Why Some People Can't Stay Close |
Intimacy tolerance is not about how much you love, how open-minded you are, or how badly you want connection. It’s about how much closeness your nervous system can actually hold before it starts to feel overwhelmed.
Most people assume that if intimacy feels good, we’ll naturally move toward it. But for many, closeness is both nourishing and threatening. It activates longing and fear at the same time. This is why desire can rise and then abruptly disappear. Not because attraction is gone, but because intimacy itself has crossed an internal threshold.
We tend to choose partners whose intimacy tolerance closely matches our own. This happens quietly, often unconsciously. Two people can have very different stories, styles, and personalities, yet share the........