Relationships
Intimacy: The "New Womb" of Our Development
Intimate partners know and reveal each other's strengths and weaknesses.
Posted July 5, 2025 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
As a young father, my wife rightfully assailed me—on many occasions—for failing to enforce our mutually agreed upon “time out plan” for reining in our children when they broke the rules. Too often, I downplayed their misbehavior or wobbled with excessive leniency as I unwittingly perfected the dubious art of “disciplinary indecisiveness” for which there was little, if any, defensible rationale.
But as the weight of my wife’s criticisms grew heavier, I turned inward in search of an explanation for my agreement-busting, equivocating, laissez-faire parental style.
Hefty doses of self-examination, each accompanied by a sharp pinch of embarrassment, soon yielded an epiphanous moment in which the explanation I sought sprang to mind as if it had been waiting impatiently for me to become aware of it: I had simply been afraid of appearing “too mean” in the eyes of our children and thus less loveable.
Then, like a red laser dot pinpointing its target, I traced my fears to several painful childhood incidents when I thought my own misbehavior had been over-punished, which left me questioning the love my parents felt for me. To my young brain, these incidents felt traumatic.
The Intimate Relationship Does Its Job Unfailingly
By calling attention to my faulty “disciplining,” my wife had played a crucial role, one especially characteristic of the intimate relationship. She’d done her part to help “levitate” my fear-based, parental deficiency so that my weakness got revealed, put on display. What had caused me to foreclose on my agreement with my wife were these painfully haunting, unresolved issues from my distant past that had taken a giant leap forward into my present, contaminating it.
I was, in effect, an absent figure when it fell to me to impose punitive consequences after our children’s misconduct. My wife’s difficult but informative feedback—intimacy’s spotlight—had illuminated the conspicuous hole in my uneven, incomplete emotional development. Again, I had been revealed for a defect that had affected my entire family. And, of course, it became incumbent upon me to take responsibility for “filling” this hole.
The upshot of this unsettling personal revelation came with a small complex of unpleasant-feeling reactions, chief of which was the fear of losing my children’s affection. But I would have to endure the sting of these emotions and, more importantly, learn from their source, if I were going to make good use of this newly unveiled personal data to repair myself, and further my growth. Moreover, by doing so, I could unburden my wife and children of the negative impact of this regrettable glitch in my parenting.
A Hypothetical MRI
Imagine your closest, most intimate relationship as though it were scanning your psyche, like an MRI, vetting your innermost traits and qualities for what is developed in you and what has yet to be developed. Now, think of this as a key function of our closest relationships. It might even be argued that it’s the “job” of intimacy to expose our rough spots, the unburnished parts of ourselves that remain in need of further refinement.
Complete Emotional Development
The intimate relationship has an uncanny knack for shining a bright, flaw-exposing light on our personal defects. It “highlights our lowlights" precisely and effectively as perhaps no other or less complicated relationship can. Given this, intimacy then becomes an indispensable vehicle for the furtherance of our emotional growth, a guidepost to what remains to be developed, refurbished, or added on to our character to help further complete it, however complete development might be defined.
Now, consider a related question: Is our fullest psychological maturity possible without the keen, exacting personal revelations gleaned from our closest relationships that can point the way to our betterment?
In my case, I needed to resolve my own childhood issues and take a necessary step forward toward emotional maturity rather than leave my “underdevelopment” unaddressed and foisted upon my undeserving wife and children, thereby straining my relations with my wife and blighting my children’s development.
What do your closest relationships reveal about you?
References
Johansen, R.N., Gaffaney, T. (2010). Need Management Therapy- A New Science of Love, Intimacy and Relationships. Bloomington, IN. Archway Publishing by Simon & Schuster.
