bakerstreet | The Nonsexual Intimacy Meme

The Nonsexual Intimacy Meme

The Nonsexual Intimacy Meme

Intimacy is NOT necessarily about full sexual contact. Intimacy is all about two people forming a connection and bond between them. That involves becoming best friends, trusting each other, knowing each other, understanding each other. Intimacy is grown and developed, it can't be rushed.

Nonsexual forms of intimacy can add a great deal of depth and variety to fiction. On one end of the spectrum, they provide extra steps to support the journey from meeting a potential mate through romance, sex, and marriage. In the middle, they convey the import of family and professional connections, distinguishing those from more casual acquaintances. On the other end, they form much of the glue in primary relationships for people who don't base their ties on sexuality. Sex and romance are valuable, but they're not everything.

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PROMPTS

Hair care. Brushing, braiding, washing, cutting -- all of these involve a lot of careful touching in ways that many people enjoy. Hair braiding is a bonding experience in some cultures. In fact, grooming is a bonding technique for social primates in general. People without close ties to others often treat themselves to regular salon visits as a socially acceptable way to meet the need for touch and interaction.
Shaving. This involves an unusually high level of trust, especially if the person is using a straight-edge razor or something else with an exposed blade rather than just a buzzer. Although it can apply to women, shaving is one of the few forms of physical intimacy that is most closely associated with men due to their facial hair. Initiaton into shaving is a major milestone for becoming a man, not just for boys during puberty but also for transsexuals during transition.
Bathing. This varies by culture; in America most people bathe alone but some other cultures practice communal bathing. A bath is usually more intimate than a shower, although a public bath can be non-intimate and small shower stall can be intimate. It's also different when two people wash each other (an exchange of intimacy and affection) than when one person washes someone else (more of a caretaking or protective gesture).
Feeding. A classic romantic motif involves lovers feeding each other, but it works as a way of providing and caring for someone in any context. Like bathing, it can also clue whether both parties are participating equally or one is taking care of the other (temporarily or regularly). This one has an existential flavor since survival depends on food supply.
Seeing someone without their adaptive equipment on. This includes glasses, dentalware, prosthetic limbs, a wheelchair, etc. Adaptive equipment is part of one's presentation to the everyday world, and taking it off can be as intimate as removing clothing, for many people in many contexts.
Holding Hands: There can be many reasons for this gesture. Physical closeness, offering comfort, or staying together in a crowd, all may have you reaching for someone.
Undressing someone. This can be kind of a one-way experience if the recipient isn't awake, and is often awkward for both people if they are awake. Sometimes it happens because hands are out of commission, but a more common example is someone passing out drunk. Overheating is another good reason. Different circumstances can imply different levels of intimacy.
Sharing secrets. This especially applies to talking about personal issues that aren't widely known. An exchange of secrets is a common ritual between "best friends" among girls and women, but appears elsewhere as well. Some things are only discussed among people with a common reference; veterans may be more comfortable discussing war memories with each other than civilians.
Ordering for someone in a restaurant. Acquiring food, without asking the other person what to get, shows a knowledge of their needs and desires. Providing food is also a gesture of support and sustenance.
Providing moral support at a major event. Helping someone get through a funeral, a trial, or other intense but not crisis situation is usually performed by a very dear friend. This is a situation where lovers or family members may be too close to the matter to be much use.
Crying on someone. When you cry, you tend to let your guard down. Most of the people close to you will see you cry at some point, so that can be a milestone in a relationship. Actually crying on someone, letting them hold you, is even more intimate.
Serving in a primary role for someone during a wedding. This includes the best man or maid of honor at a wedding, or stand-in for absent parents, etc. as well as the traditional family roles. One aspect of intimacy is sharing each other's lives, including ceremonies and transitions.
Comforting someone after a bad breakup. Moments of great vulnerability can bring people closer. While this role sometimes falls to family, breakup repair more often goes to a woman's female friends or a man's male friends.
Listening to someone's heartbeat or breathing. Close body contact, enough to carry soft personal sounds, tends to be comforting as well as connecting, as it touches on positive childhood memories for most people. It is shared between parent and child, sometimes between siblings, and later between lovers. Tight nonsexual partners may also do this.
Putting someone to bed. Interestingly, this activity can happen among people who are just getting to know each other -- most often if someone passes out drunk, but exhaustion can have a similar effect. It's a gesture of caring to put someone to bed rather than leave them where they drop. A milder version involves draping a blanket or coat over a person asleep on a couch or the like.
Sleeping in the same bed. This is an act of shared vulnerability and intimacy. Lovers customarily do this; so do some siblings or friends, especially as children. People may also be driven to share a bed, sleeping bag, etc. for warmth or lack of other accommodations in challenging circumstances.
Watching someone sleep. There is more vulnerability on the part of the sleeper, and more intimacy from the watcher, when only one person is asleep. Parents often watch their children sleep. Lovers sometimes do this with each other, which can be cute or creepy. It's also a guard position, useful for showing that one character seeks to protect another.
Waking someone up from a nightmare. A subtler form of rescue than more physical actions, this is still a gesture of protection and caring. It often leads to comfort afterwards. A typical courtesy between parent and child, or lovers, this can also be an early threshold for characters thrust together unexpectedly if one of them has sturdy daytime walls and a lot of issues. It is common, but often unspoken, among war buddies or veterans, many of whom have nightmares.
Sharing clothes, jewelry, other personal items. This is common between siblings or close female friends. Sometimes roommates do it too. Wearing someone else's shirt or bathrobe is typical in romantic relationships, so can suggest a similar level of intimacy even in the absence of sex.
Cleaning someone else's living space. This shows care and knowledge on the part of the cleaner, and trust on the part of the recipient. You have to know what NOT to throw away or move. It's typical of family members and roommates. Coworkers may clean each other's desk, office space, etc.
Living together. This is a big step, even if it's just for a little while. Housemates are in each other's pockets; it's hard to keep secrets. Family members and lovers often live together, but housemates who are family-of-choice form a category of their own. If you don't want a romantic partner, a permanent housemate is a good choice for someone to share your life with.
Childbirth. Attending the blessed event entails providing a lot of moral support for hours under high stress. It can create a bond with the baby as well as with the mother. When planned, this opportunity is only offered to the closest family members or friends, barring professionals. But it can happen by surprise in very awkward circumstances, a popular motif in fiction.
Saving someone's life. Quick action in a life-threatening situation demonstrates how much one person values another. This can create a strong sense of connection, and sometimes obligation. It often, though not always, entails personal risk for the rescuer. This is fairly typical for military buddies or police partners, etc.
Risking your life for someone. Placing someone else ahead of your own life shows their importance to you unequivocally. This often, though not always, involves trying to save or protect another person. While it can create a sense of gratitude, it frequently causes anger as well -- someone who loves you will generally object to you endangering yourself, even to protect them. Military and police buddies protect each other regularly.
Making emergency decisions for someone. This reveals both how well you know the person, and how much you care about them -- whether you know what they would want, and act on it even if it differs from your personal preference. Unlike some of the other options, in this one the initial action is often outweighed by the aftermath. Both characters have to deal with the results of the decisions, good or bad.
Deathwatch. Dying can be as intimate as giving birth. Staying with someone while they pass is an act of love; so is providing moral support to someone sitting deathwatch for a family member or other person. Many soldiers and police have done this for someone.

