04/04/2026
On relationships and intimacy -
https://www.facebook.com/share/18EimQ5xkn/?mibextid=wwXIfr
You can live with someone for years without knowing them. Or rather, you can live with them and know the surface of them, what they order at restaurants, how they take their coffee, the way they clear their throat when they're about to deliver bad news, and you can mistake all of that knowing for intimacy when it isn't intimacy at all. Amy Tan's line is from a novel about sisters and past lives and things that can't be explained, but this sentence sits inside a failed marriage, and it says something that most women who've stayed too long in the wrong relationship will recognise immediately. Habit and silence felt like intimacy. Both were effortless and asked nothing but by the time you notice the difference, years have been lost.
Tan writes about what gets lost in translation, between cultures, generations, and people who love each other and still fail to communicate. The Hundred Secret Senses is her third novel, published in 1995, and its narrator is an American woman trying to understand her Chinese half-sister's claims about a previous life. But underneath all the mysticism is something very ordinary. A woman whose marriage has failed and is trying to work out why she picked the man she picked and why it took so long to leave. The wrong beginning, she says. Bad timing. And then that devastating final clause, which is really the heart of it. Years and years of thinking habit and silence were the same as intimacy.
What she's describing is something most of us have done, or are still doing. You meet someone. The relationship has problems from the start but you don't want to look at them because you've already committed and started building a life. And so you adjust. You learn not to bring up the things that cause arguments and interpret silence as peace. You tell yourself this is maturity, that real relationships don't need constant maintenance, that the passionate couples who talk everything through are the ones who get divorced. And maybe you're right, some of the time. But there's a difference between comfortable silence and the silence where you've both stopped trying. The first is intimacy. The second is habit dressed up as intimacy. And how do you tell them apart from the inside? You don't, usually. You tell them apart from the other side of it, after it's over, when you can finally see what you were living in.
The psychologist John Bowlby spent his career studying attachment, the way early relationships teach us what love is supposed to feel like. A child who learns that closeness means vigilance will grow up associating love with watching, checking, the constant hum of anxiety that tells her someone is paying attention. But there's another version. A child who learns that closeness means being left alone will grow up finding intimacy in distance. She'll like a man who doesn't ask too many questions and feel comfortable with someone who doesn't need her to explain herself. And she won't realise for a long time that what she's calling comfort is actually absence, and what she's calling intimacy is actually two people living parallel lives that never quite touch.
The researcher John Gottman has a name for the small attempts people make to connect with each other. He calls them emotional bids. A question across the room and a hand on the arm. A comment about something you saw on the news. Little invitations to be present with each other. What happens in a failing relationship, he found, is that the bids get ignored and the person making them eventually stops. This is how silence takes over. It creeps in through all the small moments that went unanswered and all the times you said something and he didn't look up, or the times he reached for you and you were too tired, too busy, too somewhere else. After a while you both stop reaching. And the silence that fills that space looks exactly like the silence of a happy couple who don't need words. From the outside, identical.
But sometimes we choose the silence because it's easier. The relationships that ask a lot of us, that require constant explaining, that want to know what we're feeling and why, can be exhausting. And a woman who has been through enough sometimes just wants to be left alone. She doesn't want another person who needs things from her. She wants the quiet. And she tells herself this is what she deserves, or what she prefers, when actually what she's doing is hiding. The wrong beginning Tan mentions is wrong because she chose it knowing it was wrong. She picked the man who wouldn't see her because she didn't want to be seen. And then years later she wonders why she feels so lonely in her own life.
What Tan is getting at is something most women know but don't like to admit. You can waste a lot of years and stay because leaving feels like throwing away everything you've invested. You can convince yourself that good enough is good, that quiet is closeness, and that asking for more is greedy or naive or just more trouble than it's worth. And by the time you see it clearly, you've already passed the point where starting again feels easy. She lists three things, the wrong beginning, the bad timing, and then the silence, as though they were equal contributors. The first two were accidents but the third was a choice, made every day for years. The silence is what let everything else stand.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
Image: Library of Congress Life
