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

by Donald Miller

Good friends do that; they guard each other when things get scary by putting themselves in between their friends and what could harm them.

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?

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

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.

There are really only two things a person can do when they’re that much of a perfectionist. They can either live in the torture and push themselves to excel, or they can quit. I tend to go back and forth between the torture of working too hard and the sloth of quitting.

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

Grace only sticks to our imperfections. Those who can’t accept their imperfections can’t accept grace either.

Am I willing to be hurt occasionally and turn the other cheek in order to have a long-term, healthy relationship?”

The harshest people I’ve met over the years have had two things in common: they don’t fully trust anybody, and they view relationships as a means to an end.

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.

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.

how many people have damaged their own lives by mistaking enablement for grace?

Unless we’re honest with each other, we can’t connect. We can’t be intimate.

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.

“Sometimes being willing to talk about nothing shows how much we want to be with each other.

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.

DON’T KNOW WHY LOVING A WOMAN IS SCARIER than climbing a mountain or sailing an ocean, but it is. A mountain can hurt your body and an ocean can drown you, but in the end you’re still a man for conquering them. Dead or alive, you’re still a man. A woman, though, can rob your manhood and reduce you to a boy at the drop of a word. It’s no wonder we all try to control each other.

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

When a Judge personality is religious, they’ll use the Bible to gain control of others. The Bible becomes a book of rules they use to prove they are right rather than a book that introduces people to God.

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

you’d be surprised at how easy it is to convince the American people that a perfectly good man is a demon.”

THE PEOPLE with the healthiest self-esteem are also the greatest at intimacy.

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.

This is a town in which you get ahead by staying on script. You become whoever it is people want you to be or you’re out of a job.” Suddenly DC made sense.

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.

if we go to our graves with our feelings still in us, we will die with regrets.

The more fully we live into ourselves, the more impact we will have. Acting may get us the applause we want, but taking a risk on being ourselves is the only path toward true intimacy. And true intimacy, the exchange of affection between two people who are not lying, is transforming.

THE STUFF IT TAKES TO BE INTIMATE IS AUTHENTICITY, vulnerability, and a belief that other people are about as good and bad as we are.

parents who don’t admit their faults have children who are troubled and emotionally restless as though they secretly want to be free from their families so they can be themselves.

parents who hide their flaws unknowingly create an environment where kids feel the need to hide. And feeling the need to hide our true selves from the world is rarely healthy.

Maybe what children really need is simple. Maybe they just need somebody to show them it’s okay to be human.

Have a project to work on, some reason to get out of bed in the morning and preferably something that serves other people.

when something difficult happens, recognize the ways that difficulty also serves you.

Share your life with a person or people who love you unconditionally.

When men left their homes and farms to work on assembly lines, they disconnected their sense of worth from the well-being of their wives and children and began to associate it with efficiency and productivity in manufacturing.

“All relationships are living and alive and moving and becoming something.

sooner or later that love will have to encounter the hard facts of reality. Does this person have the kind of character and discipline it takes to make a loving relationship work? Is the passion real or are they trying to heal old wounds?

every person has a longing that will never be fulfilled and it’s our job to let it live and breathe and suffer within it as a way of developing our character.

I don’t know if there’s a healthier way for two people to stay in love than to stop using each other to resolve their unfulfilled longings and, instead, start holding each other closely as they experience them.