Opening Note
No one is an expert on your life or your marriage besides you and God. The research behind this book represents thousands of hours of clinical work and study, but if something here works for 97 percent of couples, you just might be one of the 3 percent. If something doesn’t feel right for your story, your marriage, or your spouse, it might not be. It will fit someone else. Just step around it.
This book as a whole may not be right for you at the moment. Some couples want help in their sex life but are not yet ready to work on something that intimate. They may first need to manage generalized anxiety or treat depression—both of which biologically short-circuit healthy sexuality—or work on healing trauma, or address an unhealthy power balance in the marriage, or a spouse who doesn’t truly honor them. Other issues may simply need to come first. Read what follows with that in mind.
Chapter 1 — What We Want—And How to Get There
Over thirty thousand hours caring for individuals and couples in counseling—the vast majority of those hours focused on sexual issues—alongside more than two thousand four hundred hours of professional education in sexuality and sex therapy, plus a scholarly library’s worth of reading and research in textbooks and professional journals preparing lectures to train others. In the early 2000s, those conversations helped give rise to Sexual Wholeness, Inc., where Christian sex therapists are trained and certified today. Hundreds of pastors and therapists have received training through ten seminaries and venues around the world.
That background matters here because what follows is not armchair theory. The research is rigorous and representative across people of all religious beliefs and of none at all—and it is also research widely used by churches and faith-based organizations. These pages approach life from a Christian perspective, which you will see reflected at several points, though the truths carry value regardless of your starting point. This book is designed to be more practical than theological. But sex itself will be far richer if a couple rightly understands it as sacred and created for a sacramental purpose.
Eight areas of confusion and misunderstanding consistently surface in couples’ lives around sexuality—and the surprising truths from the research help us understand our spouse, understand ourselves, and reach a new level of intimacy. Additional resources for couples and leaders are available at secretsofsexandmarriage.com.
One thing to hold before diving in: although no one wants to feel like the only partner trying to work on the marriage, many troubled relationships have been transformed by the power of a one-sided choice. You cannot change your spouse; you can only change yourself. That means loving and pursuing your spouse in the ways you can, and trusting God to work in the ways you can’t. Your spouse will have to decide what they will do—you are not responsible for that. But you give yourself the best possible chance of heading where you want to go if you follow God’s charge to do what you can do.
Chapter 2 — What Are Married Couples Up to in the Bedroom?
Does sex really matter so much to a marriage? The data give a clear answer: yes, it really does. In many ways, just as oil is the lubricant of an internal combustion engine—preventing the constant friction of moving parts from destroying it—the sexual relationship can be the lubricant in a marriage. Neurochemical shifts and positive feelings help reduce relational friction. A protective sense of togetherness and powerful connection can be created. The causes of friction still exist—two different people doing life together—but the sexual relationship ideally helps buffer the rough edges. The problem is that sex doesn’t always work that way. In some marriages it doesn’t act as the lubricant it is supposed to be, and in others it becomes a cause for distress.
Most of us care for our spouse and are trying hard. But when operating under wrong assumptions, we try hard in the wrong areas. We may be pursuing fixes that will never work, or putting effort into things that simply don’t matter to our spouse as much as we think. The wrong assumptions we carry—from media, culture, or a hundred other sources—include significant gaps in knowledge, blind spots, and flat-out misinformation that are getting in the way of the great intimate life we want. We have to shift our focus to what is accurate and true.
The first wrong assumption is that we are not normal—and especially that our spouse is not normal. The truth is that most couples are far more normal than they think. Because sex is one of the few areas where we rarely compare notes even with our closest friends, it is easy to feel like we are one of few couples dealing with something. By “normal” we primarily mean typical or common—and that doesn’t always mean something is ideal or optimal.
The average frequency for all couples falls right at one and a third times per week, or four times every three weeks. Twenty-three percent of couples have sex less than once a month or not at all; twenty-eight percent report one to three times per month; twenty-nine percent report one to two times per week; and fifteen percent say three to six times a week. Then there is the robust four percent who have sex daily or more. Nationally, among couples who are sexually active, seventy-eight percent practice oral sex—thirty-seven percent most of the time and forty percent some of the time—and the numbers are similar for churchgoers. Eighty-two percent of men enjoy receiving oral sex, while only thirty-eight percent of women enjoy giving it. Sixty percent of women enjoy receiving it, while seventy percent of men enjoy giving it. Even when a spouse doesn’t naturally enjoy giving oral sex, many take genuine delight in giving delight when their partner enjoys it.
Many people arrive at their marriage bed with wrong expectations about orgasm. The average male reaches orgasm in 5.4 minutes of intercourse. The average female takes fourteen minutes—almost three times as long. Climaxing together may be wonderful when it happens but is usually a poor goal. One couple, distressed because the husband was reaching orgasm far sooner than his wife, didn’t know these numbers; armed with accurate information, they were able to develop realistic goals and remove the patterns of shame, blame, and unhealthy belief that had blocked them, which allowed them to relax into playfulness and intimacy. Thirty-one percent of women and nine percent of men say they only occasionally reach orgasm—and sometimes don’t at all. Many people assume intercourse is enough stimulation for most women to climax. For roughly forty percent of women, it isn’t; they require something other than intercourse, and clitoral stimulation doubles the chance of orgasm. Yet forty-nine percent of survey-takers didn’t know that. One study found a structural factor at play: the greater the distance between the vaginal opening and the clitoral glans, the less likely intercourse alone can lead a woman to climax.
