But then I stir from this fantasy long enough to look around and tame my wild expectations. I look at elderly couples who have weathered 50+ years together and are anything but sexy. Yet something keeps them together all those years. Something deeper and more attractive draws him to her and vice versa for all those decades.
In their essence, sexiness and pornography depend on novelty. There are always new people and new bodies and new, flashy ways to turn someone on. Intimacy, however, is the opposite. It depends on getting to know the same person over a long time.
A mentor once told me something that has stuck with me. I turned it into a poem (read the full thing here):
he said,
sure sex is great
and a good body is exciting at first,
but eventually,
it’s just good to be naked,
it’s nice to be naked with the same old person.
Of course, this nudity runs far deeper than a physical lack of clothes. It’s a raw, performance-less sort of nakedness. Unlike Adam and Eve who realized they were naked and ran and hid, this sort of intimacy reveals itself to another in a beautiful and unabashed way.
Why Sex Is Not Sexy
Real sex is not a one-and-done sort of event. Instead, it’s an ongoing (dare I say boring and mundane) practice between a husband and wife. If we single people go into marriage expecting a cinematic (read: pornographic) experience every time we come to the marital bed with our beloved, we will be sorely disappointed.
This is why thousands of married people still struggle with pornography. Because sex is not a cure-all for all our desires and fantasies. No one person can satisfy all our deep longings. Media and magazine covers have programmed us.
No, real sex is not sexy. It is intimate and long-suffering. Sex is selfless and other-focused. It isn’t the object of marriage but a reflection of the intimacy that should already exist between spouses.
Think of the purpose of sex like communion. We take in the bread and wine, the body and the blood of Jesus. It’s a physical representation of a spiritual reality. It’s a shadow that points to something beyond itself. The bread and wine aren’t special in and of themselves. But they’re important because of what they point to.
Sex, similarly, is the physical coming together of two people who’ve already united themselves to the other socially, financially, emotionally and spiritually. Sex is a visible symbol of an invisible reality. But sex is not sexy.
We aren’t promised that the sex itself will satisfy. If we expect sex alone to fulfill us without the fullness of the relationship being present, it will be hollow and lifeless. We’ll walk away empty. But when sex follows all the other areas of an intimate relationship, consummated in marriage (the covenant is the consummation), it’s life-giving and fruitful (literally).
And when we think of the purpose of sex that way, we must remember: Sex is not sexy.
What Sex Really Is
Sex is real and ongoing. It happens amid vacuuming and errands. It isn’t always made-up and gorgeous. Occasionally it gets sick and vomits. The question is, will we commit to this person who will have very un-sexy days (increasingly so as the years roll on)? Or will we keep holding out for some sexy fantasy that will never materialize?
I want to un-program my mind from what our culture teaches is “sexy.” I want to reclaim a more holistic, realistic ideal of sex. And I want to return sex to its proper place in my mind. That requires undoing years of being formed in the image of our pornified culture. I need to embrace a view that’s sustainable, healthy and quite frankly, un-sexy.
So are you with me about the purpose of sex? Are you ready to help reform our culture in favor of real sex rather than the plastic version we are bombarded with daily?
It won’t be easy (or pretty). It will take a lot of rewiring our brains to think according to reality rather than Insta-glamour. Let’s truly see and not let the media tell us what’s sexy.
This article about why sex is not sexy originally appeared here.