(taken from here)

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Leonard hoists Jim's arm more firmly around his shoulders as he pushes his other hand onto the fingerprint ID pad outside of their room. He isn't much steadier than the younger man, but at least he's still able to stand upright, which is more than Jim has going for him at the moment. It is a miracle they made it back alive and in one piece, and now Leonard just has to fling Jim onto the bed and then he can pass out in his own.

"C'mon, jackass," he slurs, finally getting the door open and dragging Jim inside. "Get you on your side so you don't choke on your own vomit and die like a goddamned idiot."

"That's not dying like an idiot," Jim argues, stumbling over his own feet and nearly toppling them both, "that would only enhance my reputation. Like those guys three hundred years ago. Whassernames. All the rock stars. They live on forever."

But apparently not so vividly that Jim can remember their names. Or perhaps he's just really fucking drunk.

"Never mind, you wouldn't let me die. You'd ruin my shot at immortality."

"Just 'cause I don't want your dead ass lying around here stinking up the place," McCoy complains, locating the bed and dropping Jim onto it with all the grace one would expect in such a situation. "I'm a doctor, not a mortician. I don't know what the fuck to do with dead bodies."

Fact: this is not true.

Once he's shoved Jim's feet onto the bed, McCoy sits next to said feet and grabs for his shoes, starting to untie the laces.

"You'd roll me into the nearest refuse compactor and you know it," Jim argues, though the way his words slur and he lies rather boneless on the mattress, it's not much of a fight. "Or down one of these hills right into the bay," and he waves his arms and makes this... sound that's apparently meant to simulate the noise a body would make falling into the water.

"Jim Kirk," McCoy snaps, finally managing to get one boot undone and tugging it off, "that is the most irresponsible suggestion you have ever made in your goddamned life, and let me tell you why." As his fingers, made thick and clumsy by alcohol, start to attack the second boot, he goes over all the reasons why it is extremely environmentally and hygienically unsound to drop a human body in water that animals live in, and that humans could one day drink.

