Recently I've been thinking and teaching, and talking a lot with clients and students about being close—about what it means to feel truly connected to someone—it's like unpacking an invisible suitcase we’ve carried since childhood. Closeness, at first glance, seems so natural, so easy. Yet the closer we look, the more we see the quiet complexities, the unspoken rules and norms that shape how we understand connection.
Our families of origin are where these ideas of closeness are first formed. There, closeness might have meant following a set of rules that no one ever named aloud. Don’t talk about this. Don’t do that. Always be fine, or never be fine. There was an ease, a sense of cohesion, as long as everyone played along. Maybe your family’s closeness was built on sameness, an unspoken agreement that connection required erasing differences. In such families, closeness could even be weaponized—a tool to enforce conformity and eradicate anything that threatened the fragile harmony.
And so we grow up, carrying these inherited scripts about what closeness should look like. We learn to trade in the currency our family valued, believing it is the universal exchange rate for connection. Perhaps in your family, secrets were the currency. If you were entrusted with the hidden things, you were part of the inner circle. Or maybe it was silence, where holding your tongue signaled belonging. Some families use service, where care and sacrifice earn affection. Others trade in debate or even belligerence, where arguing well was the way to show love. Some families value a stiff upper lip, where stoicism is the cost of entry into closeness.
The challenge comes when we try to use these old tokens in new relationships. We carry these currencies into marriages, friendships, workplaces, and wonder why they don’t always work. Why does my silence feel like distance to my spouse? Why does my service go unnoticed by my friends? Why do my colleagues seem alien when I’ve been trying so hard to connect?
It’s not that we’re failing. It’s that the rules of closeness aren’t universal. Each person brings their own inherited currency, their own unspoken rules, shaped by their own family of origin. And when these currencies clash, closeness can feel elusive, like a language we’re trying to learn without a dictionary.
The beautiful, difficult truth is that closeness in any relationship requires creating something new. It asks us to lay down the old tokens that no longer serve us and to build a shared understanding together. What are the rules we will create for this relationship, here and now? What will closeness look like for us?
This is an act of curiosity and courage. It requires asking, experimenting, and listening. Maybe consistency becomes a new currency—the simple reliability of showing up, over and over again. Maybe it’s honesty, sharing the things we’ve been taught to hide. Maybe it’s affection, offering warmth and care without condition. Maybe it’s valuing health—emotional, physical, spiritual—as the foundation of connection.
To rewrite the rules, we have to first recognize the ones we’ve been following. What were the unspoken rules of closeness in your home? What tokens were you taught to trade? How do you keep trying to buy closeness with those same tools, only to come up short?
This isn’t about rejecting where we come from. It’s about noticing when the old ways limit us, when they no longer bring the connection we crave. It’s about grieving the patterns that once served us but now need to be set down. And it’s about stepping into the unknown, daring to build something new, something truer.
Closeness doesn’t have to mean sameness. It can be a mosaic of difference, pieced together with care and curiosity. It can be an experiment, a brave and tender act of discovery. What if we let go of the need to be the same and instead asked, “What do we want closeness to mean, here, with us?” What if the rules we make together are the ones that set us free?
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