Kerry Cronin speaks to a group of Boston College students.
Clearly, intimacy is not an easy notion to understand. Its meaning is broad and wide-ranging and it is often only recognized in its absence. While we regularly reduce its meaning to the closeness of a sexual relationship, there’s little doubt that intimacy characterizes other relationships in our lives, those of parents and children, siblings, and good and caring friends. Isn’t intimacy with God what we are striving for in a prayer life? It strikes me as helpful to pose the question: What are we doing when we are being intimate with another person, and why is that being intimate? Common to all of the intimate relationships in my life is one central and abiding fact: that I have the distinct feeling that I matter to the other person. In those relationships, others who love me—my parents who are my biggest fans and like me more than I probably deserve, family members who’ve known me through all of the awkward moments of my life, friends who have been with me through bitterly sad and tremendously joyful times—share in my cares and concerns because I matter to them. And I in turn am willing to try to enter into the meanings and values of their lives and take their cares and concerns on as my own, not as facts and data, but as something meaningful and moving, because they matter to me. This may seem overly simplistic, but I find it helpful when talking with young adults about intimacy to ask if they notice these patterns in their different relationships—success and failures alike. Do you 4
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feel like you matter to your friends, your roommates, your older brother, your girlfriend or boyfriend? If so, how is that shown to you? Do you know how to show someone else that she truly matters to you? How do you know if you truly matter to him? How would you know? What do you do when it becomes clear that you don’t matter to a person you love? These are sometimes very painful questions to ask and answer. Young adulthood is when most of us first begin to recognize how very much is riding on our closest emotional ties. And it’s a lot. It is also often when we discover how devastatingly precarious some of those emotional ties can be. When I talk to students about their fears and desires and ask them to think about what they long for most in their lives, they assume that their desire to be loved and to be truly known by someone else will happen in marriage. While that will be true for most of them, I also ask them to consider the different kinds of love and closeness they have in their lives now. In most cases, young people can identify at least one friend who fits the description of Aristotle’s “Friend of the Good,” the highest and best type of friendship depicted in his Nicomachean Ethics. This type of friend comprehends what is good in me, brings more of that out in me, and wants the best for me. But truly wanting the best for someone involves knowing and seeing who she really is, not merely who she is for me. To have and to be a friend like this activates our ability to be moved by someone