Where desire becomes devotion and love becomes sacred.
I have a modest proposal for all of you romantics out there (okay, maybe it’s thoroughly immodest):
That we fuck our partners senseless while considering them a sacred gift from the divine.
There. I said it. This chapter has begun.
Somewhere along the way, respectable adulthood developed the peculiar idea that these two seemingly diametrically opposed impulses should be kept in separate buildings. You may have holy love — the beautiful, devoted, emotionally safe relationship in which two people share values, pay the mortgage, know each other’s blood type, and have not attempted to remove one another’s clothing with their teeth since MapQuest sent people confidently into lakes.
Or you may have hot love — the relationship in which your higher cortical functions abandon their posts, your underwear develops a short life expectancy, and three months later one of you is crying in a Chili’s parking lot while the other changes their relationship status to It’s “Complicated.”
I reject this arrangement.
I want both. For me. For you. For all your friends and relatives.
I want “You are sacred to me” and “Take off your pants” swaddled in the same burrito.
Preferably from the same person.
Preferably within the same hour.
Hot and Holy Love is what happens when two people look at each other and somehow manage to think simultaneously:
I will protect the tenderest parts of your soul.
and
If you bend over like that again, we are not making it to dinner.
This is not a contradiction.
That is entirely the point.
The Fire and The Refuge
The hot is the fire. It’s attraction with poor impulse control and excellent intentions. It’s flirting in the grocery store like produce selection has suddenly become foreplay. It’s walking past your partner in the hallway, backing up three steps, and saying, “Come here.” It’s spending forty years together and still looking at the person you married as though they personally created nudity.
The holy is the refuge. It’s knowing that this same magnificent lunatic who would happily interfere with your pants also knows where you hurt. They know the story underneath the scars. They know the parts of you that aren’t impressive, polished, productive, emotionally evolved, or even particularly pleasant before coffee and they still think you’re magnificent.
Both, Not Alternately
Here is what nobody warns you about this kind of love: it refuses to stay in its lane.
You expect the fire and the refuge to take turns. Tuesday is for tenderness, Friday is for whatever that thing was with the door and the countertop. You expect to be handed one experience at a time, like a very reasonable person, standing patiently in line for whichever version of love is currently being served.
Then you find yourself getting ready for a date with someone you have already seen floss, already watched cry during a car commercial, already heard negotiate with a toddler over the ethics of broccoli — and somehow you are still doing the thing where you turn sideways in the mirror and think, tonight, I am going to be devastating. And they walk in, and their whole face does something involuntary, something that has nothing to do with politeness, and for one unreasonable moment you feel like the only spectacular creature on the entire earth.
That is not supposed to still be happening. You checked the paperwork. You have seen each other’s tax returns.
And it is also this: the two of you are lying on the floor because the couch felt too far away, doing the ugly-crying, can’t-catch-your-breath kind of laughing about something so stupid neither of you could explain it to a stranger, and in the middle of that ridiculousness one of you looks at the other and says something true and unguarded and slightly devastating — about a fear, a grief, a thing you’ve never told anyone — and the laughing doesn’t stop so much as it changes shape, folds itself around the truth, and holds it.
This is the thing that surprises people: being fully known does not use up desire. It gives desire a place to live that won’t collapse under its own weight. Wanting a stranger is easy and cheap and burns out fast, because there’s nothing underneath the wanting to catch you when it flares. Wanting someone who has seen you ugly-cry and stayed, who knows exactly how you take your coffee and exactly which of your father’s sentences still catches in your throat — that wanting has a foundation. It can afford to be reckless, because it isn’t going anywhere.
The Miracle of Still Looking
Familiarity is supposed to be the natural predator of desire. Every article, every late-night comedian, every well-meaning aunt at Thanksgiving will tell you the same story: you get to know someone, the mystery evaporates, and eventually you’re just two people arguing about whose turn it is to deal with the garbage disposal.
Here is the plot twist nobody tells you at the wedding: familiarity is not the enemy. Contempt is the enemy. Boredom of the imagination is the enemy. Familiarity itself is just information, and what you do with the information is entirely up to you.
You know exactly how he narrates his own driving mistakes as though a sports commentator is watching. You know the sound she makes when she’s pretending to be fine and is not remotely fine. You have watched him eat cereal directly from the box while standing at the open refrigerator door at eleven at night for reasons that have never once been explained.
