Saturday Symposium: Friendships and Emotional Intimacy

Good morning, and happy weekend! We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this week. We’ve certainly enjoyed our interactions with readers. This week, we’re particularly backlogged with email from the past 3 weeks, so please bear with us as we try to respond to everyone. If you’ve contacted us, we will get back to you…it may just take some time.

Recently, Sarah was asked to write a short guest post on body positivity for Nate Craddock’s blog, In the Optative. Nate published that on Monday. You can check it out here: “It’s Not Just ‘I’m Beautiful.'”

And with that, we’re ready for a new “Saturday Symposium” question…

How this works: It’s very simple. We ask a multi-part question related to a topic we’ve blogged about during the past week or are considering blogging about in the near future, and you, our readers, share your responses in the comments section. Feel free to be open, reflective, and vulnerable…and to challenge us. But as always, be mindful of the comment policy that ends each of our posts. Usually, we respond fairly quickly to each comment, but in order to give you time to think, come back, add more later if you want, and discuss with other readers, we will wait until after Monday to respond to comments on Saturday Symposium questions.

This week’s Saturday Symposium question: This week, we published a post on how we’ve seen positive spiritual and personal growth as a result of being in relationship with one another. Lindsey also reflected on ways to cultivate a celibate vocation actively, and that post included discussion of close, emotionally intimate relationships with people other than Sarah. This week, we ask: have you ever had a close, emotionally intimate (but not necessarily romantic) relationship with another person where “friend” didn’t quite seem the most accurate label? How did this relationship teach you about meaningful relationships? What made it so meaningful?

We look forward to reading your responses. If you’re concerned about having your comment publicly associated with your name, please consider using the Contact Us page to submit your comment. We can post it under a pseudonym (i.e. John says, “your comment”) or summarize your comment in our own words (i.e. One person observed…). Participating in this kind of public dialogue can be risky, and we want to do what we can to protect you even if that means we preserve your anonymity. Have a wonderful weekend!

Blessings,

Sarah and Lindsey

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.