How Do You Build Intimacy When There’s No Friendship Yet?

Do you think intimacy is only about sex? I’ve learned to discover a few other things more powerful than sex to help build intimacy in a relationship!

The first time I fell in love with someone I was very young. At 15, you kinda start slow. You go on a walk, you talk, you eventually hold hands after a while. The first kiss might take a few weeks of getting to know each other and then, suddenly, it happens and it feels like you’ve reached a climax, only at that age ( hopefully), you still don’t know what that means yet.

I use “yet” because that is the anticipation of something we would naturally feel like having with someone we genuinely like but is that really a given?

To be fair, in my relationships so far ( and I am 30 now), I realized that the one element making the glue of the relationship was friendship. With the first boyfriend, I was friends for a long time before we dated and then I was still friends after we broke up. The second was a shorter friendship building stage in the beginning but a very long-lasting friendship created throughout the relationship and after the resentment of the breakup wore off. It took us 3 years to get over the remorse and resentment of the breakup, but we’ve had 4 years of friendship since.

Intimacy vs nakedness

It’s important to mention that revealing parts of your body do not create intimacy as much as revealing parts of your soul. We’ve build a pop-culture based on decadent sex scenes with eclectic styles of lingerie and sex toys that give the impression of having an intimate life with someone. However, as I learned through my friendships with men I dated and no longer have sex with, intimacy lasts throughout years despite not having any physical connection anymore. Self-reflection over the matter brought some new perspectives:

We’re falling in love when we reveal ourselves to people and open up our soul more than when we have sex and experiment our limits together.

The most difficult part about intimacy is being vulnerable! By far this is the greatest virtue you can achieve with someone in a relationship, regardless of whether that’s a romantic one or not. Being able to share your own shortcomings, fears, anxieties but also your joys, your dreams and your hopes is the most rewarding part of friendship and vulnerability! You find yourself a person who will safely keep your secrets and who will not attack you, betray you or twist things and plot against you with what they came to know about you on a deeper level. It’s such a beautiful thing to know that you can be YOU with someone in a genuine and authentic way without being judged.

But how do you bring that to a new romance?

I’ve been in relationships in the last few years that were based more on the romantic side than the friendship side. Most of the times it was also because of my own inability to connect in a different way with my partners. To be fair, I was not that interested in what they were doing outside of the time they were with me. Their life was not relevant to me outside what they were contributing to mine. It’s the most honest confession one can make about the shortcomings of such romantic clashes and incompatibilities. That’s mostly due to a previous relationship that had both friendship and romance yet failed any left a huge scar that took several years to heal. Meanwhile, I avoided loving the same way just to avoid to be hurt again.

By the time I realized I had no interest in getting to know why they do what they do outside of our relationship, they would already catch on that I was not focusing on them as much as I was focusing on making my own fears about an expected breakup becoming less scary. I was codependent and struggling to see my worth in a relationship due to my early relationship experience where I was hurt deeply and could not recover properly until I went to therapy. But eventually, I became aware I need to open up again with both friendship and romance if I truly want to commit to a relationship. Being able to admit you are emotionally unavailable is also a healing process as much as it is a hard truth to accept about yourself when the easier way is to blame the other person for not forming a long-lasting relationship.

You start building a new path by applying the same rules you applied to forming trustworthy friendships: you build it step by step.

Here are the pillars of true friendship that you can apply to relationships as well:

1. Reciprocity

Do you remember those times when you just met someone new and then all of a sudden you free up time in your calendar to spend more time with them because the connection feels great? What is it that makes that connection great? Is it the newness? Is it the amount of things you have in common? Is it the convenience of the context of life you are both in? Most often the answer is all the above but most importantly, reciprocity! If someone you like, likes you back, whether romantic or not, you will find an easier way to connect and stay in touch with the person if they do the same amount of effort to invest in you and meet in the middle.

