On the Evolution of Intimacy

Nothing more defines gender and love today than change. Indeed, because these changes are so striking—and so far-reaching and fundamental in their implications—I often use them as examples of the broader changes that are reordering culture. This short book turns specifically to how changes in the worlds of gender and love are altering the human experience.

Two questions will be constant companions throughout these reflections. First, just how do we best understand the changes we see and interpret their effects? Some, such as greater gender equality, are obviously positive, while others, such as increasing divorce rates, can seem much less so. And second, just what do today’s easily confusing new realities ask of us? What awarenesses, skills, and capacities will be needed if we are to successfully navigate realities that are likely to change even more dramatically in decades ahead?

The perspective I will draw on in addressing these questions is unusual. I’m a psychiatrist, and much in my observations will reflect my experience working hands-on with individuals and couples who are attempting to make their way in today’s new gender and love landscape. But I’m also a futurist. Because of this, what I propose will as much come from understanding what we see today in the context of more encompassing cultural changes.

In addition, in contrast to what we commonly encounter with both popular and academic cultural commentary, I will engage these concerns from a very big-picture, long-term vantage. I will at times look back thousands of years. And in looking ahead, my concern will often be as much with what we are likely to encounter twenty, fifty, or a hundred years from now as with the changes we confront today.

That fact that I do so is of much more than just abstract interest. By the book’s conclusion, it should be clear that we can understand gender and love at more than a surface level only with big-picture, long-term perspective. It should also be clear that big-picture, long-term perspective is necessary if we are to engage today’s gender- and love-related conversations and controversies with the needed sophistication. The book’s conclusions will frequently be provocative and often controversial. A small handful provide a “preview of coming attractions”:

1) I will describe how the ways we think about and experience love have evolved, and how they continue to evolve. And I will propose that our times challenge us to engage a new chapter in that evolution, one as significant in its newness as that which brought us Romeo and Juliet—style romantic love 300 years ago.

2) I will describe how, in similar ways, our thinking about identity has evolved and continues to evolve. And I will propose that changes happening today in how we think about identity are as fundamental in their significance as those that brought us the modern-age concept of the individual and modern institutions such as representative governance. Of particular significance for this inquiry, this includes changes in how we think about gender identity.

3) We will examine how, consistent with the fundamental nature of these changes, both love and identity are requiring skills and capacities new to us as a species. We will see how this is similarly the case whether our concern is authentic equality between the sexes, effectively honoring gender diversity, or learning to love in ways that can work going forward. Much of my reason for writing this book is a desire to help people understand and develop those needed new skills and capacities.

4) We will also examine further essential awarenesses that come from this new picture. For example, we will look at how our historical tendency to view men and women as polar opposites has had more to do with how our thinking processes have worked in times past than it does with the actual truth of the matter. We will also look at how a more big-picture perspective reveals gender-related insights that at first might seem paradoxical: We come to see that men and women are more similar than we have assumed in times past. And, at the same time, we come to better appreciate real differences.

5) Throughout these reflections, I will observe how the tasks ahead challenge both men and women. These new tasks relate both to how men and women see themselves and how each views the other. For example, we will look at how men and women are equally capable of causing harm in relationships—in their own ways of being “violent.” We will also look at how historical perspective brings into question commonly accepted conclusions about the roots of gender discrimination and conflict between the sexes, and how this perspective requires both men and women to take greater responsibility. And we will look too at how men and women in our time each tend to be disconnected from aspects of our complex natures that we need for really deep human relating. I will propose that the changes this book is about require a depth of engagement with that complexity that is only now becoming possible—indeed, that they follow naturally from it.

Another way this inquiry is unusual is in the conceptual approach that underlies its conclusions. To get the needed big-picture, long-term perspective, the book draws extensively on the ideas of Creative Systems Theory (CST), a comprehensive framework for understanding purpose, change, and interrelationship in human systems which was developed by myself and my colleagues at the Seattle-based Institute for Creative Development over the last forty years. CST views history as an evolutionary process that goes through identifiable “developmental” stages. Applying the theory to gender and love will let us step back and better appreciate these essential aspects of human experience in the larger context of culture’s evolving story.

To bring detail to our understanding of the particular times in which we live, the book applies one specific CST notion. The concept of Cultural Maturity describes how our times are demanding (and making possible) a new chapter in our human narrative—put in developmental terms, an essential “growing up” as a species. We will look at how changes we see today in how we think about identity, gender, and love are natural consequences of this new cultural chapter.

For our task in these pages, the concept of Cultural Maturity will assist us in multiple ways. It will make understandable why we are seeing such fundamental changes in our time. (I will argue that it is hard to fully make sense of the changes currently reordering our experience of identity, gender, and love if something like what the concept of Cultural Maturity describes is not basically correct.) It will help clarify the new skills and capacities that will be needed if our love- and gender-related choices in times ahead are to be good ones. It will also help us grasp the changes in how we understand that will be necessary if needed new skills and capacities are to be realized and effectively put into practice. (I will argue that without Cultural Maturity’s changes, it is hard to imagine deeply felt identity and successful love being possible in the future.)

Particularly when it comes to love, all this might seem like too much “thinking.” We’ve tended in times past to view thinking and love as almost opposites. As we will see, given how we’ve before understood thinking and also how we’ve understood love, seeing them as not just opposites, but often as adversaries, has made perfect sense.

Two factors make the situation with this inquiry different. First is how identity and love today each require that we bring greater nuance and responsibility to our discernments. This does not mean being more analytical in making our choices—a major conclusion of CST is that addressing today’s challenges requires more than just thought as we usually think of it. But it does mean that we need to make choices that better honor the uniqueness of who we are and the particulars of our circumstances.

