Curiosity begets intimacy: there’s no such thing as TMI
Why should you be curious? We live in a world where people tell you, “You don’t owe anyone anything,” or “You need to protect your peace.”
In my opinion, that’s not the soundest advice you think it is. The loneliness epidemic induced by the COVID-19 pandemic started — woefully, might I add — five years ago, and being isolated for two of those years does something to you; stunting the growth you were so prepped to have in those formative years. It’s like we forgot how to treat the people around us with the same care we would expect of others. We’re told that we’re supposed to know ourselves intimately. To know exactly what you want, when you want to find fulfilling relationships and avoid wasting your time.
But what’s wrong with wasting time? Because at the end of the day, you won’t have shit figured out even if you will the gods to come down from the skies to take you away. You can’t expect to learn any of the things you want to if you don’t allow yourself the space.
What’s the point?
What makes you tick? What makes you do the things you do, and why are you here in this very moment you’re sharing with me? These are questions I ask myself when I meet someone for the first time who’s particularly intriguing.
I like to think I can read people well, playing the constant guessing game of “They did that because…” And to tell you the truth, I’m wrong most of the time, but that’s the joy of it. But it’s enticing to find out whether someone else thinks the same of you; that they’re also just as interested in the content of what we’re speaking about.
And it’s funny, I can loudly say that everyone reading this hates small talk. So how do you get from Point A — talking about what you do for work — to Point B — talking about a common niche interest you share? Unfortunately, I can’t give step-by-step instructions on what might work for you, but I can speak to my own experience.
A personal anecdote: I spent a large portion of my years between the ages of 12 - 16 in online spaces — Oh, the joys of unrestricted internet access at the height of a global pandemic. Luckily, I didn’t have any particularly negative experiences, mostly because I was around other kids my age there — this was Yubo (dubbed a “kid’s dating app”). To start, it was just me and my profile striking up conversations with random people, and then it moved on to going live on the app. You see, this is where the shift was made. I fully chucked myself into the deep end, spending nights talking into the void of the comment section, coming up with topics and sharing my experiences. I eventually found myself in a community with people who would join, and we’d eventually become friends, staying up till the wee hours of the morning, just talking. People from different states and countries, each with their own background and we’ve somehow found common ground on a “friend-making app.”
So, why do I mention this? Well, I eventually found comfort in the comfortable, solace in the silence. I had nothing but my own company to keep me going because boredom drove me to it. It was just me, my thoughts, my voice, and the people coming and going, apparently also finding comfort.
Profoundly, much of my personality was explored while on that platform, and I became more intimate with myself, learning about what I do and don’t like, and how I tend to communicate based on the people around me — codeswitching. Before then, I could barely hold a conversation, and after those questions from earlier began to form in my head, what makes you tick? I was curious to find out what elements made them “cool” and me “not so much”, enquiring into their lives, essentially holding interviews online to attract like-minded people, and I eventually became “cool.” A small yet significant marker of social status in hindsight.
In the confines of high school, this small corner of the internet was mine, and I thrived and didn’t feel othered. A pocket of the internet where I didn’t feel weighed down by the label “introvert” and could move into “ambivert”. Sure, there was drama and the occasional random calling you a slew of slurs because that’s just what the internet was, but it was nice outside of all that extraness to look forward to the conversations I’d have with strangers. I could learn more about myself and the positive affirmations required to build up my confidence.
If only things remained this simple…
Intimacy without curiosity, case study: dating apps
Relationships change drastically with age, as different styles of them form — acquaintances, best friends, friends, romantic, sexual, familial, situational — each with its varying levels of intimacy, commitment and emotional connection.1 How to gauge these factors is where the difficulty of breaking barriers between acquaintances turns into friends or whatever you wish to be.
Let’s talk about using the “apps” for a second. Dating apps and meeting people online have been a roller coaster of emotional ups and downs, with excitement often met with disappointment. You have profiles that you can scroll through and Like or Swipe on, depending on your attraction to them. It’s fun, it’s flirty, it’s exciting, but only you get ghosted maybe hours or even a week into talking (I’m guilty of this). I’ve had a lot of fun using apps like Hinge and have made some of the most impactful connections with people I’ve met there. And yes, it’s convenient to easily check through the boxes a profile offers, consisting of fewer than fifty words and six pictures. Unfortunately, more of us still find ourselves in an endless cycle of deleting and redownloading it. You already have an idea of the type of person they are, gaining so much information about their vices before even uttering a word, and suddenly, you’re on your first date. And you’re asking yourself, “Why do I already know so much about you?”
