Here is Odette Thibault’s opinion on the subject ( what do you think about it?) :
“Being an adult means having one’s own identity, which also means never being reducible to another person. ‘I am’ means that I am myself wholly isolated, different from others, distanced from them, and completely alone until my death. It is only when I have accepted this existential solitude that I become an adult, that I take responsibility for myself, and that I can begin to glimpse creative relationships with others.”
The dialectic between relationship and solitude is, evidently, another fundamental human dialectic. But not wanting to be “reduced” to the other also implies not wanting to reduce the other to oneself not absorbing them (orality) but rather recognizing their own autonomy. True adult heterosexuality consists in knowing how to enter into a relationship with the other as other, as someone radically different from oneself. It is one of the paradoxes of the human condition that sex, which brings people together, is also that which separates them (seccare).