Emotional Cocoons

There are many different kinds of intimacy. Most people think immediately of physical and/or see that as the best or most important kind. Those people are seriously missing the boat. So often I meet young christian couples who hold up this physical "purity" as a sign that they are being careful, guarding their hearts and yet when the break up comes it is the emotional intimacy created in those quiet moments of bared souls that find them just as if not more devastated than those that had a physical relationship. Those poor men and women don't know what hit them.

Emotional intimacy is a very serious and underestimated thing. It exists between parents and children, siblings, friends and couples. Obviously depending on the relationship it works differently and each kind of relationship has it's own brand. There are several brands of it which make it difficult to see as a problem or to always define correctly. Especially between men and women who are friends. Friendships between men and women are completely possible and reasonable, but we are meant to attract each other beyond friendship, so... A man and a woman might be friends and have romantic relationships outside that friendship but have become so emotionally intimate within the friendship that they have seriously endangered and entangled one of their hearts or more likely both.

It is very complicated sometimes to find the line between loving/caring for someone as "just friends" and cherishing someone as more. People can cross those lines all the time, and not even know really until they are too far to go back. It is comfortable, comforting, to be emotionally intimate. Our hearts are designed to be connected to others. The idea that there are no strings attached can be even more intoxicating (like the idea that you can have an open sexual relationship... which by the way is also a really bad idea!) but it is dangerous and almost and addictive narcotic of sorts. When it's gone you can even go through painful withdrawal.

Physical Intimacy without emotional intimacy is empty and a lie. A lie we tell ourselves. It is why casual sex is so meaningless and frankly heinous. Emotional intimacy without commitment and genuine intentions is oddly almost (if not more so) as empty because in the end the love and support is hollow and has no basis in reality. It will not stand as is under pressure or scrutiny. It either has to complete itself in a real commitment/connection or end to allow room for the new real commitments to others.

It is such a comfortable thing, though. Comforting to be wrapped in a cocoon of emotions, however artificial, that makes you feel safe. It is easy to spin that cocoon for someone else, with the best of intentions, even though in reality you cannot maintain it and never really meant to.

Caterpillars create cocoons to transform into butterflies. Spiders use cocoons to trap their prey and hold them while they suck out their life blood.

Yeah. Draw your own cocoosions.