What is Intimacy? Is it a transcendental feeling akin to love? Can it be found in an action, like holding hands? Will you find it in candle lit rooms, or in the voice of Barry Manilow? Who knows? For everyone, intimacy has a personally intimate meaning. Whether it’s the voice of your first true love, a special caress that makes your toes curl, or simply sharing secrets with your favorite confidant… everyone has known intimacy at some point in their life. However, only the truly blessed experience indefinite intimacy. For everyone else, myself included, life can be a string of detached indifference and uncertain moments.

A Rough Beginning

Until recently, I rolled through life in a virtual bubble. As a child I was diagnosed with asthma and suffered from an incurable case of high IQ. As such, my fellow classmates were less than accepting. The prescribed steroids in the inhalers, used to treat my asthma, were less than forgiving on my young thighs and hips. My school uniform burgeoned under the increased strain of my newly added weight, and I was left sinking in the tide of juvenile jeers. Best friends were far and few between, and I found myself fostering an incredible imagination.

The years slunk past, and I continued to gain weight until my prescription steroid was pulled from the market. After the passing of this fortuitous event I began to lose a few pounds… and had to get glasses. The unbroken barrage of tormenting taunts grew more creative in nature, and redoubled in full. By the end of middle school, I had watched my closest friends break into young-adulthood. Their breasts began to grow–mine had erupted years prior. As they went on dates, I rebuked any advance directed my way. I felt ugly. I felt hated. I felt unworthy of intimate advances.

My overwhelming sense of imagination led me to fantasize my days away, in high school. I spent untold hours, in true Revenge of the Nerds style, dreaming about relationships that I never imagined would be mine. I immediately began experiencing as many people as would have me. Men, women, they were all the same. Taller than me, more slender, more beautiful. Just more.

Abuse – The Anti-Intimacy

During freshman year, I entered my first real relationship. The pick-up line was cheesy, and he was persistent to say the least. After nearly two weeks of constant questioning, I gave in and accepted his request to date. Sadly, what I thought to be a lighthearted foray into the world of intimate acquaintance, became another devastating blow to my sense of dignity.

Our first kiss ensnared me in a spider-like web of control, and I spent months of my life hanging on his every word. Eventually my relationship drove a wedge between even my closest family and friends. I was so intoxicated by the notion that someone, anyone, could love me, that I threw myself head first into his life. Every kiss seemed sweet; every caress softened by trembling passion- to all good things an end.

Shortly after our one-month anniversary I was awash with joy, and given quite the jolt. At first I took his sexual advances to heart. No one had spared me a second glance in the past, and surely no one ever would again. In my confusion, I accepted every action as proof of intimacy. He persuaded me, roughly, to pleasure him. “At least he finds me desirable.” He publicly humiliated me. “I just need to try harder to make him love me.” He beat me during otherwise intimate moments. “I did something wrong, again.”

I began to find ways to pleasure myself in private. My first true intimate touch lay at my fingertips, between my thighs. As my orgasms grew, so did my shaky self-esteem. Every silent scream set me stronger to my cause. I found solace in the words of his closest friends (the only people whom I spoke to by that point). Every one of them told me that I was too good for him.

Not a single one of them believed that he beat me. Rather than going to prom with my senior boyfriend, I spent the last few weeks of classes trying to find a college for him to apply to. With the grim specter of his continued presence in my life, I called the admitting offices myself until he was accepted to a university- one more than three hours away. Fortuitously, he had no car.

Freedom

All at once, I was free. The distance was simply too much for our floundering relationship to handle. My independence was finally won. In the interim, I had grown particularly close to my ex-boyfriend’s closest pal. He stuck with me through my most difficult moments, and (as usual) I was too timid to tell him how I felt. I craved every touch, every hug, and every softly spoken conversation. For once in my life, I found someone who could make me feel warm and content the way that my parents could when I was little. All of the warmth of hot cocoa (with extra marshmallows), and the intimacy of a shoulder to cry on were at my fingertips. I couldn’t risk scaring him away.

