Creating loving and playful friendships:
A Model for Relationships

However you feel about monogamy vs. nonmonogamy (our next sidebar), being coupled or single, “creating loving and playful friendships” can be a helpful model to guide your formation and maintenance of sexual relationships.

Friendship is an easy model, for we already know a lot about it.  While there is no need for your friendships to involve sexual play, your sexual play can be strengthened by adding friendship to the mix.  If all you want is sex, then don’t expect to find intimacy until you start to truly care about the people with whom you have sex.  Intimacy isn’t even possible without some sense of friendship—some connection as real people, not mere flesh on flesh.  Because we have souls, Christians believe we will live eternally with God.  As eternal creatures, it’s short-sighted when we treat each other as if we’re nothing but physical bodies.  We need to care for the well-being of each other’s soul.  Honor the soul—honor the person—or your focus on his or her body will devalue you both (e.g., that’s why one-night-stands often turn out to be life draining, not life enhancing experiences). 

The price of intimacy is friendship, and as the friendship goes, so goes the intimacy.  Healthy friendship based relationships are built on loving respect and communication.  If you want your relationships to last and flourish, then you’ll need to continually learn and relearn what it means to be a true friend.  Practically speaking, this means as you are beginning to date someone, you’ll want to build your mutual emotional and physical levels together—even letting the physical level lag behind at first as you seek to build a foundation of friendship.

Regardless of how you’d choose to explain your approach to sexual relationships, if you want to honor God, then you’ll need to honor your lovers with the same kindness, respect, love and compassion that God expects you to show yourself.  God calls us to learn how to truly love ourselves—and to share that same love with others.  That’s how amazing God’s love for us truly is.