I recently spent a couple of weeks preparing a great deal of fresh material for a weekend-long marriage seminar. Along the way, I often found myself convicted by the content I was preparing. As I readied myself to teach others, I had to consider the ways in which I needed to be a student before I should be a teacher. One area this proved true was intimacy in marriage—but a kind of intimacy I think many of us seldom consider.
There is no doubt that marriage is meant to involve a husband and wife baring their bodies before one another, so that marriage is the context in which a man and woman can experience what it is to be naked and unashamed—to be fully bared, yet fully accepted. And because marriage is meant to be the deepest kind of unity two human beings can experience, it makes sense that there is a physical component to it through which two bodies are literally joined together. This is usually what we mean when we discuss intimacy in marriage.
It is my understanding that this kind of intimacy, while real, is also in a way representative or symbolic. It is a demonstration of a unity between two people that is not merely body-deep, but fully soul-deep. Physical intimacy is both significant and essential to marriage, but it is not meant to be the sum total of the intimacy shared between a husband and wife. Yet as Aileen and I have interacted with other couples, we have observed that many husbands and wives find it easier to bare their bodies than their souls. Even as they routinely give themselves to one another physically, they can withhold a great deal relationally and emotionally. Even as they give themselves in free and joyful lovemaking, they can stop short of a greater baring, which is the baring of their souls and the revealing of the deep recesses of their hearts.
As Aileen and I discussed this together, we had to conclude that this is something we are prone to as well. It’s not that we hold back shocking secrets or scandalous sins that would cause the other to recoil in dismay or disgust. It’s that we are both reserved people who find it hard to let another person in. We are both wounded people who have been hurt by those who have misused information we have revealed to them. And then I suppose we are both prideful or distrustful people who hold back the pieces of ourselves that we think might cause the other person to lower their respect for us. But by holding back, we are failing to live with full transparency and, therefore, failing to live with full intimacy. The baring of our bodies exceeds the baring of our souls.
There is an irony to this, because I am convinced there is a deep longing within each of us to be known. We want someone else to know us as we truly are and to still love us and give us their approval. But even while we want it on one level, we resist it on another, because we wonder what that other person will think of us if they know our deep thoughts, our secret longings, and our hidden fears. We wonder if they will still respect us if they know what causes us to feel shame or express remorse. Perhaps we doubt they’ll still love us if they know who we are far beneath the surface. Still, there is this longing to be known, to be as bare emotionally as we can be physically—and still to be loved and accepted. It is this longing that we never address when we hold back from revealing who and what we truly are, when we refuse to foster a deep soul intimacy—an intimacy that is then represented by, rather than superseded by, sexual intimacy.
We want someone else to know us as we truly are and to still love us and give us their approval.
So how can we foster this kind of baring?
By letting our spouse really know us, which may mean creating times and contexts for lengthy, deep, and uninterrupted conversation. This will involve asking good questions and then listening attentively so we can come to a correct rather than trite or hasty understanding of what is being communicated. To really know and be known is the work of a lifetime. It is work, but work worth committing to.
By assuring one another that no matter how deep into one another’s souls we go, we will respond with love and acceptance—that we will be like Jesus, who knows us even better than we know ourselves, but never turns away in dismay or disgust. In a non-marriage relationship, deep knowledge might provoke us to recoil or walk away, but because we are bound together in the covenant of marriage, deep knowledge can only provoke greater love and greater patience with one another in our weaknesses and sins.
By being active in both learning and revealing. The degree to which we can love another person varies with the degree to which we know them, so that the more we know them, the more we can love them. At the same time, the more we are known by that other person, the more they can love us. In this way, a relationship of deep love is a relationship that depends upon deep knowledge, and deep knowledge depends upon a deep baring.
Finally, by understanding sex as a symbol and celebration of great intimacy, but not the sum total of it. Rather than allowing the sexual union to be an outlier—a kind of intimacy that’s much deeper than any other part of our relationship—we ought to ensure it is a part of our marriage that’s consistent with living our lives bared before one another, not just in body, but in heart and soul as well.
