‘Under the Sheets’

There’s a saying about art: “If it isn’t embarrassing, you’re not putting enough of yourself in it.” In all honesty, I didn’t know if I’d post this because it’s so raw, so unfiltered, and very much me. Metaphorically, I’m letting you under my sheets here: exposing myself, showing what intimacy really looks like for me, and what it feels like to crave being known.

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I don’t really know how to start this without forewarning for how messy it’s going to be. This isn’t a think-piece and It certainly isn’t tidy. It’s just me trying to put words to something that’s been sitting in my chest for a long time.
I haven’t had a great run with relationships. I loved my ex-boyfriend a lot. Probably too much. Or maybe not too much – maybe just without armour. I loved him in that stupid, soft, unguarded way where you assume the other person will treat your heart like something fragile because that’s how you would treat theirs. That might have been naive. Or maybe the naivety was believing that love is always met with care.

Since then, it’s felt like every interaction with a guy follows the same script. It always gets there eventually. Sex, nudes, hints, jokes that aren’t really jokes. Expectations that appear out of nowhere but somehow were always there. And every time, it leaves me with this sinking feeling, like I’ve misled someone just by existing as a girl with a body.
What hurts isn’t that they want sex. I suppose it’s that they want it instead of knowing me. Or before knowing me. Or without any interest in knowing me at all. Like intimacy is something you bypass to get to the physical, rather than the thing that gives the physical any meaning.

For a while, I genuinely thought something might be wrong with me. I even wondered if I was asexual to be honest. I didn’t feel that immediate pull everyone else seemed to feel. I wasn’t excited by the idea of sex in the abstract. But I was desperate for romance. For closeness. For that kind of intimacy that feels almost unbearable because it’s so deep and so exposing. Eventually it clicked: it’s not that I don’t want sex. It’s that I don’t want it without emotional safety. Without trust. Without feeling held.
If I don’t feel emotionally connected to someone, I don’t feel physically connected either. My body doesn’t respond to strangers. It responds to being known.

There’s a song by Them and I called One Night that absolutely ruins me.
“I hate being looked at, without being seen. Undress me with your eyes until my soul’s all that remains.”
I think I’ve been trying to say that sentence my entire life. That’s it. That’s the feeling. I don’t want to be undressed with hands. I want to be undressed with attention and with care. With someone actually bothering to look at who I am beneath the surface.

I really do believe in the soul. Not in a vague, ‘Pinterest’ way but in a real, aching way. I think there’s something in us that isn’t physical, something alive and sensitive and easily bruised. And I want someone to know that part of me. My inner life, my emotional mess, my spirituality, my softness. I don’t want to be consumed. I want to be recognised.
Lately, this has bled into how I think about religion. About God. About Christianity. I don’t have this neatly packaged belief system. I’m not here to tell you I’ve figured God out. I really haven’t. But I have been thinking about Jesus, about the Bible, about the idea of holiness that it encompasses – and especially about waiting.
Waiting until marriage is something that gets laughed at now and almost treated like a joke. Like a repression kink or a relic of a less enlightened time. And maybe for some people it is. But when I think about it, it doesn’t feel like punishment. It feels like protection or like saying: this matters too much to rush. This deserves commitment. This deserves reverence. Sex is reverent.

We live in a culture that confuses access with intimacy. One that treats restraint like weakness and speed like liberation. And I don’t think that’s freedom at all. I think it’s exhausting. I think it leaves people hollow.

This is where the idea of “sin” has started to make a strange kind of sense to me. Not as shame. Not as fear. But as a warning: this thing is powerful – handle it carefully. Sex feels like something that can either connect you or fracture you depending on how it’s used. And I don’t want to pretend otherwise just because it’s uncomfortable.
This is also why I can’t reconcile myself with porn. Again – I’m not judging anyone. I know how normal it is. But for me, it ruins intimacy. It turns desire into consumption. It teaches people to look without seeing. To want bodies without caring who’s inside them. And ethically, I can’t ignore the people behind the screen – the exploitation, the coercion, the damage that’s so easy to dismiss when it’s hidden.
Porn feels like the opposite of what I want. The opposite of tenderness. The opposite of being known. It replaces “making love” with something colder, more violent, more empty. And I hate that it’s been sold to us as harmless.

At the centre of all of this is something embarrassingly simple: I want to be seen. That’s it. That’s my deepest desire. To be fully known and still chosen. Not rushed. Not reduced. Not treated like a body first and a person second.
Every time a conversation turns sexual too quickly, it feels like a small grief. Like confirmation that this world is louder about bodies than it is about souls. Sometimes it makes me feel unbearably alone. Like I’m the only one chasing this kind of intimacy. Like I’m asking for something unrealistic.
But I know I’m not alone. I know there are other people who feel this too – quietly, awkwardly, sometimes ashamed of how deeply they want depth. So I’m writing this for them as much as for me.

I don’t want to be wanted like that. Maybe you’ve been chasing this too.