Series V, Article 1: What Intimacy Actually Is

Identity, as the previous series established, is the developmental foundation from which everything that follows becomes possible. The self that knows where it stands can now do something it could not do before: bring itself into genuine contact with another person. Not proximity, not cohabitation, not even affection, though it may include all of those. Genuine contact: the experience of being known by another person as the self one actually is, and of knowing another in return (Erikson, 1968; Kegan, 1982; Laurenceau et al., 1998; Reis & Shaver, 1988).

That is what this series is about. Not closeness in the abstract, not the question of whether autistic or non-autistic people are capable of intimate relationships, not a catalog of relational difficulties. It is about intimacy as a specific developmental achievement with specific requirements and specific vulnerabilities, and about how those requirements and vulnerabilities look different across the autistic and non-autistic developmental pathways.

What Erikson Named

Erik Erikson placed intimacy as the sixth stage of psychosocial development, arriving after identity has done its foundational work (Erikson, 1968). The stage presents a central developmental challenge: the capacity to open the self genuinely to another person, to risk vulnerability, to allow the self to be known without the knowing destabilizing the self-concept that identity achieved. When that challenge is met, what becomes available is something the previous stages could not fully produce: the capacity for genuine, sustained mutual closeness, for commitment to another person and to the relationship itself, maintained through difficulty and change without requiring the self to dissolve in order to manage the proximity (Erikson, 1968; Kegan, 1982).

When the challenge is not met, the developmental outcome is isolation (Erikson, 1968). Not necessarily aloneness, and not necessarily unhappiness. Isolation in Erikson's sense is something more specific: the inability to allow genuine closeness, the self protecting its uncertain ground by preventing real encounter with another, relationships that remain shallow or performative or conditional on a distance that is never quite closed. Isolation can look, from the outside, like independence. From the inside, it tends to feel like a loneliness that does not resolve itself through any amount of activity or company.

The distinction between intimacy and isolation is not about how many people are in one's life. It is about whether any of them genuinely knows the self that is there to be known (Erikson, 1968; Laurenceau et al., 1998; Reis & Shaver, 1988).

What Intimacy Is and What It Is Not

The research on intimacy as an interpersonal process, built substantially through the work of Reis and Shaver and extended by Laurenceau and colleagues, establishes intimacy as a sequence: one person reveals something genuine about themselves; the other receives it in a way that communicates understanding, care, and real attention to what was shared; and the first person feels, in that reception, something of being genuinely known (Laurenceau et al., 1998; Reis & Shaver, 1988).

That is the mechanism. And the mechanism matters because it reveals something important: intimacy is not a state. It is a process. It is not achieved once and then maintained. It is built, and rebuilt, and built again, through an ongoing accumulation of genuine encounters in which the self is revealed and received (Laurenceau et al., 1998; Reis & Shaver, 1988). It deepens over time when the revealing and receiving happen repeatedly, when the self that is disclosed gradually becomes more complete and more honest, and when the reception that follows remains genuine (Altman & Taylor, 1973; Laurenceau et al., 1998).

What intimacy is not is equally important. Intimacy is not proximity: two people can share a home, a bed, a family, and a life without ever quite knowing each other in the sense this series is describing. Intimacy is not affection: warmth, care, and love in the ordinary sense can exist alongside a genuine absence of mutual knowing. And intimacy is not merger: the experience of feeling absorbed by another person, of losing the sense of the self in the presence of someone else, is not intimacy. It is the loss of the very condition that makes intimacy possible (Erikson, 1968; Kegan, 1982).

Genuine intimacy requires two selves. Not one self and a projection. Not one self and a reflection. Two distinct, differentiated, recognizably separate people who come into genuine contact with each other across the space that their distinctness creates. The contact is real only because the space is real. The knowing is possible only because there are two genuinely different inner worlds to be known (Erikson, 1968; Kegan, 1982; Laurenceau et al., 1998).

Why Identity Has to Come First

The previous series on identity ended with this: the question ahead is no longer who am I, but who are we, and what can we build together. That framing was deliberate, because the sequence is developmentally real. Intimacy requires identity in a way that runs deeper than Erikson's stage-ordering might suggest (Erikson, 1968).