Months afterward, and many mishaps later, I began to date my perfect man. In hindsight, it is a miracle that he didn’t leave me for all of the crap that I put him through. Our relationship, indeed, began as a comedy of errors. I would not allow him to cuddle with me. He was greeted with shrieks of indignity if he attempted to caress anything more intimate than my neck.

Regardless, we had sex less than a month after dating. It was my first time, and I refused to take any of my clothing off. He was perplexed, but, thankfully, didn’t question things too much. From that day on, it became a mission of his to make me more comfortable with my body. Although it began in the bedroom, he had soon made it a point to make me more confident in everyday life as well.

A New Beginning

By the end of our first year together, I was smiling more in public and had made new friends. I not only let him hold me while we cuddled or napped, but I craved, and even requested it. As year two of our relationship came to a close, I became more open to his requests to pleasure me orally (prior to this I loved giving oral sex, but hated receiving it because it was virtually impossible to hide my body with his head between my legs). With the passing of a third year came the end of my stalwart decision to never allow him to see my bare arms (until then I had cultivated quite the collection of jackets, so as to allow easy access to my chest without needing to display my arms at all). Perhaps my favorite year of all, the fourth year, convinced me that I was not only beautiful, but that I was fully deserving of wearing shorts in public. I could not even remember how many years it had been since I felt so comfortable with my body. And it seems I was in luck, with love, because the fifth year brought with it my desire to cuddle in the nude (although still shrouded by blanket and the cover of darkness).

I am now in year six of the most amazing relationship that I could imagine. What’s next for us on our climb to new levels of intimacy? I have always been willing to try new and adventurous positions in bed. I had never balked at trying something new to please my partner, but until he I had never considered the vast amount of intimacy that I could experience if I stopped fighting it. I had wanted others to feel close to me, to need me. Nevertheless, I was too afraid to let others into my heart. I was too afraid to need someone back.

A Life of Passion

I have since devoted my life to passion. Not the sort that you find in steamy bedroom kisses, although that is certainly in there. My passion is for those around me. It is simply amazing how intimacy can infuse worlds of meaning into so many diverse actions and situations. From smiling at a passerby on the street, allowing them the intimacy contained in such simple connections, to consoling a stranger or acquaintance who seems out of sorts. Such effortless actions, although paltry to you, may mean the world to someone else.

As I write this now, I realize how sad it is that I missed out on so much love and confidence in my life. I wish that I had accepted it sooner. My body is no longer a prison. I am intimately aware of its every wish and need. He taught me how to love myself. He taught me how to accept closeness and affection from those around me. Most importantly… with him, every day is an extension of my journey to self-acceptance and personal intimacy. With a man as patient and open minded as him in my life, I see no reason as to why I shouldn’t be able to live a lifetime of intimacy. And I’ve got to say, this sort of confidence feels downright sexy.

With a soft hiss the electric doors slid open, and I was greeted by a short burst of chilled air. My teenage ears, met by elevator music, began to throb. With a sudden jolt of vertigo, I couldn’t quite remember which direction to go, but I knew that my ship was going down.

My mother scuttled off angrily to check in at the front desk, and I was left alone to find my way to a seat. To my left sat a door to the pediatrics waiting room. To my right, ensconced in kitschy posters, was my waiting room… “Love is a Battle Ground: Bring Protection”, and “Arm yourself with abstinence”. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I was beginning to sense a theme. I sat for a spell, idling mindlessly in the light of ambient wall sconces, incessant fish tank bubbling, and the brain melting musical composition.

In the stillness, my mind wandered to the morning’s events. My father had gone to work, and the house was silent. There was no bustling. I had not been awoken for school. The tension was palpable. Mere minutes passed before my mother took note of my stirring, and set upon me with such fierceness, as I had never before seen. She had told my father that I was ill. I would be reporting to the physician promptly at noon. Supposedly I had the flu. It was going around the school, you know.

