How’s that for a title you didn’t expect from me?
Sheila Gregoire at To Love, Honor and Vacuum recently had two opportunities to be interviewed about sexuality by the Huffington Post. Not surprisingly, Sheila was outnumbered in her moral perspective…FOUR to one. I suspect those are better odds than we firm-stance Christians have in the secular world as a whole, though.
In this last segment, the subject was about having premarital sex in one’s 20s and whether that’s a positive thing for your sex life as a whole. Of course, Sheila took the biblical stance of keeping sexuality in marriage, but she didn’t have to cite scriptures on a secular program; God’s truth is consistent, and the case for sex within marriage is supported by statistics. She did a terrific job and showed that she cares deeply about people experiencing God’s best for their marriages and sex lives.
At one point, the interviewer (not on her side) tried to support his point that sex doesn’t have to be a deep, emotional connection by attempting to quote Woody Allen: “The worst sex that I’ve ever had was still pretty good.” I couldn’t find that exact quote, but I believe this one from the famous actor/director is what the interviewer meant: “Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go it’s pretty d–n good.”
Which brings me to my point. We Christians who encourage people to remain sexually pure until marriage need to admit what I knew when I was living the wrong lifestyle: Premarital sex feels great.
It is physically satisfying and entertaining and exciting. We don’t do our cause and our children any favors when we say that sex outside marriage isn’t good . . . and people hear that it doesn’t feel good. So when your teenager gets in the car with a date and goes too far, and it feels awesome and powerful and deep, might they discount the Christian message that waiting is better?
They might . . . because, as I’ve now said three times now, the premarital sex feels great.
BUT the married sex is SO MUCH BETTER!!!
Sex outside marriage is like having a Chips Ahoy cookie. I happen to like those. If someone brings a bag of them to a church potluck, I will scoop up a cookie or two and add them to my waistline. BUT what if you’re looking at a bag of Chips Ahoy versus Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies? (For those of you outside the Girl Scout realm, they are To. Die. For.) No one in their right mind would pick a hard store-bought cookie over a thin mint that delights the senses and supports the Girl Scouts.
If that comparison doesn’t speak to you, pick any of the below:
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Sex Outside Marriage |
Godly Sex in Marriage |
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Smart car
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Lamborghini
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Hot dog stand
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Emeril’s restaurant
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Hershey bar
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Godiva Chocolatier truffles
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Faded Glory
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Christian Dior
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Metal washtub
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Jacuzzi bath
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Leaky rowboat
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Cruise liner
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You get the point. If you had no idea about the second column, you might be happy having a hot dog from the street vendor. (This is just an example. Hey, the best tamales where I live come from a truck.) But if you slip into a Lamborghini wearing your Christian Dior outfit and eat a meal at Emeril’s, you know it’s worth a lot more.
I didn’t know I was in a rowboat when I was having sex before marriage. My boat was leaking, but I figured I was doing it wrong somehow, or that I merely needed a better paddle partner. I finally figured out that the only way to get it right was to get out of the rowboat and board the cruise liner!
When I teach my kids about sexuality, I plan to be honest. I tell them that the physical sensations of sex in any consensual context can be very pleasurable. God made sex to feel great. However, He blessed us with marriage to give us the very best. That’s just how our Father is. He loves us enough to want us to have the cream of the crop, the icing on the cake, the thin mint cookies . . . because we are the apple of His eye.
So yeah, those preaching multiple sex partners and 10 New Ways to Orgasm are right in saying that their prescriptions may give your body a real high. But I not satisfied with climbing a hill and whooping it up anymore. I want Mount Everest, baby.
In marriage, there is a blessing from God and a connection of life commitment that provides the foundation for the best physical intimacy one can have. Studies show those most satisfied with their sex lives are married . . . and married for a while.
Sheila beautifully described it in her interview: “It is a beautiful thing. And to say that you can have intimacy with all kinds of people, yeah, but there is nothing like a marriage.”
