What is your source(s) for this?
Genesis 2:18
Matthew 22:30
Eros is not about sex. In Plato's Symposium, Diotima (via Socrates) explains that Eros is a striving for beauty. We initially see the beauty in particular people, but if we are wise we seek the source of that beauty. Ultimately, that beauty leads to the form of beauty/goodness. In other words, for us as Christians, that striving for beauty leads us to God who is the source of the beauty and goodness we seek.
You are really downplaying what God has in store for us by assuming if it doesn't involve sex, then we lack something good. The idea is: sex represents a kind of rapture and joy that can only be had in the divine presence. When you enter the presence of pure love what you will experience will, by far, transcend any human to human intimate experience. This life is a shadow of the great hope. If you miss out on the shadows, that doesn't mean you won't be awash in the real thing. You will. I know it's hard, but you will.
Eros is not about sex by itself I'll agree there.
But it is sexual in nature (that is, it's experienced between male and female, not male and male or female and female, that's just lust biblically speaking), and in proper context, also involves agape. IE a man lives for his wife, a wife lives for her husband, your affections become less self focused and instead focused on someone else, like agape, but in eros it is more possessive and more exclusive, where agape, you might be willing to sacrifice your life for another person out of love... but that person doesn't belong to you in any way, where in eros, there's a mutual belonging between the couple. Paul writes about it in 1 Corinthians 7:4. The "ownership" is equal, they both own each other in a sense.
That is part of intimacy in itself, that you trust a person enough that you're allowing them to kind of own you, and going back to the topic of the thread briefly....
a person who is "going steady" with another person is ideally (obviously the world distorts all things) feeling out whether this other person is someone they can trust on that intimate of a level.
and back to the tangent to address one last issue...
it's not that I downplay the relationship with God. It's that I recognize the relationship with God is qualitatively different from the one you'd have with a spouse. A married couple has mutual belonging, exclusive belonging to each other (and both belong to Christ). The exclusivity in a relationship to Christ is one sided. You belong to Him and in eternity you will belong to Him exclusively because you will not belong to anyone else. But you have no ownership of the creator of the Universe, much less exclusive ownership. You can say as a collective body you have ownership in a sense, but not as an individual. That relationship is not sexual in nature either, not even for female believers. Jesus is not going to be their personal husband, and no man is going to be going gay for Jesus (and it revolts me that some people do teach along that line of personally being Christ's bride as a male believer. Yuck.). You're not going to be describing body parts of your Lord and Savior like the poetry of Song of Solomon. You're not going to be cuddling and kissing the Christ.
Essentially.. they're so qualitatively different that they're not directly comparable. Please PLEASE don't bring up the CS Lewis quote... because I find that analogy to be horrendously inept and bad, and frankly stupid. Chocolate and sex are not directly comparable, and nobody says "I had sex so now I never want chocolate again". In fact some people still enjoy chocolate long after they stopped enjoying sex.
But what I lament about it, is not the loss of the physical act (although that is a part of that relationship to be that intimate), but rather the mutual exclusive sense of belonging.
I've never belonged to a woman
and no woman has belonged to me.
and that is lonely.
it is even more lonely to realize that that status is permanent and eternal.
