The solace of love-making in war

In wars, pandemics and other moments of human brutality, chaos becomes routine and absurdity takes hold. When death itself turns into a daily occurrence people grow accustomed to, ordinary individuals are not searching for heroism so much as they are searching for meaning—something rooted in the present moment that sustains their resistance and helps them hold on to life as bodies are scattered around them.

In Malak Rizk’s novel “Extinct Lineages” (2022), set during the Lebanese civil war and unfolding alongside events such as the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the young man Bekhit, torn between war, poverty and exile, and bearing witness to the most extreme forms of cruelty, finds his lifeline in a woman he meets through the resistance. Love saves his spirit amid bullets, rockets and collective collapse.

Love is not an abstract feeling. Physical pleasure is one of its expressions, and it can itself become a refuge, a place where a person buries the world’s cruelty. A space no wider than two shoulders, yet more expansive than entire cities lost to grief and darkness. Intimate murmurs and bodily entanglement fuse two people into one, capable of tuning out the sound of bombs, if only for a few minutes.

But do we recognize that love, and a stable sexual life, is not a luxury, especially under extraordinary conditions?

A shared dance in war and pandemics

As childbirth continues in Gaza amid the war, many have mocked those able to have sex under bombardment inside displacement camps. “What are they even thinking about?” some asked sarcastically, followed by another sneer about “tent fetishes.” The ridicule directed, as usual, largely at women, reveals not only bewilderment but a deeper refusal to grasp the necessity of intimacy under such conditions.

It trivializes tenderness and dismisses human need at its most extreme edge.

In recent months, journalistic coverage has increasingly turned to the everyday lives of people in Gaza, including questions of intimacy and emotional life. For some, the question feels jarring, even inappropriate in the face of overwhelming devastation. Yet, according to multiple testimonies, it remains essential. War does not suspend humanity, nor does it erase emotional and psychological needs.

A podcast titled “How women give birth in Gaza under bombardment” sparked widespread debate. In it, Dr. Israa Saleh described the ways couples sustain intimacy during war. In schools sheltering displaced families, for example, residents agreed to designate a private room for couples. In camps, separate tents were allocated for those seeking moments alone.

Intimacy, meeting both emotional and physical needs, becomes an act of resistance that grows more urgent as the war drags on

This is not unique to Palestinians in Gaza. Looking back to World War II, we find countless stories in which love and war intertwine, especially through the longing for physical closeness. In letters sent by soldiers to their wives, dreams of a first kiss upon return surface again and again, alongside imagined moments of intimacy compensating for absence and danger.

That period also saw a marked rise in marriage rates. Many men and women confronted the terror of bombs and the instability of daily life by clinging more tightly to partnership, seeking safety, reassurance and continuity through closeness and intimacy.

The idea has stayed with me. Not only love in camps under bombardment, but in all exceptional moments. The same question resurfaced during the pandemic.

I spoke about it openly with women in Gaza, Lebanon and Egypt, and began to understand what intimacy can offer: a fragile but vital form of comfort in the face of relentless bad news and the sound of shelling that lovers try to drown out with their own voices. I also saw how love provided reassurance against the pervasive fear of loss that accompanied COVID-19.

Making love as healing

Even in times of psychological strain, intimacy can be a form of survival. Fleeting moments of closeness with a partner can restore the capacity to endure. The relationship between mental health and sexual life is reciprocal and complex: sex can meaningfully improve mood, but it is not a cure-all and cannot, on its own, resolve depression.

Intimacy and physical affection do not only lift mood in the moment, their effects extend into the following day, accumulating over time.

Rebecca Cooper-Smith, a psychotherapist and sex education specialist at Northwestern University, explains that orgasm floods the brain with oxygen and mood-enhancing chemicals such as oxytocin and dopamine, which help relieve pain and increase pleasure.

In a 36-week study involving 58 women, researchers found that intimacy and physical affection did not merely improve mood in the moment, their effects carried over into the next day in a cumulative way. Crucially, however, the determining factor was not the act itself but the presence of a loving partner; solitary practices did not produce the same effect.

Dr. Thomas Stokes also argues that sex has therapeutic power and can improve overall health. “It functions as light exercise, improving heart health and lowering blood pressure. It strengthens immunity and regulates hormones by increasing endorphins and oxytocin, which elevate mood and reduce stress. Psychologically, sex reduces anxiety, enhances self-esteem and strengthens emotional bonds between partners,” he argues.

Despising sex, despising ourselves

Michel Foucault, in “The History of Sexuality,” formulated what came to be known as the “repressive hypothesis,” critiquing the idea that sex has simply been suppressed since the 17th century. He asked instead: What is the relationship between power and sexuality? Has it truly been prohibited? Has speaking about it really been silenced? And if so, why have discourses about sex multiplied?

Foucault proposed that power did not repress desire or the body so much as redefine them, delineating which forms are acceptable and assigning them to specific identities. Power, in this sense, does not say no; it says: speak—but in this way.

He linked sexuality to what he called biopower, positioning it as part of broader demographic, political and moral regulation. Sex becomes a central tool in managing populations, as power produces individuals who internalize surveillance, who monitor themselves, turning the body itself into a site where power is exercised.

The stigma surrounding discussions of sex during crises within Arab societies is not incidental. It emerges from an entangled relationship between collective moral frameworks and state-aligned discourses that lean toward conservatism and, often, a quiet contempt for life itself, or at the very least, a refusal to recognize people’s right to inhabit their full humanity.

Within prevailing hierarchies of value, the body and its desires are viewed with suspicion or moral disdain, a sentiment that intensifies in times of hardship, when pleasure appears to contradict dominant narratives of sacrifice, death and annihilation.

This is also rooted in a long history of disciplining the body. It has produced compliant subjects who feel guilt for practicing their most basic forms of humanity, and who, in turn, reproduce this internalized authority by demanding justification from others. For Foucault, disciplinary power differs from outright domination; it does not simply seize the body, as in slavery, but seeks deeper control, pushing individuals to regulate, suppress and render their own bodies more obedient to the social order.

One woman I spoke with described growing up in a household where women took pride in the absence of sexual intimacy with their husbands, where nothing remained between them but “a plate of food.” “They always criticize a man who buries his father and then goes to sleep in his wife’s arms, as if he isn’t grieving,” she told me. What they fail to see is that intimacy itself can be a lifeline.

At the core of the problem, I believe, is how we are raised to be hostile toward sex. When a woman acknowledges that she enjoys sex, she is labeled “sinful.” If she expresses desire to her husband, she risks suspicion or shame. In this way, people police themselves, abandoning the small space in which they might reclaim their words, their bodies and their full presence. A space where they can reorder their breath, even briefly, in the face of war, pandemics or the quiet, suffocating pain that surrounds them.