I once told a woman that I did not enjoy receiving oral sex. I explained that it had never felt pleasurable to me. A few days later, she returned to that conversation and offered to do exactly that.
She was attentive and thoughtful, often speaking about trust and vulnerability. She believed she was helping—that her suggestion might help me relax or feel more comfortable. What I could not understand was why she trusted that idea more than what I had already revealed about my experience.
It was not the only time this pattern unfolded. Another woman, someone I considered a friend, made a similar offer. We were not interested in a relationship, though there was some attraction between us. Still, she told me she would enjoy giving me oral sex. Again, the same question returned—not because the offer bothered me, but because it seemed to ignore what I had already explained.
Over time, those conversations began to feel less about the act itself and more about what it seemed to assume. Oral sex faded into the background. What unsettled me was the assumption it carried: how could people who cared about emotional closeness assume that physical intimacy would help someone who had already said he did not experience intimacy that way?
We agreed that love mattered, and we both saw sex as something that could carry meaning. Yet the same action unfolded differently depending on how you understood it. For one person, it expressed care. For the other, it exposed a misunderstanding.
The same gesture, offered with care, could land as distance. What separated us was the meaning each of us attached to that act.
In everyday conversations, I started noticing similar assumptions appearing in different forms. Once, during a casual conversation, someone told me, “You can’t really know if you’re compatible until you’ve had sex”. It was not said dismissively or provocatively, but as something obvious, almost practical. The idea seemed to be that physical intimacy reveals something essential, something that cannot be accessed any other way.
This perspective did not sound cynical. The person who said it was not rejecting relationships; they hoped something real might develop, but assumed physical intimacy could help reveal whether that was possible.
I had also heard the opposite just as often. Some women said they would never have sex before marriage, others that they needed to fall in love first. What interested me was not the decision itself, but the reasoning behind it—whether it came from religious beliefs or simply from how intimacy unfolded for them.
At first, these positions seem to contradict each other: one assumes intimacy helps create love, the other that love makes intimacy possible. Yet neither rejects love or acts irrationally. That was when I began to see we were not arguing about values, but following different paths that shape how relationships develop.
The first path is familiar. You meet someone, spend time together, grow closer, and see whether love emerges. In this view, intimacy becomes part of how the relationship unfolds.
If intimacy helps people get to know each other, suggesting physical closeness before commitment does not contradict emotional interest. It becomes a way of discovering whether a relationship can grow.
This idea appears everywhere. People talk about “chemistry”, suggest couples should live together before marriage, or argue that compatibility reveals itself through shared experiences. Dating culture carries phrases like “Let’s see where this goes” or “Don’t define it yet”. These expressions assume that relationships unfold through shared experiences, including physical intimacy.
Psychology offers one explanation. Studies on self-disclosure show that closeness often develops as people share personal thoughts and experiences over time (Altman & Taylor, 1973). Trust can grow through repeated moments of openness and responsiveness, allowing intimacy to carry the relationship forward (Reis & Shaver, 1988).
Popular culture reflects the same pattern. In many films and TV shows, characters become physically intimate before defining their relationship, and the story follows how those moments unfold into love.
The more I examined this way of thinking, the harder it became to dismiss. It remains consistent and explains why someone might see physical intimacy as a sign of emotional interest. If this is how your experience unfolds, my reaction would seem just as confusing as hers did to me.
This explanation fits many lives, many stories, many expectations. And yet, when I place my own experience inside it, something remains out of alignment.
For a long time, I wondered whether the difference simply meant that my experience was unusual. One possible answer is that my experience differs from the norm. For a long time, I considered that, but it never felt complete because the order I needed did not emerge from a rule or belief. I did not see sex outside a committed relationship as wrong; it simply lacked meaning for me until something else had already taken shape.
That “something else” is difficult to describe. It is not just one condition, but several elements coming together. I need to know the other person and feel that she knows me—not just that she sees me, but that she understands me. The relationship has to feel mutual, with both of us choosing the same direction. It also has to feel specific, not something temporary or easily replaced. Only then does physical intimacy begin to make sense.
Conversations with others revealed that this perspective was not as isolated as I had first assumed. Some women told me, “I don’t have sex before marriage,” while others said, “I don’t need marriage, but I need to know we’re in a real relationship”. These positions often lead to similar choices, but they emerge from different reasons.
For some, waiting comes from a moral belief: sex belongs within marriage because marriage gives it meaning. For others, the question is whether intimacy can feel real before love exists. From the outside, these positions may appear similar because they lead to similar behavior, but they describe different experiences—one is about values, the other reflects how intimacy actually unfolds.
In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy do not become physically intimate to discover whether they love each other. Their understanding of each other develops first; physical intimacy follows after commitment has already formed.
Across cultures and individuals, these differences raise a broader question about what shapes them. Psychology points in a similar direction. Research on attachment shows that people differ in how they seek closeness, handle vulnerability, and build trust (Bowlby, 1969; Hazan & Shaver, 1987). Studies on responsive desire suggest that, for some people, desire depends strongly on context rather than appearing on its own (Nagoski, 2015). These findings do not prove that one order is correct. They simply reveal that not everyone follows the same path.
That was when I realized I had been asking the wrong question. The disagreement begins earlier than the question of whether sex should come before or after love. It starts with the quiet assumption that the way relationships unfold in our own lives applies to everyone else. Most of us do not notice that assumption until we encounter someone whose experience moves differently.
Imagine two people who want the same thing. They both hope for commitment, loyalty, and a lasting relationship. What separates them is the sequence they expect those things to follow. One sees intimacy as something that helps create love. The other sees love as something that makes intimacy possible. Both are sincere, and both are open to commitment. Yet misunderstandings can arise almost immediately—hesitation may be read as distance, while urgency can feel just as unsettling from the other side.
Two people can stand in the same moment, wanting the same future, and still feel as if they are moving in opposite directions.
What stays with me now is not the offer itself, but what it revealed about how easily we assume we understand each other. At the beginning, I asked how someone who values emotional closeness could still believe that physical intimacy might solve something I experienced as relational. At the time, the question felt like a contradiction; now it feels more like a difference in theory.
If intimacy can create connection, then her suggestion made sense. If connection must exist before intimacy becomes meaningful, then my reaction made sense. Neither of us was ignoring the other. We were simply relying on different assumptions about how relationships unfold.
The same words—closeness, intimacy, pleasure—were guiding us in different directions. The misunderstanding begins earlier, with the models we carry about how connection develops—models we rarely question because they feel natural, even obvious, until we encounter someone whose experience follows a different path.
This is why conversations about relationships can feel confusing even when people seem to agree on what they want. We may be aiming for the same outcome while imagining different ways of getting there.
Which raises a question I no longer see as rhetorical:
If two people use the same words but rely on different assumptions about how those experiences emerge, how can they recognize the difference before it turns into misunderstanding?
And more importantly—how often do we assume we understand someone, when in fact we are only recognizing our own way of making sense of things?
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Bibliography
- Altman, I., & Taylor, D. A. (1973). Social Penetration: The Development of Interpersonal Relationships. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
- Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books.
- Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Nagoski, E. (2015). Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. Simon & Schuster.
- Reis, H. T., & Shaver, P. (1988). Intimacy as an interpersonal process. In S. Duck (Ed.), Handbook of Personal Relationships. Wiley.
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