Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

by Donald Miller

Love can’t be earned, it can only be given. And it can only be exchanged by people who are completely true with each other.

Applause is a quick fix. And love is an acquired taste.

To have an intimate relationship, you have to show people who you really are.

Who else do you marry but the person who pulls you off the stage?

Here’s a thought that haunts me: What if we are designed as sensitive antennas, receptors to receive love, a longing we often mistake as a need to be impressive? What if some of the most successful people in the world got that way because their success was fueled by a misappropriated need for love? What if the people we consider to be great are actually the most broken? And what if the whole time they’re seeking applause they are missing out on true intimacy because they’ve never learned how to receive it?

I don’t mean to overstate what is yet unknown, but part of me believes when the story of earth is told, all that will be remembered is the truth we exchanged. The vulnerable moments. The terrifying risk of love and the care we took to cultivate it. And all the rest, the distracting noises of insecurity and the flattery and the flashbulbs will flicker out like a turned-off television.

Sometimes the story we’re telling the world isn’t half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.

Interestingly, he said, it wasn’t the rich who separated from the poor, but the opposite. He said people who didn’t feel like they’d accomplished much felt insecure around those who had. Bill said he wished we lived in a world where people couldn’t say what they did at all. He said the world would be a healthier place if nobody were allowed to wear a costume.

I began to wonder what life would be like if I dropped the act and began to trust that being myself would be enough to get the love I needed.

I thought about how there are so many lies in fear. So much deception. What else keeps us from living a better story than fear?

The problem is this: those of us who are never satisfied with our accomplishments secretly believe nobody will love us unless we’re perfect.

It’s all connected with the belief human love is conditional. But human love isn’t conditional. No love is conditional. If love is conditional, it’s just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love.

I’d have to trust that my flaws were the ways through which I would receive grace. We don’t think of our flaws as the glue that binds us to the people we love, but they are. Grace only sticks to our imperfections. Those who can’t accept their imperfections can’t accept grace either.

I wondered if Betsy wouldn’t be more happy married to a man who was relaxed than a man constantly feeling like he wasn’t working hard enough.

“They all think people are out to get them. It’s causing me to wonder if distrust doesn’t bring out the worst in us. I know it’s a complicated issue, because nearly everybody I put in prison has been tragically abused and so it’s natural they don’t trust others and they see life as a kill-or-be-killed drama. But it makes me wonder about those of us who deal with the same issue in lesser percentages. I wonder about my own heart. Am I willing to be hurt occasionally and turn the other cheek in order to have a long-term, healthy relationship?”

I read an article a few years ago about Apple Computers’ retail division and the way they do customer service. They want their team members to trust the “positive intent” of their customers. So when a customer comes in with a complaint, they don’t want their team members to assume they are trying to rip off the company or get something for free. They know the occasional loss will be offset by the connection they create with their customers by trusting them.

but what our head knows our body often defies.

if I spend the rest of our marriage believing she won’t love me unless I succeed, our marriage will be a disaster.

Somewhere along the line I think many of us buy into a lie that we only matter if . . . We only matter if we are strong or smart or attractive or whatever.

Partly, that’s the job of a writer, but the reality is all writing is a subtle form of manipulation, not always malicious, but usually designed to do two things: (1) communicate an idea and (2) make the writer sound intelligent.

It costs personal fear to be authentic but the reward is integrity, and by that I mean a soul fully integrated, no difference between his act and his actual person. Having integrity is about being the same person on the inside that we are on the outside, and if we don’t have integrity, life becomes exhausting.

It’s true people are attracted to intelligence and strength and even money, but attraction isn’t intimacy. What attracts us doesn’t always connect us.

The reality is people are impressed with all kinds of things: intelligence, power, money, charm, talent, and so on. But the ones we tend to stay in love with are, in the long run, the ones who do a decent job loving us back.

It makes me wonder how many people have damaged their own lives by mistaking enablement for grace?

It’s true the manipulator is the loneliest person in the world. And the second loneliest is the person being manipulated. Unless we’re honest with each other, we can’t connect. We can’t be intimate.

The reality is this, though: a healthy person coupled with an unhealthy person will still result in an unhealthy relationship.

