On the Evolution of Intimacy

We’ve covered more territory than you may have bargained for. These big-picture, long-term reflections have required not just that the reader look into the past in ways many people are not accustomed to, they have also asked us to picture possibilities that many of us may not know in our lifetimes. They’ve also challenged us to reflect with unusual depth on current circumstances. But if you’ve gotten this far, I can assume that you have found the overarching perspective—and implied learnings—these reflections have offered at least provocative.

I’ve described how the changes confronting our experience of gender and of relationships between the sexes today are legitimately confusing, how they directly bring into question much that we have known and often require that we think in new ways. But I’ve also proposed that these changes are ultimately to be celebrated. I’ve argued that we are seeing the possibility of understanding—and embodying—both identity and love in deeper and more substantive ways than have before been an option.

I’ve also addressed important related learnings that follow from engaging this more complete picture of identity and love. Of particular importance, we examined how men and women are not as different as we have before assumed. We looked at how history’s familiar polarized picture has been more a product of ways our cognitive processes have before worked than what has actually been the case. We also looked at how the result is no more some opposite conclusion, some unisex ideal. We explored what it might mean to better recognize real similarities and differences, to appreciate both what we share and what ultimately it is not possible to share.

We looked too at how new kinds of skills and capacities are needed if we are to successfully engage the challenges that identity and love today present. Some of the most important included engaging needed truths more directly (and becoming comfortable with the greater uncertainty and responsibility doing so entails), learning to better appreciate life and love as processes, thinking about commitment in more nuanced ways, and more clearly discerning our particular gifts and also ways in which we can do harm. In addressing these needed new skills and capacities, we also examined the changes in ourselves that make them possible and looked at approaches that can support these changes.

In addition, we stepped back and put these changes in the larger context of history. The insights that resulted helped make understandable why our perceptions of gender have taken the different forms that they have at different times. They also offered that we might better appreciate both why we see today’s changes and the fact of their major historical significance.

The approach I’ve used to engage these changes may at times have created its own kind of confusion. In the end, it has involved not just more encompassing ways of understanding identity, love, and history, but a more encompassing way of understanding more generally. My reason for using this approach is that it supports needed clarity in understanding what makes today’s gender- and love-related changes of such importance and also what ultimately they ask of us. If I have been successful, it has also helped link these changes to broader changes reordering our lives today that will be necessary to a future we will want to live in.

Might the changes this book has been about bring with them an end to the eternal “battle of the sexes”? As I suggested in the book’s preface, certainly not entirely. Much of past conflict has had its roots in needs that are authentically different. And the fact that relationships by their nature bring greater proximity and mutual dependencies means that we can’t escape that there will at times be a bumping of heads.

But there are good reasons to think that the kind of conflict we’ve encountered historically could lessen considerably. The possibility of getting beyond the projections that before have produced polarized interpretations of differences suggests that men and women in the future should at least be able to see each other more accurately. There is also how Whole-Person identity invites a new and deeper kind of mutual acknowledgement. At the least, it helps us appreciate other people, regardless of their gender identification or sexual orientation, more simply as people. It also brings with it the possibility of men finding greater appreciation for the unique qualities that women often bring to the table, and women the reverse.

I’ve touched briefly on the importance of current gender- and sexuality-related conversations. Might we expect them to support this lessening of conflict? Certainly they are helping us confront topics that for much too long have been swept under the rug. But I’ve observed too that unless we engage them with the needed sophistication, these conversations could also end up exacerbating the historical battle of the sexes, at least in the short term. We could see a reactive polarization similar to what we witness today in the political realm.

But whatever we see more immediately, if we can successfully take on the kinds of learnings this book has been about, we should in time find a marked lessening of conflict. These learnings make considerable demands. But at the same time, they expand the perspectives of both men and women in ways that could not be more important.

The challenges for men are most obvious. We’ve seen how men have to give up their past expectations of dominance and any beliefs that justify denigration or violation of women. We’ve seen too how what is involved requires not just changes in men’s attitudes, but changes in how men hold the experience of being a man.

We’ve also seen how the challenges are just as basic and ultimately transforming for women. Women have to better recognize how they too are capable of behaviors that violate. They also need to get beyond a narrative that sees the past only through a lens of oppression and victimization. Being fully empowered requires it. And being empowered in a way that is capable of deep caring certainly does.

It would be easy to think that these learnings require only that we act with greater awareness or compassion. Here we’ve seen how awareness and compassion can only be a start. We also need changes in how we think, and ultimately in who we are. When we succeed with these deeper changes, we become better able to see others for who they are. That includes all that we share and all that is unique in each person’s makeup and circumstances.

None of these changes are easy. And with all of them we are only taking baby steps. At best, we reside in awkward in-between times. The simple task of questioning past gender stereotypes can for many people be a stretch. The deeper challenge we have looked at here—fundamentally rethinking both identity and love—can be hard simply to make sense of. We are making a start with this deeper challenge in beginning to recognize the importance of more options in the forms that identity and love can take. But what I have described here—engaging a wholly new chapter in the story of identity and love—is necessarily tricky to grasp, and even trickier to fully take on in our lives.

That said, as we’ve seen, the rewards for even just making a start are immense. We recognize the possibility of deeper and more solid identities as men and as women. We also begin to be capable of more fulfilling intimate connections. And we discover the paradoxical fact that engaging identity and love in needed new ways, while more demanding than what we have known, is also in important ways simpler. We can think of it all as part of a needed new common sense. We are being challenged to live and love from the whole of who we are, as fully embodied beings.