Pain is another area that deserves attention rather than dismissal. Twelve percent of men and a full thirty-two percent of women experience pain at least every third time they have sex, and fifty-eight percent of women have pain occasionally. Yet forty to fifty percent of women with chronic sexual pain don’t seek help. Pushing through pain causes the body to tense up and create more pain. Sex is ultimately designed to bring spouses together in oneness, and when that is the focus, climaxes are put in the right perspective: they are great, but they aren’t the goal. There is still great sexual pleasure available without intercourse. Think of two teenagers making out in the back seat of a car who have decided they will not have sex or genital touch—they can still be powerfully aroused and even climax. That same possibility exists years down the road when perimenopause brings dryness or when erectile difficulties begin. Exploring all the options for erotic, arousing connection may be part of the solution; when a husband gets more creative, the arousal is often high enough that the dryness lessens.
The second wrong assumption is that having consistent sex—or not—doesn’t really impact the marriage. In fact, it does, and significantly. Couples in low-sex or no-sex marriages (having sex less than once a month) are much more likely to be struggling in many other ways. As a baseline, forty-three percent of couples are happy with how often they have sex, thirty-three percent fall somewhere in the middle, and twenty-four percent are unhappy with their frequency. Among couples happy with their frequency, ninety-four percent are also happy in their marriage. Among those who feel neutral, seventy percent are happy. And among those who are unhappy with their frequency, only thirty-five percent are happy in marriage. A spouse who is unhappy about how often they have sex is ten times more likely to also be unhappy in their marriage overall. Whether that’s because sex leads to marital happiness, or because being happy in marriage makes sex more likely, it’s probably both—but either way, it must be taken seriously.
Several factors predict satisfaction with frequency. Couples are much more likely to be happy with how often they have sex if they are having it once a week or more: sixty-two percent of such couples are happy, compared with only twenty-five percent of those at one to three times a month, and just nine percent of those having sex less than once a month. Couples with roughly similar levels of desire are also far more likely to be satisfied. Among those reporting equal or similar desire, eighty-two percent are happy with frequency—but that number drops to only eighteen percent for marriages where one partner has significantly higher or lower desire. The third factor is whether the partners can communicate well about sex.
The third wrong assumption is that difficulty talking about sex is acceptable—that actions speak louder than words. But without the words, you may not be getting as much action. The problem is that most of us don’t talk about sex as well as we think. Forty-nine percent of survey-takers initially claimed they talked about sexual issues whenever they needed to, without awkwardness or difficulty. But nearly half of those same people then answered other questions in ways that placed them in exactly the opposite category—saying it was definitely not easy to talk about what they wanted, or that they would not want their hesitant spouse to bring it up either. People who can talk about sex with their spouse have significantly more sex; people who find it awkward or avoid it altogether have much less sex. And those who talk about sex well are far more likely to be happy in their marriage.
Miscommunication is common and costly. A husband feeling distant might press harder for intimacy as a way of saying, “I feel totally disconnected from you, and sex would help me feel close again.” Because he’s not actually saying that, what she may hear is that he only wants to use her body and doesn’t really want her. Imagine if he could say, out loud, “I miss you. I don’t like not feeling close to you. That’s why I’m hoping to be intimate with you.” And if she could say, “But every night you’re gaming with the guys instead of hanging out with me. I need to feel close to you outside the bedroom first.” They simply needed to figure out how to connect well—to talk with compassion and empathy rather than anger, and to see each other’s hearts as they discussed what was running under the surface.
The first step is to examine these three wrong assumptions and recognize which ones show up in your own thinking. Perhaps you need to consider whether your spouse’s once-a-week desire is just as normal as your daily desire, and stop subconsciously treating them as deficient. Maybe you quietly recognize that your spouse is right to be concerned about how little sex you’ve had recently. Maybe you’ve been dismissive of their pain and need to encourage them to address it. Or perhaps you need to start talking about sex willingly instead of with avoidance, embarrassment, or anger. Ask your spouse to examine the same list and share what matters most to each of you. If you are both willing, read this book together, pausing often to discuss what applies. Be willing to hear your partner without defensiveness or blame. Feelings of fault or failure may exist, but joint problem-solving won’t happen if either of you is venting anger or being overly defensive. For the vast majority, simple shifts like these—trying hard in the right areas—will make a big difference.
Chapter 3 — What We See
Creating a healthy intimate life starts with what happens in your mind, not with what happens in the bedroom. It is a crucial neuroscientific principle: what you focus on is what you will see. And what you see changes everything about how you respond to your spouse—since it is what you are responding to. It is easy to focus on what’s not meeting our expectations. That’s usually why couples reach out for help—for desire discrepancies, the impact of trauma, conflict over practices, body parts not working the way people think they should. Yet ironically, an intense focus on the problems will only snarl things up and won’t result in healing.
Picture what happens when a car accident causes a traffic jam on the highway. Traffic backs up for miles as drivers slow down to look at the wreck, but as soon as you are past it and looking forward to where you are going, you speed up and everything flows. It works the same way in marriage—and is especially important with the sensitive issues of our sex life. If we want a hopeful, encouraging marriage, we have to shift our focus forward and be vision-oriented—what good future are we aiming for in our sexual relationship?—rather than simply tackling each problem in turn. One of the most important homework exercises for struggling couples is to create a sexual vision. Not just to say, “Here’s how often we want to do it,” but to flesh it out. How often do you want to cuddle? Do you want playful sex, erotic sex, functional sex, or what is an ideal mix of each? What are ideal practices? Essentially, what will be fun, intimate, connecting, and healthy for you as a couple? Use that as the goal toward which you aim.
