S*x is not intimacy

Some thoughts on what I'm seeing out there

This may seem obvious to many of you, but I actually think I’ve stumbled onto something important here. I’ll say it in a sentence.

Sex is not intimacy.

They are different things. Sex is one thing; intimacy is another. We seem to have lost this knowledge in the perverse confusion of our age.

If it’s true that the most visited websites on the internet are gross in nature, it must follow that the nature of our collective desire has been malformed. Our society has been discipled to want the wrong things. We think libidic thrill is the truest impulse about us. We want the experience of love without having to pay the full price of love. We want it fast, fresh, free of the fetters of slow fidelity. We want it without the many micro-martyrdoms that intimacy requires.

Life is worked out in the kitchen. The dishes roll in and roll out like the waves of the sea. You want to learn to lay down your life? Get in line to pack lunches for three little people every morning for twenty years. Intimacy is cultivated in the living room, not the bedroom.

Again, I say: Sex is not intimacy.

I leave that bare sentence right there all by itself. We need to see it. It needs to hit us. We need to memorize it. We need to recall it. We need to teach it to our men, our women, our sons, our daughters, our churches, our Christian schools, our missions internships spread across the globe that are filled with innocent and joyful Christian twentysomethings who might accidentally believe that a good and wholesome “sex life” just happens primarily because they’ve been celibate before marriage.

It doesn’t just happen. “Purity”—however one defines that—doesn’t guarantee anything. It can certainly cut down on unnecessary disappointments later in life. It can protect from the accrual of pain that comes from sexual frivolity and foolishness. I would wholeheartedly advocate aiming your life in the trajectory of a purity-that’s-on-par-with-the-beauty-of-Jesus, a purity which can be inhabited without succumbing to a narrow, lifeless Purity Culture.

And I’m not here to be chippy. I don’t have any axes to grind. I promise. I was proximate to Purity Cultures and prayed prayers and wore a ring and it didn’t kill me. It might have even saved me in those years, creating “negative space”, protecting my younger, undeveloped self that still needed some time to grow up.

I’ll say this: Sex, on its own, is not positive. Nor is it inherently negative. But sex is never nuetral. Of course, sex, when at its worst, is always a violation. When true love is neglected and friendship within the relationship is left lying there lethargic, sex is no more than bodily locomotion. And sex, when stewarded and received within a relationship that is thick with daily intimacies, can be a treasure.

But sex is not intimacy.

True intimacy, of course, often results in clean sexual connection, in occasional soul-satisfying rapture shared between lover and beloved; but that happens only when “intimacy” is understood as broadly as the human heart needs it to be understood for it to be real. And let me say this explicitly: intimacy doesn’t require sex. There are scores of single people who know the gift of intimate friendship that have nothing to do with sex. Yes, intimacy is always grounded in a sense of safety; it can be more than but is never less than the safety of soul, mind, body, and emotions that is nurtured between two. Intimacy can never be less than shared laughter that arises from easy friendship, a friendship that outlasts bodies that break down and are drained of vigor. Intimacy is never less than trust that has been built over years, over decades.

Sometimes that intimacy becomes bodily romantic rapture.

Sometimes. Praise God for those times. Those moments, when received, are to be received as gifts from God.

But we have a problem in the West, and a problem in the Western Church. We think that sex = intimacy. It does not.

Men, we need to learn that. Become proficient in the thousand forms of intimacy that have nothing to do with libido. And then teach what you have learned to your daughters and sons.

To my sisters, I suspect from the conversations I have with people, and from paying attention out on the streets, that you’re more inclined to know these things. But I know we all have growing to do. Still, we want your wisdom, we want to know what you know, we want you to teach us, we want to be students of the human arts, and we think you know something that many of us have not yet learned.

But I’ll talk to the men, because I am one, and because I have more authority with you. Do not be simple. Do not be a fool. Do not live with a small mind about what leads to the magic of intimacy. Be curious, be a student, be patient, go slow, exercise self-control, ask good questions, learn to identify wholesomeness wherever it can be found. You may not have been trained in intimacy. I grieve that with you. And still. If you want to be happy you won’t let that be an excuse. As J.K. Rowling said, “There’s a shelf life on blaming your parents.” Be curious. Ask good questions. Cut off any inputs that are contaminating your mind. Learn from people who know how to create clean relational space. And tell me in ten years if you aren’t experiencing the gift of true intimacy. Because it can take ten years. And every day you choose to pay the price will be worth it.

Amen.