Intimacy and Solitude Quotes

“How we feel about our own self, how well or little we know our own self, whether we feel alive inside, largely determine the quality of the time we spend alone, as well as the quality of the relationships we have with other people.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Balancing Closeness and Independence

“Sound crazy? It may well be, but it is precisely in relationships of intimacy that your craziness (and mine) will be hardest to conceal. p.215”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Balancing Closeness and Independence

“It should not be difficult to accept the idea that someone else is, in 'your experience of them', in part your self-creation. But it is difficult and sometimes impossible. Impossible because accepting the idea that you are in part creating your 'other' forces you to take on board a high degree of self responsibility. Few of us easily do that. p.234”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Balancing Closeness and Independence

“What helps most is remembering that such a cry or attack or sly blow is a reflection of that other person’s inner state; it is not an omniscient summary of you. Your reaction reflects your own inner state, and that can tell you which aspects of your own inner world are needy of attention. p.291”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Balancing Closeness and Independence

“[...] the responsibility for their wellbeing and for the fundamental meaning they give to their own life must, in adulthood, be theirs. To accept the burden that someone 'can't live without you' is unrealistic. It infantilises that person and overburdens you. p.226”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Balancing Closeness and Independence

“I have been using the word 'other' as though it were self-explanatory, yet who the 'other' is must always be something of a mystery. It is a mystery at an immediate level in the sense that no person is entirely knowable.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Balancing Closeness and Independence

“Someone who is comfortable in their own company and can be alone without feeling unduly anxious, defensive or half-alive is experiencing solitude”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“Knowing you can enjoy your own company is a vital precursor to being able to enjoy other people’s company without feelings of panic or neediness. And valuing your own company precedes believing that you can matter to other people in much the same way they matter to you.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“You are a self and an other.
Your 'others' are in part your own creation.
This in turn affects and shapes your experiences of self.
Your levels of self-awareness and self-acceptance largely shape how you perceive others. p.231”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Balancing Closeness and Independence

“[...] as I have seen with other people whose sense of their work is vocational rather than pragmatic, my desire to write, to understand things at a depth I can reach in no other way, pushes me to write and go on writing, even when my wants—for an easier or more sociable life, or one less exposed and fraught—are certainly well known to my rational mind. p.293”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Balancing Closeness and Independence

“Are things going the way we both want them? Are things going the way that suits us individually? What are the values we hold, separately and together? How is our relationship supporting those values? Is one of us developing at the expense of the other? Can we look at difficulties from the other’s point of view? Would we both be willing to make behavioural changes if those are needed?”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“many relationships depend for daily ease and survival on one person’s capacity to be flexible: to be able to give more than take; to be able to accept rather than demand; to be able to hold back rather than rush forward; to change when change is needed. It is no coincidence that in heterosexual relationships it is far more likely to be the woman whose sense of self is less ‘ego-bound’ and more adaptable. It is also no coincidence that it is likely to be the woman who is in much greater danger of allowing her sense of her own unique self to slide or be submerged into a ‘we-self’ which largely serves the needs of the male partner. This comes about for many reasons: • The woman is likely to have been socialised into emphasising an awareness of others rather than self-awareness (believing that self-awareness may be synonymous with selfishness). • The woman may be more flexible than her male partner. • She may unconsciously collude with her partner’s equally unexamined assumptions that his interests, career, sense of purpose have greater legitimacy than her own. • Her self-worth may depend on her capacity to make life pleasant and agreeable for others.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“Put another way, narcissism gives way to intimacy when each person can clearly see the other one as a separate individual and not just as an extension of their own needs, wishes and desires. (‘I can still love you even if you don’t always do what I want, when I want it, and how I want it.’)”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“Intimacy comes alive when you can consciously accept, cope with and even welcome the differences between your inner ideal and the real live person who is sharing your life and perhaps your bed. Someone who is gradually revealed to you with all the surprises, glories, disappointments, human faults and gifts that each of us has in varying measures. And you can accept that. And wish the person well.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“The crucial question is not: am I with Someone, but rather, am I Someone?”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“A relationship doesn’t work until you accept that it may break up tomorrow, and if it does you’ll be all right.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“Someone who has a similar confidence in their own inner reality, and who trusts that they go on existing whether or not anyone else is present, does not need to be constantly checking on their sense of self. They are, without much thinking about it, ‘calm, restful, relaxed and feeling one with people and things when no excitement is around’.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“Intimacy is not a matter of extending your self-absorption to include someone else. Much more than that, it is a matter of tuning into someone else’s reality and risking being changed by that experience.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“your connections with others can only be as rewarding as the connection you have with the only ‘someone’ with whom you live every moment of your life: your own self. Being in good contact with your own self, welcoming time with your own self as you might welcome time with a friend: this makes being with others less essential (I can’t bear to be alone) or perhaps less dangerous (I can’t be with others. They are sure to hate me/find me out/ignore me/crush me).”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“The capacity to be comfortably alone flows from satisfying experiences of being with someone else. What’s more, satisfying experiences of being with someone else fuel a continuing capacity to be alone, without feeling adrift or lonely.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“Many people who find it hard to be alone blame or despise themselves (or know themselves so little they do not realise that they can’t be alone but fill their lives with work, people, noise, booze or drugs).”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“You have to find somebody who doesn’t want to control you and who wants you to be yourself, and who actually likes what you are and not what they want you to be.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“different aspects of our complexity are ‘drawn out’ by different people, and that it is also possible to experience ourselves differently and more positively in a less stressed, more mutually accepting relationship.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“To the flow of recognition between my ‘I’ and your ‘you’ I bring my desires, my prejudices, and the force of my needs—conscious and unconscious—to the ‘evidence’ before me. In doing this, I create my own version of you. What this adds up to is that you are a somewhat different other for each person with whom you have contact.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“You are a different ‘other’ for each person you come into contact with, depending on how they ‘read’ or experience you. And, of course, each person you meet is an other for you in a way which comes very much out of your subjective reading of who that person is, your unconscious assumptions, as well as what could be called facts about the person.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“You are a self and an other. • Your ‘others’ are in part your own creation. • This in turn affects and shapes your experiences of self. • Your levels of self-awareness and self-acceptance largely shape how you perceive others.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“With some sense of your own separateness and autonomy you can go on being yourself, and make satisfying and varied connections with other people, whether or not you have a special someone in your life. This is because you know that your liveliness—your sense of being alive—comes from within. It is enriched by connections with people outside yourself, but does not depend on them. In solitude you are aware of being alive and having needs, and of being able to meet some of those needs without turning to others. In solitude you do not feel empty. In solitude you do not fear death by emotional starvation.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“Yet ‘getting it together’ with someone else is no more of a challenge than ‘getting it together’ with your own self. Not to wallow in egocentricity, just to be able to trust and enjoy who you are, to be able to take yourself for granted and so be open to others. The paradox is worth repeating. I cannot be ‘together’ with you unless I have some sense of my own separateness and autonomy. I can’t be my own self with you if I am bound to you in dependency. When our togetherness enhances my life but my life does not depend on it—I can be together with you and still be myself.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“The greater part of our lives is spent with ourselves, no matter where or with what other people we may live . . . our imagination is the only companion chained to us for the whole of existence.’ Charlotte Wolff”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world

“Clearly the crucial issue in the success of an intimate sexual relationship or very close friendship is not one of sexuality or of gender. More important than either is the conscious willingness of two people or a whole family or community to think about each other with generosity, openness, tolerance and respect, conscious that this counts for something only when it is also translated into behaviours that are routinely respectful, thoughtful and kind.”
― Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world