Now… my mother was good. As a retired nurse she had to be, but even I had missed my symptoms. What could she have possibly seen that I had not? Instant messages. Thanks to a dear friend, my sex life had been summarized and advertised – in less than 420 characters to boot. At the ripe age of 15, she had decided, I would take my first foray into the world of cold steel apparatuses. I was to be tested for disease. I was to be checked for pregnancy. I would be stripped of privacy. I would be… A woman in scrubs tapped swiftly on her clipboard, breaking me from my thoughts.

I followed her, nervously, to the room. The nurse’s soft, padded sneakers seemed to mock my own heavy heartbeat. At the end of the hall a surly, male physician complained loudly to his assistant. I lingered for a moment to try to discern the reason for his gruffness. However, the attendant would have none of that, and I was ushered swiftly into my personal suite. In the crossing of that threshold I experienced a quantum shift.

I was consumed by a hermetic world. A ruthlessly impersonal room, whitewashed and speckle free, was my prison for the duration. The paper slip afforded me, seemed a pale comfort compared to my jacket and jeans. I was assured that the doctor would be in shortly and was left, yet again, to my own devices. Peering around the room I mentally cataloged the extensive collection of brightly colored information packets. Ranging from informational booklets on osteoporosis and HPV, to cautionary tales of sexually transmitted diseases. The only visibly absent topics were birth control and condoms.

After a time had passed I decided to change. The dinky curtain, a laughable attempt at modesty in such a blatantly intimate setting, seemed absurd and remained unused. Ironically, it was that moment that my physician chose to make her entrance. Bare assed, emotionally numbed, and obviously unabashed – I made her acquaintance. The next 30 minutes dragged on painfully. She explained that she had been informed of my sexual activity, but not the extent.

“How many men have you had relations with?
How long have you been having sex for?
I have a daughter a few years older than you. She certainly would never have sex before marriage under any circumstances.
Have any of the men been repeat acquaintances?”

Her questions became increasingly uncomfortable, and I began to entertain my own thoughts.

~I’d hate to be her daughter. Poor girl probably won’t be allowed to date before marriage…

She bustled through the question line-up. I suppose she expected me to answer all at once.

“Do you feel an intense psychological need to have sex?
Are you depressed and suicidal?
Do you know that God loves you?”

“Excuse me, what?” It was at that point that I decided that enough was enough. To think that I had felt guilty when I first arrived. Under the glare of her unrewarding stare I responded to each question in turn. I had been having sex for only a few months with one man. I had always used a condom. I was not particularly depressed… However, I would be eternally grateful if she would get on with the damn examination.

I’m not sure what got her to cease her questioning. Perhaps it was my interruption. Perhaps it had been having a 15-year-old girl curse at her. Whatever the cause, I was pleased.

The examination continued as scheduled. Considering the already strained mood of the room, I managed to stifle a laugh when I lay back in the stirrups and noticed the torn magazine pages taped to the ceiling. If they chose to think that ripped pictures of daisies and puppy dogs made women more comfortable, then who was I to correct them? The speculum was cold, and she warned me of the pinch after it had already happened. The duration of my assessment was punctuated by yes/ no responses and simple questions.

Eventually she moved away, telling me that I was free to go. My results would be reported to my mother in the next week. When I stood to dress myself, I noticed the unpleasant quantity of lubricant remaining from the speculum. My parting words to her were, “You should remember to ask me about the women I’ve had sex with next time.” I only hope that it took her as long to get that stunned look off of her face as it took me to shower off all of that lubricant.

Less than a year passed before I was diagnosed with polycystic ovaries, and my general care practitioner prescribed birth control as a preventative measure. My mother eventually apologized for her handling of the situation, and to this day I still see the same gynecologist. I think she’s given up on my immortal soul.

My first visit to the OBGYN was anything but relaxing. It’s even become a sort of family joke between my closest relatives. Something to be discussed over turkey and stuffing. I like to believe that the adversity I experienced helped to make me who I am today. But all that I know for certain is that I will always remember that day, and that they wouldn’t even give me a sticker at checkout…