What can be done to improve intimacy?

Human relationships are complicated because human beings are complicated.  Everyone has difficulty creating, sustaining, and improving satisfying, meaningful encounters.

Suppose you are in a sexual relationship and you would like to improve it.  You wonder whether or not to try to improve intimacy in order to enjoy a more mutually satisfying relationship.  What would that mean?  Would it be worth it?

There’s no way to know the future.  All we can do is to learn from past relationships and hope that their lessons will be applicable in the future.

It seems commonly agreed that sexual encounters should always be safe, sane, and consensual.  Let’s assume that the sexual relationship you are in satisfies those three minimal criteria.

There’s an additional ingredient that, in my opinion, should always be added:  caring.  As a teenager, I decided that sexual relationships devoid of caring were not worth their costs.

To improve intimacy is to improve the caring component of an encounter.

In addition to honest communication, intimacy requires both openness and vulnerability.  Both are necessary; neither alone is sufficient for intimacy.

Openness is not the same as vulnerability.  Permit me to give a paradigmatic example of each.

Openness:  Suppose you are killing an evening in a strange town.  You spend a few hours in a bar drinking with someone and you are radically honest with that person about your life.  That’s being open.  It is not, however, being vulnerable.  Why?  There’s little or no risk to you.  When you leave that town the next day, the chances of ever meeting that conversation partner again may be nil.

Vulnerability:  Suppose you are really ready for sex.  While in an elevator you happen to meet a suitable sex partner who is also really ready for sex.  Being hot and mutually attracted to each other, you stop the elevator, have sex in five minutes, and then go about your lives never to see each other again.  That’s being vulnerable.  Since sexually transmitted diseases can kill you, your behavior has been very risky.  However, there was no openness whatsoever.  Your sex partner may not even have known your name.

Since intimacy requires both openness and vulnerability, ask yourself, ” Am I being both open and vulnerable in this sexual relationship?”

Do both you and your partner want to improve your sexual relationship?  Are you both willing to be more open and vulnerable?  Are you both willing to work to improve your encounter?

If not, there’s only limited improvement possible if just one of you works at it.

If so, succeeding requires commitment and skillful means to improve intimacy.

Change always involves risk.  Attempts to improve encounters can uncover unexpected problems.  Solving those problems may require a great deal of care, understanding, and commitment.  It can require a lot of time and energy.  There’s no way to guarantee any particular outcome in advance.

The way to improve intimacy is for both partners to ramp up the caring component of an encounter by becoming more open and vulnerable. This process is neither comfortable nor easy, but it can be extremely worthwhile if you’d like a much better encounter.

Since many people are afraid to improve intimacy in their encounters, it’s a good policy to limit yourself to partners whose goals for encounters match your own.  Just doing that requires serious communication.

If you develop facilitator skills, you’ll be better able to help people help themselves.

People are hurting.  They are dissatisfied.  Often they are enduring pain or suffering.  If you help them feel better about their lives, you’ll feel better about your life.

Furthermore, you’ll find yourself with more friends.  To have more and better friends, be a better friend.  The best way to be a better friend is to use facilitator skills.

Suppose that you and I are what Aristotle called “complete” friends.  If we aren’t best friends, let’s at least assume that we are genuine friends, that we are not merely using each other, that we are not merely trying to take from each other.

What should we be doing together?

My work in the friendship is to support, encourage, and challenge you to live better.  My focus is on helping you help yourself.  Your work is to support, encourage, and challenge me to live better.  Your focus is on helping me help myself.

The friends in a genuine friendship mentor each other.

Let’s suppose, for example, that you are a smoker who wants to free yourself from that addiction.  I would not only encourage you to quit, I would support you through your process of quitting.  If I used skillful means, that might be a real blessing to you; it might just make the difference between your success and failure at quitting smoking.

Facilitator skills are skillful means of mentoring.

Mentoring someone successfully requires committing yourself to promoting whatever is best for that other person.  It requires being a psychological security blanket during that person’s period of growth.  As Eben Pagan puts it in his helpful “Become Mr. Right” training, it requires “holding space” for that person.

Here are some beginning facilitator skills that, if practiced, often work really well.