When we are hurt by our spouse—as all of us will be—we have a tendency to believe negative things about their intentions. We see the motivations we most fear: my husband said he was sorry, but it was only to stop the fight; my wife doesn’t really appreciate all I do. With sex, we might believe, if my spouse really cared about me, they would want to have sex more—or conversely, my spouse cares more about sex than about me. In all cases the subtle internal belief is the same: my spouse doesn’t really care about me or what I need. Shaunti Feldhahn and Jeff Feldhahn, in their earlier research book The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages, surveyed 1,261 people and found that only 9 of them—just 0.7 percent—had stopped caring about their spouse. The rest, 99.3 percent, loved their spouse and wanted the best for them. Even in the most struggling relationships, 97 percent still deeply cared.
In a marriage where spouses truly care about each other, outward negativity often stems from emotional pain, not from a lack of love or a desire to hurt. And if you want a happy marriage, you have to let yourself believe your spouse cares—which is usually the first step in arresting the negative cycle and creating a positive one instead. When it comes to sex, believing a negative narrative is far more toxic to the marriage than actual sexual difficulties. Michael Sytsma’s doctoral research found that the difference in how much sex spouses wanted didn’t predict much distress. The greatest predictor of marital distress related to desire differences was whether the high-desire spouse believed something wrong about the thoughts and feelings of the low-desire spouse—for example, incorrectly believing that “they never want to have sex with me.” Rather than assuming your spouse only cares about their own needs, try telling yourself: my spouse may not know how to show it, but they may actually care more about my sexual pleasure than their own. Which, in fact, is usually true.
When your spouse’s actions are hurtful, another question is worth asking: do those actions stem from a bad heart, or bad skill? There is a big difference. A husband or wife may be poorly skilled in their ability to love their spouse well—but skill can be taught. The question is, can you focus on their heart while they are learning the skill? Consider one woman whose husband was genuinely emotionally absent and empathically clueless. They were working on his unhealthy behavior. But on her side, she had also become damagingly critical. She was invited to a different perspective: can you focus on his heart instead of how he is acting, and respond with that in mind? Her preteen son came to mind. She said she would never respond to her son with the same level of harshness. “I’ve got a good kid,” she recognized, “and he doesn’t know exactly how to handle things yet and needs to learn.” She was right not to crucify her son for lack of skill—and it wasn’t helpful to do that to her husband either. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, and autism can all lead to behavior that looks like a lack of care when it is actually a lack of capacity in that moment.
Nearly half (48 percent) of survey-takers said they felt self-conscious about their spouse seeing them naked, worried their spouse would be turned off by their imperfections. Yet seventy-three percent of those same people said they themselves wanted to see their spouse naked. Nearly all the others—twenty-four percent, predominantly women—said they didn’t care either way but were not turned off by their spouse’s imperfections. Just two percent said they were actually turned off. The fear of being seen is almost never matched by the reality of how a spouse responds.
When couples ask “Can we ______?” about any practice in the bedroom, it is usually the wrong question. Assuming an external rule—or lack of one—will bring clarity and solve the problem gives too much power to technique and too little to the heart. Look at the heart as you and your spouse decide together what is healthy for the two of you. If a practice makes either of you feel uncomfortable or upset, it is robbing your marriage bed of force and vigor. If it is a cause for contention, hasn’t truly been mutually decided upon, or if one party is making the other feel guilty for not going along, it is doing the same. Anything sexual that doesn’t feel good afterward—emotionally, physically, relationally—for both of you isn’t good sex, no matter how it fits one spouse’s fantasy or how intense the climax is. Bringing a third party, including imagery, into the bedroom is always eventually damaging and is inconsistent with Scripture. Be cautious of any solo practices that turn your heart away from your spouse. Erotica and pornography may seem harmless to some, but fantasies about someone other than your spouse dilute the sacredness and distract the heart—and can set up expectations that will eat at your intimate life and the pleasure you find together.
God clearly designed sex for pleasure, but it is richer than just pleasure. If your goal is powerful pleasure, you might have only okay sex; but if your goal is intimate connection and oneness, then great sex is more likely to come along with it. Both science and Scripture speak to the overwhelming importance of a right focus. The Bible calls this having a healthy eye. Jesus said, “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.” In a letter written from prison, the Apostle Paul prescribed a way to retrain the eye: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
Chapter 4 — You Are Not Broken
In general, for men, desire leads to sex; but for women, generally, sex leads to desire. This overall understanding is the key to unlocking immense freedom and enjoyment. You are simply built differently. Your spouse is not broken—and neither are you.
The type of desire we see on television—the “I’m hungry for sex with you” feeling—is called initiating desire. That seems to be the image of the “right” kind of sexual desire. But this type describes only four in ten people. In only five percent of couples do both spouses work this way. In other words, in 95 percent of marriages, at least one spouse does not normally feel desire and then pursue it. The second primary type is called receptive desire. The key characteristic is that this person is open to sex but, for various reasons, simply doesn’t think about sex as often and feels desire in a different order. A third type applies to a smaller number of people—about seven percent—and signals the need for more specialized attention: resistant desire. People with resistant desire experience it across a spectrum, from an unwillingness to engage to a consistent avoidance of sex, all the way to a fear or hatred of sex. As with all matters of sexual desire, resistant desire is complex.
