LIFEMEDICINEPART 7:
ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
Learning to love and trust can be hard, but
the challenge
of intimacy is worth the fight
Words Dr Rupert Whitaker
Image Antonio Maggi
It’s
safe to say that good relationships help make life worth living. But
non-romantic relationships, like with family and friends, often only go so
far. There are good and not-so-good points about being single, but at some
point, most of us want a romantic relationship, to feel special and to see
in someone else’s eyes that our life is important in some way. Not many
of us are clear about the different kinds of love we can have for others and
what they mean. Have you heard of eros, philia, stergethron, and agape? Greek
in origination, they’re not your usual mouthful of love .
Dynamic duos
Being single isn’t just the time for having a knees-up; it’s the
best time to clean up the bits that are likely to cause a problem in any future
intimate relationship. We all have them. There are plenty of things you can
do to become more complete as a person while you’re single, and it also
means that you’ll have more to offer someone else in the future. If
you’re interested in a relationship, you’re looking for a whole
person; so are they. They’re looking for someone to help them enjoy
life, to support them when it gets hard, to help them ‘do’ life
better, to get ahead, whatever that means to them. If you can do it for yourself
anyway, then you’ve got a lot to offer a compatible person; two of you
doing it together can be dynamic.
Learn to love yourself first
If you meet someone with potential, getting intimate can be a challenge. Intimacy
isn’t the act of letting someone put their fist up your backside, although
trust is involved there, not to mention pleasure; it’s about trusting
someone to see your less-than-perfect self and still care for you without
thinking less of you. It’s enough of a challenge to let someone see
our less-than-perfect breasts/penis/tummy/buttocks (etc), but to let them
see our character ‘warts’ is much more difficult, mainly because
we don’t want to see them ourselves. How can we expect someone else
to love us as we are if we don’t do so ourselves, more or less? In fact,
there’s a direct connection between feeling shame and being unable to
be intimate, sharing our private or hidden self. Shame is one of the most
destructive forces in all relationships. Shame is easy to cover with any number
of things: drink, drugs, sex, fighting, being a clown, or all of them. All
sorts of ways of trying to connect through the hurt of shame while avoiding
looking at it.
The challenge of intimacy
It can be hard to know how to trust someone special, especially if we’ve
not known many people who have been absolutely trustworthy or you’ve
lost too many friends or you’re in a new culture. Getting into a relationship
is therefore a big challenge. Intimacy means being exposed and letting our
needs show, which is uncomfortable and can leave us flooded with feelings
that we normally guard against. So, getting into a relationship needs doing
carefully, which is the whole purpose of dating. You test out whether the
other person, and you, have what it takes. It’s a fine balance between
remaining self-sufficient and sharing your private self. Everyone has different
needs, but there are common factors for getting into a healthy and successful
relationship.
The four different ‘types’ of love
• Eros: a sexual-based love which usually
starts off a relationship.
• Philia: A caring love where you want to
do things for the other person.
• Stergethron: A parental, protective love.
• Agape: A spiritual, strengthening love.
From sex to self
For many people, sex happens first. Sexual love, or eros, is one of four kinds
of love that a relationship requires. It can be hard to move beyond the ‘intimacy’
of sex to the intimacy of self that a real relationship requires: the slow
folding into eros of the type of love that deep friends have for one another,
called philia. We’ll look at that and the other types of love in next
month’s Life Medicine, the last in the series.
Dr Rupert Whitaker is co-founder of Terrence Higgins Trust and has a clinical
practice in psychological medicine.
Dr Rupert Whitaker is co-founder of Terrence Higgins Trust and has a clinical
practice in psychological medicine.
• www.lifemedicine.co.uk
