sex makes promises

this is something cozzens says - that sex makes promises. and as much as my usual response to any religious person discussing sex is to roll my eyes, i admit that it touched something in me.

my approach to sex, which i'm sure is difficult for both secular and religious people to understand, is rather bipolar. on the one hand, i see it as an adult act, which should be done with respect and affection, but need not be done in the confines of a committed relationship. it is something i can divorce from love, or from love-that's-going-someplace. i've had one or two casual encounters that were only that. and we were friends, and it was comforting, but we both knew the limits of it. and it's like dancing with someone you don't know, or don't know very well. you can enjoy it, but you set boundaries, on what you'll do, how exposed you'll be. you don't dance with that person the way you dance with your established partner - you take risks with that person, you feel more secure.

and then there's a place for me where it becomes something else. and then i stop being this pragmatic person and become this...i don't know. romantic person, maybe.

peter tells me that i talk about sex sometimes as if i use it as a yardstick, or a thermometer; it tells me whether the relationship i am in is healthy. i'm not sure if that's true. perhaps it is the fact that at some point i begin to dance with this person as an established partner, i start to take risks. it becomes more intimate, and thus, more vulnerable. i have heard people say that casual sex and premarital sex make you numb to intimacy, but that hasn't been my experience. vulnerability is nakedness. apparently i'm more willing to have sex with someone than to take my clothes off.

so maybe i don't feel that sex makes promises. i feel that intimacy makes promises. and i think, as cozzens also suggests, really, that it would be a mistake to confuse sex with intimacy. some people may not be self-aware enough to put them in conversation with one another. others, i'm sure, are more self-aware about it all than i am. but, yes, intimacy makes promises, and like most people who want to make a life with someone, at some point i begin to want those promises.

i don't really know where this is going. it's just been on my mind.