Every year, The Ubyssey releases a sex issue. The theme of each issue varies. In 2016, we focused on the science of sex and the processes that make people tick.
This year, we chose intimacy as our theme. It’s a broad and diverse idea — which is exactly what we wanted. While brainstorming, we struggled to formulate the specific questions that we would prompt people to write about, keeping in mind that the concept of intimacy is not restricted to the physical and the emotional realms. Intimacy is such an abstract concept, filled with nuance and complexity — and we soon realized that the way to do it justice was simply to listen.
With that in mind, we asked UBC students to write us with only the flexibility of our theme to go off of. We wanted to know what intimacy meant to them — to know their thoughts, their feelings, their minds (and what a rich subject to mine). We knew the quality of our submissions would be high, but we didn’t expect to be quite so moved.
We hope that the issue did for you what it did for us in its creation — providing you an outlet to understand, to laugh, to maybe cry a little and to learn.