Contemporary society discourages intimacy. We live in a self-regarding culture, soaked through with the impersonal need for instant gratification. Our goal is to get intimate with ourselves rather than others, to identify and indulge in our own desires and fantasies (where do you want to go today?) and to satisfy them by consuming the right products. Success and the pursuit of status are trumpeted at the expense of human connection.

Alongside the rise and rise of consumer culture we've experienced a technological revolution that replaces intimacy with simulation. The age of the internet has made us all feel more connected and yet, paradoxically, more distant. Books about connection emphasize the networks of “weak ties” in which we are all immersed and the need we have to plug in and play. With so many relationships now mediated through screens we are beginning to appreciate the limitations of digital interactions as well as the virtues. As with our attitudes to that vanishing commodity, the physical book, we are treasuring those moments of face-to-face interaction with real people in actual rather than virtual environments.

On the other hand, the dominant rhetoric in the media is one of intimacy. The yin of a consumer culture plays against the yang of a therapeutic one. Songs, films and literature are forever reminding us to overcome our shallower desires and guilty pleasures and repeat the (supposed?) “wisdom” that love conquers all.