'...intimacy is both desired and threatening. We both want our deepest privacy to be invaded, but we also fear it. We want to be able to be able to open up our very selves to the love and scrutiny of another, yet we dread the rawness of being exposed. There is somehow deep in the human psyche that tension between bonding and detachment, closeness and distance. Very often, just at the very point where intimacy seems realizable there is a fear of being engulfed, a claustrophobia, a panic and a bid for retreat. To accept that this tension is there, and to live creatively with it are probably marks of maturity. But for many the fear of intimacy itself can take over. The unwillingness to be completely open to another lies deeply in our personhood. How can we ever really trust each other to disclose our hearts and show all the weakness there?'
Elaine Storkey, The Search for Intimacy, p.2.
