High ceillings
I’ve been thinking a lot about intimacy and closeness with regards to friends. In my potentially contentious Notion page that I use to track my active friendships, I’ve been meaning to include a ceiling score to complement the closeness score I track.
I think of closeness as how comfortable and vulnerable and secure both my friend and I can be in our relationship; how many levels of intimacy we’ve reached. The ceiling then is the max closeness I think I could ever have with a certain person.
Friendships I made earlier in my life tend to have lower ceilings. They were born through proximity. As a long lived adult, I think I’ve subconsciously (but recently more intentionally) directed more of my attention towards finding people that I believe have high ceilings. There are, however, obvious gaps when I think about the deltas between the closeness and ceilings of even my closest friends.
Should this gap be closed in the first place? And if so, how does one close this gap?
I talked to L about this briefly, and she voiced that for her, the level of vulnerability and intimacy required to close this gap was reserved for her therapist. To most, I assume the reservation is made for their partners? But what if toeing the line and not being afraid of conflict and occasionally seeing friends’s spikiness was normalized? What kinds of conversations would be unlocked?
It takes a lot of energy and intent and emotional regulation to navigate to the highest ceiling, but I’d like to believe it’s worth the time.