Sooner or later the stuff I’d learned about healthy relationships kicked in and I began to trust the slow and natural process of learning to love and be loved by another person.

The backside of Hollywood passion is disappointment and loneliness—and more often than not, resentment and cynicism about the nature of love itself.

But true intimacy is just like that: it’s the food you grow from well-tilled ground. And like most things good for us, it’s an acquired taste.

He said, “Maybe, but most men don’t feel so strongly about this many girls a year, Don. Just last month you were talking like this about somebody else. I think you might be using these girls to numb your wounds. You’re addicted to some romantic fantasy, but you can’t face the reality that love demands we make a choice and stick with it.”

Change only comes when we face the difficulty of reality head-on. Fantasy changes nothing, which is why, once we're done fantasizing, it feels like a bankrupt story.

It’s funny what happens to you when part of your heart gets born inside somebody else. I trust I’ll do the crazy things parents do and they won’t seem crazy.

Relationships matter. They matter as much as exercise and nutrition. And not all relationships help us reach our goals. God doesn’t give us crying, pooping children because he wants to advance our careers. He gives them to us for the same reason he confused language at the Tower of Babel, to create chaos and deter us from investing too much energy in the gluttonous idols of self-absorption.

It all reminded me of what my friend Henry Cloud told me, that when two people are entirely and completely separate they are finally compatible to be one. Nobody’s self-worth lives inside of another person. Intimacy means we are independently together.

Real love stories don’t have dictators, they have participants.

Perhaps that’s another reason true intimacy is so frightening. It’s the one thing we all want, and must give up control to get.

The best ones were Henry Cloud and John Townsend’s Safe People and Harriet Braiker’s Who’s Pulling Your Strings?

Libros a leer

a healthy person in a relationship with an unhealthy person still makes an unhealthy relationship.

Characters only change when they live through a story.

WHENEVER SOMEBODY STARTS KEEPING SCORE IN a relationship the relationship begins to die.

The reality is, though, you can’t have a true, intimate relationship with people you control. Control is about fear. Intimacy is about risk.

It’s a hard thing to be human. It’s a very hard thing. Nobody needs a judge or a scorekeeper lording their faults over them.

IN THE BOOK SAFE PEOPLE, HENRY CLOUD AND John Townsend define what a safe person is. They say it’s somebody who speaks the truth in grace.

We had the usual conversation about what it’s like to become parents and how our perceptions of life change and so on, and then Jamie said something I’d never heard a parent say before. She said, “You know, Don, I’ve become protective of what people say to my children. It’s surprising how many people already want to name them.” I told her I didn’t know what she meant and so she explained. “They’ll pick up my son and say something like, ‘Oh, look at you, you’re going to be a little rebel. You’re going to make trouble for everybody, aren’t you? You’re going to be a firecracker.’ ” “Okay,” I said, having heard a thousand people say that stuff to a thousand babies. Jamie said it infuriated her, though. “Nobody is going to label my kids,” she said. “They’re not even out of the hospital, for crying out loud.” Jamie said as soon as somebody does that she politely takes the baby back and when the person leaves the room she whispers to the kid not to listen to them, that they can grow up and be whoever they want and nobody gets to tell them who they are except God.

With a dog, it’s pretty simple. You can just scare them and they run and hide. With people, though, it’s more complicated. The way manipulative people train others is by attacking their identity. They clang the pots and pans of lies about who they are, how terrible they are, and send their victims running into the bedroom, shaking.

when we don’t believe we are good or lovable, we isolate.

It’s a beautiful moment when somebody wakes up to this reality, when they realize God created them so other people could enjoy them, not just endure them.

If our identity gets broken, it affects our ability to connect.

LAST YEAR I READ AN ARTICLE ABOUT AN AUSTRALIAN nurse named Bronnie Ware, who spent the bulk of her career in palliative care, tending patients with twelve or fewer weeks to live. Not surprisingly most of her patients had joys and regrets. Bronnie said in the last few weeks of their lives, however, they were able to find a higher level of clarity about what mattered most. Remarkably, the most common regret of the dying was this: they wish they’d had the courage to live a life true to themselves and not the life others expected of them.

As long as you’re willing to turn the other cheek with the mean ones, vulnerability can get you a wealth of friends.