By managing anxiety you deepen your relationship as you stay intentionally connected to your partner. You can tolerate your partner's intense emotions and you can accept and regulate your own, even when that feels impossible. You compromise neither yourself, your partner, nor your self-respect, and you promise yourself to do all this in relationship. Managing anxiety means you can tolerate intimacy. This is different from closeness.
Intimacy is the deep experience of self in relation to a partner.
With intimacy, you experience yourself in a different, new, and profound way, not necessarily at the same time your partner does. Intimacy can be profoundly joyful and penetratingly uncomfortable. It is the former when you finally own your thoughts, feelings, and behavior and are willing to share all this with your partner, with and without anxiety. People who can risk both integrity and intimacy often stay sexually expressive in some manner throughout life. They struggle successfully to be true to themselves and at the same time face the anxiety inherent in a life that will certainly end no matter what else happens in it.