Too many of us avoid conflict. We fear that expressing an honest, feeling emotion will create problems.

The reason this is dangerous is that conflict makes us feel. When we feel, we change.

A conflict is an expression of an emotion.

We are fighting for the very same reason we have sex: our body is telling us something that we do not know how to identify.

It’s a sign that we want to change.

Want to 10x your business's website traffic?

Look no further! Juice.ai puts your business in charge of its content strategy and gets you targeted clicks to your website. Check it out now!

Intimate relationships are about conflict

To experience a close, caring relationship is to have an openness to the other person’s emotions.

This is a profound gift that no one can deny you.

When you have an open emotional relationship, you can feel like you can speak your mind, even if you want to change someone’s opinion or feelings.

This power is so powerful that this kind of relationship is inherently sustainable, even if someone hurts you.

You have found something that is so sacred, no one can take it away. You are its sacred space, and your love becomes a force that brings both people together.

Intimacy and intimacy are born from conflict, but not from hate. When you feel something in your heart, you cannot close off that feeling. It is too precious.

So here’s the best way to respond to conflict: first, you will not talk about it.

You will not participate in the argument. In fact, if you get involved in the argument, you are only giving fuel to the fire, and you might as well stop now.

Sit quietly. Don’t engage. Don’t defend yourself or defend your point of view.

Don’t push back or challenge the other person’s point of view. Let that be between them.

This will most likely feel uncomfortable at first, because you will feel vulnerable and exposed, but over time it will feel less uncomfortable and more powerful.

You will recognize that the moment you opened up was the most powerful one you have ever experienced. When you first realized that you had a desire for intimacy, and then that you were capable of it.

When you truly knew that you could communicate with a loved one and that it was good and natural.

You can feel this moment in your heart.

This is why we reach out to people who we love and close relationships: we want to feel what it is like to be with another person who feels as deeply as we do, to know what they feel, to know what it is like to give them your love and be received.

We want to experience this ecstasy that is unique and cannot be manufactured by social media.

No matter how connected to technology you become, you are never going to fully know how that feels.

Emotions are ours to own

In the West, we have been trained to pretend to be emotionless.

As a culture, we want to appear as if we are very successful and don’t experience anything that feels bad, which is not true.

All of the research shows that humans are emotional creatures.

Humans have a natural capacity for feeling, and it is healthy. Emotions are very powerful.

It takes a lot of work to suppress an emotion, and we do it out of habit because we don’t have the skill to experience our feelings.

The moment we can own our emotions, and when we experience them deeply, we get to experience life more intensely and we are more truly alive.

If you look at it from this perspective, it is not hard to understand why women are so comfortable and happy in intimate relationships, because we get to experience an unmitigated joy that everyone else gets to experience in the form of love.

It is a mind-blowing discovery to go from hate and trying to suppress it to loving it and getting it back to you. You feel the power in your own heart.

Real intimacy and love is a powerful experience that can transform your life.

We know it to be true in our hearts because that’s what we experience when we enter into loving relationships with other people.

A love that is too great to retire

Love is a wild, beautiful, wild thing. It’s a wonder to be in it and it can be intoxicating to share with another person, so long as they share it back with you.

That’s the magic of love when we experience it fully.

Intimacy is the core of our connection to each other, but it can be very vulnerable.

We can experience anger, disappointment, and all of the other things that can get in the way of love.

We get to experience an elixir of joy that cannot be manufactured by social media or television.

Love exists outside of social media and television. Love exists outside of the structure of a relationship.

Love is a wild thing and it cannot be boxed up and has no specific shape.

In our love relationships, we have the opportunity to be love and love another person.

Love can be an expression of our authentic selves and the ultimate expression of intimacy.

That is why we crave love. That is why we will continue to do everything we can to experience love in our lives.

Follow up thoughts on social media and intimacy

One of my readers shared her experience and asked what my thoughts on social media were.

Here’s a copy of her email:

Dear Gil,

The other day I went through some old photos of a friend I used to have and I was stunned.

She was so beautiful! She had red hair, golden skin, amazing blue eyes, and a wonderful smile.

You would not have believed she was that beautiful with those huge bags under her eyes.

I looked at her picture and then I thought, “Oh my god, did she not know how beautiful she was?!”

I had become so spoiled with social media that it was easy to see others’ lives and to forget that it does not show the whole picture of someone. It never did and never will.

If she had just looked in the mirror instead of on social media, she would have realized what she had.

It makes me angry that she had no idea how gorgeous she was because she never felt it, even in herself.

I am grateful that I had the chance to know her in person and take her out in public once and I loved her. She was so caring, gentle, and funny.

She was beautiful, inside and out, and I’ll always be thankful that I had the chance to know her.

Social media makes us feel like we can judge others. Sometimes we feel so alone, so isolated and so confused because we are seeing the world through filters that we cannot escape.

We can pretend we know what it’s like to be in another person’s life and then we wonder how they would feel about us.