If you are not truly listening to another and tuning into the reality and depth of their inner experience, you will become abusive. Then the other person is merely an object to you, simply there to meet whatever you express as your needs. They are no longer human – someone you can be discovering and learning to love. That is why knowing self – discovering the universe inside yourself – is so important. Carefully examining your own interiority with grace, you will undoubtedly find things worth exploring and redeeming. The same must be true about all the other flesh sacks walking around. We all contain multitudes.

As long as we are unaware of what is happening inside us, we will continue to act out our selfish desires and others will simply be subject to them. You are acting out your inner drives, desires and impulses; you just know nothing about them or what you really need.

It is that way with sexual desire. You have and act out your sexual impulses. You just don’t know and are not connected with what you really want, so you don’t have intimacy. You just have sex. It is just a simple exchange of goods, a transaction. You are not tuning in to another person’s needs (or even your own) or knowing one another better. You get your “need” met, but you don’t grow in intimacy. It’s like a sugary snack – sweet for a moment, but with no lasting sustenance. You are “intimate,” and yet you remain unsatisfied. You have to seek it again and again and again. Soon you will start to demand it because you think you “need” it, but you are not actually connecting.

When you start to examine your own interiority, you discover more truly what you need and want. And you can even say what you need and want. That is all you need to do – to speak it, but don’t demand it. You must also keep in mind the other person has wants and needs, too. They may not want the same thing you want, and to demand your need be met is a violation of their personhood. That is not what you want to do.

You will also discover, as you grow in intimacy with yourself, your “need” for others to give you intimacy softens. You are no longer using that other person as the provider of intimacy. Intimacy is something you already have. Interacting with another person is just connecting your interior world with theirs. You know there is something inside you worth knowing. It is enough for you just to know yourself, but of course, you want someone else to know you, too.