y with others. More
than sexual intimacy is meant, although that is of more importance than
many religious people want to admit. For the moment, however, we are
thinking of intimacy in a general sense, of our capacity to participate
in the meanings of one another's lives, to fuse into relationships
without losing our respective identities. We see young people striving
to achieve this kind of relation with each other through their talking
things over endlessly, by confessing what one feels like and what the
other seems like, and by sharing dreams, ideals, and ambitions. Where
this is not achieved by early adulthood, the individual may find himself
separated from others except for formal and stereotyped interpersonal
relations.

Only the person who is capable of intimacy can become a partner in any
relationship. People who marry with the hope of achieving the power of
intimacy are often disappointed, because mutually fulfilling sexual
intimacy requires a capacity for personal intimacy. What we are trying
to say here is that before one can become a partner, one must first be a
person. With this we have reached a kind of summary in the development
of our thesis which might be stated as follows: A person is called into
being out of relationship, but the person in his separateness is
necessary to the achievement of a new relationship.

Intimacy is not only platonic, but sexual as well. The growing person
needs help in acquiring a potential capacity for mutual, satisfying
intimacy with a partner of the opposite sex. Heterosexual mutuality has
religious significance, since sexual intimacy is supposed to be an
outward and visible sign of personal intimacy. Yet religion is often
strangely silent in this area, and our young people are often misled. A
teen-ager recently said, "I don't go much for this platonic stuff." When
asked why, he said, "I guess I'm too much of a wolf." When asked what he
meant by being a wolf, he said that he was interested only in making
love to a girl. His view of intimacy, which is similar to that of many
other young people, reveals at least two misunderstandings: first, the
separation in his mind between the platonic kind of relationship and the
sexual, and secondly, his association of the sexual with "wolf," which
is a symbol of the subhuman. Religious teaching needs to affirm sexual
intimacy as a part of people's lives, and nurture them so that their
sexual relationships may be a means of grace rather