You know she cries at dog food commercials and refuses to acknowledge it later. You have seen the face — everyone has one face — the specific, unglamorous, slightly unhinged face they make when they are furious with you and trying not to show it.
None of this is supposed to be attractive. And it is, because it’s theirs, and you are one of maybe three people alive who gets to know it.
This is the sleight of hand at the center of a love that lasts: you don’t pretend not to have seen the whole person. You’ve seen the whole person — the unflattering angles, the petty grievances, the way they say the same story slightly differently every single time and expect you not to notice — and you are still, inexplicably, marveling. Not despite the ordinary
Tuesdays. In the middle of them. Hot and Holy Love does not live in a cabin in the mountains where nobody has body odor and every conversation is profound. It lives in the kitchen, at six-thirty on a weeknight, over a sink full of dishes, one of you singing badly to a song the other one hates, and somehow that is the whole thing. That is the miracle. Not that you found someone extraordinary. That you kept finding them extraordinary after they stopped performing for you.
Both, Not Alternately (Reprise, Because This Is the Part That Matters)
Let’s slow down here, because this is the part of the whole enterprise that actually breaks people open.
Most of us have quietly made peace with a smaller deal. We got safety, and we told ourselves desire was for the young, the reckless, the people who hadn’t yet learned better. Or we got desire, and we told ourselves peace was for later, for someone more boring, for whenever we finally settled down and stopped wanting so much.
What almost nobody promises you — what almost nobody believes is actually on the menu — is this: I am safe with you, and I am wanted by you, at the exact same time, said by the exact same mouth.
Being cherished without being merely protected, like a piece of furniture someone is careful not to scratch.
Being desired without being merely consumed, like something to be used and set back down.
Being fully known — the tired version, the bloated version, the version with the ugly sweatshirt and the bad breath and the unresolved thing about your mother — and still watching someone’s face light up like you walked in wearing something scandalous.
Being pursued without having to audition for it. Not the anxious, performing kind of wanted, where you have to be witty enough, thin enough, interesting enough to keep earning the attention. The other kind. The kind where they already decided, a long time ago, that you were the one worth chasing, and now they just enjoy doing it.
There is a particular sentence some of us go our whole lives without hearing, and it costs nothing to say and changes everything to receive: I see you at your absolute worst, and I still want you. Not I love you anyway, like wanting is a burden being generously carried. I still want you. Present tense. No asterisk.
This is not a small thing to want. It is, in fact, the entire thing worth wanting.
Love With a Pulse
There is a version of “stable relationship” that is really just two people who have agreed to stop trying. The bickering has worn a groove. The affection has calcified into habit. Nobody’s leaving, exactly, but nobody’s really there either. Call it what it is: a relationship on a ventilator, breathing because the machine is breathing for it.
Hot and Holy Love is not that. It has a pulse. You can feel it.
It shows up as the text message that says nothing important and everything important. The private joke from eleven years ago that still, inexplicably, ends both of you on the floor. The way he still watches her walk into a room like it’s a small miracle he gets a front-row seat to. The way she still reaches for his hand in a parking lot for no operational reason whatsoever — nobody’s crossing a busy street, there is no danger, she just wants to be touching him.
It has peace, but it isn’t sedated. It has stability, but nothing about it has gone stiff. It has commitment with no whiff of ownership — I am yours because I keep choosing to be, not because you’d have somewhere to put a complaint if I left. It has desire with no chaos attached, because chaos was never actually the point; being wanted was the point, and you can be wanted with your whole nervous system intact.
They don’t merely keep the relationship running. They delight in each other, on purpose, regularly, the way you delight in something you can’t quite believe you get to keep.
Reverence Is Not a Vigil
Here is where people get the whole thing wrong, and I say this with love and also mild exasperation: somebody, somewhere, decided that treating your partner as sacred meant behaving as though you are perpetually attending their memorial service.
Soft voices. Meaningful eye contact held two seconds too long. Everything said like it’s being read off a plaque.
No. Absolutely not. Cancel that vigil.