The most common question among higher-desire spouses goes something like this: why isn’t my spouse as interested in sex as I am? The answer lies in the order of events. For those with receptive desire, the feeling of desire is experienced later in sexual engagement, not at the beginning. This person usually decides to get sexually engaged, begins to get aroused, views the arousal as positive, and then feels the sense of sexual desire their initiating partner felt from the very beginning—often five or ten minutes into the sexual play. Because of their physiological makeup, most with receptive desire must make a decision to get sexually engaged, and then a few minutes later are glad they did. This is not about choosing to have sex when you actively don’t want it, which could be wounding. It occurs when the receptive person looks ahead and realizes they will want it. As one woman put it, “I will engage in sex for my husband’s sake, knowing I will get in the mood eventually. Then things are usually great!” This pattern is nearly twice as common among women—seventy-three percent—as among men, where it applies to thirty-eight percent.
If we don’t recognize that these two types of desire exist, one or both partners might assume the person with receptive desire needs to change—that their desire is too low. In fact, the level of desire is a completely different topic. The goal is to work with the type of desire each of us has to come together well, for the health of our intimate life and the marriage.
Sometimes feelings and actions diverge. You may feel desire but take on the receptive role and wait for your spouse to initiate because you don’t want to be pushy—this is the case for twenty-seven percent of men and twenty-four percent of women. Or you don’t feel desire, but you initiate because it’s been a few days and you know it’s important for your marriage. This is called intentional desire, and it is an important pattern of action for many couples.
Giving a receptive partner advance notice—creating anticipation time—can help bridge the gap between the two desire types and give the receptive partner space to begin engaging mentally before anything physical begins.
How we handle a mismatch is more important than the physiological difference itself. If the higher-desire spouse responds negatively to a mismatch—pouting, getting angry, distancing, or sulking—it can be destructive to the sex life, pushing even receptive desire out of the picture entirely. A wife who was originally interested in having sex might look over at that reaction and think: but not with that. None of this is sexy or appealing. Curiosity is the antidote. Curiosity is incompatible with contempt, criticism, blame, and a host of other destructive stances—especially when talking about sex with your spouse.
Suppose you wish there was more sex happening, but you are also receptive rather than initiating. If your spouse is also receptive, you now realize they probably aren’t going to initiate in the way you’d love—which means more sex probably won’t happen unless you initiate or both of you come up with another solution. The key is to stop being on opposite sides of the table negotiating who does what and how often, and instead sit on the same side and figure out creative solutions together—for example, scheduling sex. On this topic, realize: “I’m never not going to have to work on this thing.” The person who doesn’t think about making love as much may not be naturally drawn toward that thought—but they need to do things that bring sex to mind. And the person who does think about sex may not be naturally drawn toward the attention their spouse needs outside the bedroom—and may need to purposefully work every day on things like affirming their spouse, listening, and speaking their partner’s love language. Simply expect that you will always need to work on this.
Chapter 5 — “I Want You to Want Me”
Conflict or distress around sexual desire is normal in marriage. If you are experiencing tension in this area, you are far from alone. A different level of desire also doesn’t mean a lack of desire. If the type of desire can be compared to a car being in drive, neutral, or reverse, the level of desire can be compared to the fuel in the car. Sometimes, when one partner isn’t moving, the issue is that they are in neutral instead of drive. They have plenty of fuel—it just hasn’t been activated yet.
Both spouses want connection, pleasure, and intimacy—and often in roughly similar frequency—but they approach it differently. They may each need something different to keep their fuel levels up, or they might want to use their fuel in completely different ways: one person may want a leisurely drive, while the other wants a high-speed chase. Often those differences are getting in the way rather than a truly large gap in desire level. It is crucial to grasp this, since the incorrect belief that you are far apart in desire can cause far more distress than the actual differences—which are often not as wide as you think.
Very often, the issue isn’t that one person is getting less sex than they want. It is that both people are getting less sex than they want. When you are dissatisfied with how much sex you are getting, it is very easy to think, pouting in the corner, that your spouse is completely fine with it. That’s probably not true. When neither spouse is getting as much sex as they’d like, it completely changes the dynamic. Instead of feeling like one or both of the people need to be fixed, you can try to figure out the problem that’s getting in the way. Instead of the higher-desire person asking why aren’t you having sex, both need to ask: why aren’t we having sex? Is one partner always up late cleaning the kitchen while the other falls asleep before they make it to bed? Perhaps a shared solution—both partners cleaning up together—means both go to bed at the same time. You can put yourselves on the same team to solve a joint problem and reduce distress together.
Overall, higher-desire spouses tend to be more distressed than their lower-desire or equal-desire counterparts—which makes it all the more important to treat desire differences as a shared problem rather than one person’s failure. The lower-desire spouse rarely thinks of themselves as holding power in their sex life. And yet the higher-desire spouse tends to wish they had a way to make sex happen more often, creating an unintentional power struggle that can tear at the foundation of marriage. If you are the lower-desire spouse, realize: you actually hold much of the power in your sex life. Once a lower-desire spouse realizes their power and leans into it purposefully, the marriage has the potential to become particularly playful and rich.