2. Responsiveness

Have you been waiting for someone to pick up on your subtle change in behavior? Do they lack compassion and empathy towards your problems when you start sharing something more intimate? Well, that’s the sign that they are not being there to share the same energy you put in. Go one step back and reevaluate the intentions you have with this person and then make sure you’re genuine about the way you offer time with no regrets or expectations that it will be reciprocated because responsiveness is based on the reciprocity, to begin with. Also, responsiveness solely based on respect is dry and will not sustain the relationship alone. Usually, people are able to give a certain amount of responsiveness, in the beginning, to assure a solid base of a relationship so that they can fall back on that when they lose the primary interest of their intention with the relationship. This is either a sign of ego or respect they offer and expect in relationships more than it is a genuine desire to be responsive to your needs. I wrote another article on the difference between attention and intention here.

3. Living rather than sharing experiences together

I had to learn this the hard way! Sometimes we feel that the people we talk most with are automatically our best friends. I came to realize that this is not the case. Sometimes we share a lot with someone but they don’t participate in what made a great day for us that day. They are the spectators and the cheerleaders in our lives feeding our ego and boosting our confidence but not being truly part of our life. I got sided a couple of times by a good friend of mine and she told me “you wouldn’t have had fun with us there anyway cause it wasn’t your kind of party “. I was, of course, disappointed that she thought I would not be flexible enough to accommodate other kinds of situations than the one we usually cultivated together but on the same time, as time went by I realized how badly she was struggling to get out of those vicious circles and not go to those parties anymore because it was self-destructive behavior for her and why she wouldn’t want me to be there in the first place. It was not the only case I had of friends who were a bit ashamed with their own over indulgences and preferred not to mix groups of friends hoping that their better side will be maintained through the intellectual conversations we had in our friendship. I was a lot of times sided by people who considered me their pillar of hope for a better life and I was abandoned when they couldn’t raise to the level of their own expectations and hopes and dreams. That doesn’t make me the boring friend or reality check friend or the one that is always sober and never has any self banter. However, it did make me lonely a few times with a few relationships I truly valued but lost them as we grew more and more apart. The important part is to see that the other one will not be able to stick around not because they don’t want to, but because it’s just too hard for them to do so if for so long you’ve spend more and more time apart. Somehow, the mindset to stay committed to a path depends on the energy of the people around us. And we don’t condemn a friend who decides to stay with the bad influence group rather than with you. We know they could do better but they can’t help themselves out of their own misery and we are not able to do it for them. The same might happen in relationships. I got the confirmation this happened to one of my ex-es whom I’ve spent the longest time with. I learned then that no matter how much you want to push someone to include you in their life or to pull them into yours, they would go their own way anyway if they can’t mitigate their own internal conflicts.

4. Loyalty

The same friend that told me she doesn’t want to take me to those places she was hanging out, eventually ended up dating a friend from my group of friends. Those days, my group was mixed and we were all very young and this particular friend was a complete jerk to women in that stage of his life. I knew very well they would not match. But I also loved her a lot and would not want to break her heart. In the many times, I tried to warn her about the true intentions of this guy, she would not want to listen. However, they dated for about 1 year and she eliminated any source of contact with me during that time because he told her I was against them and I represent a threat to the relationship. Obviously that was a display of narcissism from his side. But there was one thing that prevailed, and that was my loyalty to her. Even though she made the wrong choice and they ended up breaking up in a very nasty way, I was always aware that her choice was manipulated by him and I waited for her to wake up to the reality of things. We are still best friends to this day and we trust each other more for my ability to put my own hurt feelings aside and see her for what she is rather than an abusive person who abandoned me. She was human and chose madness of love over the advice that seemed rather counter-intuitive for the love bombing he was doing to sweep her off her feet.

If you want to read more about the trap of narcissistic abuse and how to avoid falling into it, I wrote another article here about this.

