Intimacy is a hallmark of the Christian life (Au & Cannon, 1995). Experiencing true intimacy begins with knowing ourselves as being loved and accepting ourselves as lovable (Delio, 2013). The Christian understanding of God as Trinity described above makes intimacy and self-acceptance possible, even if we have never experienced the love of another human being. God loves us to the extent that God is prepared to become one of us subject to all of the cruelty we can muster in our least humane moments God's love encompasses the humiliating and torturous death of Jesus, God incarnate, on the Cross. The consequence of all this is that regardless of how we have been treated, humiliated, or hurt, God knows what such treatment is like. No matter how we may have treated, humiliated, or hurt others, God knows what such hurt and humiliation is like. God loves us anyway. When we talk about intimacy with others we are discussing a special kind of relationship, a way of relating closely associated in the philosophical sense with the idea friendship. There is an expression in English about 'fair-weather friends'. These are people who are your 'friends' when the going is easy but when the going gets tough they are nowhere to be seen. Real friendship, real intimacy, goes beyond being nice to a person when to do so is easy. It is about committing oneself to another person over time, even when that commitment is difficult for either of you. The consequence of this commitment is the build-up of trust. Intimacy and trust go hand in hand. An intimate relationship can be defined as differing from other kinds of relationships in at least six ways (Randall, 2014): Knowledge: intimate partners have extensive often confidential knowledge of each other Caring: intimate partners feel more affection for one another than for most others Interdependence: frequent, strong, diverse, and enduring effects on each other Mutuality: tendency to think of each other as 'us' not just I or me Trust: the expectation that one partner will treat the other fairly, warmly, and honourably Commitment: expect their partnerships to continue and invest personally in that expectation. Finally, intimate relationships can create a context in which we can experience what it means to talk about transcendence and the sacred. In intimate relationships we transcend our tendency to egotistical self-absorption as we lose ourselves in our wonder and concern for the other. In truly intimate relationships this loss of self is paradoxically an affirmation of oneself as someone truly worthy. We discover our own worth, our dignity as a human person, as we discover ourselves through the eyes and heart of our intimate other.

Growth in the virtue of chastity and in sexual integration is a developmental and life-long process. People can practice chastity in different ways at different times of their lives. As a young person this usually means abstaining from genital sexual intercourse before marriage, because only in marriage is the full goodness of the sexual relationship between a man and a woman realized. However, it also means learning to embrace one's sexual identity as a man or a woman and to learn how to relate meaningfully, deeply, intimately and justly with members of both sexes through the development of friendships. In marriage, chastity in relation to sexuality means, above all, faithfulness to one's spouse, respect for one's partner's sexual desires or lack thereof at different times and mindfulness of how genital sexual intimacy serves the unitive and generative ends of marriage through conjugal love and procreation respectively. But here too friendship is an important aspect of living chastely. For some people chastity can mean a choice not to get married and therefore not to engage in genital intimacy either for a time or throughout a whole lifetime. Such a decision may be made to achieve some other good, such as the pursuit of a particular career or committing to a celibate life in the service of Christ and his Church. Chastity involves self-mastery and contributes to our living wholeheartedly as multidimensional beings with body, mind and spirit. In this way chastity helps the individual to integrate various dimensions of the self in the pursuit of the most noble goods for oneself and others especially the good of love, the greatest of the virtues. One cannot be a truly loving person if one is not also a chaste person.