Short story about aliens who melt into one another when they are being intimate

Question

I'm looking for a short story that I read many years ago (20-40 years!) about aliens who kind of melt into one another when they are being intimate. Like one could put their hand right through the body of the other and it is a form of sexual contact. It was sweet, not creepy.

Answer 1

I'm going to venture a guess here that this might be the novel The Gods Themselves... by Isaac Asimov. The key point in this story is a pinhole opening (The Pump) to another universe where physical laws were different; in the other universe, the alien species is three gendered, and their sexual congress was all three of them melding together. The story alternates between characters in our universe, and characters in theirs, worrying about leakage of physical laws from one universe to another (sounds strange when expressed that way, but it makes sense in story context). The section involving the aliens could have been seen as something of a short story, but really does not stand alone.

Answer 2

This might also partially match the Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker, published between 1982 and 2000 for the 4 books.

This is a series about competition between human (not alien!) and self-replicating and intelligent robots and their final synthesis of a organic-synthetic hybrid.

Explored through the books are human interactions with technology and each-other, often through the use of drugs, including one drug that allows people to "melt" and if taken with another person (or more than one other) allows them to melt and merge together to have something like a very intense sexual experience. I don't recall if there is a scene where one person passes a hand through another, but certainly body-parts merge.

I wouldn't call the novels at all sweet, including the "melt" scenes. The books overall are quite disturbing and involve a lot of violence, sex, drugs etc.