The second factor pertains to just how the type of thought required to address these challenges is different. (Its importance should become increasingly clear as the book progresses.) CST’s approach to understanding is unique in that it inherently draws on the whole of our cognitive complexity—always as much on the relational worlds of feelings and emotions, the inspired possibilities of imagination, and the sensory and sensual realities of the body as on the intellect. In so doing, it helps us think with greater detail about identity and love while at the same time taking us closer to them as direct experience. As a bonus, because these less conscious aspects of intelligence are exactly the parts of ourselves that we tend to be disconnected from in our time, drawing on CST’s approach to understanding directly supports the new skills and capacities that the future of identity and love depend on.

A related way CST will serve us with this inquiry is reflected in the book’s subtitle: A Brief Exploration Into the Past, Present, and Future of Gender and Love. A person would not expect such an exploration to be “brief.” What allows me to keep this volume to only 160 pages is that CST gives as much attention to pattern as to particulars. The recognition of big-picture pattern will often allow us to capture complex dynamics with single-brushstroke succinctness.¹

Is this book for everyone? If you ascribe to pretty traditional ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman and are comfortable with the picture of marriage and family broadly shared over the last century, what I describe may well be more than you wish to consider. You may also not be delighted with the book if you find political correctness a priority— whatever the particular flavor of socio-political correctness. Culturally mature perspective challenges us to address questions of all sorts in more encompassing and complete—more systemic—ways. As far as political correctness, it alerts us to how liberal and conservative (and also middle-of-the-road) ideological views, each in its own way not only fails to provide useful answers, more often than not they miss the real questions. This applies to ideological positions we might take with regard to gender and love as much as it does to more obviously ideological concerns.

My reference to how the book challenges both men and women provides good illustration. Women’s issues—and with them, changes needed on the part of men—are today being given particular, and essential, new attention. I will applaud this. But I will also emphasize that while men obviously have much to learn from today’s gender-related conversations, women do as well. Indeed, because the conversation right now, at least in liberal/progressive circles, tends to focus almost entirely on the blindnesses of men, I will often be particularly careful to be balanced in this regard.²

Near the end of the book, I will turn specifically to contemporary conversations spawned by efforts such as the #MeToo movement.³ I will describe how the general direction of such advocacy is almost wholly positive. But I will also propose that the larger part of what we have seen to this point is better understood as a culminating expression of the modern age project⁴ than a reflection of Cultural Maturity’s needed further changes. And I will emphasize that we can be vulnerable in these conversations to simplistic conclusions that in the end benefit neither women nor men. Over the course of the book, I will touch on a handful of complexities that we must keep in mind if such advocacy is ultimately to serve us.

By the book’s conclusion, the reader should be able to bring more nuanced and sophisticated perspective to today’s essential gender- and love-related conversations. The reader should also come to appreciate some of the great rewards that come with such perspective. For example, we will see how Cultural Maturity’s changes should bring, with time, a lessening of “the battle of the sexes.” I don’t mean this in some utopian, idealized sense. Men and women will always at times have conflicting needs. But this lessening of the kind of conflict we have seen in the past is a result that follows naturally from Cultural Maturity’s changes. If we can bring the needed complexity of perspective to today’s gender- and love-related conversations, these conversations should support relegating at least the most egregious aspects of the battle of the sexes to history. If we can’t, even if we are well intentioned, the result of these conversations could be the opposite. We could very well see the same kind of extreme, reactive polarization we witness today in the political sphere.

This book comes at the challenge ahead for men and women from multiple directions, each of which interplays with the others. In the pages ahead, we will examine the roots of our experience of gender and love and how that experience has evolved through history. We will look more deeply at just what is new in today’s new chapter in how we understand ourselves and connect with those we care about. We will tease apart some of the new skills and capacities we will need if identity and love are to work going forward. We will examine some of the particular tasks ahead for men and for women. And we will reflect on how these changes support new kinds of fulfillment as we look into the future.

Again, this book is not for everyone—at least not everyone right now. Depending on your life experience, it may be decades before the emerging realities examined here manifest in a major way in your life. If you are only beginning to be impacted by the kinds of changes this book is about, you may find the book’s reflections at best only abstractly interesting. That said, I will argue that the demands and possibilities this book is about will in time be pertinent to everyone.⁵

1 Besides being an exploration into identity, gender, and love, The Evolution of Intimacy can also be thought of as an examination of one particular application of Creative Systems Theory. As such, it can also be thought of as a test of the theory. To the degree the book provides helpful guidance, it serves as evidence for the theory’s accuracy.

2 In my psychiatry practice, I frequently work with young men who find themselves rightfully confused by today’s changing realities and often contradictory expectations. Being able to step back in a way that clarifies lessons to be learned all the way around proves particularly important for helping these young men make sense of changes being asked of them in our time and why they are important.

3 For those who are reading this book well after its initial date of publication, the #MeToo movement was an effort in the spring of 2018 to bring new attention to male abuse of power and sexual misconduct. It began with the highlighting of abusive behavior in Hollywood.

5 People of non-heterosexual orientation or with relationships to gender other than binary should find the book’s approach respectful and honoring of their experiences. But it is also the case that I most often make the point of reference traditional heterosexual identity and relationship. If I addressed multiple kinds of experience each step along the way, the book would pretty quickly cease to be a “brief” exploration—and would also quickly take me beyond where I have sufficient expertise. I’ve chosen to trust that readers can add the needed perspective when appropriate. Thus, for example, at the end of Chapter Five, I list “Specific Learnings for Men” and “Specific Learnings for Women.” With each list, I make reference to the fact that being a man or being a woman can be experienced in multiple ways. But I’ve also trusted that people will be able to make necessary translations.