Think of beginning facilitator skills as a two-step process: (1) develop empathy and (2) lead the other person, who is your friend or potential friend, into tomorrow.  Find out about your friend’s situation and then help your friend to accept it and to discover a way forward.  (Note well that this is not the same as telling your friend what to do about it!)

First, ask about your friend’s situation and listen well to the answer.  (See also the post “Listening Well” in the moral well-being category of this blog.)  Since your friend is probably stuck on it, you may have to ask repeatedly.

Furthermore, don’t just ask about the specific frustration; ask also about how your friend feels about it.  Uncover not only the dissatisfaction but also the negative emotion that results from it.

Before proceeding, it’s very important for you to relate to your friend’s negative emotion.  It’s easy:  just remember a situation in which you felt the same way and talk about it.  If you make yourself emotionally relatable in this way, your friend will feel a stronger bond (connection, identification) with you.  Your friend will feel better understood and less lonely.

It makes no difference whether or not you think the emotion is justified.  Do not be judgmental.  Do not argue.  It’s the awareness and acceptance of the emotion that’s critical for draining it of its power.

Second, after you have understood your friend’s situation and related emotionally to how your friend feels about it, it’s time to shift the focus from the present to the future.  This will help your friend detach from the emotion and move forward.

The transitional question here is:  “What did you learn from this?”  Enable your friend to focus on the lesson learned.

It’s important to ensure that the answer includes improved self-understanding:  “What did you learn from this about yourself?”  How we think about ourselves is not only important with respect to how we feel about ourselves but also with respect to how we behave.

Once there’s a specific answer that makes sense, focus on the benefit of the lesson learned.  “How will this help you in the future?”  This transforms the lesson into a tool to be used to live better.  It derives a potentially valuable benefit from an emotionally negative situation.  It transforms an obstacle into an opportunity for enjoying an improved life.

In this way, even beginning facilitator skills can be very useful in friendships.  If you get better at holding space, you’ll help others as well as yourself.

Listening well is listening with your heart — not just with your ears.

What gift is more precious than the gift of a listening heart?

We are able to give it whenever we want.

How?  Simply remember to practice listening well.  That means listening without distraction.  Just ask and listen.

Doing anything without distraction is not easy.  Without training, our minds are out of control.  The best way to control them is to master any effective breathing practice (such as, for example, zazen meditation).  Nothing is better at helping us to focus and let go of distracting thoughts.

Like everything we do, listening occurs in the present moment.  Listening well is impossible when we are remembering the past, imagining the future, or focused on what is elsewhere. Listening well requires being fully present right here, right now.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but most of us are walking around with a lot of hurt, heartache, and resentment.  We are not incessantly joyful; instead, we are almost incessantly dissatisfied.  We miss much of our lives because we are lost in our thoughts.  Developing empathy for the predicament that others are in makes us predisposed to listen well.

Listening well to another begins with adopting an other-directed attitude.  Being sensitive to the concerns and problems of others requires suspending our egocentric concerns.  The more we are focused on gaining or grasping what we want, the less well we listen.

There’s an important irony here.  We think that we will enjoy experiences more if we are focused on gaining what we want from them.  Life doesn’t work that way.  The more we are focused on gaining what we want from experiences, the less we enjoy them.

Encounters (interpersonal relationships) are important.  As a result, we often try to control them so that we gain what we want from them.  Since other people don’t want us to manage them, this tactic usually works quite poorly.

The better way is to be open to whatever happens.  This means letting go of trying to use encounters for personal gain.  Instead of being egocentric, it’s better to focus on the other person.  [See the post "Arguing Essay" in the moral well-being category.]  Doing this is giving the gift of a listening heart.

How does it make you feel when someone listens attentively and nonjudgmentally to what you have to say?  How does it make you feel when someone shares life with you that way?

Avoid making things worse.  There are two chief ways we do that when listening.  The first is talking too much.  Focusing on asking good questions and talking no more than half as much as the other prevent that.  The second is giving unsolicited advice.  Don’t.  Unless asked to help, resist the temptation to try to fix others’ lives.

Don’t take my word for it.  If you don’t already realize it, please test this for yourself.

Once you realize how well it works, just keep practicing it.

Though it’s not easy, listening well is as simple as it is valuable.

This arguing essay answers the question “Is it useful or not?”

