Fear of Intimacy

Every clause does work. The capacity is inhibited rather than absent. Anxiety is the cause. And the other person is highly valued, which is what makes the exchange dangerous. Somebody who does not matter cannot inflict much.

The existential formulation that follows is the one worth carrying. The account given is existential. Loving somebody, and being loved back, raises the value of a life and sharpens the fact that it ends. On that reading what is being avoided is not the person but the increase in what there is to lose.

How intimacy breaks into features and attachment types

Three defining features are named. Content, which is whether a person can say anything about themselves at all. Emotional valence, meaning the feelings about the information exchanged. And vulnerability, meaning the person's regard for the one they are intimate with.

Bartholomew and Horowitz set out four adult attachment types, and the value of the scheme is that it separates two things usually run together, self-worth and view of others:

• secure: a sense of worthiness, and comfort with both intimacy and autonomy
• preoccupied: no such sense of self-worth, a positive view of others, and a search for their love and acceptance
• fearful: no belief in being lovable, and distance kept from people on the expectation of being turned away
• dismissing: no doubt at all about its own worth, and distance kept from other people, having concluded they cannot be relied on

Two of those four avoid closeness, and for opposite reasons. One does not believe they deserve it and the other does not believe anyone can be relied on.

What the Fear of Intimacy Scale measures

The Fear of Intimacy Scale is a thirty-five item self-evaluation, and its useful property is that it works on people who are not currently in a relationship.

Doi and Thelen found it correlated positively with confidence in the dependability of others and with fear of abandonment, and negatively with comfort and closeness. A high score means a high level of fear.

What fear of intimacy predicts in women

Reis and Grenyer found substantially higher levels among women with depression.

Two findings concern the relationship rather than the person. Fear of intimacy in women may be strongly associated with actual intimacy rather than desired intimacy, and a woman's level of it is a good indicator of how long the couple's relationship will last. A woman with the fear tends to read her own relationship as less close than it is, and this holds even when her partner has no such difficulty.

One result points straight at upbringing. Girls raised to withhold trust from strangers turned out, consistently, to fear closeness more and to be lonelier than those who were not. An instruction given for safety produces a measurable cost decades later.

What rape survivors score on the intimacy scale

Mark H. Thelen, Michelle D. Sherman and Tiffany S. Borst studied rape survivors in 1998 using the scale alongside other measures, comparing them with non-abused controls.

Survivors reported higher fear of intimacy than controls, which the authors read as the experience of rape being related to discomfort in close relationships. When trait anxiety was controlled for, no significant differences remained on fear of intimacy, confidence in others' dependability or comfort with closeness, and the attachment dimensions and the scale correlated significantly with trait anxiety in the predicted direction. Those who had disclosed the rape did not differ significantly from those who had not, although the differences ran in the predicted direction.

Separately, abused women showed significantly higher levels of externalised self-sacrifice, silence and disconnection in intimate relationships than non-abused women, and the material notes that the difficulty of helping is magnified by the betrayal of trust having occurred within interpersonal relationships.

What survivors of childhood sexual abuse describe is narrower and harder. Being seen as they actually are is the thing they cannot allow, and trusting an authority figure enough to be open with one carries an expectation of being harmed again for it. Closeness is frightening because it recalls that the position is a dangerous one.

How fear of intimacy shows up in offenders

Studies indicate that people with insufficient intimacy, or who are lonely, are more vulnerable to exhibiting sexually offending behaviour, and one recent study found child molesters showing significantly higher levels of fear of intimacy than rapists, than non-sexually offending inmates, and than a control group of law-abiding citizens.

A separate result concerns what happens during a row. Men high in attachment anxiety are aiming at something else during conflict, which is not to be left, and that aim appears to hold back the worst violence while doing nothing about the milder kind or about psychological abuse.

What intimacy anxiety disorder requires for a diagnosis

Intimacy anxiety disorder is described as a specific anxiety disorder: intense anxiety or fear in one or more intimate or partner-social interactions, causing considerable distress and impairing function in at least part of daily life.

The two categories are separated. Sexual interactions include kissing, sexual touching and intercourse, and the cognitions behind the anxiety are fears of being incompetent, making mistakes, being judged on performance, causing harm or being harmed. Partner-social interactions include talking to a romantic interest, asking for or going on a dinner date, hugging, holding hands and kissing, and the cognitions are about mistakes, incompetence, failure and judgement.

Meeting the criteria requires high anxiety in one category or the other, which allows the two to come apart.