“Jocelyn” and “Danny” come off as unusually integrated, connected, and intimate. They have the feel about them of knowing each other deeply, without facade, and delighting in who each other is.
“So, what’s your secret?” I asked them.
“We sleep naked,” Jocelyn told me. “And Danny gets a full body-to-body naked hug every morning before he jumps in the shower.”
Though they have a very large master bedroom, they sleep in a relatively small full-sized bed. “It looks like a postage stamp in that room,” Jocelyn explains. “But we want to be close all night long.”
Jocelyn and Danny are living embodiments of the power of physical touch and sight to foster marital connection. This desire to connect and enjoy each other helps them avoid one of the most common marital arguments: the nighttime thermostat setting.
“I’ve learned to not care what the temperature is,” Danny told me. “Guys usually think their wives want the temperature set too high and they complain about it being too hot to sleep and then fight to make it colder. But I’d rather Jocelyn feel warm enough to not want to wear any clothes, so I’ve trained myself to not care how hot it is.”
Jocelyn and Danny aren’t newlyweds, by the way. They’ve been married for a decade and a half and in Jocelyn’s words “The sex keeps getting better and better and better.”
That’s not the message we’re getting fed, is it? We live in a culture today that wants to fool us into believing that marriage is where sex goes to die. An enthralling honeymoon and maybe an exciting first year, but then, less sex, less romance, and less fun. We’ve probably all heard the old saying that if a couple puts a penny in a jar for every time they make love the first year of marriage, and then take out a penny every time they make love from the second year on, the jar will never empty. It’s not normal, healthy, or God-honoring for marriage to be this way.
And yet that’s what too many people expect. When a man I had only recently met asked me the title of my next book, I gulped a bit but then answered, “Married Sex.” He responded, “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”
I thought this was so sad, but secretly, I was also grateful he had just given me a great opening joke for when I started speaking on it…
The common lie that it’s “all downhill” after the honeymoon, sexually speaking, allows far too many Christian couples to settle for mediocre or even pathetic sex lives. My co-author, Debra Fileta (a licensed counselor) astonishes me when she tells me how common it is for her to work with couples who haven’t been sexually intimate in years. And she’s not talking about couples in their fifties, sixties or seventies—she’s talking about couples in their twenties and thirties.
Dr. David Schnarch, who was a clinical psychologist and certified sex therapist, pointed out that while our genitals reach peak performance before the age of thirty, “Genital prime and sexual prime are entirely different, each occurring at opposite ends of your life span. People don’t reach their sexual prime until their forties, fifties, or beyond.” A flourishing sexual relationship takes emotional maturity, relational maturity and spiritual health, all of which can take decades to achieve. Schnarch captures the intent of our book perfectly: “If you depend on horniness to carry you through a century of marriage” you’re going to be sorely disappointed. However, if you’re willing to build the kind of life, relationship, and spiritual vitality that energizes sexual intimacy, your best, most satisfying years, sexually speaking, may very well lie ahead of you.
This evil, stupid lie that sex is most enjoyable and active only at the start of a relationship has stolen more marital pleasure than perhaps any other that Satan has concocted. The enemy’s plan is always to subvert God’s plan, which in this case means encouraging people to have as much sex as they can before marriage, and as little sex as possible after marriage. And if sex is one of God’s greatest gifts to us, you can be sure that it will also be one of Satan’s favorite targets to tear down a marriage.
Thankfully, there are couples who are fighting back against this false view of sex, people who believe that God’s plan for sex is better than anything we could have thought up on our own. These couples are marriage “explorers,” determined to traverse, map out, experience and sight-see this wondrous “land” called sexual intimacy in marriage.
Christians should lead the way in this endeavor. We worship God when we enjoy his creation, and sex is part of his creation. But marriage is the necessary context in which sex reaches its supreme beauty. A woman presenting her naked body to her husband in the privacy of their bedroom is a thing of beauty, intimacy and loveliness. A woman walking naked through an airport makes you shudder and assume something is wrong with her mentally. Context is everything. Take sex out of its intended context, and a beautiful movement can become an agent of destruction.
The biblical context for a flourishing sex life is marriage and love. Since God is a God of love, we know that every healthy act of sex must be rooted in love, governed by love, and an expression of love.
The fact that God created sex tells us quite a bit about him, not least of which is that he’s the kind of God who approves of pleasure that feels transcendent. When we clearly know and love God, we can accurately see and understand sex. When we accurately see and understand sex, we can freely enjoy it.
