I've been thinking about how differently we experience things when we're not in a hurry. A meal can become an entirely different pleasure when we have nowhere to be afterwards. We notice flavours we might otherwise have missed, enjoy the conversation between mouthfuls and sometimes find ourselves sitting at the table long after we've finished eating.
I think intimacy can be much the same.
There's something lovely about being with someone when neither of you is particularly concerned about what happens next. You might be lying together talking, touching occasionally, laughing about something ridiculous or simply enjoying the warmth of another body beside yours. Nothing needs to progress. There's no particular destination, and perhaps that's part of what makes the experience so enjoyable.
Of course, slowness isn't always what we want. There are moments when desire arrives with such enthusiasm that the last thing we feel like doing is taking our time. I love that there can be room for both. Intimacy would be rather predictable if it always followed the same rhythm.
What interests me is how easily we bring a sense of obligation into experiences that are supposed to be pleasurable. We can become so accustomed to anticipating what another person wants, or wondering what we should be doing, that we lose touch with our own experience.
Sometimes we're physically close to someone while our attention is somewhere else entirely.
And I wonder how much of this comes from the way we've learned to participate in relationships. We become familiar with certain expectations, even when nobody has explicitly asked anything of us. We might feel responsible for another person's enjoyment, worry about disappointing them or simply fall into habits that leave little room for curiosity.
It's difficult to discover what you enjoy when you're busy trying to get everything right.
Perhaps one of the pleasures of slowing down is that it gives us an opportunity to notice each other again. We can become curious about a touch, a change in breathing, the warmth of someone's skin or the unexpected pleasure of doing absolutely nothing together.
There's also something rather intimate about being able to say what we want, or what we don't want, without feeling that either needs an explanation. Sometimes we want closeness without sex. Sometimes we want sex without a long conversation beforehand. Sometimes we want to be held, and sometimes we'd rather have the entire bed to ourselves.
Being able to make room for those differences seems far more interesting to me than following an idea of what intimacy ought to look like.
I don't think slowness is necessarily the secret to better intimacy. But I do think there's something worth exploring in our relationship with time, particularly when we're with someone we care about.
When we're no longer preoccupied with where an experience is going, we might discover how much pleasure there is in simply being part of it.
