Everyone's always stressing the importance of physicality in relationships. If you don't kiss them you won't know if they're a good kisser. If you don't sleep with them, you won't know if they're good in bed. How can you be intimate if you aren't physical? It's not possible, right? That's why people discourage long-distance relationships. "Oh, it won't work. It won't last. Someone will stop feeling loved and the distance will be too much."

But how come I can stand here, 1,000 some miles apart from my boyfriend and tell you I have never loved or been loved so intimately. We see each other for MAYBE seven days every four to six months. How does that work? What does that look like since physically we spend more time apart than together?

Intimacy isn't bound by physicality. It's bound by something deeper. I'm convinced of this.

Intimacy in any relationship is found deep within all the crevices of who you are and what has made you, you. It's found when a ground of open, honest, vulnerability, and care is established. I'm talking about the hard to reach, requiring patience, communication, time, and effort kind of intimacy. It's not found in a good make-out session or in a bed. It's found in the late night talks when one's past is keeping them up. It's found in prayer for one another. It's found in tough conversations that neither of you wants to have and the bare face, all guards down, teary-eyed moments.

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Intimacy is found when you realize the one whom your soul loves is the one who cares for you more than anyone else on this earth. Who cares more about you every day. Who cares not about when you're spending the night next, but about when the last time you spent time with God was.

That's the intimacy I'm convinced we all crave and am sure we all confuse with the short lasting, shallow physical intimacy. Intimacy doesn't require physicality. It requires two beings who care more about each other than themselves. Sure physicality plays a role in intimacy in its own way. But in no way is physicality a deal breaker for two people who are intimately in love. No way can something so surface level overcome something so much more deep, personal, and quite frankly, intimate.