Coming back to using this virtue in a relationship, I was always surprised how much value it brings to see the true potential in people beyond the display they show. For example, one ex-boyfriend started drinking and smoking and became a rocker after we dated. He was with a rather fat girl, kind of self-destructive for 3 years after we broke up. I left him so I was aware this might have caused a trauma that manifests like this. But I always knew in my heart he was not that “bad boy” he was putting in display now. So years after we met in a tea place close to winter holidays and shared some grown-up memories. I wasn’t even sure why we were meeting after such a long time. We probably both needed closure. We chatted for a few hours. We caught up on life events since our breakup 5 years earlier. He was single as well. We both were so I told him right there something that would soothe the pain I caused but not create an illusion of being back together unless he truly wanted what I wanted from life at that point :

“Just because you’ve made some bad decisions, it doesn’t change the reasons why I fell in love with you the first time. You are still the same person and I see deep inside you the routes for that potential you always had to continue growing if you give it voice and resources to grow.”

We never dated again nor we met again after this point. But we spoke a few times on the phone and I am friends with him on Facebook and I know he is married now to an exceptional woman, beautiful, smart and kind just like he deserved. I am not sure if my loyalty to the friendship we shared beyond the adolescent mad love we had has helped him rediscover his confidence and start dating someone of his level after that, but I certainly believe we all could use that kind of loyalty from an ex provided we had a friendship going on as well. Loyalty to believe in our potential that they loved in us when we were together beyond the mistakes we would end up making in life.

5. Accountability not responsibility

We’ve come to a point where our monogamous cultures are inevitably pushing us into commitments far greater than we are supposed to take to keep appearances. What we need to keep in mind when we date is that the same way we don’t take responsibility for our friends fucking up at life, we should not take the responsibility in relationships either. However, we should keep them accountable for their stuff just like we do with our friends. And the beautiful thing about this is that it is the number one factor of helping couples develop intimacy. Once you no longer care about the other person just from the perspective of what they bring to the relationship with you but you also care about the relationship they have with themselves and help them reflect and keep accountability over their progress, then you’re more connected and involved than simple lovers.

Friendship often relies on vulnerability to admit your fault/ situation and the ability to see beyond the needs you have and help the other person get back on track by keeping them accountable and not taking up the task in their place. I’ve heard many times the stories of couples that had one partner struggling with something and the other ( usually the man) taking up the role of a savior because he needed to feel like a hero and her weakness helped him look better. I talked about the hero effect here. We can of course still maintain that without having to put the responsibility on the other partner to solve our problems.

All in all, just like in any friendship, relationships should not push friendship in an artificial way and try to integrate completely the partner in our lives just to feel like they truly belong to one another. I see how my own stories of growing out of friendships and relationships have taught me just as much about myself as the ones that were kept and still stand strong today. Being aware that some relationships are not meant to last is essential in building intimacy through friendship first. Because even if you do break up, you still have a great friend whom you can talk to like I have in 2 of my ex-boyfriends. I see the value of building intimacy through a friendship having more advantages than threats even if it might break the relationship. It provides more freedom than constraints and that’s the biggest most common source of divorce in monogamous relationships: we expect partners to be “everything” for each other and we isolate them from the opportunity to grow out of that relationship by invoking friendship arguments. As point 4 said, loyalty goes beyond the physical dimension of the relationship. Equally, we can’t expect to be everywhere with our partners just because I said at point 3 that friends spend time together instead of just tell each other the stories of how they had fun somewhere else. Indeed, it pays off to have more time bounding rather than just hustling as a couple, but the distance is just as valuable in a relationship as closeness. The balance between these 2 things allows the trust to form and attraction to be maintained by the amount of newness we bring to the relationship with the stories that we bring from outside the couple into the relationship.

Finally, forming a friendship first based relationship will be a long term foundation for love as a passion would wear off, as tensions from outside the couple will corrode the relationship as cheating might represent a challenge for long-term monogamous relationships. Friendship allows you to step back and see that what your partner does might not even have to do with you but with their own internal struggles. That’s when you can be there for them and help as a friend does.