The Myth of Sex Equaling Intimacy — The Myths Series

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The Myth of Sex Equal­ing Inti­ma­cy — Inti­ma­cy is an act of con­tin­u­al strip­ping away — of reveal­ing who we are, with total honesty.

Of Wayne’s many books, the one clos­est to today’s top­ic is: The. Best. Rela­tion­ship. Ever.

Intimacy, it seems to me, is something that many people say they are seeking, at least in the abstract.

Inti­ma­cy is not sole­ly about dia­logue nor using the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Mod­el. It’s not about long walks or shared inter­ests. It’s not about rais­ing kids togeth­er and con­tribut­ing to the run­ning of the house­hold. Inti­ma­cy may con­tain all or many of the above, but inti­ma­cy is about, first and fore­most, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and trust.

Intimacy — is about openness, honesty and vulnerability.

In my book, The. Best. Rela­tion­ship. Ever. I wrote:

Confusing sex with intimacy

In my book This End­less Moment, I wrote about a woman who broke off her engage­ment because she’d had sex (on a pool table!) with a friend. She talked about how hot and char­gy it was. 

I asked her why she’d bro­ken off her engagement. 

“I can’t stay with my fiancé, because I must love [pool table guy] a lot! After all, I had great sex with him!” 

I said, “Or you just got real­ly horny, and had good sex. It was just sex.” 

She: “Oh no! I’d nev­er have sex with some­one just because he turns me on. I only have sex with peo­ple I love, and I must love him a lot, giv­en how good the sex was.” 

Enough said?

The prob­lem is not hav­ing sex with a friend on a pool table. The prob­lem comes from not being will­ing to admit that hav­ing sex is fun, in and of itself. 

“I had sex with him/her, it must be love!” is idio­cy. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it’s real­ly preva­lent. And that’s because we have such a hard time accept­ing our­selves as sex­u­al beings. 

It’s so weird. Peo­ple have such trou­ble say­ing. “I’m horny, and love to have sex!” This coy­ness around mat­ters sex­u­al orig­i­nates in our fear of being “seen” as sexual.

Most people are afraid to declare their sexual side, for fear of being judged as “perverse.”

• True inti­ma­cy (being seen) encom­pass­es sex­u­al­i­ty, but is not equal to it. 
• Sex­u­al­i­ty is an inti­mate act – true inti­ma­cy is so much more. 
• True inti­ma­cy is the act of becom­ing open, hon­est, and vulnerable. 
• True inti­ma­cy is the activ­i­ty of shar­ing deeply and with verve. 
• Most cou­ples have sex, while nev­er achiev­ing true intimacy. 

Because of our embarrassment over our sexual nature, we quickly mislabel sexual charge as ‘love’

Sex is not equiv­a­lent to romance or love, and yet romance and love often con­tain, or pro­vide a con­tain­er for, our sex­u­al­i­ty. Sex­u­al­i­ty is a sim­ple and very basic part of our being. It is what it is, and noth­ing more. 

Inti­ma­cy, on the oth­er hand, is the abil­i­ty (to use the lan­guage of The Haven in BC) to be open, hon­est, and vulnerable.

• Open­ness is the will­ing­ness to shine a light on me. If I am open, I am will­ing to be clear about all aspects of myself.
• Hon­esty is just what it sounds like. It means telling the truth as opposed to half-truths, manip­u­la­tions, or even “lit­tle white lies.”
• Vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty adds to this: I am even will­ing to admit to the scary, strange, weird, nasty, manip­u­la­tive parts. I am will­ing to tell you how I hurt myself. I am will­ing to risk it because this is what true dia­logue, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and rela­tion­ship require.

This is scary stuff for most, so other things intrude:

Many moons ago there was a series of TV com­mer­cial in Cana­da, from Star Choice, a satel­lite TV com­pa­ny. In one com­mer­cial, a man and a woman are sit­ting on a couch. The woman turns to the man and says some­thing like, “Tell me about how you are real­ly feel­ing about our relationship.” 

The guy looks like he’s hav­ing his prostate checked. 

The announc­er walks on screen and says, “This dis­as­ter could have been avoid­ed, if only he had got­ten Star Choice TV.” 