To be genuinely known by another person, the self has to be available to be known. A self that does not yet know who it is cannot bring a coherent and authentic self-concept into genuine contact with another, because there is nothing stable enough to make contact with (Erikson, 1968; McAdams, 2001; McAdams & McLean, 2013). What tends to happen instead is one of two things. Either the self reaches toward the other and finds, in the closeness, a way to fill in what it does not yet know about itself from the other person's presence: merger, the self taking shape in the borrowed light of another identity. Or the self protects its uncertain ground by preventing genuine encounter: isolation, the self keeping others at a distance that feels like safety but functions like deprivation (Erikson, 1968; Kegan, 1982).

Both of these outcomes are recognizable in the developmental histories this series has traced. The autistic person who arrived at adult relationships with a self-concept built partly from distorted feedback or from the performed self that masking constructed may find that genuine closeness destabilizes what has been so effortfully built. The non-autistic person, and particularly the high body empathetic in MacMillan's theoretical framework, whose oscillation has been tilting toward accommodation, may find that closeness tips toward merger before it reaches the genuine contact that intimacy requires. Both of these are identity challenges appearing in the domain of intimacy. They are not addressed by working on the relationship in isolation. They are addressed by returning to the developmental foundation (Erikson, 1968; Kegan, 1982; McAdams & McLean, 2013).

This is why the identity series had to come before this one. Not because identity resolves everything, but because without it, the work of genuine intimacy cannot properly begin.

When Intimacy Fails

Merger and isolation are worth sitting with separately, because they look very different from the outside while reflecting the same underlying developmental gap.

Merger is the intimacy failure that most resembles intimacy from a distance. Two people are close, intensely involved with each other, and often deeply attached. But the closeness has come at the cost of the distinction that genuine intimacy requires. One self, or both, has organized itself around the other's presence, perspective, needs, and reactions in a way that makes genuine encounter between two distinct people structurally unavailable. There is closeness without genuine knowing, because the self that would be known has become difficult to locate within the relationship. Merger is the failure of the self's own ground (Erikson, 1968; Kegan, 1982).

Isolation is the failure of contact. The self knows where it stands and guards that ground carefully, but the guarding prevents the vulnerability that genuine intimacy requires. The self is available to be known in theory but not in practice, because the risk of revelation, of showing the actual self to another person and finding it unwelcome, is too significant to take. Isolation tends to accumulate a particular kind of loneliness: the loneliness of someone who is never quite reached, who meets many people and is genuinely known by none, who lives alongside others without ever fully arriving in the space between (Erikson, 1968; Laurenceau et al., 1998; Reis & Shaver, 1988).

Both carry costs that accumulate across adulthood in ways that Erikson's framework makes legible: the person who cannot achieve genuine intimacy does not simply miss the pleasures of closeness. They miss what intimacy makes possible further down the developmental arc, the generativity that arises from having been genuinely known and from having genuinely known another, the capacity to contribute beyond the self from a foundation of real connection (Erikson, 1968).

Two Systems, One Destination

The developmental destination of this stage is the same for autistic and non-autistic people alike: genuine mutual knowing, the experience of being genuinely received as the self one actually is and of genuinely receiving another in return (Erikson, 1968; Laurenceau et al., 1998; Reis & Shaver, 1988).

What differs across the two developmental pathways is not the destination. It is the mechanism through which intimacy is built, the signals through which intimacy bids are sent and received, and the specific vulnerabilities each pathway carries into the work of genuine closeness (Crompton, Hallett, et al., 2020; Crompton, Sharp, et al., 2020; Milton, 2012; Sala et al., 2020). Those differences are real and consequential, and understanding them is what this series is about.

The non-autistic pathway builds intimacy through a specific engine: the reciprocal disclosure of self, the back-and-forth of revealing and receiving, the body-empathy-mediated attunement that allows each person to register the other's emotional experience in real time and respond to it as the intimacy bid it is (Altman & Taylor, 1973; Laurenceau et al., 1998; Reis & Shaver, 1988). That engine has its own strengths and its own vulnerabilities, including the particular vulnerability of the high body empathetic nervous system, for whom closeness can tip toward merger before genuine intimacy is established (Erikson, 1968; Kegan, 1982).

