Trying to Connect to God Through Sex When Your Partner Isn’t Sexually Spiritual
Jan 08, 2026
Trying to Connect to God Through Sex When You’re Dealing With a Sexual Atheist
One of the most spiritual acts that exists is making love with someone. Being completely connected on a base level and experiencing a connection at every single chakra point (for lack of a better description) until we reach a point of such heightened ecstasy that all we are enraptured in is love, bliss, and an ineffable sense of connectedness. In those moments, there is no separation. No “me” and “you.” Just presence. Just union.
However, what I have come to realise is that there are people who are deeply religious in the sexual sense, and others who are deeply atheist. What I mean by this is that sexuality itself functions like a religion. This is the lens I work from in existential sex therapy, where sexuality is understood not just as behaviour or technique, but as a relationship to meaning, connection, and selfhood. It is practiced. It is felt. It is lived. It shows up in every single encounter because sex is never just a physical act. It is an exchange of energy, meaning, vulnerability, and intention. And because of this, it can only truly be shared with someone who can meet us at that level.
Relationships have shown me, time and time again, that opposites often attract. There is a principle that says when we find ourselves with someone, we are with them until we learn everything we need from them. What attracts us in the first place is often the lack we sense in ourselves. I’ve written before about this hunger and ache for depth in RAVENOUS, where desire is less about wanting another and more about what opens inside us when we allow ourselves to truly receive. The other person holds something we don’t yet have access to, and through the relationship we come to understand that this capacity already exists within us.
On an emotional or psychological level, this dynamic can be incredibly fruitful. But when we bring this principle into sexuality, something more delicate happens. Because the question we are really asking the other person is not simply to sleep with us, but to join us on a journey toward something sacred. To meet God through sex. To experience sexuality not just as pleasure or closeness, but as a portal into unity, transcendence, and oneness — with ourselves, with the other, and with something larger than both.
This is where the fracture begins.
When one person experiences sex as a spiritual act and the other experiences it as something grounded purely in the human, the physical, or the psychological, there is often an unspoken tension. The connection can feel intense, magnetic, even loving, but it never quite lands in the same place. One person is reaching upward and outward, while the other is staying firmly within the limits of what they know and trust. This polarity mirrors what I explore in The Two Polarities of a Relationship, where intimacy often stretches between freedom and safety, depth and containment.
So what do we do when we encounter a sexual atheist on our path of discovering God through sex?
The simplest answer, aligned with what I mentioned earlier, is that this individual is on their own journey and is meant to teach us something. This places us, at least initially, in a position of guiding, educating, or inviting the other into deeper levels of connection. And sometimes, this works. Sometimes people soften. Sometimes doors open. Sometimes the body learns before the mind does.
But often, what actually happens is far more subtle and far more painful.
Because without realising it, we can begin to carry the responsibility for both people’s experience. We start holding the depth alone. This is often the moment when couples begin to recognise deeper sexual intimacy issues, not because desire has vanished, but because meaning has quietly slipped out of the room. We bring the presence, the attunement, the reverence — and over time, we begin to feel unseen in the very place where we most long to be met.
The sexual atheist is not wrong. They are not broken. They are simply oriented differently. Their relationship to sex does not include transcendence in the same way. And asking them to experience God through sex can feel to them like pressure, confusion, or even failure — as if they are being asked to feel something that isn’t true for them.
What looks like a sexual mismatch is actually an existential one.
At some point, we are forced to ask ourselves a difficult question: am I trying to share an experience, or am I trying to convert someone? Am I inviting, or am I hoping that love will change them into someone who can meet me where I already am?
There is a quiet grief that comes with realising that not every lover is meant to be a companion on this particular path. Some people come into our lives to show us how deeply we long for the sacred. Others come to teach us the cost of abandoning ourselves in the hope that someone else will follow.
Trying to meet God through sex with someone who does not experience sex as sacred can slowly hollow us out. Not because they are wrong, but because we begin to silence parts of ourselves in order to stay connected.
Sacred sexuality requires consent — not just of the body, but of meaning. Without transparency about how we experience sex, desire, and connection, this consent can never fully exist — something I explore further in The Importance of Transparency in Intimate Relationships. Of intention. Of worldview. When that consent is mutual, sex becomes a form of communion. When it is not, it becomes longing.
And longing, no matter how beautiful or spiritual it feels, is not the same as union.
Vaya Con Dios
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