We then see the cou­ple sit­ting next to each oth­er, star­ing bliss­ful­ly at the TV screen. There’s a romance play­ing, the woman is teary eyed and smil­ing, and they guy is also smil­ing and look­ing alto­geth­er too clever by half. 

Moral: watch­ing satel­lite TV averts a dis­as­ter — the very scary inti­mate communication.

Leading me to an off ramp on the highway of today’s Myth.

There’s a great book called Rad­i­cal Hon­esty, by Brad Blan­ton. His the­o­ry and I would con­cur, is that liv­ing in our head and spend­ing all our time “think­ing” is some­thing to be escaped from, as our head lies, all the time. 

Of course, this is also Bud­dhism 101. 

Blan­ton describes how we tell oth­ers lies about our past, our present, our think­ing, about whom we are and what we know. Blan­ton calls lying “bull­shit,” and pre­scribes total hon­esty as a cure. 

This core of hon­esty leads to a feel­ing of naked­ness before oth­ers. When I am vul­ner­a­ble I am plac­ing myself naked before anoth­er, by choice, in order to be seen and known. This requires trust. 

Trust is about hav­ing faith that the per­son I am being vul­ner­a­ble with will not attempt to take advan­tage of me. As I tell my part­ner some­thing, I trust that they will treat my rev­e­la­tion with dig­ni­ty and respect. 

They will not try to hurt me with what I’ve said, call me names, nor use what I’ve shared as a weapon. They will nev­er try to con­trol me, or the rela­tion­ship. They want to be with me as I am, and that “as I am” grows with each revelation. 

As I devel­op more and more trust, I learn to be more and more open and vulnerable. 

Contrast that to most relationships.

Most cou­ples, when they reach an impasse, fight by dredg­ing up some­thing the part­ner said in a moment of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. This is designed to hurt, to wound — not to resolve what­ev­er issue the cou­ple first dis­agreed about. This fling­ing back and forth of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties nat­u­ral­ly leads to less and less inti­ma­cy. Anoth­er favourite avoid­ance tack tak­en by cou­ples is:

“I’ve been hurt in the past (either by you or by some­one else,) so I won’t risk being com­plete­ly open with you. You’ll have to wait for intimacy.”

Excus­es abound over why inti­ma­cy will take a long time. And often there’s some expec­ta­tion that, first, the oth­er per­son “should” fix what­ev­er hap­pened in the past. 

Most of this comes from our upbring­ing, nat­u­ral­ly, as we’ve been say­ing through­out this myth series. Par­ents often cut off the shar­ing of emo­tions. Babies who scream or cry are rocked or fed. Chil­dren and teens are pun­ished / dis­ci­plined / or talked out of emo­tion­al outbursts. 

Sel­dom do par­ents have the skills to teach their kids how to com­mu­ni­cate ele­gant­ly… obvi­ous­ly, they can’t do it with each oth­er, so how can they mod­el it for their kids? 

And it gets even worse when some­thing goes wrong for the kid / teen. I had a 17-year-old client. Her par­ents, like most, had told her repeat­ed­ly, “You can tell us any­thing. We won’t get mad. We’ll just help you sort it out.” 

So, she took them up on it and had told them that she’d become sex­u­al­ly active. All hell broke loose. Yelling. Both par­ents name-call­ing. Dad even slapped her. T

he par­ents (who knew me from my work­ing with them pre­vi­ous­ly) sent her to me to “sort her out.” 

Dur­ing our ses­sion, she cried, a lot. I helped her get her tears and anger out. 

Then, I said, “Tell me about your expe­ri­ence. That’s a big moment!” She told me about her sex­u­al encounter, with relief, pride, awe and a bit of fear. 

Too bad mom and dad had cho­sen not to expe­ri­ence all of that with her, by com­mu­ni­cat­ing instead of brow­beat­ing. Need­less to say, the 17-year-old learned a les­son about the dan­gers of being hon­est, open and vul­ner­a­ble, but hope­ful­ly also learned from our con­ver­sa­tion what inti­mate dia­logue could be like.

Sadly, though, most adults have precious little experience with full-blown intimacy.

It takes work to trust, to risk, to open, and it takes accep­tance, because it’s not always going to work out. And few have had it mod­eled, so that’s a prob­lem too.