The thesis that it is useful is based on the fact that intellectual progress occurs only when ideas clash.

In philosophy, the give and take of intellectual combat is the dialectic that originated with oral disputes in ancient Greece.  In science, new ideas are always challenged, and the ones that don’t survive testing are junked.  In a courtroom, the attorney for the prosecution presents interpretations that are challenged by the attorney for the defense, and the judge or jury decides which argument is closer to the truth.

The point is not that the clashing of ideas always yields truth.  It doesn’t.  The point is that it’s a common method for attempting to discover truth.  So arguing is often thought to be useful in certain contexts.  No arguing essay should ignore this.

Nevertheless, especially in encounters (relationships), clashing ideas does not have to be understood as arguing.  There’s a better way.  Never argue; instead, discuss.

Why?

Any arguing essay ought to consider the subject matter of arguments, namely, opinions.

Opinions (judgments, beliefs) are perspectives.  Lacking omniscience, all human perspectives are partial.  None of us has an impartial, objective understanding of reality.

Furthermore, our opinions are always temporal.  We are able to change our minds.  Even if we don’t, whether it’s for a long time or a short time, opinions that we hold are always held at a certain time.  In that sense, they are temporary.

Also, they are relative to the person who holds them.  Since reality is in incessant flux, we are always in the process of updating our understanding.  Understanding is additive.  Over time, opinions change because our understanding changes as circumstances change.

Problems proliferate when we become attached to our opinions.  This is the central point of this arguing essay.  Since the world is always changing, the more attached to our favorite static opinions we are, the more likely it is that those opinions will be false.

Fanatics are people who are most attached to their own opinions, and fanatics are fools.  Having the courage of your convictions is having the courage of a fool.

By way of contrast, genuine philosophers, lovers of wisdom, regularly practice challenging their own opinions.  Having the courage to challenge your own convictions is having the courage of a philosopher.

Suppose that you and I disagree about some issue.  Contrast two attitudes.

First, I am attached to the idea that I am right and you are wrong.  I assume that I’m smarter than you or that my evidence is better than your evidence.  The more fanatical I am, the more I am predisposed to begin arguing with you.  Why?  I’m egocentric.  Like all conflicts, arguments come from egocentricity.

Furthermore, if I challenge you, what are you likely to do?  Because you’ll feel threatened, you’ll just stubbornly dig in and resist my attack.  When was the last time someone argued you out of an important opinion?

Second, I am not attached to the idea that I am right and you are wrong.  I am a philosopher rather than a fanatic.  I assume only that our perspectives are different.  I calmly tell you that my perspective differs from yours and suggest that there is probably some truth behind each of our perspectives.  Why don’t we discuss it to try to find common ground that we can both accept?

Instead of perceiving this as a challenge, you should perceive it as an opportunity to develop our encounter.  There’s no threat or conflict.  Instead, we are both on the side of seeking the truth about the issue.  Instead of provoking you to feel threatened, I’m enabling you to feel respected.

The conclusion of this arguing essay is that it’s better to prefer discussing to arguing.

In concrete situations, this isn’t always easy to do.  Nevertheless, it’s why it is better to let go of arguing in favor of discussing.

Furthermore, it’s a concrete way of being less egotistical.  Sages are successful philosophers, in other words, those who actually live well (as opposed to those who are still seeking to live well). This isn’t just a way of being more persuasive, it’s the way of sages.

Becoming comfortable with uncertainty is an effective means of improving encounters (interpersonal relationships).

Encounters challenge everyone.  Have you ever met anyone who had little or no difficulty with respect to friendships, love affairs, inter-familial relationships, work relationships, and so on?  I haven’t.  Encounters can be extremely valuable, but we purchase that importance only by willing to endure the troubles they generate.

Is there a general strategy that is very useful with respect to improving encounters?

Yes, namely, becoming comfortable with uncertainty.

Since intellectual progress occurs only when ideas clash, it’s a good procedure to engage in the give and take of comparing and contrasting evidence in an effort to improve understanding.  In philosophy, this process is engaging in the dialectic.

However, with respect to encounters, it’s important to discuss rather than to argue.  Never argue.

Why not?

If you and I were to argue about some issue, we’d each be taking the position that “I am right; there’s better evidence for my position than for yours and I’m smart enough to realize that and you aren’t.”

