D + M x P = I

An equation for intimacy with Lila Donnolo

Pleasure research has brought me to intimacy time and again. In his 1943 paper,  "A Theory of Human Motivation," seminal psychologist Abraham Maslow posited that friendship, family, and sex — what we might colloquially call intimacy — are the third level on the hierarchy of human need, just after our physical needs (food, air, water) and safety (shelter and health). 

Lila Donnolo is an intimacy activist. She has spent the last several years recording private conversations about sex, love, and pleasure for her podcast, Horizontal with Lila. With the intention of diminishing loneliness, eradicating shame, and cultivating connection, she records these conversations as intimately as she can—while lying in bed—with her guests.  After 125 episodes, Lila’s got a theory about intimacy that she’s getting ready to share with the world. The Pleasure Report got first dibs. 

“I think most of us are starved for intimacy,” she said when we connected on Zoom last week.  “Intimacy has become synonymous with sex,” she said, “which is a very narrow container. I want to expand our notion of intimacy so that it is inclusive of, but not relegated to the sexual and the romantic. So we aren’t starving.”

By starving, she means too many of us are having experiences akin to what Lila calls junk food sex—encounters where we are yearning for connection but get empty calories instead. “It feels good for a moment,” she says, “but then there's a hangover because it wasn't really what we wanted.” This seems like this could extend to so many areas of our lives, the impulse to reach for some distraction—a phone, a screen, food—to appease a desire but ultimately, it leaves us hungry. 

If what we are really craving is intimacy, then it might be helpful to know what intimacy is and how we might go about creating it.

“My definition of intimacy begins with disclosure,” Lila said. “We need to reveal something that is tender to us. The things that we love the most are also tender to us because that is where we could get hurt.  So disclosure—which could be verbal, physical, emotional, or energetic— is the foundation on which intimacy is built.”

But disclosure on its own is not intimacy. “If I give you a monologue about my hard upbringing at a bar, are we intimate?” She asked.  “I don't think so. Or at least not yet. Not without a few other factors.” 

Another element, Lila says, is mutual recognition— which I understand as reciprocity in attention and curiosity.   “I feel seen, and I see you, you feel seen, and you see me,” is how Lila describes it.

The third element of intimacy is permeability, the ways we let one another into our bodies, minds, and hearts. “I have to somehow allow you to affect me,” she explains.  “If we share stories but we don't feel or allow our thinking to expand, if we're not letting someone in and allowing them to change us, then it's not intimacy.”

Lila has put this together into an equation: D+MxP = I

DISCLOSURE + MUTUAL RECOGNITION X PERMEABILITY = INTIMACY

As we spoke, I imagined a Venn diagram with two circles interconnecting.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s like that. Let it in. Let it affect you.”

Intimacy is most often associated with physical touch, but there’s so much more to it than that. I think about how I find eye contact to be very intimate. The extended gaze with a lover is one example, but also, on the streets of New York, that lingering exchange with a stranger. “And laughing,” Lila adds. “Let someone move you to tears or move you to laughter. There's so much intimacy, in my opinion, in laughing together.”

Intimacy can also be an intellectual connection when we allow someone to penetrate our minds and expand our notion of the world. “Allowing someone to change your mind about something that you believed is so intimate,” Lila said, “because it involves admitting that maybe you were wrong, or maybe you were misguided, or maybe you didn't have all the information.” 

Why is intimacy, like pleasure, so complicated? It seems counterintuitive that we would either consciously or subconsciously deny ourselves either one. Lila explained one barrier, which also pertains to pleasure. “There’s an idea called upper limiting,” she said. That’s when you are unconsciously approaching the limit of how much pleasure you can tolerate. When that happens, Lila said, “you subconsciously do something to sabotage yourself. You bring yourself down to the level of good feelings you're comfortable with.” 

I recognized myself in her words. Maybe you do, too. When things are going “too” well, I sometimes notice that I pick a fight or get anxious. Lila said she notices that she gets scared and starts thinking she’ll have an accident. It is, after all, the trope we see in movies and in pretty much every novel ever written: As soon as life gets really good, something bad has to happen. Lila learned this in a screenwriting class. Her teacher told her, “This is how you write a screenplay: You create a character that we love. And then you torture them.”

A second barrier to intimacy and, this one, too, overlaps with pleasure, is the Paradox of Change. In our day and age, there is almost always the potential to order up something new and different. The fear that we are missing opportunities for pleasure and intimacy elsewhere can cause anxiety and make us hesitant to commit to the imperfect situation we are in.

“If we look to people who have been in long-term relationships, they're going to tell you that it's not like there aren’t things that drive them crazy and that they would prefer we're not true about their partner, but they decided that they were going to work to stay and develop deep intimacy.” After 20 years of marriage, I can attest to this. Learning to embrace the imperfections requires effort and discipline but the payoff is big. 

With so many people on their own, without access to partners or families, I wondered what we can do on our own to nurture intimacy. Lila has been thinking about this, too. Just before lockdown, she traveled to Indonesia for a vacation. She ended up staying and spent the first six months of the pandemic alone in a town where she knew no one. These six months were instructive for Lila in auto-intimacy. “It’s all about how we talk to ourselves,” she said. “For years, the inside of my head was a terrible place to be.” I thought about how universal this is. As children, we are so full of wonder and curiosity. At some point, however, that wonder and curiosity turn to judgment. For Lila, her mind was an acrimonious and hostile environment.  She’s been doing a lot of what she calls inner landscaping: replacing thoughts, relegating the inner critic to the background, and introducing new voices. “I started to develop a voice that began to speak to me in a permissive and loving tone,” she said. “And now I have this incredible mothering voice in my head that has started saying, ‘I’ve got you, I've got you.’”

So, how do we create more intimacy in our world? We start by cultivating novel, personal ways of taking care of ourselves, and then we can create more intimacy with those around us by disclosing more of ourselves. When we nurture ourselves back to health, we can afford to bring more attention to others, and in turn, allow ourselves to be permeated. I’ve been building a community of intimacy nerds, people whose idea of a good time is telling one another the rawest truth and allowing ourselves to be witnessed in all-out self-hood— whether that is dancing, crying, screaming, laughing, or having a mind-bending conversation. We are gathering here at The Pleasure Report. Join us.

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From the Institute of Pleasure Studies

Lila’s podcast is a must-listen for fellow intimacy nerds. She offers intimacy coaching for couples and individuals. You can find out more about her and her work here. 

Joe and I (Sue Jaye Johnson) are launching our second round of a 3-month relationship course called Relationship Tripping. It starts in April. If this speaks to you, let’s talk.

The pandemic has brought our intimacy needs into stark relief. But the extreme isolation incurred by Covid-19 is really just the grand finale of decades of culturally-sanctioned depreciated intimacy. We will return with an issue about the architecture of loneliness and for now we cite, once again, The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture, which includes perfectionism, individualism, and progress, all antithetical to a culture of intimacy. 

Want a pandemic-proof way to create more intimacy with someone? Go through these 36 questions that will make you fall in love with yourself and your partner. 

Other ideas: Try an extended hug with someone you love. Agree to a set amount of time. Try 3 minutes to start. Allow yourself to relax and imagine the Venn Diagram of interconnectedness. Here is a comprehensive list of ways to hug. Or, eye gaze. Same thing. Look into your partner’s left eye, soften and allow them to really see you. Let us know how it goes.