Intimacy: Marijuana as

For some couples, the heightening of emotional closeness in sex as a result of smoking is carried over into other aspects of their lives. Murray and Judy, recently married, are both mental-health professionals in their early thirties. They are moderate users, smoking about twice a week, invariably on weekend evenings. Each time they smoke together, whether or not there are other people present, they find themselves experiencing a profound sense of closeness—an intimacy, they say, that led directly to their decision to get married. Since marijuana played a role in that decision, I asked them, separately, to describe how it happened.
    Murray began:

When we smoked together, we would really get intimate. It was like our boundaries would fuse. At first it was a little frightening, but we were able to get beyond it.

    Judy recalls:

All of these things that go on when we're stoned had never happened to me before I met Murray. I was never as close to anybody as I allowed myself to be with him. We smoked in the beginning of our relationship, but neither of us could tolerate the closeness that soon. And so we didn't allow things to get really intimate until after a few months. And then, vroom, it began to take over in the way we were with each other even when we weren't stoned.

    Murray had told me that he had felt threatened at times during the early months of the relationship. He and Judy would argue frequently, and he would respond by trying to change the subject. But Judy would persist, bringing the disagreement to some kind of resolution. On some occasions, they would be smoking while this was going on, although it didn't seem to interfere with their ability to get to the root of the problem. Knowing that most smokers prefer not to light up a joint during moments of stress, anger or tension, I asked Murray if he had any conflicts over doing so:

Sure, it was hard, but we worked on faith that things would get better. I guess what happens is that by working out one of these arguments, rather than just forgetting it and pushing it aside, as I used to do, you really draw closer to the other person. Of course, we could go through life without ever doing that, but I'm glad we did. I was terrified of the closeness, but now I can enjoy it.
    Judy remembers these things a lot more than I do. That's interesting, that she usually remembers them. I think it's more repression than forgetting on my part. She'll remember all kinds of things. We'll have intense conversations, and sometimes they'll become sexual too, and I'll be feeling great, very close to her. The next day I will still feel the closeness, but I'll have forgotten the substance of what we had talked about, and I'll just remember the feeling. I'll ask Judy about it, and almost invariably she'll remember exactly what happened.

    For Judy, the process of finding greater intimacy when high together first occurred one summer evening, where for three hours she felt a concentrated closeness that she had never felt before. "I felt totally understood by Murray," she recalls. "I felt like we were on exactly the same wavelength and that I could say anything to him, all the things I was too defended against to say at other times, and that he had not been able to hear." At first, Judy attributed the intensity of these effects to the particular batch of marijuana they had been smoking. She labeled it "truth serum":

I had the feeling on this dope that I was talking right to his core, rather than the part of him that in his normal waking life is insecure. I was talking to him directly. It reminded me of the difference between recording a radio program with your tape recorder using a microphone, or directly, with the cables connected to the source. That's what it was like.
    I would say, for example, "You know how ridiculously you were acting today in that store?" And he would say "Yeah," and then I would mimic how he had been acting. But if I had said that while it was actually going on, he wouldn't have heard it at all. That night, I felt that we had no neurotic defenses, and I remember feeling, "This is what it must be like to be successfully and completely psychoanalyzed."
    I felt very safe and comfortable that night, but also incredibly anxious, because it was such a concentrated closeness, and it didn't go away, but lasted for three hours. Every once in a while one of us would have to get up and go into another room, just to get a break from all that intensity.
    These days, the same thing happens, no matter what dope we smoke. I say, "It's not going to happen this time," and it's like a standing joke. But we have different reactions to it. The first time it happened, when we were dating, he got angry when I brought it up the next day. "You always have to analyze everything, don't you?" he told me. It was clear to me that we had reached a new level in closeness, and I was very upset because he didn't want to talk about it or even acknowledge it.
    It may also be because during that first stoned encounter I was able to make interpretations to him about his mother, which I could never say to him in our normal life without getting belted. But stoned, I felt free to say these things, and, equally important, he was able to hear them.