Research has shown that thanks to this inherent need to swap real-life meaningful feels for screen-lit cheap thrills, we’re becoming lonelier than ever. Alas, if you do accidentally do catch a feel, offseting those preoccupations with another body can be done with the flick of an opposable thumb. It’s as if with increased connectivity, we’re making sure we don’t connect, and certainly making sure we don’t fall in love. We hedge our bets with backup lovers, ghost the disposables, keep bodies on the bench and play card games with hearts. So why, then, as millennials, have we lost our appetite? We crave cheap, fast food the second a home-cooked meal is placed in front of us. Secrets that will replay with the pang of memory, again and again, particularly when loneliness comes knocking.Ĭharles Darwin, after studying various forms of affection around the world, from kissing to the rubbing of noses, concluded that the “desire to receive pleasure from close contact with a beloved person” is not only universal, but instinctive, concluding that our immense hunger for supreme, intense connections is a primal one. All the secrets that your temporal lobe can hold. It has fluffy blankets and the crackling of a fire. Intimacy also can’t grow alone, it has fertilizers in the form of sunsets, street lamps, twilight reflections, slow-motion eyelash flutters, heavy breaths, touch and goosebumps. You can’t have the former without the latter and you can’t have the latter without the phosphorous-loaded tip of desire.

If love is a blanket of darkness that, despite dilated pupils, constricts our sight into a single-track tunnel, floods our brains with stress hormones and turns us into a dizzy mess of preoccupation and restlessness then intimacy is the light switch. This feeling will glue itself to you, and if you’re lucky (or not), it will haunt your heart at sunrise and your central nervous system in the dead of the night, pleading for a reprise. Quantum entanglement, where two particles connect across space object permanence, the knowledge that the unseen continues to exist define rapturous connection how you will, but intimacy is a heady, heady elixir.

The atmosphere falls around you as if the earth has opened up and devoured itself.

Gravity and time become irrelevant as the theory of relativity steps in and the clock slows down.

You close your eyes and electricity buzzes throughout your veins, pulsating in your chest and neck, making the skin hum, toes curl and the fingertips quiver. “The touch of a foot in the night is sincere.” – Eileen Myles

Space grateful dead heady