The personals page that revealed how many people already had what they wanted

Waiting for a session with the Dalai Lama, Howard Cutler once picked up a local newspaper turned open to its personals section, page after page of people describing exactly who they hoped to find, hoping a few carefully chosen words might finally end their loneliness. Still thinking about those ads, Cutler sat down and asked the Dalai Lama a question he hadn't planned, do you ever get lonely.

The answer was immediate. No.

Cutler was unprepared for this. He'd expected the usual hedge, everyone feels lonely sometimes, and had a follow-up question ready about coping strategies. Instead the Dalai Lama explained that he approaches people looking for their positive qualities, which creates an immediate sense of connection, and that he carries little fear of being judged or thought strange, which leaves him open. He described talking with kitchen staff in Tibet, joking and gossiping without formality, and since becoming a refugee, sharing his deepest worries as easily with the person who sweeps his floor as with anyone else.

Western culture, by contrast, tends to funnel the entire concept of intimacy into one narrow channel, the single romantic partner, the one person destined to know your inner life completely. When that person is absent, or the relationship cools, people often experience it as a total absence of intimacy, rather than as one form of connection among many. But researchers studying the concept find enormous disagreement about what intimacy even is. One zoologist defines it purely as physical contact. Others define it as sharing your innermost self, or simply as a felt sense of connectivity, broad enough that some theorists even include our relationship to trees or to the stars.

That range is the opening. If intimacy can mean so many things across so many cultures and eras, then most people are already surrounded by more of it than the personals-page model gives them credit for. The friend you've known for a decade, the neighbor you nod to each morning, the colleague who actually listens, these are underused sources of exactly the connection people go looking for elsewhere.

Look at the people already in your life, the long-standing friend, the neighbor, the coworker, and ask honestly whether you've been treating any of them as a lesser form of connection simply because they aren't a romantic partner. Pick one of them this week and share something slightly more honest or personal than you normally would, testing whether the relationship can hold more weight than you've been giving it. In a routine interaction, with a cashier, a barista, someone you'd normally treat as background, try a small genuine exchange, a real question, a moment of attention, and notice what shifts. If you're waiting on one special person to arrive before you feel connected, deliberately widen your definition of intimacy to include what's already around you.