There is a moment that arrives, in the early life of a new relationship, when something has gone unexpectedly well — the dinner has stretched long and unhurried, the conversation has wandered into territory you had not visited with anyone for years, and the person across the table has, by every available measure, been quietly extraordinary; they have been attentive without performance, they have laughed at the right things, they have looked at you, properly, in a way that very few people in your life have ever managed. And then, somewhere on the walk home, an old and unmistakable feeling arrives without invitation — not joy, not even anticipation, but something cooler and stranger, a kind of quiet mineral panic at the back of the throat, accompanied by the sudden and unaccountable conviction that this is too much, that you must withdraw, and that another evening like this one would be, in some way you cannot quite articulate, dangerous.

It is worth pausing to ask, with the patience the question deserves, what exactly is the danger one fears? For most people who struggle with intimacy do not, as it turns out, fear intimacy in any pure abstract sense; they fear, rather, what intimacy will reveal — what comes "after" the closeness rather than the closeness itself, what is uncovered once a person has been let in, what will be visible to that person in the morning light when the careful self-presentations of new acquaintance have at last fallen away. And underneath that fear, sleeping in the deeper layers of the body, there is usually the old conviction — older than the relationship, older than the person you have just had dinner with — that once seen, you will be left; and the leaving, after the letting-in, will be worse than the loneliness one had been quietly managing before.

Is this familiar? Have you, perhaps, organised an entire adult life around the careful avoidance of that particular pain, dressing the avoidance up in various sophisticated forms — "I am simply not the relationship type", or "I have too much going on right now", or "I have very particular standards", or any of the other handsome rationales one composes to make the avoidance look like a choice rather than a wound?

We speak of intimacy, in most modern discussion, as if it were a simple matter of vulnerability — as if all one had to do was open up, and trust would naturally follow; but this is not, in my experience, how it actually works. People who struggle with closeness are rarely closed because they are cold; they are closed because something, at some point in their history, made them very thoroughly afraid, and the closing was, at that earlier moment, a perfectly reasonable act of survival. The question, then, is not whether you are guarded — for of course you are — but what, more precisely, you were originally guarding against, and whether the conditions which once justified the guard are, in fact, still present in the room with you now.

You may not know the original injury; many of us do not. There may be only a vague sense of it — a childhood in which feelings were dismissed or mocked, a parent who turned away when you were distressed, a first love who broke things in ways you could not have foreseen, a betrayal by someone who had promised never to leave, or, very commonly, a long, slow accumulation of small evidences that the people you most needed could not be entirely relied upon. The body remembers all of this; the body keeps a meticulous, wordless, private balance sheet, and when the body senses, halfway through a long dinner, that this is the kind of evening from which proper intimacy could grow, the body sounds the old alarm. The alarm does not know what year it is; the alarm thinks it is still the year of the original wound, and it is doing the only job it has ever known.

How might one begin, then, to speak to the alarm — not to silence it, and not to override it, but simply to acknowledge it? It is a tender practice, and it cannot be done all at once; it begins, perhaps, in your own kitchen on a Sunday morning, with no one watching, by saying — aloud, or quietly within yourself — something like, "I hear you, and I know you are trying to keep me safe, and I know what once happened, and I am not asking you to be quiet, only to let me try, with this one person, very slowly, to see whether things might be different now". There is a particular dignity in addressing one's own fear this way; for the fear is not foolish, and was never foolish, and deserves to be greeted as one would greet a veteran of a war one was too young to remember.

Moving slowly, in matters of the heart, looks remarkably unlike what one might expect; it does not look like a great announcement, and it does not look like a manifesto of one's wounds delivered on a third date. It looks, more humbly, like a single small true sentence — "that hurt my feelings a little", perhaps, or "I do not yet know what I think about that, may I come back to it?", or "when you did that earlier, something I cannot quite name happened in my chest, and I would like to understand it". These are not heroic disclosures; they are humbler than that, and harder to make than the heroic kind, precisely because they are so small. The work of intimacy, in adult life, is the slow accumulation of such small honesties — and the willingness to remain in the room while the other person is still absorbing them, which is the part one's own alarm system finds most difficult of all.

Why do we call it a dance? Because, I think, intimacy is not a destination one arrives at and then secures, like a property purchase; it is a continuous, slightly clumsy movement towards and away from each other, and even the healthiest couples do this all their lives — sometimes one is closer, sometimes the other, sometimes there is a small misstep, a moment of withdrawal, and then a return. What you may have mistaken in yourself, all these years, for an inability to love, may be merely an inability to dance at the pace the world expected of you; and there is no rule, anywhere in nature or in love, that says the dance must be quick, or that you must be perfectly in step on the first evening, or even on the first year. There is only the patient willingness to keep moving, however slowly, and to trust that the other person is willing to move with you — and to ask of them, gently and without dramatics, whether they are; for that, in the end, is the only question worth answering. Are they willing? Are you? Everything else is the work, and the work is a lifetime, and the lifetime — for all you have feared otherwise — is genuinely worth having.