“Intimacy rests on two people who have a capacity to both listen and speak up, who have the courage to bring more and more of their full selves into the relationship,” says psychologist Harriet Lerner. “Both need equal power in defining what they want and what they really think and believe. But you have to know you can leave a relationship. If you truly believe you can’t survive without a relationship, you have no power to really be yourself within it.”

Well said.