Prior to meeting at nineteen, my wife and I lived very worldly lives. She didn’t get serious about following Jesus until two years after we became a couple, and I didn’t even know Christ until a couple of years after that. You might say that from a marriage and intimacy standpoint, we did everything wrong. But even after committing to Christ, we still did a lot of things wrong, and some of them are things the Church continues to promote.
Baggage from previous partners and faulty worldviews caused us to drift along, trying our best to navigate life in Christ while harboring distorted ideas of what intimacy should look like. The Church circles we ran with at the time had a healthy perspective that great marriages and great sex went hand in hand, and we were fortunate to have a pastor then who emphasized that sex was God’s idea, and we (men and women) should enjoy it. But the Christian sex books and teachings we absorbed and promoted from 2001 forward are, well, wrong about a lot of stuff, and they’ve preached intimacy doctrines that often actually harm marriages.
Perhaps the best evidence of this is that Church culture seems to ignore an ugly truth: The vast majority of women rarely if ever get to experience sex as God intended. That is to say, sex should be equally satisfying for women and men most if not all of the time. In fact, it should be better for women (maybe 2 or 3 or even 4 times better, if you get my drift) because God designed women that way. He doesn’t make mistakes; there’s a purpose for that design feature, but most women have resigned themselves to ho-hum experiences and most men are more or less content to leave it that way.
Men of the Church talk a lot about providing for our women—along with keeping the kids secure, it’s kind of our main thing—so why are we so disinterested in providing the best experience possible for our women in the bedroom? For one reason: We’ve never been told we need to. For another: It’s likely to require a lot of work, and not the physical kind.
Godly women have been instructed through decades of books, sermons, and teachings that it’s a woman’s responsibility to go above and beyond in the bedroom for us. We’re now seeing that these modern church doctrines about sex have unintentionally and needlessly wounded a lot of women in several ways. Credit modern researchers and writers like Sheila Wray Gregoire for finally breaking through the fog of the Christian-sex-writer battlefield with hard data and thousands of testimonials.
Gregoire and others are confirming what many Jesus-loving women have been silently enduring for years, my wife included. Husbands need to dial in and face the uncomfortable reality that if we truly want amazing sex, we’ve got some work to do — and it doesn’t begin in the bedroom.
The Talk
Most of this wasn’t on my radar until a few months ago, when my wife texted me an article titled 10 Questions to Ask if She Doesn’t Want Sex. She was sitting on the sofa next to me at the time, and prefaced it with, “Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble,” before she let me know I should read it, because it was an “interesting article” on (admittedly) my favorite subject.
Let me pause here to say that even if you think your sex life is great, it will be well worth your timeto go over to Substack and read that article, if for no other reason than that it will make you a better friend, parent, minister, counselor, or intercessor for others. The prevalence of this among your friends and in your congregations may surprise you. For most of the guys reading this, don’t delay. Odds are you’ve dropped the ball in the bedroom many times over the years, and your wife might be just too wonderful to tell you.
Sexual Sin/Sexual Selfishness
Now guys, I know I’ve dropped the ball aplenty. For one thing, my wife is a type-A Irish Alaskan from a roughneck family who will tell you—in no uncertain terms—when you’ve dropped a ball. She’s petite but her piercing blue eyes are as loud as train horns whenever she needs them to be. For another, I’ve had to confess my fumbles to her more than once. The aforementioned baggage includes several laps around the confession, repentance, forgiveness track when it comes to both sexual sin and run of the mill sexual selfishness.
But in that area, things were humming along pretty well, despite the challenges of eight kids and bodies pushing fifty, including menopause in all of its glory. But after reading the article she forwarded me, I was startled. More importantly, it got me talking to Jesus about it:
Lord, am I blowing it on some of this stuff?
Yup.
Which stuff?
Better ask her.
But..that means she might stop…doing stuff I like.
Yes, she might. Do you care what she likes? Or are you content using her to get what you want?
This was really bad timing for having one of those heart-to-heart sex talks that might cause me to go without for a while. We had just been gifted a two-night B&B stay in town, our first real time away for just the two of us in about twenty years. You can imagine I had, er, expectations for how to spend that time.
But were my plans on par with hers?
Was she looking forward to my plans, or was she secretly dreading them?