It is also worth remembering that your spouse’s lower desire doesn’t mean you aren’t desirable. It is easy for the higher-desire spouse to internalize a refusal as a commentary on their appeal. Separating your spouse’s desire level from your own worth is essential. And while sex is something couples may deeply long for, the research has tried and failed—from multiple angles—to prove that sex is a need in the way food and water are needs. Without food and water, we die. Without human connection, we suffer and fail to thrive. Sex is not in that same category. When we assert that sex is a need, it implies we have to have it. Not true. It is a God-designed drive we are called to discipline for good. That said, choosing not to make sex a priority is no more acceptable than demanding it. When you choose not to work on sexual intimacy, you put unhealthy selfish desires ahead of the good of your marriage and your spouse—which will always be destructive.
Desire is not a static thing. Childbirth, a new job, new seasons of life, disease, medications, trauma, and aging all change our bodies and typically impact desire negatively. Sleep, exercise, sunlight, and healthy diet are physical changes that can positively impact desire. Being regularly sexually stimulated—through sexual activity or anticipation of it—actually raises levels of testosterone, one of the chemicals facilitating desire. Conversely, forgoing sex causes testosterone levels to drop, creating a vicious cycle: less sex leads to lower desire, which leads to even less sex, which leads to even lower desire. But encouragingly, choosing to have sex can create a positive cycle that becomes self-sustaining.
Get curious and ask each other the basics. Assume you don’t know what your spouse will say. How often do each of you want sex? Ask each other what matters and what you could do—what would most fill your tank, and your partner’s? Try forty days of a chosen pattern—weekly, every other day, or twice a week—and see if you find one that works for both of you. For multiple reasons, couples generally benefit from keeping engagement at once a week or more. And listen for the surprise that can come out of a season like this. As one husband reflected: “I finally realized—my spouse is choosing me. She doesn’t feel the physical urge as strongly as I do, and she is choosing me anyway. That is radical. It makes me feel loved and desired—even though the desire is different from what I thought I wanted. It makes me so thankful for her.”
Chapter 6 — Sexual Healing
All of us have insecurities hidden deep inside, and the acute ones beg for comfort. When we hear, “This thing you’re especially insecure about? You don’t have to be. You’re amazing,” the emotional impact is profound.
Across twenty years of research around the globe, it is clear that certain important emotional factors—the deepest fears and desires in our hearts—simply tend to be different between most men and most women. In general, the core insecurities for women are these: am I loveable? Special? Beautiful? Am I worthy of being loved for who I am on the inside? These questions aren’t answered positively just because a woman gets married to a great man or even has her picture on the cover of a magazine. They morph into: does he really love me? Does he think I’m beautiful? Almost seven in ten women—68 percent—said these kinds of thoughts were occasionally or often in their mind. This is why most women feel an emotional need to feel loved and cherished, beautiful and special, pursued and wanted. Whatever makes her feel that way—which could be as simple as texting “I love you” in the middle of her workday—isn’t just nice but powerful, because it speaks affirmation directly to the area of greatest insecurity. That is why the Cinderella scene touches the hearts of women who long ago set aside fairy tales: it tugs at a deep longing to be someone who is worth going after, and special enough that her man takes delight in pursuing her.
In general, the most acute insecurity in the heart of men is not “Am I loveable?” but “Am I able?” Am I adequate? Do I have what it takes? Am I any good at what I do? These questions aren’t resolved just because a man is a great dad or a famous CEO. They morph into: does she believe I’m a great dad? Is she proud of me? Does she see what I’ve done and say it is good? Men tend to project an “I’ve got this covered” confidence, but privately say it is just a mask. Three out of four men—76 percent—surveyed for The Male Factor said, “I am not always as confident as I look.” That underground self-doubt is so painful that most men shy away from feeling it at all costs—especially with their wife. Three in four men on the For Women Only survey, asked to make a choice, said that feeling inadequate was far more painful than feeling unloved: they would give up feeling their wife loved them if they could feel that she respected them. Women rightly point out that they need respect too—but most women, if forced to choose, would not give up feeling loved to get respect. Most men would.
This is why most men feel a powerful longing to be appreciated and respected—to feel admired and believed in, to hear that what they just did was good. Whatever makes him feel that way—which can be as simple as saying, “Thank you for cleaning up the kitchen”—isn’t just nice but powerful, because it speaks affirmation directly to the area of greatest insecurity. That is why the video of Seth Small’s wife rooting her husband on to do something incredible, leaping a wall to find him at the finish line, so unexpectedly touches the hearts of men: it tugs at a deep longing to be noticed for accomplishing something good—and to have the most important person in his life be that proud of him.
It is not your responsibility to make your spouse feel good about themselves, nor their responsibility to do the same for you. Each of us is responsible for our own view of self—ideally, as we seek our most fundamental identity from the One who created us. Each of us must fight our own battle against insecurity; winning that struggle is on us, not our spouse. And yet as each of us looks at our spouse, out fighting their own battle, we provide them ammunition—on the side of confidence or on the side of insecurity. Speaking life into each other’s area of deep vulnerability is a God-given opportunity to affirm one another well.
