Intimacy is not sex. We often confuse the two but sex the way the world handles it is not intimacy. My intimacy with God is that I can tell him anything and he hears me with an open heart. He may not agree with what I am saying but he hears me. On the flip side, I can trust him to tell me anything and he can trust me to listen. See, it’s watching out for each other in a deeper more profound way then just your normal friendship. God and I are more than friends.
The man who you seek should never be one with whom you can’t tell your deepest secrets to. He shouldn’t be the one who you withhold from. I know often that is the case we don’t want to be seen in a bad light so we project a false image but eventually one of you takes a good hard look around and sees that it’s not what it seems. We need to be able to do better than that.
I love Pastor Doug with all of my heart. I would do a lot of things for him but I don’t want to be in love with an image. I have to say that when we married each other we made the grave mistake of not taking the time to get to know each other better and so we each had our image of the other. Neither one of us has lived up to the other’s image in some areas and exceeded our image in others. It has been a process of unlearning what we thought we knew about each other and learning to love what we know about each other. Some things were great disappointments to each other and some brought great relief and joy. It’s the price we paid for the compromise. This is why I caution you so strongly not to compromise on waiting to get married until you know for sure who the person is and that takes time, a couple of years. It’s too hard to go back and undo what you’ve done and so often I hear the horror stories. Most times at these moments of realizations they become deal breakers and divorce and break ups are the logical next step. When there is a problem in our marriage we dig deep to resolve it. We look to each other and we look to our faith. We are committed to seeing it through and we trust each other. See, that’s when the intimacy comes in. The things we’ve built so far and the things we honestly know about each other have to kick in at this point. Love is not enough to see you through these times. Love is an emotion, intimacy is a tangible thing that you can hang on to because you know it. This is when commitment either locks in or fails.
Sex doesn’t undo all of this rather it’s a quick fix that doesn’t stick. The reality is, you talk and hang out together a whole lot more hours than you are in bed together in any relationship. Erwin McMannus said something profound. He said that you have sex while dating when you run out of things to talk about. In other words, sex actually retards the growth pattern of your relationship when it happens before true intimacy develops. The thing you wanted most is the thing you just pushed away. Don’t confuse sex and intimacy they are not the same at all. I can’t stress that enough.
Make sure that the man whom you call your very own is your intimate partner. One who is trustworthy, who cares for your heart as best he can and who is honestly seeking out the real you while showing you who he really his. Don’t get caught in the trap of, ‘I’ll be who you want me to be’. So often I see women who wrap their whole personality around who he needs her to be or vice versa. This is so fake and so short term. You are who you are. Deal with it. Then seek out the one who loves the true you. You’ll be content then.
Pastor Susan 