Being an Intimate subtype Five is bizarre

Being acutely lonely.................being acutely "most-people" avoidant/dismissive

Fantasizing about the 1 connection you want...in all its impossibilities........probably making the possibility of connection to someone who could actually be the right one...nearly impossible...or it never goes anywhere or gets off the ground because its comparison to what has become the perfect fantasy is stunningly painful and flawed, in contrast.

I figured out a major Something that gets in the way of possible "good" intimacy*, recently [*meaning, 'good enough/perfectly adequate' - isn't that a sickening phrase?  Does anyone else hear the loud resounding gong of "Settling!!" in their mind when they read this?].

It falls into that "acutely painful" {to an Intimate Five) category:

It's when you feel the beginnings of that feeling like you could kind of fall in love, with this person; all the chimes are ringing, within you...all the right feelings and bells and whistles are going off, one by one, that lead you to falling deeper and deeper "in love"...and then, like the Speedbump from Hell, you hit that thing.  That something that just makes you lurch in your dreamy feelings, halt, worry, take stock, re-evaluate...etc.

I know this is a common experience in the human romantic world...I guess it's a matter of what the thing is... like, how severe or "minor," and according to whom.


The sad and bad part is that for me, it takes very little.  Always has.  Very little for me to stop, cast doubt, and give up.

I've often read that Fives are very sensitive; and if it's true that I am one, then I can certainly vouch that it's true.  It takes very little turbulence of whatever the particular kind of Five is sensitive to, for a Five to disappear out of that person's life, and scram.

How sorry and how true this is of me.

Even if I feel that I love someone with my whole heart, sometimes, if I sense some Speedbump-from-Hell [it's relative, remember] sort of incongruity betweeen us which my mind or heart or maybe (it's my) self-confidence can't get over, I find myself over the course of time slowly becoming emotionally disengaged from that person.  It's like...automatic.  I would, if I could, get over it--and I would, if I could, stay emotionally invested; sometimes I dearly wish to.
But I can't stop what my heart does.

I am not cold; it hurts me, really deep inside where they don't know about it and can't see.  But my heart does something I can't control and just sort of numbs out- freezes out -the pain.  The very hurting makes my heart divest myself of them so that it feels less and less.  I know that doesn't make sense.
[It's "ice" pain, not "fire" pain:  Pain that is like fire keeps burning and burning, and feels hotter and more painful as it goes on; and it consumes (the person) as it goes.  But pain that has the qualities more of ice is most acutely painful and shocking at the beginning; and as it goes along it numbs and tingles/fades away.  It probably leaves just as great an amount of devastation (to the person), but that devastation is not felt or perhaps fully perceived by that person- not for a long, long time afterward.]


I imagine...
I had an imagination, of something like this, and wondering how it would go:

What if...what would happen if, right when that time, that moment [the big scary Speed Bump] happens, the person I love, who loves me in return, were to stop me, and speak to & allay my fears about that 1 thing?  To talk me down from that irrational precipice, of self-rejection (because I am turning down/denying myself, of that love...not feeling I can be a match to it, or "fit," in that person's loves, likes...their world)...what if they stayed me with their eyes and with their hand [or arms or lips or anything else <:} ♥], and told me that I was an unshakeable part of their heart, their love, their life...and that they could never divest themselves of my presence and of that love [me], in their life?

I have had.
One.
My best friend.

Unfortunately my best friend is not marriageable [nor boyfriend-able]... <:)  ...But she still matters most to me, I think, above all other living human beings because she was that person, for me.  (More people can be that person...it's a multiple-residence title.  They'd be another one of 'that person.')

Anyway, when it comes down to it, I don't know if this thing in me is just crushingly low self-confidence or insecurity about being loved and "up to it" [= being 'enough' for another person?], or if it is a part of Five-ness, or if those two things are one and the same.

Please, someone who cares about Enneagram Fives (Sexual or Intimate or Romantic subtype, whichever you fancy in name) out there, you would really be helping so many Fives by delving thoroughly into this subtype and their struggles with intimacy.  Very few Enneagram authors either deal with this type of Five in any way that does us justice, or they dissect Five like a bug, analyzing our intimacy & romantic patterns from a dry, scientific, detached observer's point of view, acting like we are not creatures of feeling...but merely of behaviour and habit.

*At some point remind me [Self?] to post up some of the better Sexual/Romantic/Intimate Five links to sources who actually have worthwhile things to say about it.....




1/31/2010 update:

So, finally- I apologize! -I've been meaning to do this for a long while, now:

Here is the link to the publication which contains the very best Intimate Five (or Sexual Five) description I have and probably will ever have read: The Inner World of a Romantic Five, by Val Brown. It is an article, a ways down in the document (the direct link is a PDF document)- so you'll have to skim through to find it. But it's a gold mine.