24. Luciana's Husband on the Importance of Intimacy for Men.

Um, so we need to find other people and other friends and, and so, and you know, I think, I know that there's some places in our culture that believe that men and women can't be friends, uh, that kind of a thing.

And I'm a bit more, I'm, I'm a bit more of a, I don't like to think of things quite so gendered like that in general, but I think men and women absolutely can be friends.

And I'm only using men and women sort of as a, as a, as a, framework for what I'm talking about because there are differences in experience and that is a legit thing even if you know so anyway those experiences are different but I see it as yeah men and women can be friends how do you define that?

And let me just say, if you, with this lady friend that you had, when she said she was not available for intercourse, she was available for other sexual things, but not intercourse.

If you had said, well, no, I don't want this relationship with you, you would have foregone a very fulfilling relationship in your life.

Yeah.

Like you and this lady had a really nice thing going on for a while.

Yep.

And that was only because of your openness.

Yep.

And we actually, we used to share about other dates that we were going on with other people.

And it was kind of nice to have someone to bounce that off of and be like, okay, well, let's cuddle for a little bit then because now I feel a little bit better about my life.

But I think that's an interesting thing right there.

I might have gone on a bad date with somebody or she did.

But then we still had somebody who we could be intimate with in a different way.

Right.

Right.

And I think that gets to this broader point that you made and that I think is a critical point.

I think intimacy is so important.

Obviously that's the name of my podcast, but I think we need to think about intimacy in the broadest sense possible.

In that, you know, for my podcast, my focus, yes, is sexual intimacy and relationships because that's important.

But like you said, what about the intimacy that comes from friendship and just from sharing life experiences or sharing something that's on your mind or something that's on your heart? And, you know, something that was told to me and that I want to say to listeners is that I think intimacy, we should allow intimacy to penetrate our lives and what I mean by that is okay when you go to work every day have intimate business relationships, you know really express, you know your fears about a project.

really express, you know, what are your reservations about something that you're working on? Like really have those deep conversations in that context.

And then with your friends, you know, can you really open up to them about, you know, what are you struggling with? What are your fears? You know, what are you most looking forward to? Or what is something that disappointed you lately? You know, I think that's those deep, intimate friendships are so important.

So it's like, if we look around, we can have intimacy everywhere.