You see, I’m a firm believer in not texting much before a first date. I don’t even really ask what they do until I see them in person because I love to learn. I love seeing the looks people have on their faces when talking about their passions or what they dislike about their day jobs. But the more dates I go on, I find myself not even getting past the first one.
Why? Too many reasons to list here, but what keeps getting brought up in my mind is the dissonance between being open and honest and choosing not to be. As a lesbian, I crave passion and deep, intimate knowledge of the person I’m seeing, whether it be casual or serious. Like, how can I expect to continue that kind of relationship if I don’t want to know what you like in the bedroom or don’t have the desire to explore your body as you would with mine?
Not allowing yourself the space to be open or making up your mind about someone based on certain characteristics (again, I’m guilty of this) stops you from actually reaching the potential that might exist in a relationship. However, I would preface this by saying that there are times when you won’t mesh well with the other and can’t see it developing further, but people of multiple facets exist right at your fingertips. Take what you can from them and leave it clean like that, and maybe don’t ghost — I might be speaking to myself here — and communicate.
As M. Scott Peck puts it in his book, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, defining community as;
“[the coming together of a group of individuals] who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together’ and to delight in each other and make others’ conditions our own.”2
Let empathy guide our conversations and go beyond surface-level tendencies. Ask that weird question or talk about a meaningless experience, life is too short to worry so much about pampering a fabricated version of yourself, a facade.
Sit and enjoy their (or your own) company for a while.
true fulfilment
Finding fulfilment in relationships has been at the beating heart of my journey. Entering my twenty-somethings, I knew it would be a slippery slope of positive and negative experiences I could only yearn to learn from. But throughout its beginning stages, I’ve enjoyed the company I find myself with.
My mother has a transactional perspective on relationships: “What can they offer you?” or “What’s the point if you’re not talking about future goals or your careers and aspirations?” All are important topics, yes, but they can become quite shallow because of the serious nature that those questions pose. If you don’t have your shit figured out, it’s because that's not all there is. “What are you guys talking about that has you coming home past 1 am?” she asks. And I respond with, “Nothing and everything at the same time.”
However, I can see how exhausting it may be to figure out what type of person someone may be. To find someone or a group of people I can talk about nothing and everything with is the fulfilment I crave in my relationships. Instead, I focus on the feeling I get around the people I see myself sharing my life with. Asking myself, do I feel comfortable enough to share my experiences, opinions and secrets? Is this a safe space free of judgment, but allows critique?
And most importantly, do I like myself when I’m around them?
This is the constant dialogue I’m having with myself to discover who someone else is and more about myself. As bell hooks puts it in her book All About Love: New Visions;
“What we learn through experience is that our capacity to establish deep and profound connections in friendship strengthens all our intimate bonds.”3
Those who also crave the intimacy I desire, a longing for knowledge beyond what’s previously been understood, continue to pursue the people who want the same. More often than not, you can tell when someone isn’t curious about you, there’s a sense of disdain in their attitude towards you or when they make a baseless assumption. It’s a weird feeling that can have me furrowing my brows, confused about how A suddenly became Z. I immediately pull back and realise that my perception of myself doesn’t match what is being communicated to the other because of the apparent white noise between us, and it hurts. Boundaries are a thing, so let’s not cross them by making silly mistakes and letting expectations get in the way. Discover who they are with empathy and curiosity.
I’ve genuinely enjoyed every moment of discovering the nuances of relationships and how to become more inquisitive about life outside of my own. The mistakes I’ve made navigating them and the beauty of hindsight may have had me reeling about how I could’ve done better given the chance to rewind time.
But it’s okay, though.
Time is such a beautiful thing, allowing space to think and reflect, I can better understand myself, to understand those I love and will hopefully love in the future. So yes, tell me everything there is to know, I’ll always remain curious.
And just a final quote to leave you with from Parker Palmer;
“Only as we are in communion with ourselves can we find community with others.”4
This is an essay I wrote in response to what it feels like to navigate relationships and the personal journey that I’m exploring. It’s a never-ending one, and I want to continue this dialogue with myself and hopefully, the people reading this and whether there are patterns you find in your relationships. I would love to revisit this again and again, to see how I change and how I might differ from this one opinion I had while I was twenty.
Care to join?
— dami
References:
Gawda, B. (2019). The Structure of the Concepts Related to Love Spectrum: Emotional Verbal Fluency Technique Application, Initial Psychometrics, and Its Validation. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 48(6), 1339–1361. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-019-09661-y
M Scott Peck (1987). The different drum: community-making and peace. Arrow.
hooks, bell. (1999). All About Love: New Visions (pp. 135–136). Harper Perennial.
Palmer, P. J. (2017). Courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life - 20th anniversary edition. (20th ed., p. 92). Jossey-Bass.
