The Nonsexual Intimacy Meme

[spectrumseed]

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.

RULES

• Comment with your character. Be sure to include preferences (ie, f/f for shipping, OTA for gen, etc)
• Tag others!

PROMPTS

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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).
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. 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.
21. 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.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. 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.
25. 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.
26. 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)

Comments

[chosetofight]

[She'd lost a brother, and she'd consented to let a scientist use her to help her country. Knowing what she does now about Captain America, she trusts Steve in a way she can't explain. He knows what she is, truly knows, and, unlike some of the others, offers no judgement. Sees her as no less for what she was willing to do to avenge her parents and her nation.]

I can... [Explaining how her powers work is something Wanda never really tries to do.] I can tap into the mind. Introduce a different emotion, sway it to something else.

I prefer calm.

[Which so many people mistake for something else, but she wants to be clear, now.]

Not 'happy.' Happiness is brief, and it is unpredictable. Calm is stable.

[redactions]

[ Roughly, ] You can make it quiet.

[ His fingers flex. It's tempting. He never slept through the night being here and rests only in short bursts, shifts of movement. But it feels wrong to use it. Hasn't his mind been taken out enough? ]

No.

[ She means well, though, and she came looking for him when he was hurt. Kindness, he knows in little packets, small things Steve and Sam (and Natasha, when she thinks he's not paying attention) do. ]

Sorry if I disturbed you.

[chosetofight]

[Wanda doesn't withdraw, but she doesn't press either. After all, she's used her powers against doctors more than ones, not willing, on that particular day, to put up with one more needle in her arm or one more stupid exercise. She understands what 'no' means.]

My brother used to have nightmares. I have them, too.

[And her powers don't work on herself. She can't take away the noise and the images and the smells and the pains. She can't let herself sleep like she could for him.]

[redactions]

[ So she needs quiet too. He nods, and steps aside for her to explore the room. It's barely furnished; the bed is soft and made in neat hospital corners. A few books sit on the first bookshelf he's put up. There's a television, but James tends to use the radio on the bedside table more. The floor is exposed, with a small carpet pushed up near one corner of the wall. Sometimes, he sleeps on the floor. Simpler that way. ]

You can stay here, if you want. [ a faint quirk to the corner of his mouth ] Sam says it helps to talk.

[chosetofight]

[Wanda takes the invitation and steps in. The room isn't that different than hers. She has a small dresser instead of a television, and it's one of the only things she's really personalized. Her jewellery is spread out on it, neatly organized. But that's, in a way, the only signs of life in the entire room.

She hasn't been away from the lab long enough for that to go away.]

To talk. [It's almost sighed.] He's said the same to me.

But the person I talk to is gone.

[Still, she's talking. That counts for something, she thinks.]

[redactions]

[ Sam does that. Invades one's life and starts dusting the corners, dredging out what's old and putting it back together. If he weren't a counsellor, he'd be a good surgeon. Steady hands, for other people's hearts. James almost-smiles contentedly. Of course, he'd be doing the same for Wanda that he's done for James, and for Steve. ]

I'm sorry about your brother, [ he hesitates for a microsecond before turning his back to Wanda and smoothening out a place on the bed for her to sit. Exposing weakness, but she's not a threat. ] I'm not very good at talking, but I listen.

[ In a way, HYDRA never wiped out the part of him that listened. As a boy it was to Steve's breathing, his footsteps on the alleyways of Brooklyn and in their apartment, he was always more haphazard with walking when he was hurt. In the War it transmuted to the sound of machine guns, boots on dry leaves or the crunch of freshly fallen snow, and the Winter Soldier stayed there for seventy long years. Nowadays, it's gone back to Steve - as all things circle to him. ]

[chosetofight]

[Slowly, Wanda approaches and sits on the bed. It's strange, but it's not unwelcome. She's still trying to piece her life back together, trying to patch up the hole left in everything by the loss of Pietro. There will be no filling that place, she knows it, but she needs to be able to think about something else. She needs to want to be an Avenger.

She's here now because there's nowhere else to go.]

We were twins. There was never a day we spent apart.

[It explains everything she thinks she needs to. She didn't just lose her brother. She lost a part of herself, her other half. She isn't a full person, maybe never was. Especially not after she lost her parents.]

I still hear him. Like he's just in the next room, and all I have to do-- [her fingers move idly, wisps of red weaving between them as her eyes take on a steady, low glow] --is reach out to him.

[redactions]

[ Never a day apart. Inseparable on schoolyard and battlefield. Neither whole without the other. Steve watched him fall — one of his clearest memories is of his terror, and his cry as the roar of the engine faded. It's a grief that cripples, stabs, swallows in turns, sometimes all at once, all without mercy. It's nothing James can empathise with: he was the one lost. He observes, doesn't flinch when she uses her powers. They're instruments, like his arm. Like every tool, it's not inherently dangerous, only made. ]

[ Quietly, ] Even in sleep?

[chosetofight]

Strucker tried to make us sleep apart. While he was experimenting.

[She can still remember those nights. Probably because she never slept. The moment she closed her eyes when she was alone...]

Before my powers manifested, I'd spend the whole time screaming. I made sure someone always heard me.

After my powers... Well. Doors don't stop me now.