Intimacy: Where So Many Fear to Tread : Lifestyles: To be intimate--and to dance well--couples must learn communication, understanding and forgiveness.

Nowhere is intimacy so evident as on the wide expanse of a ballroom dance floor.

For fluid motion, there must be communication, understanding and forgiveness.

But on the dance floor, there is a set series of steps, and both partners--if they are paying attention--know them. Would that intimacy were so easy off the dance floor.

John and Nina Gambardella of Branford, Conn., dance competitively in the senior division of the United States Ballroom Dance Assn. They have just completed a practice session in which they “argued about half the time.”

They have been married 45 years and have six children of whom they are proud--and they can still find plenty to argue about.

“We fought about things over the years,” John Gambardella says. “It’s all right to be angry. You learn to give and take--synchronization with each other--last, but not least, to music.”

Oops. It’s intimacy, that buzzword-of-a-bugaboo. The Gambardellas have found it.

But for many, the steps go awry.

Marva Frazier of Hartford, Conn., broke up with her boyfriend two weeks ago. They had been dating for two years and even talked of marriage. At least she spoke of marriage. He spoke of moving to Maine--presumably alone. Frazier, 26, feared she would never hear wedding bells, so she suggested that they consider a separation.

“He was a nice guy and all, but when I would ask him where we were heading, he would shy off,” Frazier says. “I mean, how long do I have to wait?”

So just what does it mean to be intimate? For our purposes, Webster defines it as “pertaining to the inmost character of a thing,” a state of being closely acquainted or very familiar with someone.

It is right there above intimidate, which is what the discussion often does to men. For men have not always been as well-prepared for the dance of intimacy. In fact, intimacy means something entirely different to men and women.

Girls learn of intimacy in small groups of friends, where they talk about whether “you’d let (the boys) stick their tongues in your mouth, and what you’d name your children,” says Catherine Blinder, public information officer of the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women.

That, to a junior high girl, is intimacy. Later, she will learn--through conversations with her same-sex friends, or even opposite-sex but not sexual friends--that intimacy mostly means communication. She will learn, if she is paying attention, that you can have sex without intimacy and intimacy without sex.

And to a boy who is listening just as closely to his buddies in the locker room? He learns that intimacy is sex and conquering. And, if he is the normal, unlucky boy, the talk will never go beyond that, and he will grow up confused about all the fuss about intimacy. And the girls will grow up talking among themselves about why the boys just don’t “do” intimacy.

“The locker room is anathema to intimacy. In the locker room, it’s: ‘I’m tough. I’m going to grow up and carve notches on my penis for the women I deflower,’ ” says Richard Engelhardt, a clinical social worker in private practice in Middletown and Southington, Conn.

Not necessarily the foundation of a healthy discussion, is it?

“Men have to learn how to become intimate, how to take risks . . .,” Engelhardt says.

But it isn’t easy. “If intimacy is the placing of another person’s emotional needs at the same level of importance as your own--or sometimes even placing them ahead of your own--then that’s diametrically opposed to stepping up the ladder,” he says.

David and Elena Sherwood, both 31 and married for 13 years, are instructors for a new course in Manchester (Conn.) Community College’s Continuing Education program called Creating Intimacy in Relationships.

What happens, Elena Sherwood says, is that unexpressed feelings are trapped, leading to such problems as alcoholism, drug abuse and physical abuse.

“Instead of dealing with our feelings, we find escape mechanisms, and they’re very destructive,” she says.

But some men say they offer a different kind of intimacy, that what women really are asking for is for them to be women, and they can’t.

The Sherwoods believe intimacy needs to be taught to children at home and in school. They decided to educate themselves early in their marriage, when they felt like roommates instead of intimate partners.

“With us, there wasn’t a lot of communication,” Elena Sherwood says.

Gambardella proposes that ballroom dancing be taught in public schools as a way for young people to learn to express themselves.

“When a girl is on a ballroom floor, she becomes a lady,” he says. “When a boy is on a ballroom floor, he becomes a gentleman.”