intimacy

Definition

Feeling or atmosphere of closeness and openness towards someone else, often but not necessarily involving sexuality.

Etymology

From intimate + -cy.

Example Sentences

• "To adulterous lust the most sacred duties are sacrificed, because, before marriage, men, by a promiscuous intimacy with women, learned to consider love as a selfish gratification—learned to separate it not only from esteem, but from the affection merely built on habit, which mixes a little humanity with it."
• "1879, Robert Louis Stevenson, “Truth of Intercourse” in Essays, English and American, The Harvard Classics, Volume 28, edited by Charles W. Eliot, New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1910, p. 287, The habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with his wife and friends; while another man who never told a formal falsehood in his life may yet be himself one lie—heart and face, from top to bottom. This is the kind of lie which poisons intimacy."
• "[…] there was keen intimacy between the dog and the man."

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