Honesty, Radical Acceptance, and the Grief In Between — What I Learned From a Few Years of Sitting With My Own Wants/Needs/Desires
A few years ago, if you'd asked me to define intimacy, I probably would've given you the textbook answer. Closeness. Vulnerability. Connection. All true, and all pretty useless the moments I tried to practice it in a way that met me.
What actually changed things for me was not a definition. It was getting honest — really honest — about what I wanted, what I needed, and what I actually desired, instead of what I thought I was supposed to want. That kind of honesty doesn’t stay comfortable for long. It surfaces things you've been quietly avoiding, and for me, a lot of what it surfaced was grief and letting go.
Grief for wants I'd never let myself name out loud. Grief for relationships that weren't going to become what I'd hoped, no matter how much honesty I brought to them. Grief for versions of intimacy I'd assumed I'd have by now, that simply weren't there. Honesty asked me to see all of that more clearly. Radical acceptance was the much slower, much harder practice of not looking away from it once I had a clearer view.
None of that came from a book. It came from practicing over and over, in real relationships — with partners, with friends, with myself. But somewhere in that process, I started writing things down. Prompts I came back to. Questions that cracked something open when I let myself actually sit with them instead of answering on autopilot. Eventually, that collection became a small guide I called Intimacy Exploration.
Naming What You Actually Want
Honesty starts small. Not with a big confession to someone else, but with a quieter question turned inward: what do I actually want here? Not what's reasonable, not what I've already decided I can't have, not what keeps the peace — what do I want.
That question got a lot easier once I stopped treating intimacy as one single thing you either have or don't. It's several different pathways of connection, and most of us are better at some than others without ever noticing the imbalance — or noticing which ones we've quietly given up wanting, because wanting them hurt too much.
Emotional — sharing feelings and feeling understood
Intellectual — exchanging ideas and staying curious together
Experiential — bonding through shared activities and memories
Physical — non-sexual touch, presence, and closeness
Sexual — desire, pleasure, and sexual connection
Spiritual — shared meaning, values, or a sense of purpose
Romantic — affection, attraction, and devotion
Creative — making or building something together, alongside someone
For me, naming these separately made the grief easier to locate, too. It's one thing to feel a vague sense that something's missing. It's another to be honest enough to say: this specific kind of closeness is the one I've been longing for and grieving.
What Radical Acceptance Actually Asks For
Underneath all eight types, I kept running into the same handful of elements, again and again — honesty and acceptance turned out to be the hardest for me:
Safety — trust, consistency, validation
Curiosity — asking questions, staying open, exploring inner worlds
Presence — being here, now, without the phone, without the mental to-do list
Honesty — saying the true thing, being transparent, actually taking in feedback
Radical acceptance — noticing your own biases, making room for what's true even when it's hard, letting go of how things "should" be
Reflection — turning attention back on yourself, getting curious about your own feelings instead of just reacting to them
Acceptance isn't resignation. It's not deciding you didn't really want the thing after all. It's letting the want and the loss sit in the same place without rushing to fix, minimize, or explain either one away. That's most of what grief actually is, in my experience — not moving on from what you wanted, but making room for both the wanting and the not-having, at the same time, without one canceling out the other.
Safety comes first, underneath all of it. None of this is a checklist you complete once — it's commitments you keep making, imperfectly, for as long as it matters to you. Including your relationship with yourself.
Why I Turned It Into a Guide
I built the Intimacy Exploration guide because I don't actually believe intimacy is something you learn from a book or guide — including the one I created LOL. What changes things is honesty with yourself, acceptance of what that honesty turns up, and space to grieve whatever needs grieving along the way. None of that is something you can hand to someone. You have to practice it.
So the guide isn't a program with a finish line. It's a set of prompts meant to be sat with, one honest answer at a time, and returned to as you change — because you will change, and what's true about your relationship to intimacy today won't necessarily be true in five years.
If any of this feels familiar, this is exactly the kind of work we do one-on-one and with partnered systems in sex and relationship counseling at Here We Are. You don't have to already have the language for what's going on — that's part of what we'd work out together. Reach out to schedule a session, or explore more resources on the site if you're not ready for that yet.
The Intimacy Exploration guide is also available here.
Cat Bishop, LPC, is the founder of Here We Are Therapy, where we offer individual and systems therapy, sex and relationship counseling, and support for grief, life transitions, and neurodivergent experiences.