So, many people substitute sex for intimacy, without even noticing.

We were taught to be mod­est — to think that being naked is an inti­mate act. (Begin­ning to see the con­nec­tion?) So, we hide (behind clothes) and resist the pull to be seen. (Of course, I’m also talk­ing about inti­mate com­mu­ni­ca­tion here…) 

I sus­pect that most peo­ple have a “young ado­les­cence” atti­tude about sex–sort of a left­over from the first 2 years of puber­ty. Back then, sex was some­thing joked about, whis­pered about. Kids teach­ing kids. 

Adults sense the need for close­ness and inti­ma­cy — we want to be inti­mate, to share who we are, at the core of us. But we lack the skill-set to do so… and often the best we can do is to have sex while being embar­rassed about our bod­ies. This is left-over from ado­les­cence (for many of us) and our first sex­u­al encounters.

Remem­ber being blown away by the inten­si­ty? Our minds go, “Wow. That was so… so… spe­cial!!! I came, (s)he came, and (s)he treat­ed me as if I was… spe­cial!!! I must be in love! That was so… so… inti­mate! S(he) saw all of me, liked me, loved me!!! (S)he must be… oh!!!… my… soul mate!”

Well, phooey. Sex is a marker, an indicator, in and of itself, of exactly nothing.

Hav­ing sex is sim­ply a way to find out whether or not you’ll let your body expe­ri­ence plea­sure. It only seems to be “spe­cial” because sex, our bod­ies and pas­sion­ate hor­i­zon­tal encoun­ters are so so plea­sur­able and much eas­i­er than com­mu­ni­cat­ing intimately:

“I want to be close to some­one with­out hav­ing to open up to them, to be hon­est. I know! I’ve been told that being naked and hav­ing sex with some­one is spe­cial… and I’m sure that I’d only do it with some­one spe­cial! This must mean we’re in an inti­mate relationship!!!”

This is what hap­pened for pool table girl.

I tried, oh how I tried, to get her to talk about sex, rela­tion­ships, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. After all, she’d con­demned her fiancé for doing the same things she did. 

All she could keep say­ing was, “He did it for sex, I did it for love.” So sex-shy was she that she was reluc­tant to dis­cuss how much she enjoyed it. She end­ed up leav­ing her fiancé, and ther­a­py, because “You just don’t under­stand about true love!” 

After a while, though, peo­ple get browned off when they wake up one day and realise that sex does­n’t pro­duce inti­ma­cy.

But because it’s the only item in most cou­ple’s inti­ma­cy bag of tricks, (since they don’t have deep and mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tions, and thus vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and open­ness and trust aren’t hap­pen­ing) peo­ple feel cheat­ed. But remem­ber: they decid­ed, long ago, that sex should equal inti­ma­cy, so they run off and screw some­one else. And miss that they’re real­ly screw­ing themselves.

Intimacy has little or nothing to do with sex

Inti­ma­cy is an act of con­tin­u­al strip­ping away — of reveal­ing who we are, with total hon­esty. There can be no ele­ment of one per­son try­ing to con­trol the oth­er, no hold­ing back, no blam­ing. Inti­ma­cy is an ongo­ing process or deep com­mu­ni­ca­tion, not an iso­lat­ed, sin­gle act. 

Sex, on the oth­er hand, is a great way to let some­one know you find them attrac­tive and, prac­tised as “safer sex,” is sim­ply fun. And rarely, when sex is com­bined with inti­mate relat­ing, the result tran­scends both inti­ma­cy and sex­u­al­i­ty and becomes a sacred act.

If you’re try­ing to use sex to find inti­ma­cy, you’ll most like­ly fail. If you refuse to be ful­ly, deeply, vul­ner­a­bly, out-of-con­trol inti­mate with your part­ner, sex will nev­er be what it could be. It will either become a weapon, bor­ing, or non-exis­tent. If you think that fideli­ty means your rela­tion­ship is sol­id, think again.

In the end, inti­ma­cy pro­duces the ener­gy of life. Sex, in and of itself, is sim­ply an activ­i­ty. Com­bined with true, hon­est inti­ma­cy, it’s a sym­pho­ny. At its best, it’s expe­ri­enced naked­ly and open­ly — with­out shame.

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