Full disclosure: I often enjoy viewing erotica online. This piece is not about sexual acts, or sex. It’s not even about porn. I bring up the topic because it’s the major pathway a lot of people take towards intimacy. I also bring up erotica for context, because I have something honest, vulnerable, sincere and, I believe, important, to say about real intimacy. Finally, I have to admit, I bring up porn as a way to grab your attention and hope you’ll stick with me for a PG … 14 discussion about “the birds & the needs” of intimacy for adults.

Erotica filmed by women for women is often the most tasteful content. The genre of real couples allowing themselves to be filmed in their most intimate moments has a lot of appeal for me. As a man, the stereotype would be that I am in the minority watching porn whose target audience is women. The tastefully done cinematography of real couples can be very gratifying to watch. It can add a bit of novelty to my own sexual life, giving me a wonderful feeling of what other loving couples look like when they are enjoying one another.

I believe there are more of us out there, men and women, who are craving something more real in real life. I have a partner. We’re very happy together. As such, choosing monogamy with her, I know I will not experience physical intimacy with other body types, or other ethnicities, so I am grateful to the couples who choose to be vulnerable enough to allow themselves to be witnessed in their most intimate moments.

Then again, true intimacy isn’t physical, or sexual. True, we all need ‘Vitamin T’ (touch) but we also need Vitamin I (intimacy ~ “into-me-see”). Those are the beautiful, fleeting, rare moments when we have the unique opportunity to really see the inside of another person …. not their trauma, not their insecurities, not their masks or social roles but theit real inner being, that warm center of themselves, who we all are deep down. It’s a heart-melting experience to share such soft and tender moments with another person.

Lying face to face on the couch, perhaps our legs outstretched, our feet touching, our calves just grazing each other. The experience we’re involved in is intimate, emotional. Sex isn’t the goal. We’re just … into each other … seeing into each other, understanding, listening, connecting.

Connection is a human need.

And it’s rare. Maybe it’s always been rare, locked behind social stigmas, concerns about being back-stabbed, betrayed, worried about what things mutual friends might think, or assume or gossip about.

Intimacy is also tied up with monogamy, and it’s too often been the case that if we’re in a committed relationship, all of our deeper emotional needs are put on our partner. “Emotional cheating” became almost as big a reason for jealousy as an affair.

I believe deep down that it doesn’t have to be that way. I know that it takes a high level of emotional maturity (some call it Emotional I.Q.) to share intimacy without our sexual instincts, programming, hormones, or social conditioning sabotaging our relationships. But I also believe the rise of anxiety and depression in today’s world is significant, and suggest that a major reason behind it is our lack of true connection with others … plural.

I’m not referring to connecting over messenger or having digital face time with others. I believe an academic study could easily be done that would correlate social media with social anxiety.

There are real-life interpersonal groups based on the art of connection. I have been leading one of them in the city where I live for several years. Covid, of course, has hampered the group’s ability to connect, but even so, I have stuck to my principles and not brought the group online.

I believe it’s just not the same. And in that way, it’s very similar to erotica. Yes, I enjoy the vicarious gratification of watching other couples, pending I’m there. But of course I’m not there, and neither is the je ne sais quoi of sex.

In today’s world, there are even sex robots now. I will refrain from making a judgment on that technology. It’s too far off-topic to address here. I will only say this: it might replace the physical act of sex ~  je ne sais quoi notwithstanding ~ but how could it ever replace intimacy?

We are healthiest when we embrace each other and eschew the taboo of intimacy which locks it behind the walls of sex and emotional cheating, and certainly not imprison it behind the walls of technology. In drama, “breaking the fourth wall” means connecting directly with the audience. Is technology the fifth wall in the modern world? Just another barrier from connection?

I learned how to lead the Art of Connection group I founded from an organization called Authentic Relating. Authentic Relating is an international group that, legend has it, was born at Burning Man. I have mixed feelings about some of the things I have heard second-hand about Burning Man, including heavy drug use and orgies. There’s also wonderful stories of real heart-warming connection with strangers in the desert most of whom will never see each other again. Wonderful as that may be, intimacy with strangers, that sounds like a one-night stand to me. What I mean is really, deeply connecting with others. I guess I mean emotional commitment ~ plural. Isn’t that closer to how small tribes once lived?

A final point: my background is actually a somewhat sexually conservative one. When I accidentally found myself in a sub-culture in Ashland, Oregon that held a 2-week long retreat in the woods misrepresenting itself as a connection and healing retreat. I ran away, screaming. What I had accidentally stumbled on was a Dionysian orgy in the woods. What I saw there led me to further realize that our society too often uses sex as nothing more than a proxy for intimacy.

It seems we are afraid of true connection. Maybe we have valid reasons. Neverthless, there is an epidemic of anemia for intimacy. And as digital technologies mediate our interactions more and more, and we retreat further behind our Digital Walls, I believe ~ maybe I fear ~ that many of us are missing the je ne sais quoi of being human: connection with other people in real life.