Memoir: On Intimacy, Recognition, and Healing Between Men

He and I found ourselves face to face. A big man, strong, long black wavy hair drenched in sweat. He wore a soaked green t-shirt and breathed heavily. I could feel the pulse of his breath in my beard, the rhythm of it mixing with mine. His energy reminded me of a warrior—something ancient, powerful, a little intimidating. Old patterns of fear stirred in me—not physically, but emotionally. Echoes of painful past betrayals by men moved through my system. But something in me knew to stay.

It happened on a Sunday morning at Chloe’s Five Rhythms dance in Santa Fe, at the Railyard Performance Center. The music had softened into the final rhythm—Stillness. Most people swayed gently or lay on the floor, spent from the ecstatic highs of earlier waves.

Our eyes locked. It was not aggression or dominance. It was knowing. The kind that only comes when you’ve lived through something that nearly broke you—and chose to heal.

We stepped closer. Our arms brushed, rotated, and eventually locked gently at the inner elbows. Slowly, we leaned in. No choreography. Just an instinctive surrender. A giving and receiving of weight. At times, it was clumsy, at others, strangely elegant. But words like 'clumsy' and 'elegant' didn’t really belong here. This was a space untouched by judgment, where movement and presence were all that mattered.

We found stillness together, like two buoys tied on a moonlit lake.

His dark brown eyes were watery. His lips chapped. His face, sun-marked and weathered. He gazed at me not with fear or judgment, but with care. My nervous system lit up with old masculine conditioning—those unconscious instincts of bracing for conflict. But I stayed. I listened inward. “Thank you, body. I hear you. We’re safe now.”

In the animal kingdom, we’re told that when two creatures lock eyes, it signals a choice—fight, flight, or fuck. But in this moment, it was none of those. It was something rarely spoken of: a third, spiritual possibility—healing.

Although I learned more of his story later, it was in that moment that we knew—we had lived versions of the same fire.

He, the fighter: rebellious and raging, thrown into a reform school at fifteen, hardened by abuse, graduating into a life of fists, bottles, and broken hearts. He turned his pain outward, becoming more violent than what hurt him.

Me, the vanisher: quiet and compliant, naïvely entering a military institute at 16 hoping to find honor, only to learn shame and obedience. I turned my rage inward. I cut myself down, vanished into video games, porn, fantasy, addiction. I disappeared into my own skin of shame.

And yet there we were—decades later—he a therapist, me a men's relationship coach. Two men who had alchemized pain into purpose. Two mirrors.

I don’t remember who moved first. Maybe it was something ancient and instinctual in both of us that surrendered simultaneously.

We hugged—not the quick pat-on-the-back, two-second man-hug you give at a barbecue. This was a full-body, sweaty, unmoving embrace. We pressed in, breathing together, our soft bellies gently rising and falling against one another. His eyes stayed open. So did mine.

There’s a kind of brotherhood that lives in the body—a felt sense, wordless and grounding. It’s rough and hairy, sometimes odorous and sweaty, and distinctly not-feminine. You might find it in the grunting of team sports, the dripping sweat of building something together in the hot sun, the solemn and melodious cadences of military marching, the satisfied exhaustion after a political march for justice, or the unspoken bond of digging shoulder to shoulder in a ditch. For many of us, it’s only remembered dimly, from childhood days on the playground before performance and posturing set in. Back when connection was simple, natural—when it didn’t need men’s groups to occur.

In our embrace, another layer of betrayal broke. Not the betrayal of one another, but the betrayal by men—brothers, fathers, teachers, coaches, cultures that told us to stay tough, stay silent, stay strong.

The grief of boyhood poured through our eyes—not as tears (though there were those)—but as knowing.

No one said, “Me too.” The moment said it for us.

That presence—pure, masculine, vulnerable—was the medicine.

It struck me how rare this is:

To meet a man not in competition or performance, but in truth. To be seen without masks. To say with our presence alone:  “I know where you’ve been, brother. And I’m not afraid of your wounds. I’ve got them too. I've learned how to love them in me. That's how I can truly love you.”

For most of my life, I didn’t think this kind of connection was possible. I didn’t even know it was something to want.

I grew up where manhood meant muscle, money, conquest, distraction, isolation. Sensitivity was shameful. Vulnerability was dangerous. So I became like the men around me: hard, objectifying, performative, a quiet addict to a thousand small self-betrayals. I wore a mask of kindness and competence. Inside, I was profoundly sick.

And he? He fought harder. He raged louder. His addictions took different forms—booze, money, power, status, violence, sex—but they all emerged from the same raw ache of unmet need, the same gnawing hunger for love and safety.

Somehow, in our separate spirals, we chose to heal. He through therapy, men’s work, dancing, and the loving boundaries of women who didn’t collapse to his need. Me through mentorship, community, shadow work, and learning to love the scared little boys inside me without shame.

We didn’t become perfect. We became whole.

That’s what made this moment matter. It felt like church without pews. Ceremony without incense. A homecoming.

Later, sitting on the edge of the dance floor, we finally spoke.

“I saw you,” he said. “I saw me in you.”

“Same,” I said. “It’s a powerful thing. To look into your eyes and see myself looking back. To feel supported by you without words.”

He smiled. “We didn’t get what we needed as boys. But we can give it to ourselves now. And to each other.”

That was it.

There was no fixing, no saving, no solving.

Only the sacred act of witnessing—of holding space for truth.

We stood as mirrors, each reflecting the other’s hard-earned dignity.

And in that wordless, grounded presence, we reclaimed something that had always belonged to us.

Maybe that’s all healing really is—welcoming home the parts of ourselves we believed were unlovable, and being witnessed by another’s compassionate gaze that the love we've longed for has always been our own.

It's in that gaze that intimacy is born—not out of words or wounds, but out of presence. Of saying: I’m here. I see you. I’m not leaving.

That is a kind of intimacy the world doesn’t talk about enough.

But I will.