You can know — bone-deep, unshakably — that the person across from you is a genuine miracle, a specific unrepeatable configuration of a human being that the universe is never going to produce again, and you can also, in the very same breath, put a pillow over their face because they are being insufferable about the thermostat. Reverence does not require solemnity. It requires attention. And two people paying that kind of attention to each other tend to end up, more often than not, absolutely deranged with each other in the very best way.
Play is not the opposite of sacred. Play might be one of sacred’s favorite hobbies. When you are silly with someone — genuinely, unguardedly, doing-the-voice, wearing-the-ridiculous-hat, fully-committed-to-the-bit silly — you are demonstrating a level of safety that a hushed candlelit dinner could never prove. You cannot be that unguarded with someone you don’t trust completely. The absurdity is the evidence. I feel safe enough with you to be a complete idiot is one of the more romantic sentences a human being can say, even if — especially if — it’s said mid-cackle with mashed potato somewhere it shouldn’t be.
Hot and Holy Love laughs. Constantly. Inappropriately, sometimes, at funerals of relationships you no longer have, at each other’s terrible impressions, at the specific way one of you says a certain word wrong and has for eleven years and refuses correction on principle. It is not a permanent, hushed appreciation society. It is a riot that occasionally, without warning, goes quiet and looks you dead in the eye and means every word.
You Don’t Have to Apologize for Wanting the Whole Thing
At some point in reading this, a small, practical, slightly exhausted voice in you may have said: that’s lovely, but isn’t that a lot to want? Shouldn’t I be more reasonable?
I want to address that voice directly, because it is not stupid — it is just tired, and it has probably been burned.
Wanting to be desired does not make you shallow. Bodies are not a lesser category of love; wanting to be wanted in yours is not a character flaw you need to quietly manage.
Wanting to feel safe — completely, structurally safe, the kind where you can fall apart and not lose the relationship — does not make you needy. It makes you someone who understands what love is actually for.
And wanting both, in the same person, at the same time — friendship and fire, devotion and desire, someone who knows your worst year and someone who still can’t quite believe their luck — is not an inflated request that has to be negotiated down into something smaller and more sensible before the universe will consider granting it.
Nobody hands you a form at eighteen explaining that you’re only allowed to pick one. You made that rule up, probably after watching it happen to people around you, probably after a few disappointments of your own convinced you that wanting the whole thing was what got people hurt. It’s an understandable rule. It’s also not true.
You do not have to apologize for wanting to be someone’s peace and someone’s problem. You do not have to make yourself smaller so the wanting fits in a more modest container. You are allowed to want the entire, ridiculous, contradictory, extraordinary experience of being loved like this — not as a fantasy you keep in a drawer, but as an actual, livable, Tuesday-night, dish-in-the-sink kind of life.
There is a person out there — or already across the table from you — capable of looking at your worst morning and your best dress with the exact same expression: I cannot believe I get to have you.
That’s it. That’s the whole ask.
The person whose soul you’ll handle like it’s made of something breakable — because it is — can also be the person who makes you late for dinner. The person who feels like coming home can still make your pulse do something undignified in a grocery store aisle. The person who knows every embarrassing, unedited thing about you can still look at you across a room full of strangers as though they just discovered you, tonight, for the first time, and got extraordinarily lucky.
Don’t negotiate yourself down to safe or exciting. Don’t agree to the separate buildings.
Go find — or go build, with the person already in your kitchen — a love that is fully alive and fully sacred, at the same time, on purpose, for the rest of your life.
That’s the whole proposal. I told you it was immodest.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Chapter Companion Song Recommendation:
— “Heaven,” Bryan Adams, 1984
The Erotic Four™ and Hot and Holy Love™ are trademarks of Randi Fredricks.
This article is an excerpt from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s forthcoming book Magnificent Men: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire, exploring the restoration of men’s dignity and worth, the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, and hot and holy love.
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author, psychotherapist, and leading expert in counseling, communication, and human connection. Her first published study, released in 1993, explored the impact of family dysfunction on intimacy and communication in adult relationships. For more than three decades, she has developed innovative therapeutic models to help individuals and couples create deeper connection, emotional resilience, and extraordinary relationships. Her work explores the intersection of psychology, spirituality, humor, eroticism, and human magnificence, helping people live more fully, love more deeply, and embrace the extraordinary possibilities of a beautiful life.
