Rethinking Intimacy Beyond Sex: Nonsexual Partnerships in Contemporary China

• In Event: Beyond Mononormativity in the Sociology of Sexualities

Abstract

While intimacy is often conceptualized through sexual relationships, a growing number of people actively seek partnered closeness without sex. This paper examines how intimacy is practiced when partners decide in advance to decouple sex from their relationship, focusing on contemporary China, where compulsory sexuality channels people into sex-centered scripts and narrows what can be imagined and narrated as intimacy. To see intimacy apart from sex, I study “nonsexual partnerships,” where partners intentionally de-emphasize or forgo sexual interaction yet nonetheless understand their connection as intimate and meaningful. Unlike unions that become sexless unintentionally over time, the cases analyzed here are marked by clarity of intention, shared commitments around the absence of sex, and careful negotiation of expectations. Precisely because these partners cannot lean on familiar sexual scripts to organize closeness, they must articulate aims, boundaries, and routines explicitly—making visible the internal organization of intimacy that typically remains tacit.

Drawing on 51 in-depth interviews and observation of online workshops, the study shows that when sex is decentered, partners assemble intimacy from a modular repertoire of five recurrent practices: (1) bodily involvement; (2) care work; (3) narrative exchange; (4) boundary work; and (5) the practice of “being there.” What distinguishes nonsexual intimacy is not the behaviors per se, but their organizing logics and the architecture that lets partners reweight and reassemble them to route intimacy labor from sex toward other domains. The article advances a practice–repertoire lens that treats intimacy as routinized doings and sayings organized by recognizable logics, offering a portable analytic template for comparing intimacy across relationship types and contexts: identify practices, specify their logics, and observe how they are assembled. Findings broaden theories of intimacy and asexuality by suggesting a new framework that recognizes nonsexual partnerships as designed, not deficient, forms of closeness.

Author

• Xi Cao, Columbia University