Faith & formation

Access Is Not Intimacy

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  5 min read

Consider what it would mean to be given a key to somebody’s house.

It is not nothing. It is, in fact, an enormous statement — it says you are trusted, that you may come without arranging it first, that the door is not a question any more.

Now consider somebody who has held that key for twenty years and has only ever stood in the hallway.

Two different things that use the same word

Access is permission to come in. Intimacy is what happens once you are in, over time, at a cost to your privacy.

The door was opened at enormous cost. Most of us have been standing in the hallway ever since, sincerely grateful.

The reason these get confused is that access was the expensive part. The curtain tore. That was the barrier, and the barrier is gone, and it is entirely reasonable to be so struck by that fact that you treat it as the finish line.

But an opened door is a beginning that can be mistaken for an arrival. Nothing further is automatic. Access removed the obstacle; it did not perform the relationship.

How the hallway gets comfortable

Nobody decides to stay in the hallway. It happens because the hallway has real things in it.

There is genuine gratitude there — and gratitude is not fake, it is just not the same as company. There is activity: things to carry in and out, people to meet at the door, a great deal that looks from outside exactly like being at home.

And crucially, the hallway is safe in a specific way. You can be in a house without being seen in it. You can hold the key, use it daily, speak warmly about the person who gave it to you, and never once sit down in a room where they might ask you something you were not prepared for.

What the further rooms actually cost

They cost the thing that all intimacy costs, and there is no version where they do not: unmanaged time in which you are not producing anything.

That is a harder ask than service, and people who serve enormously often find it the hardest ask of all, because it removes every instrument they are good at. There is no rota. Nothing to report. No way to tell afterwards whether it went well.

Which is why so many sincere, busy, genuinely faithful people can say honestly that they have access and have not, in any ordinary sense, gone in.