Please notice that the claim that “I am right” is an egocentric claim.  To argue is to practice egocentricity To be attached to your own ideas is to be predisposed to argue, to be ready for intellectual conflict and combat.  If someone challenges your ego, you are only likely to dig in and defend yourself.  While some people enjoy arguing, if you are interested in improving your encounters it’s wise never to argue.

Becoming more comfortable with uncertainty undermines the tendency to be argumentative.  It’s also more honest.

Realty is in incessant flux.  Therefore our individual perspectives are not only partial but temporary.  Attaching to our own opinions is the foolishness of fanaticism.

Wisdom with respect to our own opinions comes from always being ready to challenge them, which is the courage of a philosopher.  The wiser you are, the more comfortable with uncertainty about your own opinions you are.  This justifies permanently abandoning the attitude that “I get it and you don’t.”

Instead of taking it personally and arguing when someone disagrees with you, think (and be willing to say), “What we have here is a difference in perspective.  There’s probably some truth in each of our perspectives.  Let’s discuss this and determine if there isn’t a synthesis.  Help me understand how you see it by explaining your perspective to me.”

Are you inclined to argue with someone who respects you and wants to understand you?  Aren’t you instead inclined to be agreeable and to determine whether or not there is common ground?  Even if there is no common ground, friendship requires mutual respect.  Friends are able to disagree while still liking each other.

It’s not easy to become more comfortable with uncertainty.  It is, though, much more intellectual honest than merely being fanatically attached to your own views.  Furthermore, being more comfortable with uncertainty is an excellent way to improve your encounters.   I’ve learned this the hard way!

Natural masks are false faces that, at least occasionally, we present to others.

A false face can be useful.  For example, it usually seems appropriate on the job.  Even if you don’t feel like it, it’s advisable to project the image of a competent, efficient servant in an even, calm manner.  Good business advice:  keep smiling and asking potential clients, “How may I serve you?”

This is an example of how natural masks can reduce friction in interpersonal relationships.

However, wearing a natural mask has a high cost.  Why?

It prevents openness.  To love is to understand the beloved deeply and to encourage whatever is best for the beloved.  Suppose, for example, that I want to be your friend, that I want to love you.  How can I do that without understanding you?  If you are not open with me, I cannot understand you deeply.  Hiding is the opposite of being open.  If you hide from me, you prevent me from loving you.  So the wearing of false faces fosters loneliness.  It costs emotional energy and increases dissatisfaction.

Furthermore, wearing a natural mask is not always effective in hiding us from others.  Folks who know us aren’t totally lacking in insight.  So a false face may not fool others as much as we think it does; in fact, by wearing them, we may be fooling ourselves more than we are fooling others.

Wearing natural masks is untruthful.  How could we live well by deliberately trying to conceal the truth?

Why are we tempted to wear masks?  Is it because without them we have not received unconditional love?  Is it because without them we fear just being ourselves?

Is it because without them we think others will find in us nothing of value?  Here is an opportunity for self-examination.  Please ask yourself:  ‘Why do I wear natural masks?  Wouldn’t it be better not to feel it necessary to wear them?”

Why not awaken to the fact that there is nothing [no separate self] to protect?

Instead of squandering emotional energy trying to hide from others, why not channel that emotional energy into freeing yourself from bondage to self and love others?

The truth is that I lack a separate (substantial) self.  Aren’t you the same?  If so, are you afraid that others will discover the emptiness within you?

We create narrative stories, which are continuing personalities or invented selves, to shield our inner emptiness from others.  We attach very strongly to the personal identities we have so lovingly created.  We cling to our own fictions!

Since there are no such separate entities, we must work incessantly to prop up our own stories.  What a waste!

Why do we keep doing that?  We are afraid to let go.  So we hold ourselves apart, keep ourselves separated, from others.  This attachment to self poisons love.  Our problem is egocentricity and, like masochists, we are doing it to ourselves!

What’s the cure?

Letting go.  Why not adopt a daily practice letting go of all false faces?  That’s what any effective spiritual practice such as zazen meditation enables us to do.

There are two companion posts on interpersonal relationship skills.  One focuses on a secure attachment style and the other focuses on an insecure style.

