Quotes on Intimacy

I realize this is a very sacred and personal topic.

I really love the talk given by Elder Holland called Souls, Symbols and Sacraments as well.

Thanks to Dr. Kent Brooks at BYU for a lot of these quotes.

Elder Holland taught the truth when he said: “If you persist in pursuing physical satisfaction without the sanction of heaven . . . you may undermine both your longing for physical intimacy and your ability to give wholehearted devotion to a later, truer love. You may come to that moment . . . [and] discover to your horror that what you should have saved you have spent, and that only God’s grace can recover the piecemeal dissipation of the virtue you so casually gave away.” (“Personal Purity,” Ensign, Nov. 1998, 76B77.)

Elder Scott taught: “Satan promotes counterfeit love which is lust. It is driven by a hunger to appease personal appetite. One who practices this deception cares little for the pain and destruction caused another. While often camouflaged by flattering words, its motivation is self-gratification.” (“Making the Right Decisions,” Ensign, May 1991, 35.)

Fragmentation is the illusion that one can have true unity and love by nurturing only one aspect of a relationship, such as the physical or sexual dimension. Or, it leads to the illusion that being one, physically, can compensate for the lack of oneness in other aspects of our relationship. When two people engage in sexual intimacies before marriage, the physical closeness they experience creates the illusion that they are truly one in all ways emotionally, socially, intellectually, and even spiritually. In spite of the illusion of oneness, the truth is that these other dimensions remain grossly underdeveloped, if not ignored.

Dr. Brown explained the result: “Two people may marry for physical gratification and then discover that the illusion of union collapses under the weight of [emotional] intellectual, social, and spiritual incompatibilities.” (ibid, 5-6.)

The Lord declared: “And verily I say unto you, as I have said before, he that looketh on a woman to lust after her, or if any shall commit adultery in their hearts, they shall not have the Spirit, but shall deny the faith and shall fear.” (D&C 63:16.)

Lust offends the Spirit. When the Spirit is withdrawn from us, the gifts and fruits of the Spirit are also gradually lost qualities like “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, [and] temperance.” (Galatians 5:23). Imagine what it would be like to be in a relationship where there was no love, no joy, no peace, no longsuffering, no gentleness, no goodness, no faith, no meekness, and no temperance. As Lehi taught, Satan “seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself.” (2 Ne. 2:27.)