Come A Little Closer

On the shame at the heart of love and the unbearable intimacy of being seen.

There's a hole in my head in the shape of your love. The hole, left by hungry eyes and a curious mind, has laid me bare before you. What do you see between the skin and the muscle and the fat? How does it feel to have your name carved on my bones? What do you think of this soft, ungainly interior of me? Dig a little deeper and tell me what I'm made of. Come a little closer, but promise me you'll stay.

Love is paradoxical. It pulls you in two directions at once: towards wanting to be seen, and away from it. Before you have love, you still hold to the fantasy that someone will settle their gaze on you and, in their curiosity, stay long enough to dig deeper than what is there at the surface. And yet, when love arrives and someone does stay, their gaze begins to feel heavier than you once imagined. You wanted to be seen. You did not account for what it would feel like to actually be looked at.

In the beginning, everyone performs. You show them the things you are proud of, tell them your best stories. You wear your best outfits and choose your words carefully. You present your flaws the way people do in job interviews, naming them in a way that sounds like modesty but is actually endearing. You offer yourself up as your most palatable, most captivating self. You draw them in the same way they draw you in. They like what they see. You like what they see of themselves. This is where love begins: in mutual, beautiful fiction.

Love is not as gentle as I imagined it when I was still a teenager. From the books and the movies I thought it would be all soft glances and easy understanding. Love arriving like a homecoming; frictionless, fated. The implication was that to be loved was to be chosen, and to be chosen was to be safe. These stories did not portray the particular vertigo of being known by someone; the moment when being seen stops feeling like a gift and starts feeling like exposure.

Because sooner or later, the performance breaks. You run out of your good stories, or you start to repeat yourself. The unpolished version of you emerges in impatience, in fear, in a need you cannot dress up nicely. You say a little too much and watch someone’s face as they register something they hadn’t before. You have been handing each other pieces of a puzzle, and now, without meaning to, the shape of the missing pieces is beginning to show.

Love and intimacy carry their own shadow, and that shadow is shame. We all have parts of ourselves we keep back. The things we feel quietly terrible about, things we have learned to hide so well we almost forget they are there. These are precisely the things that intimacy asks for. Love does not knock politely; and it tends to find what you have hidden behind the door.

I wrote once about how I believe that to be loved is to be seen, about the vulnerability this requires, and the specific bravery of letting someone’s attention land on you without immediately deflecting. I still believe this. But I have been slower to write about the shame that lives on the other side of it, which is: what if they look, and find something they weren’t expecting? What if you look, and find something you weren’t expecting?

There are things I feel shame about in relationships of course. Things I would have loved to keep hidden. The ways I seek reassurance without quite asking for it. The ways I make myself smaller, even after promising myself, and sometimes them, that I wouldn’t. The tendency to assume the worst and keep a tally instead of simply saying what’s wrong. The funny thing is: I almost forget these parts of myself when I am not in love. If I’m the only one seeing the sides, it does not feel as much as exposure, and I can tuck them away neatly, pretending they are not there in the first place.

If love asks for this kind of exposure, leaving can start to feel like a relief. You can step out of the light before it gets too harsh, and begin again with someone new. You can return to the version of yourself that is easier to offer and easier to admire. You get to keep up the lie, even to yourself, that you are less complicated than you are. Our culture has made this easier than it has ever been: there is always something to reach for when the being seen becomes uncomfortable, always another face on a screen that has not yet seen the missing pieces. The option to leave has never been more available, and neither has the temptation to use it.

But each departure only preserves the illusion. Nothing is resolved, only postponed. The parts of you that feel unlovable remain untouched, having neither healed nor been disproven. Leaving confirms the very thing you already suspected: that those parts must be hidden to be endured. That you are too much, or not enough, or both. The shame stays. You just take it somewhere new.

Love demands endurance, not perfection. It asks whether you are willing to remain even as your carefully assembled image begins to fade at the edges. To sit with the discomfort of being seen, fully, plainly, without immediately trying to edit. And to offer the same patience in return: to accept the person in front of you not only as their best self, but as their most unflattering one. To look at what they are afraid to show and stay curious.

This is what your own love teaches you, if you let it. When you love someone, even the parts they try to hide have a beauty to them. Their small hesitations, their unguarded needs, their private offenses against themselves, their fear of their past — these do not repel you. They make the person in front of you more whole, more real. You look at what they are most afraid you will see and instead feel tenderness. And that tenderness carries a hope you almost do not dare to name: that perhaps you are being seen the same way too.

There's a hole in your head in the shape of my love. The hole, left by my hungry eyes and curious mind, has laid you bare before me. What a beautiful thing, to see the truth of you between the skin and the muscle and the fat. The carvings on your bones match mine. How tender, that soft, ungainly interior of you. Let me dig a little deeper, show me all there is to see. Let me come a little closer. I promise I'll stay.