Nearly everyone has either a secure or an insecure style.

Sages are the exception.  Theirs is neither a secure nor an insecure style.  (The fact that there are so few sages probably explains why psychologists tend to ignore them.)

What is the best attachment style?  It is neither secure nor insecure.  It is beyond either.  It’s actually not an attachment sytle at all.  It’s being detached.

You may be thinking, “What?  Isn’t a secure style balanced and aren’t sages, if there are any, balanced?”  Good question.

Consider an analogy.  What’s the best way to handle distressing emotions like fear, anger, and grief?

The first step, as I argue elsewhere, is to avoid either acting with that emotion as motivation or trying to ignore it.  Both extremes are foolish.  Both perpetuate the emotion:  one by keeping it alive actively and the other by keeping it alive passively.  If so, both fail to deal effectively with it.

So the first step is just to accept that it is real without doing anything else.

More, though, should be done.  Taking a time out is helpful, but it’s only a first step.  At least it avoids being unbalanced.  If you find yourself at either extreme, take a more centered approach.

However, if you have taken a centered approach, your work is not yet over:  while avoiding reacting badly, you still haven’t reacted so as to disable the emotion and master it.  You still haven’t reacted really well.  There’s a second step to be taken.

Similarly, with respect to interpersonal relationship skills, if you have an insecure attachment style, if your style is either avoidant or anxious, the first step is to take a centered approach.

Someone who has a secure attachment style with respect to interpersonal relationship skills already takes a centered approach.  So, if your attachment style is insecure, you’ll need to take a step that those with a secure approach have already internalized.

Centering is insufficient for mastering interpersonal relationship skills.  Though it avoids doing badly, there’s another step to be taken to react really well.  It’s true that taking a centered approach to interpersonal relationship skills is better than taking either of the insecure approaches, but your work is not yet over:  while avoiding the extremes, you still haven’t reacted so as to master relationships.

It’s not an accident that the final step to be taken in both the case of emotions and in the case of interpersonal relations is the same.  The reason is that both are based on “ego delusion.”  Mastering either emotions or interpersonal relations requires dissolving the delusion.

Mastery requires detachment.

Detachment is the dissolution of ego delusion.  Since your ego is your sense of separation, detachment is letting go of your sense of separation.  It’s the transition from a scattered life to a unified one.

Both a secure attachment style and an insecure one are egocentric.  If there were no separation between you and that other person, it would be impossible for there to be any kind of attachment between you and that other person!

There are only two kinds of attachments:  egocentric and nonegocentric.  Since the only nonegocentric attachment is to awakening (enlightenment, nirvana) [because its goal is the dissolution of egocentricity], interpersonal attachments are egocentric.

That’s a valid argument.  Is it sound?

My suggestion is simple:   why don’t you find out for yourself?

The only way to find out for yourself is to let go of your egocentricity and observe what happens to your interpersonal relationships (and emotions).   In particular, it’s impossible  to think your way to a right understanding of mastery.  What is required for you to find out for yourself is mastering some effective spiritual practice (like zazen) or other.

If you do, since egocentricity poisons love, you will discover for yourself that all your interpersonal relationships will become more loving.  Why?  By letting go of trying to gain anything from others for yourself, you’ll be able to focus of what is best for others.  After all, selflessly promoting what is best for others is loving them.  Isn’t love one of your ultimate values?

If this makes sense to you and you are not yet practicing, I encourage you to start “sitting” immediately.

The topic here is interpersonal relationship skills and how to improve them by understanding your attachment style.

The foundation for understanding and improving your interpersonal relationship skills is understanding yourself.

I argue in the companion post on secure attachment style that it is the middle way between the two extremes of clinging to others too much and pushing them away.  A secure style is a balanced (centered) approach to relating to others.

An insecure style with respect to interpersonal relationship skills is an unbalanced approach to relating to others.  Nearly half of all Americans have an insecure style.  According to Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence, there are two kinds of insecure attachment styles.

(i)  About one-quarter of Americans have an avoidant attachment style with respect to interpersonal relationship skills.

A human child learns and adopts this style when it is routinely ignored by parents (or primary care givers) when young.  Such infants learn that their feelings are unimportant and, so, that they themselves are not very valuable.

