cracking the doors of intimacy
all i want is to see you & be seen
if we meet at a party, let’s skip the small talk. i don’t really care for your favorite restaurant in new york, or when you arrived into the city, or which neighborhood you live in — i mean, i do, but there are so many other topics i want to know first.
like: what are your dreams, your nightmares? what are you running towards & away from? i want to know what you think about identity, the last time you’ve called your father. my voice strains over the deep 808s—i hope you can’t hear my desperation, that the bass is too loud. can we strip away the pulsing lights, the stench of sweat and soju, until it’s just us two?
there’s the idea of breaking the touch barrier in dating1, but i’m way more fascinated with how to break the intimacy barrier in budding friendships. sometimes it happens immediately—perhaps, the first convo at a social gathering. other times, it’s gradual—it takes several meetings before some poem, some article, some thing triggers a mutual spark. most times it never happens, and i am left craving answers that i will never get—my appetite wanes thereafter.2
in a conversation i default to being the anthropologist, which is why i find it so refreshing when someone returns the same energy. in other words—if you ask me intimate questions back, i know this is the start of a beautiful friendship.
attempts towards intimacy
one of my favorite ken liu stories, state change, details a world where people’s souls manifest as an animate object that reflects & shapes their personality. in the story the main character’s soul object is an ice cube and it colors her trepidation in the world, her mannerisms, and what she’s attracted to.
ice breakers are my bread and butter. quirky as ever, i ask people what kitchen appliance they’d be in a way to arrive at this sort of soul-object-energy, but it never ends up being that #deep—it comes off more like a buzzfeed quiz.
cracking intimacy with these off-putting questions has been my hack all the way back in high school: inspired by the HONY project, i managed the humans of h*gh tech instagram account. as an earnest freshman armed with a camera and bright eyes, i interrupted teachers & upperclassmen during lunch breaks, asking them a “deep” question and memorializing the moment on social media. for my college project team, we’d start meetings off with a round of we’re not really strangers—and when we ran out of cards, i’d somewhat desperately make up contrived scenarios: which college building would you hide in a zombie apocalypse? what song would you use to replace a fire alarm?
in the end, these “deep” questions are faulty proxies for genuine connection—asking them didn’t bring me any closer to upperclassmen in hs, nor peers in my club. it was almost counter-productive—it gave me the false hope that i broke down their walls, and i neglected to follow up with getting to know them outside of the context we shared.
there’s a bilingual card game “parents are human” that’s intended to provoke vulnerability with our immigrant parents, with questions like "what is the best advice you have ever received?” i’ve intentionally abstained from trying this out with my parents. perhaps it’s lucky that my parents are fairly open about voicing their love, their philosophy, et al. perhaps its because im jaded from the efficacy of these forced plays for connection, because nothing is a true substitute for sitting down and getting to know someone. perhaps it’s because the questions i want to ask my parents are more intrusive than a card game would allow: do you wish i were a son? do you wish you had moved to Hong Kong? when you were 11, what did you think you’d be doing now?3 simply asking them would not be enough, because I know they would lie.
my friends & i played with letterloop, a way to have a group newsletter with your friends and ask meta-questions you normally wouldn’t text someone. i think the written of nature made it easier to treat the questions as a journaling exercise rather than a gimmick—yet it’s not a practice that i found sustainable to keep up.
& of course there are the irl events. the social clubs of nyc organizing events designed to facilitate this intimacy — closer, circle, among many others. there’s a blurry line between manufactured/social engineered closeness vs. genuine connection, and im still walking the tightrope.
at the end of the day, a tool is a tool. some inspire me to toy with my own artifacts to facilitate intimacy, but i still feel like nothing replaces a good ol’ conversation with someone.
packaging intimacy
growing up i was entranced with internet older sister figures: bestdressed, linhtruong, hana lee. i felt like i was in their bedrooms, sitting criss-crossed, listening to their boy-troubles and existentialist thoughts. it felt like an honor; you’d trust me with your interiority, something i craved from my peers. when i watched their videos, their vulnerability was a warm embrace through the screen.
yet relying on this intimacy with these public figures is dangerous — because at the end of the day, they are not our friends, they do not know us, and therefore owe us nothing. a lot of people are infuriated that bestdressed disappeared from YouTube without an explanation and has seemingly moved onto brand deals. i felt personally betrayed when hana lee got double eyelid surgery, after years of looking up to her monolid tutorials — but who is she to care about me? yes, if a friend is going to prioritize other things, a texts heads-up is respectful; but these YouTubers are not our friends. packaged intimacy is dangerous because it fosters parasocial relationships and unrealistic expectations.
“Opening up a window into an intimate part of your or other people’s lives is a power move. Many of us grew up binge-watching reality TV about people’s homes, careers, and relationships. Then came the blogs and the iconic online publications, reporting from the bathroom floors and closets of the most powerful women in New York and LA. Then came the YouTube vlogs, Instagram…I don’t have to explain this to you. The point is — **intimacy has never gone out of style.** When one platform lost our trust, another one rose in its place, offering an even closer look into one’s life.” -Selling Intimacy
when you open a window into your life, people want to climb into your room. and strangers don’t know the rules of your home: they will walk around with shoes on, make a mess of your couch, spill their drinks onto the floor. on all levels of the chain, we are chasing intimacy and settling for some imitation.
am i the problem?
an unwelcome challenge: if it’s so easy to get close with someone, are you really close to anyone at all? this accusation during a fight frustrated me to no end. i wanted to insist: i have the emotional capacity to maintain all these close friendships, that empathy is my superpower and is neverending. i want to insist: i care about you, but i can also leave space for all these people i care about—but is that true? can i have it both ways/do I want it both ways? do i have a habit of abandoning an intimately close relationship in favor of chasing more and more “close” friendships? am i addicted to the feeling of breaking this intimacy barrier, at the detriment of my already established connections? these are open wounds with no resolution, not yet.
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stray thoughts:
I wrote this in one go because these issues are top-of-mind. my questions are not just rhetorical — I’d appreciate any thoughts / responses!
I think in the age of gen AI I’m leaning into intimacy as a way human-created art differentiates itself. I get more and more intimate into the topics I write about almost as a challenge.
tik tok influencers have honestly kind of strayed away from packaging intimacy — there’s only so much interiority you can exhibit in a 10 second glory reel. I think that’s why I want to move into filmmaking — how do I capture this intimacy via art? Photography and writing have been my methods so far, but I imagine combining the two into a moving story can carry further resonance. But again I question myself—im scrubbing myself raw in my art, and for what reason? Am I forcing a sense of intimacy with an invisible audience through this navel-gazing that’s inherently narcissistic? being intimate time and time again can turn exhausting, so why do I keep doing it?
is trying to crack ultimate intimacy with someone a sisyphean task? is trying to have myself known by another fruitless?
cringe
guys let me know if that phrase didnt make sense lMAO
watch aftersun to find out why this breaks my heart
Banger - it’s so hard to stay close to everyone and even harder to predict how it’ll unfold
love aftersun :"")