Decolonizing Intimacy

Let me tell you something I never learned in school: intimacy is not one-size-fits-all.

Growing up, I was handed a script. Maybe you were too. It came with invisible footnotes and cultural assumptions:

Love looks like this.

Men act like that.

Intimacy happens in private, between two people, probably after marriage, probably behind closed doors, probably with the lights off.

It was tidy. Predictable. Heteronormative. And honestly? A little beige.

I spent years trying to follow that script, wondering why it never quite fit. Why I felt like something essential—something tender, raw, and sacred—was missing. Why connection sometimes felt more like performance than presence.

Then I started unpacking it. Colonization doesn’t just happen to land or language. It happens to the body. To desire. To the way we touch and don’t touch each other. It shapes who we’re told we’re allowed to love, how we’re allowed to express it, and even whose intimacy is considered valid.

Decolonizing intimacy, for me, has meant asking messy, uncomfortable questions. Who taught me what love should look like? Whose values am I carrying in my skin? And what happens if I throw out the script?

What happens is freedom.

I learned that intimacy can look like sitting in silence with a friend, both of us crying. It can look like two men holding hands without needing to explain. It can look like a cuddle session where nobody’s trying to get anywhere but here. It can look like sacred touch outside of romance. Like being witnessed without judgment. Like saying, “Can you just hold me?” and hearing, “Yes.”

This is the kind of intimacy I practice now. The kind I offer in my work. The kind I live into, imperfectly but earnestly, every day.

If we want more honest, nourishing connection, we have to make space for more than one story. We have to let go of the idea that intimacy has to be private, sexual, or goal-oriented. That it only belongs to couples. That it’s weakness to need touch, or that vulnerability is something to be ashamed of.

We have to remember that our bodies already know how to connect. They’ve just been conditioned to forget.

So here’s a question I’ll leave you with:
What parts of your intimacy have you inherited, not chosen?

And what might it feel like to reclaim them on your own terms?

If this resonates, I invite you to explore my work at www.TrevorJamesLA.com, or book a free clarity call right here. I offer touch-based and somatic intimacy sessions for people ready to come home to themselves, free of shame, full of sensation, and guided by truth.

Because real intimacy doesn’t have to fit the old mold.
It just has to feel like you.