Both spouses deeply want to feel close to one another. But the order of intimacy that most creates that connection may be different. As you approach your spouse for sexual connection, these are often the subconscious thoughts running beneath the surface: women tend to think, we can do that once you touch my heart; men tend to think, you touch my heart by doing that. Women want to feel cherished, loved, immensely appealing, close, and attended to. Men want to feel wanted, appreciated, immensely desirable, close, and that you can’t keep your hands off them. When women are hurt, they tend to withdraw sexually. When men are hurt, they tend to withdraw emotionally. When a woman’s heart is cared for, she is more likely to be sexually open, sensual, and playful. When a man’s heart is cared for, he is more likely to be emotionally warm, attentive, and tender.
Your attention to her outside the bedroom—throughout the day, including in the kitchen over breakfast—sets the stage for her interest in your attention inside the bedroom. This is not about jumping through hoops to get the prize. As you do things that give your wife a positive answer to the question “Am I loveable?”—holding her hand, texting “you’re beautiful,” noticing her—she feels cared for, and it helps her feel close to you. As one woman explained: “If he’s not listening or valuing me during the day, then I don’t want him to put his arms around me at night. Because what he’s doing is untrue. That affection feels like a farce. And that goes both ways. If I’m being critical or condescending to him and then say, ‘Let’s get into bed,’ he wouldn’t like that either.”
For men, sex is probably not just about the physical act—it is also about feeling that his wife desires him. Feeling desired speaks reassurance at a very deep level to his hidden insecurities. One wife once asked about men and sex: “No matter what is going on, it’s like the cure for everything. He’s depressed? I have sex with him—he’s fine. Angry with the kids? I have sex with him—he’s fine. Bad day at work? Sex—he’s fine!” The response: you are never responsible for changing him with your body or otherwise. But it sounds like you’re realizing that you have great power in his life—you can press the reset button on your husband any time. A second truth is that sex likely helps your man feel close to you. If he feels disconnected, if he senses distance during the day, he may reach out for you sexually to address that discomfort. You may think it is crazy that he wants sex when you are at odds—and not realize that he is reaching for you because you are at odds. When he has an orgasm with you, oxytocin—a bonding hormone—is released in his brain, and he feels close to you again. Beyond these core gender patterns, other personal insecurities—about body image, past experiences, performance, or unrelated life stressors—can also shape how each spouse feels about and engages with sexual intimacy.
Chapter 7 — The Magic Touch
Imagine three kids entering a playroom. One makes a beeline to the toys they always play with and doesn’t look at anything else. The second child is haughty and critical of each toy and task in the room. The face of the third shows delight and wonder as they try old toys and explore new ones. When something doesn’t work, they don’t get irritated or back off—instead, they get an I wonder if… look on their face and examine it in a different way. If you could choose just one of those kids as a playmate, which would you choose? More important: if you had to be one of those three children, which would you choose to be?
As Albert Einstein once explained, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” Curiosity is a thirst to know or learn something. Once you cultivate the desire to learn the intimate things that make your spouse tick, curiosity truly is a sexual superpower. A simple, sincere, inquisitive approach to your spouse can be even more impactful than a vast array of sexual knowledge or perfect technique. A healthy curiosity is focused on continually discovering your spouse—working to understand them, to learn them. What matters to your spouse most, in and out of the bedroom? What do they really enjoy and what do they merely tolerate? What have they avoided telling you because they were worried it would hurt your feelings?
The research makes the case concisely: if your spouse views you as curious, you are both more than three times as likely to be very happy with how often you have sex. In fact, the more your spouse views you as curious, the more often you are likely to have sex, period. The message being received by routine, lack of remembering, or indifference is clear—I’m not curious about you, and don’t really care about you. That perception may not be accurate at all, but it is what the spouse hears. By contrast, those who praised their spouse sexually frequently used the word “considerate”—and being considerate is nearly synonymous with knowing and acting on what matters to the other person, which requires curiosity to begin with. When your wife seems unaroused, rather than pulling away because you feel like you failed, you accept the challenge and curiously ask what might work. When your husband seems passive, you neither pull back nor overcompensate—you curiously ask, what’s up? What would help you want to engage?
Curiosity also reduces anxiety and makes sex more playful and erotic. Consider a wife who didn’t feel competent performing oral sex. She said, “I don’t know how. I feel clumsy. And I feel like he’s comparing me to previous partners.” Though her husband insisted he loved being with her in that way, she was bound up by anxiety—not truly opposed to the idea, but afraid. The suggestion was to shift from a fear-based “I don’t know how” mindset to a curious “I wonder” mindset: rather than trying to do oral sex and get it right, approach it as play, discovery, exploration. Does this feel good? What happens when I do this? Her face shifted immediately to a curious expression as she considered it. “That right there,” came the response. “That feeling you’re having is curiosity. You’re considering what it would be like to approach it differently. If you can hang on to that feeling through the play, you can at least discover if you like it.” She ended up enjoying it once it became about exploring rather than performing.
A posture of ongoing curiosity also prevents your intimate life from falling into ruts. It keeps you attentive to shifts in what your spouse enjoys, to new possibilities you haven’t tried, and to subtle cues you might otherwise overlook. And it is simpler to demonstrate than you may think—mostly a mindset that becomes a habit. It starts with a humility that acknowledges you don’t know it all, and you especially don’t know everything about your spouse, which fosters a willingness to keep your eyes open and try to figure out answers over time.
