'The real business of being human, I would like to argue, has little to with sex. Sex is rightly listed alongside the pleasures of eating and drinking. The same pleasure centre of the brain is lit up. But it's not intimate. Intimacy is about a spiritual, not a physical closeness.
Real intimacy is singularly unerotic. When my mother died, when my husband's parents died, when we listened to each other and held each other - that was intimate. Being with someone who is grieving and being allowed in, being trusted to that extent - that is true intimacy, in a way that showing off our new negligee is not.'
Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.95.