"So if you think I would put you in the bay," he finishes, "I am offended on a process - profy - professon - doctory level."

"Oh my God, fine," Jim groans, waving an arm. "Fine, fine, I'm sorry I insulted your... your, uh... being a doctor. Geez."

He squirms around, managing to slide his arms free of his jacket. Somehow. Victory! "And that I suggested you would let me die. You don't have to. I'm starting to suspect I'll feel like death in the morning anyway. The hangover I'm gonna have..."

"And I," McCoy tells him, "have a very good hangover cure hypospray that you," he tugs the boot off and drops it on the floor, "are not going to get because you are a jerk." He reaches around and grabs Jim's jacket, staggering to his feet and draping it over the back of his chair.

"Yeah, well." He's trying to be belligerent and failing miserably because he can't even properly prop himself up on his elbows. "I weathered so many hangovers before I met you. I'll live."

"Just you wait," McCoy says with relish, peeling off Jim's socks one at a time, and managing to clumsily roll them together into something resembling a ball. "I'm gonna be fresh as a goddamned daisy and you're going to wish I had thrown you into the bay. Then we'll see who's the jerk." A beat. "It's still gonna be you."

"If I had a dollar," Jim replies, waving an arm, "for every time you wanted me to wait and see that I was still a jerk. I could. I could."

Oh, God, thinking is so hard right now.

"...pay somebody else to wait. Or get rid of my body." Oh, Jesus, are we back to that now?

"You'd have to pay someone a shit-ton of money to get rid of your body, and you wouldn't have that much from when I've told you to wait and see that you were still a jerk." Leonard's got Jim as undressed as he can without shoving him around too much, so he throws the sock-ball across the room and, unceremoniously, drops on the bed next to him. Getting to his own is too much fucking effort. "I've only done it ... twenty times."

A month.

Which, okay, adds up.

"That's still a lot."

Jim turns his head slightly, blinking, bleary-eyed. "Hey, if I'm such a jerk, how come you're going to bed with me?"

"I'm not going to bed with you, I'm going to bed ... next to you," McCoy points out, determined to get this right, because he's pretty sure he'll never live it down if word gets out that he went to bed with Jim Kirk. "There's a difference."

"You're still in bed with me," Jim replies, with a hilariously bad attempt at an eyebrow waggle. It looks like he's got something in his eye and he's grimacing about it. "Same difference."

"You got something in your eye?" McCoy asks, rolling onto his side and poking underneath Jim's eye with his thumb. "Looks like you do. Need some help?"

"...Bones, get your thumb out of my eye." He bats his friend's hand away gently. "Unless you're flirting, are you flirting?"

"Why would I be flirting?" He frowns, lowering his hand. "I'm not flirting. Although I did undress you."

"Why wouldn't you be flirting?" asks the man whose entire life thesis is apparently this very question. "Also I've totally used that line on people before. It's surprisingly effective."

"You've told people you undressed them?" Leonard asks, still trying to grasp on this situation and not, frankly, doing so well at it. "Did you actually undress them or did you just tell them you had?"

"Wait, what?" Jim frowns, rolling onto his side heavily. "Why would I tell someone I'm undressing them? They can tell. And if they can't tell I'm undressing them I'm not undressing them because they're in no condition to be undressed."

But after a moment, Starfleet's finest tactical mind reaches through the alcoholic fog. "...The eye thing. You have something in your eye, let me help, and then I lean in close. That's what I meant."

"Oh." McCoy blinks at Jim, one of the sharpest medical minds in Starfleet struggling to process this. "I wasn't hitting on you," he repeats, in case Jim didn't hear him the first time. "You were doing this thing with your eyes - " He bats his own lashes, managing to look like he has something large in his eye. "And I was saying you had something in it."

"...I'm sure it doesn't look like that when I do it."

Jim flops back over, sighing heavily. "You think if I sleep enough, I'll sleep through the rest of being drunk, and all of being hung over, and wake up all right?"

"That depends on how long you're planning on sleeping," McCoy lectures, one hand lifting, finger pointing at the ceiling. "A hangover for a man of your weight mass and age should last about twenty four hours, unless a medical professional treats it earlier, which he won't, because you're a jackass. So probably not."

"You think I can't sleep for twenty-four hours straight?" Jim rolls over, gracelessly punching his pillow, fluffing it under his head. "You just watch me."

...Starfleet's finest, aiming for being the best sleeper this weekend. The academy would be proud.

"Fine, I dare you," McCoy mutters, watching Jim as he settles in, and stretching out alongside him. "If you wake up before ... " He squints blearily at the time. "...two thirty tomorrow morning, you owe me dinner."

15+16+14????

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