09/18/2026
Jarratt Butler and I talked about the need for intimacy on his podcast It's About D A M N Time. Make sure you listen 👂🏾.
One of the most uncomfortable lessons about intimacy is that s*x is almost never just s*x.
The act itself can be brief, almost ridiculous, and yet people build entire lives around it. They lie, marry without desire, stay in dead relationships, cheat on themselves, compare bodies, deceive themselves, and still, the real question remains: What am I really hungry for? Because often, this hunger is not just physical. It's the hunger to be wanted, without having to beg. To be seen, without having to explain every wound. To be seen, without having to explain every pain. For a moment, you no longer have to play a role. The strong man, the good wife, the successful person, the spiritual, the independent person, the person who has everything under control.
Many people believe they want more s*x, better s*x, wilder s*x, but beneath it lies something more vulnerable. They want presence. They want relief from loneliness. They want to feel alive in a body they've learned to manage, not really live in. And it's precisely here that it becomes painful, because control can protect you for a while. It can help you survive heartbreak, humiliation, rejection, disappointment, and that old feeling of wanting too much and getting too little. You learn to use less. You learn to expect less. You make your body something functional, your desire something private, your heart something you can take care of. You call it freedom, because it feels better than dependency. But sometimes, what we call freedom is just a clean form of avoidance.
Real freedom is not the absence of need. Real freedom is the ability to love without wanting to possess, to desire without wanting to break, to stay connected without losing yourself, and to leave without destroying yourself or the other person. It's much harder to do that than to act like it doesn't matter. And maybe that's why it can be more dangerous to really be seen than to be wanted. Wanting still allows for a mask. Someone can want your body and still never touch the place where you truly live.
But when someone sees the part in you that is buried under competence, cynicism, s*xuality, independence, beauty, discipline, or spiritual language, something begins to tremble within you. Because when your dignity is still visible, when your tenderness is still there, when your light has not completely died, the story begins to break that you are damaged, too cold, too far away, too much or not enough. And this crack first feels like a threat before it feels like healing. The body knows this before the mind does. The body knows when s*x is empty. The body knows when touch is just a performance. The body knows when intensity is confused with intimacy.
The body also knows when something is real: a pause, a glance, a hand that doesn't rush, a question in which you are included, a moment where no one consumes the other. It is here that the sacred comes into intimacy, not through technique and not through exotic rituals, but through presence. Through the courage to let other people truly exist. Through the act of wanting to give, not to want to impress. Through the act of waiting long enough for desire to become honest.
Perhaps this is the deepest lesson: You can be desired and still not seen. You can be chosen and still not loved. You can have s*x and still feel untouched. You can lead a respectable life and still sell your soul to safety, approval, comfort, money, or fear. And you can also return to yourself in a single honest moment, in which the body, heart, and truth are finally in the same space.
The most important question you can ask yourself: Can you allow yourself to be touched by life without making it a control, performance, possession, escape, or self-protection?
~ Joe Turan