As we’re going to see from God’s word, God loves sex, and therefore, so should we. Scripture affirms time and time again that sex in marriage is not only God’s plan, but it is a splendid gift that it is ours for the taking, and one to be enjoyed through most of our adult days.
If this strikes a chord with you, there are two opportunities for you to further explore this aspect of marriage:
Debra Fileta and I recently finished writing Married Sex: A Christian Couples’ Guide to Reimagining Your Love Life, which will be available October 5 and is now available for pre-order.
On October 2, Debra and I are sponsoring a Married Sex online conference with a stellar line-up of speakers. Our speaker list is truly incredible, featuring speakers like Dave and Anne Wilson, Levi and Jennie Lusko, John and Lisa Bevere, Shaunti Feldhahn, Christine Caine, Drs. Les and Leslie Parrot, Dr. Juli Slattery, Dr. Cory Allen, Ryan and Selena Frederick, and many others. You can find more information (and pre-register) here: https://www.marriedsexconference.com/. Early bird registration ends September 1st, so if you’re interested, you’ll want to sign up soon.
And as you might have guessed, you can expect that this topic will come up much more frequently in this blog in the coming months. It’s my prayer that Christian couples can be known for celebrating and enjoying the wonderful gift of married sex.
It shouldn’t be an oxymoron but it is. At least for many people. I’ve been married for 15 years and sex is nonexistent. When it existed, he only cared about his pleasure. There’re no kind words, no affection and he often makes some snide remarks on how I need to loose weight. I’m neither overweight, nor unattractive but can never be good enough. The thing is, my husband, who is a christian for everyone but me, just does not love me. Not sure that he ever did. At 36 years old, this is a very lonely place to be.
I’m so sorry N. You’re right–the breakdown of the marriage is what is causing the sexual breakdown, and you’ll need to address the marriage before sex can be restored. Again, really sorry. This is heartbreaking
In the same boat N, except its my wife who is the refuser for 30 years. Maybe we’ve averaged 4 times a year over that time. First 2 years – 0 times (yes – from wedding night onwards) – that is, until she decided she wanted a baby. For the last 10 years, about a dozen times.
Why? After numerous counseling sessions it boiled down to: “Its just not who I am” or “I just don’t feel like it, so why should I?” Oh, and I’m a jerk for not accepting that.
Despite all this, I tried. Really tried. Kept my vows. Never refused. Romance, friendship, pursual, etc. Tried everything, and found out, it just doesn’t matter if they other person doesn’t care and its not important to them. So here we are, 30 years later, and just room mates.
The other day out of the blue she goes “I feel like we’re drifting apart.” For once in my married life, I was so shocked that she even said it, and I had a real loss of mental control and a very cruel moment: I laughed at her. “After 30 years of sexual rejection, what did you expect?” I immediately apologized for the way I said that – it WAS cruel – but said I would not apologize for the truth.
So, its not always a “breakdown in the marriage” that causes the sexual breakdown, but vice versa. Sometimes a sexual breakdown can break the marriage too. Too bad the former is given WAY more attention than the latter.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: until the church/pastorate treats married sexual intimacy with importance and the lack of it with condemnation, AND from the pulpit, the church will have no influence whatsoever with not only its own congregation, but with the rest of the culture as well.
That’s a fair comment John: sexual breakdown CAN lead to marital breakdown. I was referring to her particular situation.
What a wonderful read! As a single and abstaining Christian, this gives me so much hope for the future! Thank you so much and may GOD bless you!
Love from Kenya.
So glad you are addressing this topic and had planned to sign up for the conference until we read the conference sessions are only 10-20 minutes each. Those seem unusually short so we wondered if the content would simply be encouraging thoughts or testimonies from the speakers versus in depth teachings of new information. Have always loved your writing and hoping the book will cover the complexity of the issue as I’d love some resource to help my own marriage as well as the marriages of my parishioners. Thx for all you do!
I get what you’re saying Brooks. I know some will be longer than the 20 minutes, as we’ve already started to receive some. We are striving to provide as much in depth teaching as possible. With those people we have selected, I feel confident people will get that. But I understand how the format might make you skeptical.
Always been told sex is for men women just have to put up with it is a duty as well as childbirth.Men get off Scott free . Women have their periods have their emotional up and down men don’t have to deal with it man can enjoy sex more than women though there are some women that can and do enjoy it majority of women do not enjoy sex because they don’t have an orgasm. Someone once said it’s because of Adam and Eve eve took the Apple first so women are punished
Christine, just about everything you’ve been taught is what we’re trying to correct with this book and conference.