Such infants grow into adults who have too much difficulty trusting others.

If you have an avoidant style, you feel uncomfortable becoming or being emotionally close with someone else.  If someone tries to become emotionally intimate with you, you may feel nervous.  You tend to suppress your own distressing emotions.

(ii) About one-fifth of Americans have an anxious attachment style with respect to interpersonal relationship skills.

A human child learns and adopts this style when its parents are often inconsistent or ambivalent.  If a child is sometimes treated with tenderness and at other times treated with anger, what else could such a child learn?

Such infants grow into adults who are too uncertain of their own value.

If you have an anxious style, you may cling apprehensively to friends and lovers because you worry that you will be abandoned.  You may fear that you are deficient and, once someone discovers the real you, that person will leave.  (Your need for incessant reassurance can actually stimulate others to leave you.)

If you have developed either an avoidant or an anxious primary attachment style, you have more difficulty establishing satisfactory, good, or excellent relationships with other people.  If so and you naturally want to improve your relationships, what should you do?

I don’t know what you should do.  In fact, as I have argued elsewhere several times in print, nobody knows what you should do.  Why?

Since acts have consequences and we are unable to foresee all those consequences in advance, it’s always possible that, in the fullness of time, any particular act, even when well intended, proves to be wrong in the sense that it spawns more negative consequences than any alternative.

Furthermore, I don’t myself have an insecure attachment style.  All I am able to do is to imagine how I would think and what I would do if I had an insecure attachment style.

Please do not think that having a secure attachment style solves all problems related to interpersonal relationship skills.  Even for those who, like me, have been blessed with a secure style have a lot of work to do.  In fact, in the third and last post of this series, I make clear the central task for all adults when it comes to interpersonal relationship skills whether or not you happen to have a secure or an insecure style.

Your first reaction upon learning that you have an insecure style may simply be to breathe a sigh of relief.  Finally you have an explanation for why the difficulties you have had in interpersonal relationships are greater than those of some other people you know.

Furthermore, you are not to blame!  You were not born with an insecure attachment style.  You learned it in infancy and childhood.  It was the way you coped in order to survive.

This itself provides a rational reason for hope:  since it was learned, it is possible to unlearn it.

When it comes to unwinding it, you do not have to do everything at once.  With your next friend or lover, you can begin to act as if you had a secure attachment style, as if you were so important and valuable that that person was fortunate to have made your acquaintance.  If you act confidently well enough, you yourself will eventually believe it by reinventing yourself.

There’s actually an advantage to remaking yourself in this way, namely, that, if successful, you will have learned a lot about how to work on yourself effectively.

Imagine how you will feel if you make the transition.  Yes, you will realize, there was an enormous amount of suffering caused by your initial insecure style.  Furthermore, it was very difficult at times to force yourself to transition to a secure style.  However, your rewards may be proportional to the obstacles you have overcome.

Success is all about overcoming obstacles. In that sense, learning how to overcome obstacles is a blessing that obstacles provide.

How do you think about obstacles?  If you moan and groan and feel sorry for yourself for having to confront them, if you stay stuck, if you play the victim, you will never grow and your life will never flow.  If, on the other hand, you welcome obstacles as opportunities to be mastered, you have a winner’s attitude.

This is why, as odd as it may seem initially, having developed an insecure attachment style as a child can actually be better in the long run if you overcome it than having developed a secure attachment style as a child.

There are people who live well.  Sages exist. Furthermore, nobody becomes a sage by chance or by magic.  Like mastering any other valuable skill, mastering life requires overcoming obstacles by persistently practicing in a right way.

If mastering important interpersonal relationship skills is difficult for you and you nevertheless master them anyway, good for you!  You will have grown more than someone for whom they came easily.

What many who enjoy a secure attachment style from childhood fail to realize is that they haven’t really mastered interpersonal relationships skills either.  If you had an insecure attachment style from childhood, at least you were under no delusion that you had mastered relationships as a teenager or young adult.  The truth is that everyone confronts obstacles.  At least you were aware of one of your important ones, which is good because awareness of a problem is a necessary condition for its solution.

What, then, is the attachment style appropriate to interpersonal mastery?

My answer to that important question is in my third of the three posts in this series.  Before reading it, challenge yourself:  what’s your answer?

