"Paul says that it is to be with Christ.

Again, does that imply close intimate fellowship with Jesus?"

 

The answer is definitely, "yes!"  We will have His mind and, as His other half, we will be in His resurrected body.  It doesn't get any more intimate than that.  Before then, anytime He wants a hug, He superimposes the Bride of Christ over someone (I know 'cause that's what He did with me and others).  Up there, the Bride will already be in the body that was crucified and resurrected:  Isa. 26:19, "Thy dead men shall live, together with My dead body shall they arise." 

 

We don't lose our individuality as the Bride of Christ, and can go places and do things separately from that body in Heaven, but we supernaturally make up the corporate Bride when Jesus needs and wants her.  That's why millions of people over time can be represented as one body before God, the other half of Jesus Christ - His Bride.  He has a supernatural way of doing it.  He can relate to us, male or female, individually or corporately as His Bride.

 

Someone had a vision of a dead body dripping with blood lying in the heavens at the Resurrection.  It was Christ's body that had been crucified.  Those being raptured went into it and filled it up before it ascended into Heaven.  Just as God opened Adam to take out a rib to make Eve, so the spear that pierced Christ's body on the cross, from which blood spilled, has over the last 2,000 years been creating a Bride for Christ by all those who accept the blood He shed for them.