A couple of days before the trip I asked her about that article, and whether I was currently blowing it in some of those areas. I knew I’d been guilty of some of those things in the past (like breaking trust) and we’d worked through a bunch of them over the years but…how was the board set currently?
Did she feel the freedom to discuss it honestly with me? And was I ready to receive her honest assessments of those questions with a heart fertile for restoration?
I decided to trust God, and let ‘em rip:
Early in your marriage, did you express frustration, anger, or criticism that your wife wasn’t enjoying sex as much as you were?
— Sheila Wray Gregoire, 10 Questions to Ask if She Doesn’t Want Sex
Have you expressed frustration when she is experiencing physical issues that make sex uncomfortable?
Was sex depersonalizing?
The article asked questions like that, and even more intimate ones about how awesome or not awesome her experiences are.
The Holy Spirit took over, and she managed to speak freely about topics she’d been holding back on. I listened in a way that made her feel safe to divulge everything, something I haven’t always given her the opportunity to do in the past. She cried in relief, we spoke kind words, and God broke something off that had been calcifying too long.
It was a healing conversation, and since then I’ve wanted to shake every guy I know and tell him, “Dude! You’ve got to try this!”
Faulty Wiring, Faulty Rewiring
I came from a secular family, where women were objectified on our walls and every guy over fourteen got a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit calendar for Christmas. Sex wasn’t taboo, far from it. Needless to say, that led to multiple sex partners from a young age, and pornography was just another form of entertainment.
Modern Christianity has a very different take on sex. The Church’s template for courtship and conduct prior to marriage, and for roles and expectations during marriage, may work for a lot of couples. But we’re beginning to recognize that there’s an underlying problem with that template. The Church has unintentionally mirrored the secular sex world in one massive way: Neither are very concerned with how much physical enjoyment the woman gets out of it.
That needs to change, because God never intended for women to be unsatisfied in any room of the house, but especially in the one she should be most able to find satisfaction, rest, and reward in.
So here are those sex tips I mentioned earlier, the ones I wish I’d known thirty years ago but I’m glad I’m finally attuned to:
Confess any sexual sin you’ve been burying. The bill always comes due and you might as well clamp off the compounding interest on the debt of shame. If you need accountability to do this, email me or a God-fearing buddy to help you make it happen.
Ask God to reveal sex issues you’ve been deaf about. Those issues will likely be confirmed by her later, so wrestling with God about them now will set the table for a healing conversation later on.
Read that article I linked above, and ask your wife to do the same.
Find a quiet time to sit down and discuss the topics raised. Don’t have it while kids are running around, and certainly don’t bring it up on a night where you hope to get lucky.
Listen quietly and let her take as much time as she needs to open up. This might take a few minutes or several lengthy conversations over many days. Man up and take it.
Also, get some exercise. No, you’re not going to get tight abs overnight, but start by at least making a concerted effort. Just knowing you’re trying will be a huge first step.
There are plenty more, but let’s just start with these for now.
When assessing the success or failure of modern Church teaching about sex, the details are pretty important. The data indicates (and yes, there is data) that the Christian Church’s sex intelligentsia haven’t been doing our women many favors.
The notion that men are near primitive, sexual beings who need it to survive is insulting to men. Likewise, the idea that good Christian women just need to grin and bear mediocre (or incredibly uncomfortable) sex whether they want it or not runs counter to the manner in which Jesus elevated women in every other sphere.
Young wives just starting out need to know that sex should be great for her, too. If sex isn’t even as good as it is for young husbands, men need to understand why that is, and make some adjustments early on.
I truly wish I’d known to ask those questions earlier, and spared my wife years of thinking there was something wrong with her for not enjoying intimacy as God intended with me.
For those of us who’ve been in this marriage game a while, maybe you believe things are great. But isn’t it worth spending time to find out if things could be better? Maybe a lot better?
On the other side of the spectrum, there might be layers of unconfessed anguish that God wants to root out of both of you. If you’re a pastor or leader, ask the Lord if it’s worth challenging the men under your influence to consider these questions with their own wives.
God wants husbands and wives to win, and win big, in every room of the house. Most women don’t — less than 30% in fact. It’s not always fun to talk about that, and even less fun to address it, but as with everything associated with love and marriage, hard work brings the greatest rewards.
Fortunately in this area, the two hardest parts are the ones you can get over with right at the beginning: Ask your woman, “How are we doing in the bedroom?” And then shut up and listen.
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