If you need help talking, read a book together out loud. Take turns reading and use the book as the excuse to discuss sexual things. As one wife described: “I’ve been reluctant to share certain things because I want to give him affirmation rather than making him feel like I’m being critical—‘try this, not that.’ But when we finally read a book together, it was like, ‘Now this isn’t personal. We’re being invited into this conversation; we can blame it on the author!’ We were suddenly tackling a problem together and were on the same page working it out.” And there is a kind of grace in trying at all. A thought often attributed to A. W. Tozer suggests that God knows we cannot begin to understand his true nature but loves the fact that we try, in whatever capacity we can. The same spirit applies in marriage. My hope is that even though I try and fumble about and ask silly questions and try again, that she would give me grace in that effort, even though I’m a twit. There’s mystery to her that I’m not sure I’ll ever fully understand—but so much more intimacy comes from trying.
Chapter 8 — Getting Started
When there’s a sense of disappointment, pressure, or frustration in a couple’s sex life—a feeling of “I never know what answer I’m going to get”—we tend to think the issue is about someone’s sex drive. In reality, it may be about initiation.
Living seductively also means not letting your worst self come out with your spouse. Maybe you realize you have to stop treating your spouse like another child to be managed, or fight off irritation that they didn’t notice the work you put in on the lawn. Maybe you fight the temptation to be cold in bed because you’re hanging on to anger about something said over breakfast, or to act like a martyr when asked to run an errand when you’re tired. You know you can fight your less-than-appealing natural tendencies because you already do. At work, at church, homeschooling the kids, or planning a community event, you don’t demand the things you want. You draw them out—from colleagues, from friends—by bringing your best self to the party. You need to apply the same skill with your spouse.
The first skill is sending a signal to create a spark. Sparks can be verbal (“Wanna get naked?”) or nonverbal, beginning to caress more private areas. They can be very direct—beginning to unbutton clothing—or more indirect, like taking an evening shower and not being in a hurry to get pajamas on. One husband discovered that his wife really valued his effort to equally share the chores, and that if he explicitly flirted with her while doing the dishes or before going out to clean the gutters, it gave them both “anticipation time” and was their start to the sexual process, even if it happened hours later. His wife said, “Instead of foreplay, we call it choreplay.”
The second skill is making sure the signal isn’t just being sent but received well. It isn’t enough to make a move—you need to stay attuned to whether your spouse is actually receiving and understanding the signal you intend. The third skill is clarifying what you are sparking. Think of intimate touch as falling into three categories: basic cuddling, something you could do in front of others; making out, something arousing that you wouldn’t do in front of others but that is not orgasm-focused; and sex, which is orgasm-focused. There is real value in you and your spouse developing shared language for these categories so you can figure out what level of touch you are aiming for. “I don’t think I have the energy for sex, but I would love to cuddle” is a sentence that could prevent enormous misunderstanding—especially when the higher-desire spouse is simply looking for a cuddle but their partner resists because they assume he or she is looking for actual sex.
The fourth skill—knowing how to say and receive a no—may be the most important. The failure to effectively give and receive a no is one of the most infectious agents in a couple’s sex life. The key is that both the person saying no and the person hearing it need to convey and absorb one message: the timing isn’t right. Because so many vulnerabilities and emotions are involved in reaching out to a spouse sexually, it is easy to hear painful messages in a turndown—you aren’t desirable, I don’t like you, you’re not appealing to me, I don’t care about you. It is highly likely that none of those is accurate, but they feel real nevertheless. “The timing isn’t right” provides a reassuring alternative. It doesn’t mean it won’t sting—but it is a world away from “you aren’t an appealing person.” In general, it makes all the difference if the person giving the no can share why the timing isn’t right and offer an alternative: “Oh honey, I’m so sorry. Today was grueling. Can we have a date Thursday after I get back from my shift?”
Chapter 9 — Love the One You’re With
Accepting that your spouse isn’t everything you wanted lets you enjoy what you’ve got. In the end, as one seasoned therapist puts it, all counseling work is grief work. Something about your spouse isn’t what you were hoping for. You have to grieve what isn’t and accept what is before you can move forward to enjoy what you have.
There is power in acceptance. It can transform what would be ongoing disappointment into contentment and even enjoyment. The best partner probably provides about 80 percent of what you would want in a spouse. We all fall short; we all have opportunities for disappointment. Maybe you have always envisioned sex being playful, but your spouse treats it like an engineering problem. Or you’ve wished your spouse would sexually flirt with you during the day, but they’re in work or parenting mode and it doesn’t cross their mind. Or perhaps something more significant—maybe your spouse should be much better at something that really matters to you, and because they aren’t, you feel frustrated or discontented. Maybe you’re in a neurodiverse marriage, with a spouse who has ADHD or is on the autism spectrum, and their scattered focus or difficulty empathizing keeps you feeling seen only in glances. When you feel those very real disappointments, there is a way forward—it’s just probably not the answer you’re hoping for. We want the cause of the disappointment to be resolved so we get everything as we want it. Instead, we must grapple with a different solution: grieving the loss of what we wanted and accepting things as they are, even as we continue to work on ourselves.
This may be a hard truth to come to terms with. If your spouse is wrestling with something disappointing or hurtful, no one can make them change. But you have the power to bring about positive change by shifting yourself. Whenever you allow something in your spouse to keep you from your own fulfillment, you are choosing to be a type of victim. If they must change before you can be okay, you are trapped by whether they are willing—so you try to force change on them, and that usually backfires, because humans typically do not respond positively to being pushed. The research is stark: those who said they had not come to terms with the gap between what they wanted and what they had were 3.5 times more likely to report a dissatisfying marriage. Those who had largely or entirely come to terms with it were nearly three times more likely to report being happy in their marriage.