The autistic pathway builds intimacy through different channels: explicitness, reliability, shared engagement, direct communication, and the neurotype-matched ease of being with someone whose inner world is organized by similar assumptions (Crompton, Hallett, et al., 2020; Crompton, Sharp, et al., 2020; Sala et al., 2020). That engine also has its strengths and its own vulnerabilities, including the difficulty that arises when the autistic person's way of offering intimacy is not recognized as an intimacy bid by a partner whose nervous system is waiting for a different kind of signal (Milton, 2012; Smith et al., 2021; Yew et al., 2023).

When these two systems meet in a neurodiverse relationship, something specific happens: each person is extending genuine care and genuine effort toward closeness, and each person is frequently missing what the other is offering, because the signals are not translating (Jones et al., 2024; Milton, 2012; Smith et al., 2021; Yew et al., 2023). The result is often the painful situation the literature on neurodiverse partnerships consistently documents: two people who love each other and are lonely in ways neither fully understands (Smith et al., 2021; Stafford, 2023; Yew et al., 2023).

What it takes to move toward genuine mutual intelligibility across two different intimacy systems is the question the rest of this series is organized around. The answer is not simple and it is not automatic. But it is reachable.

Next in this series: How Intimacy Forms Along the Non-Autistic Pathway, the mechanism through which non-autistic people build genuine closeness, what makes it work, what makes it fail, and what the high body empathetic's nervous system does to intimacy when the pull toward others runs stronger than the capacity to remain grounded in one's own experience.


THE SERIES:

Article 1: What Intimacy Actually Is
Article 2: How Intimacy Forms Along the Non-Autistic Pathway
Article 3: How Intimacy Forms Along the Autistic Pathway
Article 4: Physical Intimacy, Sensory Experience and the Body
Article 5: When Two Intimacy Systems Meet
Article 6: Toward Mutual Intelligibility

References

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Crompton, C. J., Hallett, S., Ropar, D., Flynn, E. G., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2020). “I never realised everybody felt as happy as I do when I am around autistic people”: A thematic analysis of autistic adults’ relationships with autistic and neurotypical friends and family. Autism, 24(6), 1438–1448. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320908976

Crompton, C. J., Sharp, M., Axbey, H., Fletcher-Watson, S., Flynn, E. G., & Ropar, D. (2020). Neurotype-matching, but not being autistic, influences self and observer ratings of interpersonal rapport. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 586171. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586171

Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. W. W. Norton.

Jones, D. R., Botha, M., Ackerman, R. A., King, K., & Sasson, N. J. (2024). Non-autistic observers both detect and demonstrate the double empathy problem when evaluating interactions between autistic and non-autistic adults. Autism, 28(8), 2053–2065. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613231219743

Kegan, R. (1982). The evolving self: Problem and process in human development. Harvard University Press.

Laurenceau, J.-P., Barrett, L. F., & Pietromonaco, P. R. (1998). Intimacy as an interpersonal process: The importance of self-disclosure, partner disclosure, and perceived partner responsiveness in interpersonal exchanges. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1238–1251. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1238

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McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721413475622

Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The “double empathy problem.” Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008

Reis, H. T., & Shaver, P. (1988). Intimacy as an interpersonal process. In S. Duck, D. F. Hay, S. E. Hobfoll, W. Ickes, & B. M. Montgomery (Eds.), Handbook of personal relationships: Theory, research and interventions (pp. 367–389). Wiley.

Sala, G., Hooley, M., & Stokes, M. A. (2020). Romantic intimacy in autism: A qualitative analysis. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 50, 4133–4147. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04377-x

Smith, R., Netto, J., Gribble, N. C., & Falkmer, M. (2021). “At the end of the day, it’s love”: An exploration of relationships in neurodiverse couples. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 51, 3311–3321. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04790-z

Stafford, A. (2023). Relationship-counselling recommendations for partnerships involving autistic adults: A scoping review. Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.59158/001c.77496

Yew, R. Y., Hooley, M., & Stokes, M. A. (2023). Factors of relationship satisfaction for autistic and non-autistic partners in long-term relationships. Autism, 27(8), 2348–2360. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613231160244