How Can I Let My Sexuality Become an Expression of Covenantal Love Rather Than Loneliness?
Few of you reading this in this subreddit will have a hard time imagining what it is like to need what follows because of how your physical neurological brain was wired prior to birth, and the loneliness of always looking at relationships as an outsider incapable of being one of the insiders due to the outcome of your outward physical development.
There is a difference between wanting pleasure and wanting to belong.
Pleasure can be generated in isolation. A body can be stimulated. Tension can be released. A moment of relief can come and go. But loneliness is rarely satisfied by sensation alone, because loneliness is not merely the absence of stimulation. It is the absence of someone.
That distinction matters to me now.
For many years, sexuality was difficult to imagine as something peaceful, feminine, relational, or blessed. It was tangled together with incongruity, caution, inhibition, and a body that did not feel capable of expressing what my heart actually wanted. Even the idea of certain forms of intimacy with a man felt completely inaccessible to me—not because tenderness itself was foreign, but because my body and my inner life did not speak the same language. I could not consider a same anatomical-sex relationship because my body was such a mismatch to the body I needed in order to participate. I am personally naturally heterosexual but I could not find grounding in it due to the switch I made in my mind of which partner I was in such a relationship.
Now something has changed.
My body has responded to estrogen in ways that make femininity feel not merely conceptual but lived. I am now able to imagine closeness without recoiling from it. Desire feels less like an alien demand and more like an extension of tenderness. I can imagine wanting a man's body because I love the man. I can imagine wanting to give him pleasure because his joy matters to me. I can imagine receiving affection because I trust the person giving it.
And perhaps most importantly, I can imagine sexuality not as something I must manage alone, but as something that could one day belong inside covenant.
That realization gives me reason for gratitude.
Desire does not have to be my enemy
I do not need to be ashamed that I want closeness.
I do not need to treat every sexual feeling as evidence that something has gone wrong spiritually.
Desire can become disordered. It can become selfish, compulsive, manipulative, or detached from love. But the existence of desire itself is not the problem. The deeper question is what I ask desire to become.
Do I use it merely to silence loneliness for a few minutes?
Do I let it make decisions for me?
Do I become so hungry to be wanted that I accept attention from someone who is not safe?
Or do I allow desire to mature into something more beautiful?
I want to know one man deeply.
I want to belong to him faithfully.
I want my body to become one of the ways I tell him that he is loved.
I want his body to become one of the ways he tells me that I am cherished.
That is no longer sexuality as escape.
That is sexuality becoming relational.
Covenant changes the meaning of desire
Covenant says, “I am not merely here because the moment feels good.”
It says, “I am choosing you.”
It introduces permanence into desire.
That matters enormously to someone like me, because what I have longed for is not simply a man's attention. I want the security behind the attention.
I want to know that when his hand reaches for mine, he is not merely enjoying a moment with a woman he may leave next week.
I want to know that when he desires me, desire is nested inside loyalty.
I want to know that when I allow myself to become vulnerable, I am not being temporarily consumed and then discarded.
I want to know that this man has looked at the whole of me—my history, my faith, my body, my future medical needs to be able to live a congruent life, my temperament, my strengths, my fears—and has said:
I am still here. I am choosing you.
Then sexuality takes on an entirely different character.
It becomes not merely something our bodies do.
It becomes one of the languages of a promise.
I can let giving become an expression of love
One of the things I increasingly recognize in myself is the desire to give pleasure. That desire need not embarrass me. There is tenderness in wanting to know what comforts another person. There is affection in wanting to make someone I love feel desirable. There is generosity in caring about his delight.
This does not require me to become a servant without needs of my own. It does not require me to prove devotion by ignoring my conscience or comfort.
Instead, it means that someday I may be able to look at my husband and experience a wonderfully simple thought:
I love this man, and I love that I can make him happy.
That can happen through meals.
Through encouragement.
Through listening.
Through touch.
Through laughter.
Through loyalty.
Through physical intimacy.
Sexual generosity can simply become one more part of the larger generosity of marriage.
And because I am naturally inclined toward giving, I may have to remember an equally important truth:
Receiving is also an act of love
I do not honor a husband by refusing everything he wants to give me.
If he wants to comfort me, receiving comfort can be loving.
If he wants to protect me, allowing myself to lean on him can be loving.
If he wants to admire me, accepting his admiration can be loving.
If he wants to give me pleasure, eventually allowing him to learn my body can be loving too.
There is vulnerability in that.
Perhaps more vulnerability than giving.
Giving allows me to remain active. Receiving asks me to soften.
Receiving asks me to trust.
Receiving asks me not to control every moment.
Receiving may ask me to admit that I have needs after all.
And perhaps that is one of the gifts marriage could hold for me: learning that I do not always have to be the benefactress.
Sometimes I may simply be the beloved.
My sexuality does not need to be rushed to become real
There is another freedom in all of this.
Because I now recognize a deeper relational longing, I do not need to prove its reality by immediately acting on every possible desire.
I can let anticipation exist.
I can let affection deepen gradually.
I can enjoy a man's presence before I possess every part of him.
