Continuing intimacy requires each person to remain partly indistinct

Evidence

In relations of intimacy of the modern type, trust is always ambivalent, and the possibility of severance is more or less ever present. Personal ties can be ruptured, and ties of intimacy returned to the sphere of impersonal contacts—in the broken love affair, the intimate suddenly becomes again a stranger. The demand of “opening oneself up” to the other which personal trust relations now presume, the injunction to hide nothing from the other, mix reassurance and deep anxiety. Personal trust demands a level of self-understanding and self-expression which must itself be a source of psychological tension. For mutual self-revelation is combined with the need for reciprocity and support; yet the two are frequently incompatible. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 345 (#complicates, via linked claim)

And as the beloved is here loved not as an individual but as the messenger of a supraindividual beauty, so is the lover himself also deindividualized, because his love, as I indicated, comes not from the creative personality but from his former beholding of the Idea of the beautiful. Both object and subject are only vessels of the Idea. Obviously, love must first be removed from this sphere outside of both of them, every ego must first have found a definite, secure boundary for itself, for love to move on the shortest line between them, as it were, and for love therefore to be able to quiet their yearning only through reciprocal love. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 583 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Intimacy arises when a relation’s unique shared ingredients feel essential; Modern intimate trust demands self-revelation that produces permanent psychological tension — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 345; Reciprocal modern love presupposes each ego having secured a definite boundary — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 583 (+2 more)

Related

• Reciprocal modern love presupposes each ego having secured a definite boundary (similarity 0.88)
• Modern intimate trust demands self-revelation that produces permanent psychological tension (similarity 0.85)
• Modernity does not replace intimacy with impersonality but transforms it through distancing (similarity 0.81)
• Modern love attaches to unanalyzable individuality rather than to any specific attribute (similarity 0.80)
• Modern culture simultaneously demands intimate love and makes trusting it irrational (similarity 0.79)
• Intimacy arises when a relation’s unique shared ingredients feel essential (similarity 0.79)
• Perfect devotion of one party requires reciprocal surrender by the other on another level (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Modern intimate trust demands self-revelation that produces permanent psychological tension #complicates (0.85) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 345
• Reciprocal modern love presupposes each ego having secured a definite boundary #contradicts (0.82) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 583