To fully accept your spouse—which is not the same thing as condoning unhealthy behavior—you must fully release those things about them that negatively distract you. You must grieve and let go of who they are not, if you are to accept who they are. Think of what it takes to grieve the loss of a close friend or family member. You have to work through many emotions to accept that you will no longer be able to grab coffee and catch up. In healthy grieving, you eventually reach full acceptance. That same process must happen with many disappointments in marriage. A wife might say, “I know he’s ADHD off the charts, but I need him to really care about what happened during my day—to sit on the couch and just listen.” A husband might say, “I know she’s not a workout-type person, but I really need her to come to the gym with me.” Or maybe it is far more significant—the loss of his erections after prostate surgery, or the chronic fatigue and pain she feels from autoimmune disease. If you wish for something you will never have, you’re not only going to be distressed, but dissatisfaction with your spouse can grow exponentially. Even worse, you can easily miss what is wonderful about them. Grieving means accepting that something will never be a part of your life. First, you stop seeing your spouse through a deficit lens. Instead of only seeing weakness, grieving who he is not allows you to be drawn by his strengths. Second, fully accepting who your spouse is not allows you to see who they are—just as grieving that a child will never be the athlete you hoped for lets you celebrate the artist they are becoming.
Grace is the next step. One huge difference between giddy premarital couples and crisis couples struggling to be in the same room is a willingness to extend grace—unmerited favor. In marriage, you extend grace by choosing to see the best in each other, despite all the very real ways you mess up. It means putting into practice the biblical command to focus on things that are excellent and worthy of praise rather than things that are worthy of driving you crazy. Perhaps you choose to view your spouse as persistent—a trait you love—rather than stubborn, a trait you dislike. One person described how it felt when it finally worked: “He kept showing me grace during the rough patches, and it was finally like, ‘Wait a minute, there’s no reason to fight him because he’s on my side!’”
If you don’t grieve, then what your spouse is not is all you see—as if you are standing an inch from a scratched-up porch column, and most of what fills your eyes are the blemishes. Having grace is like stepping back several yards and refocusing: you can see the whole house, which helps you not fixate on the scratches. Giving honor, then, is like looking at the house and realizing it is beautiful—the graceful windows, the welcoming front door that makes you want to walk inside. When you honor your spouse, you focus on and celebrate that 80 percent. There is a critical difference between acceptance and tolerance. As one therapist pushed back on a frustrated higher-desire wife: “You are tolerating it in him. That isn’t acceptance. How long will you be able to tolerate it before you crack under the weight of your frustration and shift to resentment?” Sexuality is so diverse; it is sad when someone gets stuck on one type of behavior or characteristic. If you can move through the frustration, there is so much more on the other side. Honor makes acceptance complete and allows for true enjoyment. Those who had come to a more complete sense of acceptance showed more positive outcomes across the board: they were more likely to enjoy being sexually playful, more likely to communicate well, and less likely to hold back about mentioning something they might want to try.
Marriage is a choice and then a lifelong commitment. The wedding vow phrase “forsaking all others” is old-fashioned, but it foreshadows the grief process. It acknowledges: not only am I choosing all of who you are and who you are not, I am actively choosing not any other.
Chapter 10 — A Higher View
The writer of Genesis records that Adam yada his wife, Eve, and she bore a son. Typically translated as “knew,” the Hebrew word yada means to know. While it would be easy to view this as a euphemism, it is actually a powerful choice of words reflecting God’s higher design for sex. Sex becomes about learning one another and exposing your innermost selves fully to each other. At its fullest, sex is about sharing and creating a profound intimacy—a oneness that often takes years of learning and growth to experience in full.
For many years, scholars taught that Song of Solomon was solely a divine allegory of Christ’s love for his bride. Certainly, they argued, descriptions of tasting of her garden or his fruit couldn’t be about oral sex—God would never speak of something as base as physical pleasure. Except a plain reading of the text shows it is about both the spirit of the act and a loving couple engaging in sex. Conversely, culture often emphasizes only the body of the act. Sex becomes entertainment—a sport—all about parts and technique and how you play the game for the greatest pleasure.
For sex to be complete and truly great, it must be incarnate—fully body and fully spirit. If either spouse focuses only on the physical (bigger, better orgasms without caring how the behavior impacts their spouse’s heart), the greater meaning of the act is at risk, and sex becomes disincarnate. Or if either spouse focuses only on the spirit (“I’d rather never have sex again, I just want to be close”), sex is missing a key component and becomes disincarnate just the same.
Consider Sam, the high-desire spouse, who is often focused on the body of the act. When he initiates, his wife Jasmine often responds in a way that says, we can do that after you touch my heart—she is asking for the spirit of the act. After Sam takes her on a date and attends to her heart, Jasmine wants to engage physically. While they emphasized different aspects, they accepted influence from each other and worked to keep sex about both the body and the spirit—they worked to keep it incarnate.
So be curious and explore each other. Don’t just accept your assumptions. Talk through the points in this book. And enjoy spending the rest of your marriage on the process of discovery. The journey may not always be easy, but it will be rich and well worth it.