Interiority, Curiosity and Care
I’ve been using the words emotional availability, emotional intelligence and reciprocity for years. Trying to come to some kind of definition and understand their real-life applications. Embarrassingly enough, I still don’t think I fully understand what I meant by them and probably the reason I keep writing about it. I continue to discover some of the conflicting differences when it comes to sharing a life together, relating to one another and truly being understood.
Sharing Life With Another
“Did you eat your rice today?”
It is a common question and a genuine way to show someone that you care. But if I were hungry, would you want to know what was happening in my life, what I was thinking about, or how I was feeling?
Or perhaps the bigger question is … Why would I need to interrogate your feelings when I am already showing you that I care?
These two approaches can represent very different understandings of intimacy. The first is an expression of practical care. The second is an invitation into each other’s inner experience. Neither is inherently better. They simply come from different understandings of what it means to care for another person.
When I talk about sharing life, I’m not primarily talking about the distribution of domestic responsibilities… who prepares the meals, who initiates sex, who pays the bills, or even how often we communicate about the activities of everyday life. I’m talking about our interior emotional landscape. I’m talking about being known by another person through the sharing of our inner worlds, our private thoughts, feelings, uncertainties, hopes, disappointments and raw emotions.
Reciprocity
Reciprocity isn’t necessarily about equality. It’s not doing the math of who pays for what, does the chores, makes more money or makes the biggest sacrifice. Those issues can matter a lot, but that is not what I’m referring to. I’m talking about something that may be impossible to measure.
I become genuinely curious about your inner world, your feelings and your experience… and you become curious about mine. You want to understand my experience, and I want to understand yours. This is not about information exchange, or a tally of what someone is doing for you. It is what happens between two inner worlds. Isn’t this where intimacy lives?
Care vs. Internal Curiosity
Practical care can be deeply loving. Someone asking if you’ve eaten, making sure you’re home safe, getting you something you need, helping you with a problem, or simply being there when life gets difficult can communicate enormous affection. But what happens when care doesn’t include curiosity about the person being cared for?
Someone can take very good care of us while knowing very little about us. The opposite is true too. Someone can be deeply curious about our interior world and be terrible at practical care.
I’m not looking for one or the other. I want both. I want someone who asks me if I ate and is curious to ask me why I didn’t. Not because I enjoy being interrogated, but because the question tells me that you aren’t simply caring for my life, you are interested in the person living it.
Is this what it means to share our worlds?
Care says, I want you to be okay.
Curiosity says, I want to know you.
Reciprocity says, I want that movement to happen in both directions.
I want to know what is happening inside you, and I want you to want to know what is happening inside me.
Maybe intimacy goes one step further. It isn’t simply about knowing another person’s inner world, but allowing yourself to be affected by it. Your sadness matters to me. Your excitement becomes something I want to experience with you. Your fears make me want to understand rather than simply fix them. When you are happy, I am happy. Your inner world becomes more than information I’ve received. It enters my world.
This is what I mean by sharing a life: not that we have to agree or understand each other, but that there is enough room between us for both of our inner worlds to exist, to be heard, and to matter.
Emotional Availability Isn’t the Same as Reciprocity
I’ve also realized that emotional availability isn’t the same thing as reciprocity.
Someone can be emotionally expressive. They can talk openly about their trauma, disclose intimate things, cry, be vulnerable, and say they want a deep relationship—and still not be particularly curious about someone else’s internal world.
Emotional availability asks: Can you open?
Reciprocity asks: Can we open toward each other?
Those are different things. Someone can open the door to their own interior world without being curious and walking through the door into yours.
The Family Question
I continue to wonder why my attention is so consistently drawn to questions of reciprocity and emotional availability, and emotional intelligence. When I was seventeen, I took a leap of faith and sought out a therapist because I wanted to have healthy relationships in my life. Even then, I knew there was something not quite right about the model I had been given by my family.
I was the black sheep in my family, questioning the status quo and the family dynamics around me. I wondered why communication happened the way it did, and why it so often seemed like I was the one causing problems. There was never really a place in my family for my feelings or my experience. Eventually I realized I wanted something different. A place where I was heard, where my feelings mattered, where I was accepted, and where I was honored.
If I never felt there was much room for my inner world in my family, is it any wonder that creating an emotionally available reciprocal relationship has become so important to me? Maybe belonging, for me, has something to do with having a place for my inner world in someone else’s consciousness.
My People Who Already Know How to Do This
This is where my circle of friends becomes critical. Because I know that I already have this in my life.
My friendships are reciprocal. We share our internal worlds. I don’t have to teach them to ask about me. I don’t have to convince them that my inner life matters or explain why curiosity is important. It just happens organically.
There is a natural flow of movement toward each other. I tell them what is happening in my life, and they want to know more. They tell me what is happening in theirs, and I want to know more. We don’t always agree, and we never have answers for each other, but there is room for each of us to be seen and known.
My friendships matter because they tell me that I’m not imagining some impossible form of intimacy or demanding something completely unreasonable. I have lived this way for a long time. I’ve built relationships around it. I know what it feels like.
And this is why its absence becomes so noticeable in romantic relationships.
The Romantic Experiment
It’s often in our romantic lives, where there is more “skin in the game” that our old struggles and shadows show up most clearly. How we were treated in our families shapes the choices we make in love, sometimes leading us to repeat old patterns until we find healthier ways of relating.
Thailand has become my laboratory.
I was never taught to ask someone if they ate today. That kind of practical care was never part of my cultural upbringing in the way it is here. Conversely, I became more curious about people’s interior worlds, something I don’t experience as often in this environment. Be the change you want to see in the world… or as I translate it… be the person you want the other to be in the world.
So I ask the questions. I learned how to listen deeply. I try to understand what is being said beneath the surface. But what happens when I don’t experience the same curiosity coming back at me.
Am I being met or am I mostly doing the meeting? This question has become increasingly difficult to ignore.
I’ve also noticed how a relationship between a foreigner man and a Thai woman can bring a big lifestyle shift for the woman. She may be thinking what joining my life would mean for her in terms of responsibilities, her family, homelife, future plans, and the structural changes she will have to make.
And this is where our differences become most interesting. Two people can both want a serious relationship and still have vastly different ideas about what it means to share an intimate life.
Can two people want the same relationship if they are experiencing its meaning so differently? Can we learn each other’s language without either of us abandoning our own? Can two people make room for each other’s interior worlds—and allow those worlds to affect the life they create together?
I don’t think either way of seeing a relationship is necessarily wrong. They may simply reflect different ideas about what it means to share a life. Our personal histories and cultures can help explain why we approach intimacy differently. But understanding those differences isn’t enough. We still have to discover whether two people can meet each other in a way that feels mutual.
I have spent a lot of my life being very good at walking through other people’s doors.
Perhaps I have sometimes mistaken that ability for intimacy.
But intimacy isn’t one person becoming exceptionally skilled at entering the other’s world.
It’s two people opening their doors.
I don’t need to teach someone to open theirs.
I can simply notice whether they do.
There was a place for me.
I was honored.
Perhaps adulthood is learning that I don’t have to fight my way into every room I enter.
