Your newsfeed on Facebook. That email you forgot to write. The text message from your ex. The model’s body on the cover of a magazine that you wish you had. The mountain of work stuff that won’t let you visit your parents this weekend. The shiny object over there! All of the aforementioned have something in common and they all serve the same purpose. They’re all distractions and you allow them to keep your focus away from what’s happening right in front of your eyes.

Everyday we allow excuses, complaints and stories to close the portal to the depth of intimacy in our lives. Intimacy, or lack thereof, can show up in every kind of relationship. Why do we use our decoys to keep it out of our space? Because we’re so terrified of being let down, abandoned, forgotten, overseen, discouraged or denied? Yes, we block intimacy on purpose and we’ve conditioned ourselves to do so for as long as we can remember.  If you think you’re being strategic about selecting the kind of intimacy that you let in, get ready for a wake up call. If your wall is up, nothing can get through. The walls we build aren’t made out of Swiss cheese.

The other night I was out to dinner with four of my closest girlfriends. I noticed some things that night that inspired my blog today:

We all had our cell phones on the table instead of in our purses. In the middle of our catching up, one of my friends got a text message. The screen of her smartphone lit up like a beacon in the distance. It caught all of our eyes in the lowly lit setting of the swanky restaurant. She grabbed her phone and became invested in her own little world for a couple minutes while the rest of us continued to chat. The pulling away of her energy from the intimacy of the present moment began a domino effect. Another one of my friends began scrolling through her text conversations… just because.

Another friend started talking about something that her ex boyfriend wrote on his Facebook wall and she couldn’t wait another moment to show it to us. While she waited for her Facebook app on her iPhone to update, my other friend said, “Shoot! I forgot to email my investor!” So she jumped on her phone to send him a quick email. My iPhone sat innocently on the table next to my empty bread plate, but I pushed the button to see if I had missed a text while everyone became invested in their handheld lifelines.

Yep, I missed one from a handsome young man I had lunch with the day before. I began to write back and then looked up at my dinner dates. We were ALL on our phones. “We’re RIDICULOUS! Look at us right now!” I said. We all laughed about it in the moment, but later that night I wondered why that has become even somewhat normal.

We all used shiny objects to take our attention away from being fully connected with each other. To truly be connected and invested with someone can feel risky and uncomfortable. What’s the longest you’ve looked into someone’s eyes? Staring contests end when someone smiles, laughs, looks away or blinks. If this were an easy thing to do, we wouldn’t call it a contest. Looking into the windows of another being’s soul can stir up a lot of stuff on both sides of that looking glass. Since we’re all reflections of each other, connecting with someone on that level also makes us look inside of us. Not only do we block intimacy from others, we also avoid getting truly intimate with ourselves. What you see in the people before you is exactly how you’re showing up to them.