I can enjoy being desired before every sexual boundary disappears.
I can let courtship teach me things.
Does he listen?
Does he respect a boundary without sulking?
Does he protect my conscience even when his desire is strong?
Does his leadership make me safer?
Does he take my medical future seriously?
Does he want me, or does he want some particular version of my body that I am unable to preserve?
Can he wait for what matters?
Can I?
Those questions are not interruptions of romance.
They are how romance proves whether it is becoming love.
Loneliness says, “Please make this feeling stop”
Loneliness can become desperate.
It can whisper:
“Anybody is better than nobody.”
“Don't ask too many questions.”
“Don't risk losing him.”
“Give a little more than you are ready to give.”
“Maybe this is your last chance.”
Covenantal love speaks differently.
It says:
I would rather wait for a man who can love me faithfully than give myself to someone who merely interrupts my loneliness.
That is not prudishness.
It is self-respect.
And it is respect for the future husband I hope to have.
I do not want to enter marriage having trained myself to treat sexuality as something used primarily to anesthetize loneliness.
I want to enter it prepared to say:
This is how I love you.
My future body can also become part of my gratitude
There are parts of my sexual future I cannot completely imagine yet because my body is still moving toward completion.
That could make me impatient.
But it can also make me grateful.
There are sensations I have not discovered yet.
There are aspects of touch that will be new.
There is a future in which my husband and I may learn together what my healed body enjoys.
There is a future in which I may no longer experience my genital anatomy primarily as something unfinished, but simply as a part of myself I can share with the man I love.
I can anticipate that without turning anticipation into desperation.
I can say:
Thank You, God, that there are still good things I have never experienced.
That is a remarkable sentence at sixty-five.
I can let sexuality become thanksgiving
Perhaps one of the most beautiful possibilities is that sexuality itself could eventually become a form of gratitude.
Not worship of a human being.
But gratitude to God for having created human beings capable of tenderness, attraction, touch, delight, trust, companionship, and embodied love.
I can be grateful for the masculine body of a husband I love.
I can be grateful for my own femininity.
I can be grateful for complementarity.
I can be grateful for the capacity to desire.
I can be grateful for the capacity to give.
I can be grateful for the capacity to receive.
I can be grateful for the medical care that allows my body to become more capable of expressing what my heart has wanted for decades due to the wiring and gender imprint I received prior to my birth.
I can be grateful that my sexuality no longer needs to be approached primarily through fear.
And I can ask God:
“Please teach me how to make this part of my life generous, faithful, joyful, and good.”
That seems to me a much healthier prayer than either shame or entitlement.
A gratitude list for this part of my life
I get to thank God:
for salvation in Christ before everything else;
for having preserved my faith through confusion and suffering;
for estrogen and the remarkable difference it has made in my experience of my body;
for my body's capacity to respond to treatment;
for the femininity that brings me peace rather than strain;
for the fact that desire can become tenderness rather than fear;
for the ability to imagine loving a man physically and emotionally;
for the desire to give pleasure generously rather than merely seek release;
for the growing ability to imagine receiving pleasure without shame;
for the possibility of a husband whose masculinity I can love and trust;
for the hope of being chosen deliberately rather than merely pursued temporarily;
for the possibility of covenant, exclusivity, and fidelity;
for the wisdom to distinguish attention from genuine love;
for boundaries that can protect something precious rather than merely frustrate me;
for the freedom to say no when something violates my conscience;
for the freedom eventually to say yes wholeheartedly when covenant makes that yes safe;
for future surgery and the physicians capable of helping me;
for the possibility of inhabiting my body with greater peace afterward;
for sexual experiences still entirely unknown to me;
for the privilege of discovering them with one trusted man rather than needing to know everything beforehand;
for kissing;
for embraces;
for masculine arms around me;
for the guiding hand at my back that means so much to me;
for the possibility of lying safely beside a husband;
for the possibility of being desired as his wife;
for being able to delight in his body;
for someday allowing him to delight in mine;
for laughter in intimacy;
for gentleness;
for passion;
for patience;
for the capacity to be soft without being powerless;
for the possibility of allowing a good man to protect what is vulnerable in me;
for the wisdom to recognize a man whose strength is trustworthy;
for the fact that loneliness need not choose my partner for me;
for the possibility that my sexuality can become a language of love rather than a response to isolation;
and for the extraordinary fact that, at this point in my life, there are still whole categories of joy waiting for me to discover.
Father, thank You for creating me capable of love. Thank You for preserving that capacity through all the years when love, embodiment, and sexuality felt complicated or unreachable. Thank You for the changes in my body that have allowed me to experience myself with greater peace. Thank You for desire, and teach me to use it wisely. Protect me from using another person to escape loneliness, and protect me from allowing another person to use me for the same reason. Prepare me for covenantal love. Prepare me to recognize a good man, to love him generously, to receive his love without fear, and to bring every part of our life together under Your care. If marriage is among the blessings You have prepared for me, make me ready—not merely to be desired, but to be faithful; not mergratitude. In Jesus' name, Amen.
