Sexual Intimacy

Sexual Intimacy

The husband should fulfill his wife’s sexual needs, and the wife should fulfill her husband’s needs. The wife gives authority over her body to her husband, and the husband gives authority over his body to his wife.

1 Corinthians 7:3-4

BECAUSE MEN AND WOMEN are sexually different, we often come at sexual intimacy in different ways. The husband’s emphasis is most often on the physical aspects. Seeing, touching, feeling, and the experience of foreplay and climax are the focus of his attention. The wife, on the other hand, comes to sexual intimacy with an emphasis on the emotional aspect. To feel loved, cared for, appreciated, and treated tenderly brings her great pleasure. In short, if she truly feels loved, then the sexual experience is but an extension of this emotional pleasure.

Sexual intimacy requires an understanding response to these differences. In 1 Corinthians 7, the apostle Paul writes directly that each spouse should fulfill the other’s sexual needs. In other words, sexual intimacy requires selflessness. For the sexual relationship to be a source of relational closeness, each spouse must think first of the other and how best to make sex a source of joy for him or her.

It should be obvious that we cannot separate sexual intimacy from emotional, intellectual, social, and spiritual intimacy. We cannot attain sexual intimacy without intimacy in the other areas of life. The goal is not just to have sex, but to experience closeness and to find a sense of mutual satisfaction.

Father, forgive me for the times when I’ve seen physical satisfaction as the only goal of sex. Help us as a couple to focus on the intimate, emotional connection that comes when we think of each other in our sexual relationship.

Intimacy