Could it be
that the virtue of attunement will arise as one of the chief virtues between
men and women in intimate relationships in the twenty-first century?
Is
attunement emerging as virtue for men and women to flourish in love, justice,
and God’s ongoing dynamic redemption in the world?
Popular
author John Gottman, voted as one of the top ten influential therapists in the
past twenty-five years, suggests that attunement is the virtue that creates
intimate trust and makes intimacy personal between couples.
Now Catholic
scholar and feminist, Cristina Traina in her recent provocative book, Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics
of Sensuality between Unequals, argues that the virtue of “erotic
attunement” is at the heart of healthy and good sensuality. It is essential for an ethics of sensuality.

For me, her 376
page book is a compelling read on the virtue of attunement in maternal
sexuality and sensuality. She fully engages the question: where is the clear
line between interpersonal natural affection and exploitation of children? Although
her focus is on breastfeeding, she discusses the whole range of sensual care of
parent-infant: skin-to-skin contact, cuddling, touching, tickling, caressing,
kissing, and so on.
She is
well-versed in the danger of power in sexuality, sexual violence, and
well-documented cases of parental incest. She does not gloss over parents
addicted to sexual abuse.
Traina is
well aware of the fact that uncritical devotion to maternal intuition renders
female abusers invisible. She does not sugarcoat the dangers of abuse in mothers
breastfeeding children.
Several
years ago I was surprised when it suddenly dawned on me that breastfeeding and
cross-sex friendship share significant parallels. Previously, I confess as a
white male I had given little thought to breastfeeding.
But breastfeeding
and intimate cross-sex friendship share some amazing similarities in
challenges, desires, sensuality, intimacy, virtues, delights, and dangers. They
obviously part company in several ways. One involves a relationship of unequals
while the other involves equals. The other glaring difference is that
breastfeeding is a physical bond between mother and child and for a specific
temporary period of time.
But they are
social and intimate practices which enlarge our view of sexuality, touch, desire,
and delight from the narrow range of foreplay and sexual intercourse.
As someone with
a passion for integrating sexuality and spirituality as well as a passion for
intimate spiritual friendships between the sexes, I was deeply encouraged by
Traina’s advocacy for recovering nonsexual delight, desire, and touch in human connection.
Drawing from
Traina’s significant work, I would like to introduce the virtue of embodied attunement
as the way forward for healthy intimate cross-sex friendships in the 21st
century.
Before we go
any further I must clarify what I mean by sensuous attunement. By using the
term, “sensuous” I am intending a holistic phrase encompassing the moral use of
touch and sensuality. As men and women we are embodied selves. We are real people and all our desires are embodied or sensuous. We engage the other with our senses. The uphill battle for even including “sensuous” is that
for many people, including Christians, sensuality is a code for sex or sexual
intimacy.
This is
something that Traina does address: we need to expand our language (and our
experience) to include sensuality as something which is not referring to genital
sex or foreplay. To highlight the confusing meanings of erotic and sensuality among
serious-minded Christians I need to point out differences in meaning when using
terms.
There are many
moderate and progressive Catholics and Protestants who use the term, “erotic” as
something which may include sex but does encompass something far broader than
genital sexuality. For them, it is a desire and delight in all that is good and
beautiful. Traina belongs in this group herself.
There is
some movement among evangelicals to embrace a broader meaning of “erotic.” See
for example neo-reformed James K.A. Smith in his most recent two books, Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom “I basically make
no distinction between love and desire, eschewing any difference between eros and agapē… agapē is rightly directed eros."
However, for
my friends who want to maintain a distinction with “erotic” meaning sexual connection
as something different from nonsexual sensual connection, I am going to refer
to sensuous attunement instead of erotic attunement.
If I quote
Traina using the word erotic, she’s using it to mean delight, desire, sensuality,
and pleasure and not anything that means foreplay, genital sex, or sexual
abuse.
She argues
that we must make a distinction between sexual love and sensuous love but one
will find eros in both loves (closely
aligned with Smith’s view of agapē is
rightly directed eros).
I want to provide
you with some quotes on some specific aspects within her book. I think these
are applicable to the virtue of sensuous attunement in cross-sex friendships.
I’ll be engaging
these more in my next post.
The necessity of embodied loving—loving
another through my embodied self and loving another’s particular embodied
goodness.
"It is not possible to love another's
goodness, her participation in God, separately from loving her embodied self,
and it is not possible to love another except through my embodied self. This
does not mean that I always love another's body with mine, but that our
embodiedness-the space it takes up, its particular needs and pleasures-is
always part of our relating, so that I cannot comprehensively love another's
good without in some sense loving her body as well."
The posture of attuned openness and
desire, is:
"a love desiring and delighting in
other persons and the world within the horizon of God's all-encompassing
love.... opened out toward and disposed to receive the other, attuned to the
other's goodness in an attitude of availability."
The virtue of attuned openness and
ethics of sensuality:
"The chief measure of our attunement
is the success of our interactions with others.
Attunement invites others to
transform their desires, not to feel the fear that leads to grasping, not to
see others as threats to their egos.
Attunement is perceptive cultivation
of right relation between persons, attunement is simply justice approached from
the direction of intimacy.
Because
we love and yearn for what is good and beautiful, attraction, desire, and often
a degree of sensuality mark all significant human connections.
Attunement-the
dance answering the partner's needs and desires-is the substance of the virtue.
We
need an approach that recognizes the confluence of self-love and other-love in
touch and also makes us aware of our own capacities to misread and abuse these
loves and their goods."
On
popular Freudianism:
"My
goal is not a comprehensive historical explanation of this sexual reductionism…
I argue that under the influence
of Freudianism, Westerners, especially Americans, have ignored the complexity
of intimate, bodily relations, instead selecting a few implicitly contradictory
strands of meaning from them and labeling them "sexuality."
Pansexualism-the
idea that sexual dynamics are present at all stages of life and in all human
interaction-is a Freudian inheritance."
What do you think about the virtue of sensuous attunement? Is it a virtue which creates intimate trust within marriage and beyond?
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