at the end of the day, you are who you'll end up with.

Getting involved with another person is a messy affair; you're combining two separate people with two sets of lives and expecting it to go off without a hitch. Sure, optimism and Hollywood tell you it'll be a seamless compromise--and in the honeymoon phase I have no doubt it will be. Only, humans are naturally selfish beings, sooner or later our need to come first will surface. If you make it to this point and still somehow are able to keep a balance (balance between not only the couple in the relationship but the people in their lives as well) then the next hurdle comes forward: merging the couple's baggage.

This is the part where you let your significant other see behind the veil; it's do or die time because if you're going to be with this person fairly long (ish) term then you don't want to be on eggshells the rest of this (rollercoaster) ride. You want to be able to relax and be yourself so you try to either throw it all on the table or ease them into it. If you rush the merger then you run the risk of scaring the other person off with all your eccentricities or learning that the person you're with is a first class nut job. If you ease them in, and don't fool yourself into thinking this is a safer route, you may have them think you've led them on and you aren't who you were-- that you've changed into someone completely different.

When you let someone in, you show them things you hide from most people, you let them into your inner sanctum. Unfortunately, most of the people you let in have no business being there; they'll trash it, kick everything over, and top it off with a steaming dump on it. When you become that intimate with someone, you run out of places you can hide-- places that are yours and yours alone. It becomes harder to say "this isn't for me, I'm out", harder to run, harder to go back to the beginning.

Intimacy means the devaluing of yourself for the sake of adding someone in.