How’s your search for love going? Have you found the right person yet?

“There is one person who makes the whole difference here,” says Dr. Dain Heer, author of Being You, Changing the World and co-author of Sex Is Not A Four Letter Word But Relationships Often Times Is. “If you were willing to be intimate with that one person—it would give you the choice to have it with anyone else in your life, as it worked for you and as you deserved it.”

What if having the relationship you’re longing for did require finding the right person, but that right person was someone you never expected? What if the person you’ve been searching for in relationship were actually YOU?

Relationship might not actually be what we’re looking for, says Heer. Relationship by definition means the distance between two objects. In a relationships there always has to be distance. Very often, that distance is between you and you, as you give up you in order to fit in to this reality by having a relationship.

Heer says that what most of us are looking for instead of relationship is intimacy, where you are in communion or oneness. In oneness, everything exists and nothing is judged. Isn’t that more of what you’re really looking for?

-Intimacy does not require copulation—believing that it does is a great mis-identification of what intimacy is. You can have intimacy with everyone, if you’re willing to. But the person you have find to begin having intimacy is you.

There are five components to intimacy, according to Heer and his co-author, Access Consciousness^® co-founder Gary Douglas. These components are honor, trust, allowance, vulnerability, and gratitude.

Honor means to treat with regard, “in all ways. Always,” says Heer.

He cites an example that may shock some. What if you were attracted to someone for the sexualness they had available? Then once they got into relationship with you, they decided they couldn’t flirt with anyone else anymore? What if they decided that would be dishonoring of their partner?

“Because you flirt doesn’t mean you’re going home with someone,” Heer points out. “Because you flirt means you’re flirtatious! It might even mean you’re a little more alive! It might mean you’re a little more fun!” That very flirtatiousness might be what attracted them to you in the first place.

“You might ask your partner how they feel about it before you go about eliminating some part of you that they may adore.” Eliminating that part of you would be dishonoring your partner and dishonoring you!

The second component of intimacy is trust. “Trust means trusting the person will be exactly as they were when you first met them.” It does not mean having faith that they will change as you believe they should—even if you know that’s in their best interest. That’s setting yourself up for “a dismal, abysmal failure in the relationship. That’s blind faith and it doesn’t work,” says Heer.

Allowance is the third component of intimacy. Allowance is where anything and everything the other person chooses is just an interesting point of view. “The minute you go into judgment, you’re out of allowance and out of intimacy. You can either have intimacy or judgment. Your choice,” he says.

“What if all of your points of view could be just interesting points of view? Would you and your partner have more ease? More freedom? Less judgment? This is one of the keys to eliminating judgment in your life and going beyond it.”

The fourth element of intimacy is vulnerability. Vulnerability is like the open wound which hasn’t scabbed over. Every breeze that goes by it is excruciatingly intense.

Though many of us have been told or concluded that vulnerability is a bad thing, without it no receiving is possible. The barriers you put up to vulnerability may appear to protect you, but those same barriers also keep you trapped.

“For every single one of those barriers you erect, you have to judge whether you’re doing it right or not, and whether it’s working or not, and whether it is indeed keeping out the bad evil thing you wanted to keep out. This keeps you in a constant state of judgment and takes a huge amount of energy.

“If you’re truly willing to be there with no barriers to someone, it creates a totally different possibility. It creates a softness in you, a receiving of everything, and it invites that possibility for them as well.”

Gratitude, the fifth element of intimacy, has a number of advantages over love. As he sees it, love requires judgment, whereas gratitude does not.

“You judge to see how much you love someone and how they’re loving you, or not loving you, and how you’re living up to it, or not living up to it.
“If you’ve been with somebody longer than 10 seconds you’re already in judgment of him or her. That’s why the longer you’re with someone the more separate you feel from them. You build walls of judgment around you and they build walls of judgment around them and then you can’t get any closer than the walls of judgment will allow.”

“You can either be grateful or have judgment,” he says. “Which would you like to choose?”

In direct contrast to what you’ve been told, says Heer, “vulnerability is not weakness. On the contrary, it’s the place of true power and potency. Why? Because when you have no barriers and no judgments, you can have total awareness of everything since you have no barriers shutting it off and total power and potency available.”

Using the five elements of intimacy can allow a totally different relationship to be possible.

Beyond the components of intimacy, another reason that the person to start with when looking for relationship or intimacy is YOU is the tendency so many of us have to give ourselves up to make a relationship—sometimes any relationship, no matter how bad—work.

This is actually the opposite of what really works. When you have someone who won’t divorce themselves for anyone, that person becomes a leader. By Heer’s definition, a leader is someone who knows where they are going, does not require followers, and is willing to go where they’re going whether anyone else goes or not.

Get the replay of this class; Getting The Sex You Deserve and The Relationship You Desire here.

When two people who are leaders are in a relationship, it creates a place where each of them is willing to allow the other person to be who they are. Both people desire the other person to grow, to be more, and to expand, because they are inspired, rather than threatened, by it. “The people who have the best relationships actually have their own lives,” observes Heer.

“Relationship is awesome so long as it is a contribution to your life. If you want to have a relationship, you should have a great and phenomenal one!”