The Wounder of Aging by Michael Gurian

Author:Michael Gurian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

The Art of Intimate Separateness

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“To love another person is to see the face of God,” the author Victor Hugo wrote almost 150 years ago. We are social animals, wired for relationship and human contact. If we spend some part of our day wondering about sex, we spend even more trying to understand and improve our ability to be intimate. Thus intimacies occur in every workplace, every meeting place, every home. Protecting and developing intimacy is extremely important during the stages of age.

There is healthy intimacy as we age and there is unhealthy intimacy, and perhaps billions of versions of each. There is certainly no single right way to be intimate, marry, divorce, remarry, choose against intimacy, choose intimacy again, have sex, have sex often, or choose to give up sex altogether. Part of the wonder of aging is the freedom to realize that love, sex, and intimacy are what we make them, and we make them into what we and our intimates need. Desire gradually capitulates its dominant position; deep intimacy gradually takes hold of us. Unless we concentrate on how this is happening, we may not even know it is happening. Wonders, even miracles, in coupled intimacy come from honesty, realistic optimism, and collaboration toward new goals of love.

When I work with couples in marital counseling, I try to flow toward what the couple needs, and often they need short-term solutions to specific issues, such as sexual changes. Sometimes the counseling ends once the short-term solutions are realized. Often, though, counseling continues toward new ways of understanding how to sustain love in the stages of age. Coupled love must now transform into an evolved intimacy system appropriate for love after fifty. The fourth concentration in our wonder-of-aging paradigm is the generous kind of love I call intimate separateness.

Adapting a relationship toward intimate separateness can help sustain marriage (or new partnership) through the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and beyond. In this chapter, let’s use the term “marriage” for any significant life partnership. Whether you are evolving a marriage of many decades or beginning a new one, your body and brain have matured by the time you are fifty into a self that needs different balances of desire and longing, ideal and real, aggression and conciliation, quietude and passion than before. As you age into and through the stages of age, emotional and sexual intimacy need to transform. “Duh!” we say. Yet few things are more difficult to do, unless we look closely at them. In this chapter, let’s look closely at the evolution of both emotional and sexual intimacy as we age.

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