Intimacy: Between Body and Soul

God is dead. So we were told. Nature is dying. So we are told. Communities are vanishing. So we are told. Where then can we find meaning?

The essay below discusses intimacy in the context of the relationship between a person and the other. The publication touches on themes such as sexual expression, the #MeToo movement, objectification, cultural deterioration, meaning and the loss of it, beauty, marriage and the everlasting role of the soul in establishing the kind of relationship from which meaning can be derived from and the nihility of existence defeated.

In doing so, I bring together ideas from a diverse range of thinkers, theologians and writers, including Hunter S. Thompson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Bishop Barron, Saint Theophan, Petre Tutea, Viktor E. Frankl, Sir Roger Scruton and more.

The aim of this essay is to argue that the process and the state of intimacy is a complex and necessary element upon which a meaningful relationship (of any kind, but especially between a person and the other) is established. However, for a range of reasons discussed below in detail, intimacy continues to be eroded and therefore, men and women in today’s developed, modern, and in parts post-modern, Western society have a hard time to establish such a relationship.

The publication offers certain solutions to this issue. Nevertheless, as the situation is quite complex and rather dire, these solutions should be taken by the reader as additional views as to how to remedy this aspect of life that is being eradicated, rather than definitive measures.