CULTURES IN INTIMACY

It felt like an epiphany, like my body was responding to the process.

You were so cute and awkward on our first date, tension evident in your stance as we were waiting to order. I could tell that you didn’t know how to talk to me in this new context yet—as potential lovers who didn’t really know each other in an intimate way. There was no script that fit us properly, no easy transition from friends to lovers in this tight little Mexican place. You told me out loud that you were feeling awkward and nervous, which I appreciated. According to my journal, I told you in return that I thought that the awkwardness was exciting because “awkwardness is just one step in the process of getting to know someone and becoming close with them.”

Then, we sat down at some table by the window, and I started transitioning into your lover. It was some strange rite of passage, with you getting me water as an expression of chivalry and me deciding whether to sit across from or beside you, us figuring out where to put our hands and how to express our feelings to one another. I never understood how first dates worked until I felt my heart swelling at that table with each advancement in the process, with each connective moment we shared. It felt like an epiphany, like my body was responding to the process.

For that whole first week, each date that we went on, deciding on our meeting spots, finding walking paths, coming up with excuses for me to kiss you in your bed, it felt scary and new as we figured out how to approach these new gestures towards each other. From that time, as well as the months following it, a number of funny stories that we retell to each other all the time and a host of habits and rituals have formed.

I have realized ever since then that I was missing something in my initial comment about the process of entering intimacy. The process includes “getting to know someone,” or understanding who they are and how to sit with them on a day-to-day basis, yet there’s this whole aspect of co-creation that I was missing. I am changed by the time that I have spent in love, by the endless conversations and the new routines and experiences involved. I am quite sure that you have changed as well, at the very least in the shared understanding of intimacy that we have developed. We have messed up each other’s individual lifestyles, blending them together in some bizarre new culture.

I am shocked to find myself calling my friends and siblings gibberish names that I made up just for you by habit, without any effort. We speak a new language together, and it pops up in parts of my everyday life. I speak to you the secret language that I reserved just for my mom and dad at home, and you have molded it into something of its own, new words that you whisper to me that only I know the meaning of. You use the voice of my childhood to tell me how deeply you love me. I find myself putting on this strange, urban New England accent around you as a joke, but then it bleeds into my everyday speech.

Or, remember how we each respond to different songs when they play out in public, or at dances? You used to light up whenever we heard a song you knew I loved, but now each of them are embedded with some meaning in the history of our connection. We start singing them all, with the modified lyrics that we made up in the moment, or we slow dance to them, echoing old connections that we made to the song, creating new memories.

Because of you, I have begun to realize that it’s silly to see ourselves as individual buckets of selfhood, as self-generated personality types. We are a blend of our own will, of our desires and life experiences, and with the cultures that we create when we come into contact with other people. I still listen to the music that I used to sing to with my friends in seventh grade, the songs that my teachers taught me in high school orchestra, and my mom’s car playlist. My individual taste is made up of every single person that I ever was and every other person that I came into contact with along the way.

The way that I sign my emails, the way that I Capitalize Important Words, the dance moves that I invented with a new friend of mine in college, the shoes that I walk in, my absolute favorite YouTuber, my love of croissants, my absolute favorite cheese, my daily habit of completing the Wordle. The way that I shuffle my feet around and move in circles when I’m bored, one million board games, the songs that I hum while I’m walking around, the books that I reference in conversation, the way that I like to stick my hand out of the car window and make it an airplane, the way that sometimes I pretend that my yogurt is ice cream, the way that I jokingly mispronounce the word “yogurt” sometimes. All of these things are mine. They are the things that make me so distinctly me when I meet new people. They comprise my “brand” and my understanding of my very self. Yet, none of them were my own idea or invention. They all emerged in a loving act of co-creation, a socially generative process that gives life to our relationships and to our own personalities. To love is to contribute to someone’s fundamental makeup, and to allow yourself to be changed, giving up control over your own self-creation.

I guess I wanted to tell you, then, that I am so happy to join you in this process, my love. I want for your “self” to continue penetrating the membrane of mine and messing everything up. I want for my “self” to be endlessly informed and shaped by yours, for our culture of intimacy to join the others in the process of my becoming.

AUTHOR: Catherine Du
ARTIST: Jacqueline Zhang