Private

"Tenderness is always personal, interior, private, -- to some extent at least it modestly shuns the gaze of others. It can display itself freely only to those who can understand it and respond to it properly." --JP II Love and Responsibility

The tenderness between a man and a woman is a private matter, for through it they are seeking to enter into the other's heart, to assume, through love, the other's experiences and state as their own. Through physical love, the invisible becomes visible; it is God's gift to man and wife to experience a unity and closeness that is otherwise impossible, for two people are always incommunicable on this earth.

Even had man never sinned, and were still in the garden of Eden where man and woman were naked without shame, the intimate affections between man and woman would be a private matter. Others would look away should they happen upon it out of respect and love for them--out of a recognition that this beautiful love was something which involves only that one man and one woman. The total gift and total reception of the gift can only be communicated between the two persons involved.

This is not to say that brief moments of tenderness cannot be shared in the sight of others, nor that a man and woman should not allow their tender love to be revealed to the world through the way they interact with each other. However when it becomes an exchange between them which is seeking the depths of the other, even if it is just looking in each other's eyes, they are removing themselves from the levels which are accessible by onlookers, and it becomes a private affair.