knowing you, your needs, and your vulnerability. It also means
receiving the other’s free response. Both are risky, and
therefore both make you more mature. You learn to let go of
your insistence on a yes, to be vulnerable to a no, and to
accept a no without feeling the need to punish. To
listen intimately to a partner asking for what he wants is to
pick up on the feeling and need beneath the request. It is to
appreciate where the request came from. It is to feel
compassion for any pain that may lurk in the request. It is to
give the other credit for risking rejection or
misunderstanding. We hear with our ears; we listen with our
intuition and our heart. Giving and receiving entail the
ability to accommodate the full spectrum of a partner’s
fears and foibles and to distinguish between needs we can and
cannot expect to see fulfilled. A
second way intimate adults give and receive is through
mutually chosen sex and playfulness: You make love when both
of you want it, not when one of you push the other into it.
You can be intimate without having to be sexual. You know how
to have fun together. You play without hurting each other,
without engaging in sarcasm or ridicule, without laughing at
each other’s shortcomings. Finally,
we give and receive by granting equality, freedom from
hierarchy, to our partner and ourselves. Only the healthy ego,
and not another person, is meant to preside over your life. In
true intimacy, partners have an equal voice in decision
making. One partner does not insist on dominating the other.
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