The topic is interpersonal relationship skills and how to improve them by understanding your attachment style.

The foundation for understanding and improving your interpersonal relationship skills is understanding yourself.

You are important.  At least when it comes to important topics, it’s foolish to rely on anyone else to do your thinking for you.  When it comes to understanding yourself, since you are unique, it’s not even really possible to rely on anyone else to do your thinking for you.

What is helpful is to learn about general theories of human nature and then to use them as a means of examining and understanding yourself.

In that context, I recommend Daniel Goleman’s Vital Lies, Simple Truths,  Emotional Intelligence, and Social Intelligence.  With respect to his discussion of attachment styles in Social Intelligence, he follows Phillip Shaver, and I am here following them both.  It’s possible to use their ideas to improve your interpersonal relationship skills.

Since our perspectives are, at best, partial and, at worst, erroneous, it’s always wise to keep challenging our own views.  Intellectual progress is sparked by the clashing of views.

I think of authors like Goleman as friends who are encouraging and challenging me to think better about my life.  The purpose of doing that is not to get stuck thinking:  when I am able to think beter about my life, I am sometimes able to use that thinking to improve my life.  I’d like to be able to improve my interpersonal relationship skills.

According to Goleman, neuroscientists distinguish seven different neural networks.  One of them deals with what psychologists call “attachment style.”

The chief purpose of this post is to encourage you to ask and really think about the answers to the following two questions.

(1)   What is your primary attachment style?

(2)  What lessons should be drawn concerning improving your interpersonal relationship skills?

In this post, I consider a secure attachment style.  In a related post, I consider an insecure attachment style.

(1)  Your primary attachment style is the primary way in which you attach yourself to those other people who matter most to you.

You were not born with it.  You learned it in infancy and childhood.  Since it was learned, it’s possible (in theory) to unlearn it; however, it almost always stays the same throughout life.  (It sometimes happens, though, that someone will have different attachment styles with different people.)

Your attachment style is the foundation of all your interpersonal relationships.

Understanding it enables you to have a clearer understanding of all your friendships, love affairs, and familial relationships.  Since interpersonal relationships give everyone difficulty, understanding them better is the precondition for improving them.

Psychologists who study attachment styles have different classification systems according to their similarities and differences.  The fundamental division is into secure and unsecure attachment styles.

Slightly more than half Americans have a secure attachment style; slightly less than half  Americans have an insecure attachment style.

A secure attachment style  is the middle way between the two extremes of clinging to others too much and pushing them away.  Infants and children who are well nurtured by empathetic parents (or primary caregivers) develop this style.  They are able to get close to other people easily and to depend upon them.

Were your parents consistently empathetic?

If your style is secure, you have good self esteem; you think of yourself as valuable, as being worthy of affection and care.  You think of others as accessible and reliable, and you have good intentions towards them

(2)  Permit me four important evaluative comments for you to consider.

First, it’s better to have a secure attachment style than to have an insecure one.  Why?  If you have a secure attachment style, all your interpersonal relationships begin with a more secure foundation and, so, are likely to be more successful.

Second, though you learned it, your are not responsible for the attachment style that you learned.  If you have a secure attachment style, do not congratulate yourself for it.  If you lack a secure attachment style, do not blame yourself for it.

Third, if you were lucky enough to have learned a secure attachment style, it’s important to realize that nearly one out of every two people you encounter learned an insecure attachment style.  Nearly half of all people have not enjoyed the kind of secure foundation for interpersonal relationships that you have enjoyed.  In this respect, many people are not like you, and, if you fail to realize that, your understanding of many others will be obstructed.

Fourth, if you were lucky enough to have learned a secure attachment style, being compassionate is easier for you than it is for those who learned an insecure attachment style.  Since you are in a better position to empathize with others and to help them help themselves, it is easier for you to love others than it is for many people.  Since it’s good to be loving, I hope that you’ll challenge yourself to maximize this advantage that you enjoy.

A useful way to think about erotic love is to categorize it into three levels.  What are they?  What can be done to attain the highest level of erotic love?

The lowest and first level is by far the most common.  It may have been the level W. H. Auden mentioned:  “Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.”

