Intimacy is vitally important in a relationship, and is an integral part of your sexual wellness and wellbeing. Intimacy means different things to different people, however, and it does not necessarily mean having lots of sex.
Intimacy is more about deep committed – a relationship based on trust, honesty, self-disclosure, appreciation, respect, togetherness and interdependence. Men and women go about this in different ways, though, with women preferring a ‘face to face’ approach. This means that when women talk to men, they like to draw closer, look into one another’s eyes (what is called an ‘anchoring gaze’) and talk about deep, intimate details of their lives, such as their hopes and their worries. This is probably rooted in ancient times, where ancestral women would have spent their days looking into the eyes of their infant children, and soothing them by talking.
Men, on the other hand, tend to regard intimacy as either playing or working side by side, rather than face to face. They may discuss troubles with their love lives or a bad week at work perhaps, but it is far more rare for them to discuss their darkest fears and their secret dreams. When they talk, they often speak in a jokey way, hiding their true feelings behind humour. Men also rarely look deeply into one another’s eyes. Again, this probably harks back to historic times when ancestral males would be more likely to gather in groups, hunting prey together. They stayed side by side with their friends, and only faced enemies.
For this reason, if you want to be intimate with a man, do things with him side by side, rather than making him feel threatened with a direct gaze. At the same time, men are more likely to find ‘debating’ an intimate activity, while women thing that ‘organising a neighbourhood party together’ would be one of the most intimate things they could imagine.