The Dance of Intimacy

What it is about

The Dance of Intimacy is Harriet Lerner’s book on the pull between closeness and a separate self. Writing especially to women trained to manage everyone else’s feelings, she describes how anxiety produces pursuit, overfunctioning, or a fusion that looks like care and leaves no one standing on their own feet. Changing the dance means changing one’s own steps—saying what one will do, and will no longer do—while staying in contact, and then living with the other person’s move to pull one back. It is a family-systems argument about intimacy, not a communication script and not the later book on apology.

Questions it can answer

• How can managing other people’s feelings stand in the way of closeness?
• What does it look like to change one’s own step without cutting off or pursuing harder?
• Why does a partner often press for the old pattern once someone stops overfunctioning?

What you will not find

• A method for making the other person want the same degree of closeness
• Permission to manage a partner’s feelings more skilfully
• A numbered household manual of the kind in Marriage Rules