JoshuaReich.org

I’m working ahead to get ready for our relationship series that we’re kicking off in a couple of weeks called #RelationshipGoals and one of the books I read was John Ortberg’s I’d Like You More If You Were More like Me: Getting Real about Getting Close. There are so many things I enjoyed about this book, that I thought I’d share some favorite quotes:

1. Why do we fear intimacy so much? For one thing, I think we’re afraid of being hurt. Intimacy means being known by someone – as Nancy knows me, for example. She knows my strengths and weaknesses, my hopes and fear. She can use that knowledge to bond with me and grow closer to me, or she can use it to shame, wound, or betray me. We also fear intimacy because it can set us up for disappointments.
2. Intimacy respects distance but isn’t content with it.
3. In the minds of a lot of people in our culture, the word intimacy got all tangled up with sex. But even though there is a connection between the two words, they are not interchangeable, and one is not necessarily dependent on the other. We don’t need to have sex to be intimate with someone in order to have sex. The vast majority of our intimate relationships have absolutely nothing to do with sex. Intimacy also applies to our relationships with our kids, our parents, our friends, our coworkers – and even with God.
4. To love someone means both to will and to work for that person to become who God created them to be.
5. The Bible never tells us to fall in love. But it has a lot to say about growing in love.
6. One of the most important “awareness” questions we can ask ourselves in each significant relationship is, “How does my connection with this person impact the person I’m becoming?”
7. What makes the miracle of human connection possible is our ability to discern another person’s emotional state, empathize with it, and enter into it.
8. “Feeling felt” is to the human soul what food is to the stomach, or air is to the lungs.
9. Feeling felt requires two gifts that we can give to one another: knowing and acceptance. If you know about my weakness or my woundedness, but you don’t care, you won’t be able to help me. On the other hand, if you accept me as I am, but you don’t know about my breaking heart, you won’t be able to bring healing to my particular situation.
10. We treasure joyful moments because they somehow heal and connect us. What’more, our joy is not just about us. The research is quite clear on this: Joyful people are more compassionate in their actions than less joyful people. They are more financially generous than less joyful people. They develop friendships and deeper friendships than less joyful people. They are more likely to stay married. They are more resilient in the face of hardship. They exhibit greater vitality and a zest for life.
11. Naming an emotion is the first step in healing that emotion inwardly.
12. Commitment gives us what Lewis Smedes calls a “small island of certainty” in an uncertain world: “How strange it is, when you think about it that a mere human being can take hold of the future and fasten one part of it down for another person … I stretch myself into unpredictable days ahead and make one thing predictable for you: I will be there with you.”
13. Commitment is the foundation of intimacy because without commitment there can be no trust, and without trust, there can be no intimacy.
14. When a relationship has intimacy without commitment, there’s a greater potential for hurt.
15. Psychologist Robert Sternberg proposed that marriage involved what he calls a triangle of life: intimacy (by which he means feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness), passion (romance and physical attraction), and commitment (the decision to maintain that love). These elements must be proportional. When intimacy exceeds commitment, there is potential for hurt. When commitment exceeds intimacy, there is a disappointment for the heart. But when commitment, passion, and intimacy go hand in hand, relationships flourish.
16. Lewis Smedes identified three things we surrender when we commit ourselves to another person: our freedom, our individuality, and our control. When we commit ourselves to someone, we’re no longer the only ones in charge. Our time and our heart are no longer our own. Commitment builds an invisible fence around us, and we freely choose to honor its restrictions on our freedom. Once we’ve committed, we’re no longer just me, myself, I; we’ve become part of we.
17. Shame is condemnation – the internalization of rejection. As Lewis Smedes puts it, “Shame is a weighty feeling.” Guilt causes us to feel bad about what we’ve done; shame causes us to feel bad about who we are. Shame – at least the toxic kind – causes us to feel that we will never be acceptable. It touches the very core of our identity.
18. Differences mean that conflict is inevitable. Often friendships, as well as marriages, have an early phase that is relatively conflict-free. Sooner or later, though reality sets in.
19. Intimacy does not mean having a relationship without conflict. Intimacy does not mean having a relationship without any ruptures. Every relationship experiences rupture from time to time. What determines ongoing intimacy is what happens next.
20. One way of measuring the health of a relationship is how quickly a couple moves to repair the connection when they experience a rupture.