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‘The past is just a story we tell ourselves’
Intimate loving relationships, in their varying combination of physical and emotional components, reflect the infinite variety of human beings: their personal qualities, their past experiences, the culture in which they have grown up, their fantasy lives…
As a precursor to such relationships among adults, the earliest bond between baby and mother is formed on the basis of primary sensory experiences: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. Individuals involved in intimate relationships would, ideally, choose to stay in each other's proximity, i.e. with their bodies located in the same place and time, with their senses switched on and tuned onto one another. Geographical distance and extended temporal gaps between encounters can be painful, and major sensory disabilities in one or both partners can interfere with, or at any rate alter, the quality of their relationship.
In reality, conditions are seldom ideal and, even when they are, they are unlikely to remain so on a permanent basis. In all intimate relationships, be they of an erotic or of any other kind, uncontrollable internal pressures or external circumstances create the need for compromises. Let us briefly look at a few situations where some of the ingredients are missing, or have at some point been lost, and consider whether such close relationships are still possible under those conditions.
Being unable to see, hear or touch the loved one can be distressful. Yet, even the extreme conditions of blindness or deafness in one or both partners