The Difference Between Love, Sex, Intimacy, Trauma Bonding, & Compatibility

Excerpt From The Boundaries Handbook

We humans are adorable. Whether we crave intimate connection, jonesing for it desperately like a junkie seeking out the next fix, or whether we’re scared of it, running away from intimacy like we’re going to die if anyone gets too close, or whether we flip back and forth between both, most of us have no idea how to love and be loved in a well-boundaried yet intimate way. Why? Because our original teachers, our parents, usually didn’t know how to really love us either, and they rarely modeled it with others. Instead of growing up with childhood lessons that guide our Love School curriculum as thoroughly as we learn our K-12 education, most of us were fed a laundry list of lies about what love is and is not.

I’m not even talking only about the romanticized Disney princess notion of love, the romantic comedy ideas about love and intimacy, the media’s fairy tale romantic comedy representations of romance, Sex and the City’s superficial, narcissistic, and trauma bonded stereotypes of love, sex, and intimacy, or pornography’s graphic, objectivizing, detached, and intimacy-free imagery of how sex is supposed to be. I’m also talking about the way we idealize the Friends TV show version of our close inner circle of intimate friends, or how we develop unrealistic expectations about what our intimate family bonds should be like, and even how to relate in a healthy way in business or professional connections that can become personally close, given how many hours per day most of us spend working.

No matter how big your heart is, if you believe love and intimacy is what you’re shown in the media, you’re likely to wind up confused and disillusioned, especially if you had less than perfect parents, like most of us did (and like most of us who are parents are.) If you add to the media’s distorted view the screwed up messages about love and sex that arise from the church, the patriarchy, racialized stereotypes, and the conditioning of a confused culture, it’s no wonder we grow up feeling disoriented and disappointed, suffering from what Christine Hassler calls an “expectation hangover.”

“Love” disappoints us over and over again. But is that thing that disappoints us and puts us at risk of chronic illness really love? I don’t believe so. Is it intimacy? Probably not. So let us begin by unpacking some distinctions between love, sex, intimacy, trauma bonding, and compatibility.

Consider this as a way to peel some definitions apart.  You might love someone as unconditionally as is humanly possible but have zero intimacy because you’ve had to break all contact. You can have sex with zero intimacy if you don’t know someone you sleep with. You can love and be personally and emotionally intimate with someone you have zero sexual attraction to, such as a close friend or family member.  You can be transpersonally intimate with someone who you don’t know very well, such as someone you meet in a workshop or in rehab.  You might also have a certain kind of one sided intimacy, such as when you’re exposing your heart and your guts to your therapist or your priest, but neither one of you knows the mundane details of daily life and you don’t hang out beyond the therapeutic container. You can feel very enmeshed and fused with someone you’re trauma bonded with in ways that feel very intimate, even though the dynamic may be very abusive and unhealthy. And sadly, you can really love and be intimate with someone you’re simply not compatible with.

To have love, sex, intimacy, and compatibility, without trauma bonding, with one person, in a well-boundaried, healthy way, is rare, if not nearly impossible! Not only do we often fail to be truly intimate with our romantic partners and family members; we’re also frequently on the receiving end of subtly or overtly abusive behavior on the part of those who we’re trauma bonded with, those who say they love us, especially when we’re young. Such messaging confuses us, especially if we’re subjected to a “love reversal,” when we get confused about what is and is not love because an abuser might follow their boundary violating, abusive behavior with words like, “But I love you.”

It helps to try to sort out some of these definitions, since they can get easily confused, especially for trauma survivors who may have been very deprived of love, healthy, boundaried sex, real, safe, non-enmeshed intimacy, and enough access to knowing your true Self and having refined standards to be able to discern compatibility. So let’s try to define these things for clarity’s sake.