It is striking how often people at a bar looking for a pre-dinner drink check to see what their friends are ordering first; instead of just deciding what to order they start looking to each other. Unable to decide we flatter sincerely through imitation. It's a trivial sounding example, but it indicates something interesting about our tendency towards safety in numbers.

Assertiveness of your particular needs and wants is as important to experiencing intimacy as being empathetic towards another person's. In hoping for an unrealistic fusion with the other we can start to lose the texture and grain of ourselves as we submerge to the group identity. Couples frequently kill off intimacy with this kind of convergence. They fall into habits of thought and action so calcified through repetition (a litany of “we do this …”, “we love that …”) that it becomes impossible to recognize the particular contribution of each. In burying their own preferences, which they can now barely remember, they converge towards an ideal of the generic couple with few surprises. Highly reliable but estranged from their strangeness, they create a privatized form of common sense.