More About Sex

So this marriage class is giving us a good structure to work through some deep-rooted, difficult issues in our marriage, as well as providing a safe group environment to share some of that in. Two weeks ago, we worked through what it would mean to overcome angry outbursts. Last week, we worked through what it would mean to have a fully fulfilling sexual life—without getting into too much detail, I thought I would continue along the lines of an earlier post about sex in highlighting a few things I learned this week:

It is important and healthy to talk about this with each other. Sex can be one of the hardest things to talk about—we are often brought up without a model or experience of how to talk about it appropriately; we lack the verbage. We may feel embarrassed or haunted by past sins or hurts. We may subconsciously have a difficult time truly believing that sex in its intended nature is entirely good. We often expect our spouses to read our minds in this area in ways we would never expect them to read our minds otherwise. The more we talk openly about it, the easier it becomes and the better our relationship.

Solo sex in marriage is dangerous. I use that term to refer to any sexual experience or thought not involving our spouse—it would be easy to think that all disappears after you get married, but it doesn’t necessarily. If we aren’t careful, it can create a harmful pattern of behavior and drive you apart from your spouse sexually—because you are applying to them norms of sexual behavior you are gleaning from other sources, or conditioning your body to seek arousal or experience pleasure in certain ways that do not involve your spouse, or decreasing your sexual drive or desire for your spouse.

Our sexual life is a relationship, not an event. The world tells us our sex life is not fulfilling unless we are having sex at a certain frequency during which we experience simultaneous climax every time—and especially in our performance-oriented, results-driven, comparative culture, it can get too easy to focus on that. All that is really not the point. We may not need or want to climax every time. Frequency may ebb and flow depending on our needs or circumstances. The point is that we are talking, understanding, learning, growing, basically that we focus on relationship over results.

Never compare. This really goes for any area of what we do together—ministry, parenting, working—but there is no surer way to destroy or devalue what we have together than comparing, comparing ourselves to other couples or what is implied to be normal, comparing each other with other women or men. Maybe because there is so little healthy talk and appropriate community out there about it, we grasp at these comparisons, but in essence what we are doing is doubting God’s sovereignty and goodness, not accepting each other, opening the door to judgment instead of increasing intimacy. Our sex life is a room in which there is only him and me, and God. No one and nothing else.

Invite God in. Invite him into our sexual life. We did that this past week and I felt it was really powerful. Mostly we did that by praying together every night. It brought out clarity of purpose, unearthed important issues to work through. Have you considered what God is trying to say to you about your sexual life? Have you considered how much he cares about this aspect of you and your spouse?