The Intimacy Phobic

Urban Indian women watch Sex in the City with the kind of devotion earlier reserved for Ally MacBeal. The Diary of Bridgette Jones sells, the sequel sells, and the movie sells some more; and it’s not just for Hugh Grant blinkity-blink-blinking his eyes in lieu of acting. What women are connecting with, mainly, is the amazingly spot-on portrayal of the long and seemingly endless supply of intimacy-phobic men that these women encounter – again and again. In another day and age these chaps may have been dismissed as cads, bounders, or simply a-hs. Today, as a 33-year-old single woman in Mumbai says, “They seem to be all we got.”
To set the record straight here and get one thing out of the way: do note that the intimacy-phobic man doesn’t necessarily baulk at having sex with a woman. That he will usually take where he finds. But if the woman involved mistakes this for a deepening of the relationship, that’s where the trouble begins. She usually wants follow-up phone calls, perhaps an affectionate, intimate reference to the fact that they’ve had sex, and if they’re having it regularly, then godforbid, even a meet-the-family-and-friends kind of evening. And then, somewhere along the way, when she realizes he’s behaving like a fugitive, but does show up at the remotest places if there’s some nooky on the cards, she phones-a-friend, usually a woman friend and has a long chat. The words bastard and asshole may feature in their conversation.
One intimacy-phobic 38-year-old man speaks for them all, when he says defensively: “Ah come on, I take what is made available to me.” And here’s the crux. What he and his brethren, his entire jaat-jamaat, have learnt to see as ‘available’ is only what they choose to see, not what is really available.
Follow the logic closely here: Most women, when they enter a sexually intimate deal (yup it is a gender-differentiated thing, whichever way you slice it), are also making available, waiting in the wings, all eagerly queued up, a host of non-sexual tender and intimate parts of themselves and their lives: a listening ear, a cosy meal, a tidy room, intelligent convo, Scrabble or some such, some whining about their own pushy moms, dinner out in a public place, a stroll, an invitation to a favourite nephew’s birthday/navjyot/graduation/shaadi …you get the picture.
The intimacy-phobic, however, chooses to completely ‘not see’ that this is available. Or if he does see it, in his mind the woman is then instantly transformed into some kind of Venus fly-trap, hungrily opening and shutting her cloying, devouring jaws - being pushy, marriage-driven, grabbing, controlling, and over-reading into what was ‘after all just some fun’ between them.
The man who has trouble with this larger intimacy of a relationship, is what is also called love-avoidant. In fact, the man is so chronically love-avoidant, that he shrivels like a salted slug at the use of the word ‘love’ even in the phrase ‘love-avoidant’ – this is the experience of many counsellors who work with couples, potential couples and couples in which the man is desperately pretending not to be a couple.
That’s another diagnostic thing too: an intimacy-phobic man will never call what he has going ‘a relationship’ in the first place. He will doggedly stick to words like ‘friend’ and if pushed badly and really squirming, may even bestow the honour of ‘best friend’ on the woman. (At this point, the woman’s having another phone convo with her girl friend in her head, in which the words bastard and asshole may feature.) If further challenged, the man will then trot out some antique, dusty theory involving biology, in which men and women are forever locked in chased and chaser mode and he has the genes to prove it, etc.
But what’s really at work, to put it in psycho-socio-babble, is this: The intimacy-phobic is a chap who has been ‘crippled’ by family and/or culture. If there is a history of enmeshment with one of the parents, often the mother, in which the boy was used as a hero child, performer, confidant, or the eternal baby, then the relationship was one in which the child was there to service the parent's needs, not the other way around. And that's what kicks into place every time a woman makes any kind of one-on-one demand on his affections, dare we say love. To put it in English: This is a man who can't distinguish between being close to someone and being eaten up alive.
Just like diabetes has reached epidemic proportions, intimacy-phobia has become endemic in the male urban population. Some of them will seek cures and possibly break out by daring to engage in genuine and tender relationships with women who won’t eat them up alive. Others will hobble along, and drag a few good women with them along the road for a while, but will never really connect. And yet others will actually encounter their nightmares by tangling misguidedly with women who will, under the gloss, be controlling, needy, deranged, demanding…so be afraid, be very afraid.
GOURI DANGE