Humans are social beings. We experience massive frustration when our committed relationships fail to bring us the promise of intimacy, and this may help to explain the neediness, control, and ultimate option of separation and divorce found in so many relationships. The search for intimacy may be why we form social groups, and it may explain why we quest for spiritual fulfillment in our religious lives. We do not want to be alone. We want to touch and to be touched.
Contemporary society seems to have produced a feeling of alienation for many people.
For all the benefits we derive from living in a highly technological world, we still lack ways to form intimate relationships with other people. In fact, our high tech society seems to fragment our social connections, to drive us away from other people. What our high tech world has brought us is an abundance of stress in our personal lives. And stress and intimacy are hardly compatible bedfellows. To have an intimate connection with another person requires first that we have access to our own personal emotions and ideas.