Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

Bowen’s aphorism suggests that some friendships between women can begin with an intense, accelerated closeness—confidences, disclosures, and emotional candor arriving early—only to cool over time into polite, surface-level exchange. The “backwards” movement reverses the conventional narrative of intimacy slowly deepening; here, the deepest material comes first, and what follows is a retreat into social ritual. The line can be read less as a universal claim than as a sharp observation about modern social life: vulnerability may be offered quickly (sometimes as a bid for connection), but sustaining that depth requires conditions—trust, time, shared circumstance—that may not endure. The ending in “small talk” implies not hostility but a quiet diminishment.