Nearly all sex affairs are efforts to use another person to improve our own condition.  They nearly always involve emotional addiction as well as lust, which is why they are commonly thought of as pits to be fallen into.

If (at least) one partner in an erotic love sex affair is emotionally dependent upon the other, it cannot be a genuine love affair.  Contrary to what many think, emotions are always self-centered (as I argue in my book HOW TO SURVIVE COLLEGE EMOTIONALLY).  Since love is other-centered, emotions and love are antithetical.  Emotions poison love.  It is impossible to be selfless and emotional.

Emotional maturity increases as egocentricity decreases.  To love is to give selflessly, which is why sages or saints, who are the most selfless people, are the most loving people.  To love is to promote what is good for your beloved; it is not to use your beloved to promote your good.  Loving is not taking, using, or exploiting.  Loving is a selfless activity, not an egocentric feeling or set of feelings.

It’s better to think of “(to) love” as a verb rather than as a noun.

So the extent to which you are not emotionally independent is the extent to which you are incapable of love.  The degree to which you are not fully in control of and responsible for your emotions is the degree to which you are unable to love.

Since most people have never worked on themselves enough to decrease their egocentricity significantly, most people are incapable creating an encounter that rises above the lowest level of erotic “love.”  When at least one partner is egocentric, a sex affair cannot rise above this lowest level.  This explains why almost all sex affairs occur at this lowest level.

Whether or not they are worth the bother of creating and sustaining them, the real problem with utility sex affairs is that they are unsatisfactory in the sense that they are devoid of love.  Since, as Einstein said, “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them,” solving their central problem requires attaining the next level.

Since it requires emotional independence, the second level marks a profound shift.  To understand why, think of emotional independence as emotional success.

Few have paid the price for emotional success.  Brian Tracy:  “The ability to discipline yourself to delay gratification in the short term in order to enjoy greater rewards in the long term is the indispensable prerequisite for success.”  Success always requires doing the work before getting paid.  Zen master Muso:  “Those who want to get paid before they do any work, so to speak, who demand assurance of success before they make any effort, will never get anywhere, either in Buddhism or in ordinary endeavors.”

Nevertheless, there are some emotionally independent people who hook up.  Instead of living as if it is someone else’s task to take care of them emotionally, they have accepted full responsibility for the emotional quality of their lives and worked hard to make themselves emotionally self-reliant (by using a meditative practice to reduce their egocentricity).

So the second level of erotic love is coming together for mutual gain.  The ideal is one of equality:  I promote what is best for you and you promote what is best for me.  Neither of us is dependent upon the other.  Though conditioned, the giving and receiving is satisfying.  The partners remain different and separate, but they are both better off conjoined and living together.

The danger in second-level encounters is that they may fall out of balance.  They can be excellent bargains, but, frankly, trading is no more genuine loving than using is.  Loving has nothing to do with keeping score.  Their conditioned nature appears whenever one partner gives or receives so much less or more than the other that unfairness surfaces.  As soon as I am receiving much less value than I am giving, my impulse will be either to restore the balance or end the encounter.

The third level of erotic love requires both partners to abandon egocentricity.  Though it is simple, it is not easy to let go of our self-concepts.

However, it is possible since, contrary to popular belief, we are not separate, continuant selves beneath our incessantly changing qualities.  We are selves, but those selves are nothing beyond a cobbling together of transient parts.  The third level requires identifying with the other as (part of) my self; it requires including the other as (part of) my self.

As with “love,” it helps to think of “self” as a verb rather than as a noun.

This identification or inclusion permits unconditioned giving and unconditioned receiving.  It is the unconditioned nature of the giving and receiving that marks this as a genuine love.

Love requires incessant effort.  As Zen master Dogen wrote, “Continuous exertion is not something ordinary people are fond of, but nevertheless it is the true refuge for everyone.”  It’s not just that most people are not fond of it, it’s also that most people are incapable of it.

What should you do if you wish to experience the third level of erotic love for yourself?  Since there’s no way to guarantee that experience of erotic love, I recommend letting that dream go.

However, what you can control is becoming capable of experiencing it should the opportunity ever arise.  Remaining open to it and becoming capable of it are possible and valuable.

How?  How are they possible?  There’s only one way:  by mastering an effective meditative practice.