There is truly nothing at all like a God-centered marriage that pursues His holy plan for sex. I pray that for the couples who read my blog — that you will not just experience physical satisfaction, but spiritual and emotional connection through this deeply personal, physical act.
Great Comparisons! Great points and a great way to word it thank you so much. I pray I can influence my children to not make the same mistakes I did.
My husband was my first on my wedding night, but I was not his and he has described much the same. You did an excellent job explaining the concepts and comparison – thank you for your blogging ministry!
I agree. It reminds me of Digory Kirke’s magic apple from C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew. Digory’s mother is sick and dying. Aslan sends him on a mission to get a magic apple that will protect Narnia from the White Witch. The White Witch tells him that the apple will heal his mother and that he should steal it and take it home to his mother. He decides to follow Aslan’s counsel and takes it back to Narnia. Aslan tells him that apple does have the power to heal, but it cannot be taken through deceit. Digory assumes that if he had taken the apple it would not have healed his mother. Aslan clarifies that it would have healed her, because things always work according to their design, however it would have brought both her and Digory to misery. There would have come a day when they both would wish that she had died rather than eat the apple. The apple that Aslan gives to Digory, however heals his mother to a happier life.
We often make the mistake as Christians of thinking that all sin leads to immediate and harsh suffering. Then we become bitter and angry when we see cheaters prosper and scoundrels having a good time, or confused and lost when bad things feel so good.
Sex feels good. It just does. But if we climb the wall rather than enter in at the gate, it can spoil our chances for greater happiness later in life.
Love this analogy from The Magician’s Nephew! Thanks for sharing it.
I agree! Great analogy! Sex before marriage (especially with someone other than your marriage partner) is very destructive. It’s so hard to overcome some of the baggage we bring into the marriage bed. I pray my children make better choices than I and my husband did.
Plenty of people have meaningless sex in their marriage too…myself included. My relationship with my wife has been less than ideal for our entire marriage of 13 years. I started to grow distant from her the first year of marriage, for a few reasons, one of them being our sexual relationship wasn’t anything like what i hoped it would be. We completely abstained from any type of sex with each other before marriage. We both had just one other partner prior to meeting. After we married, I hoped it’d be hot, frequent, variable, and overall fun. She wanted it to be infrequent, lights out, in the bed only, and preferably just missionary. We’ve been to counseling, but she is just too combative and has so many of her own issues that she just can’t overcome. I have to say, if we had had premarital sex, I would have realized we were sexually incompatible in short order, and avoided alot of pain and heartbreak by ending the relationship in an early stage. Unfortunately, we waited and I learned that lesson too late. So here I stay, stuck and committed, having infrequent and distant sex. I stay because I made a commitment and because we have two little kids. Christians like to say that if you live according to God’s principles that he’ll bless your endeavors, especially your interpersonal relationships and particularly your marriage, but that hasn’t been my experience. Your point in your article seemed to be that sex is better in a marriage, but I maintain that it’s not the marriage, it’s the relationship, and you don’t have to be bonded in holy matrimony to have a fantastic one of those.
My heart breaks for you and those in similar situations. All too often, this is the experience in marriage for many spouses.
However, claims that one can determine sexual compatibility by being intimate before marriage just don’t jive with the research and stories I’ve heard. Libido and relationship can change over time, so some who struggled at first do great and others who had terrific sex before marriage flounder over time. Things can change for better or worse or remain relatively good throughout. Moreover, marital commitment makes a difference in how well a relationship fares in the long-term. Over and over, the best sex is reported by married couples.
Most long-term sexual problems are about selfishness, not incompatibility. We hope to marry someone who has the attitude of seeking out answers when the going gets tough. There may be some reasons behind why your wife is sexually distant, but ultimately you both need to step up to the plate and deal with them.
God will bless our endeavors, but often not in ways we anticipate. I certainly agree with you that it isn’t a sure thing that you will be blessed with a great marriage if you wait and do the right things. You simply can’t account for what your spouse will do.
I pray for healing in your marriage.
In general, when you follow His rules, God does bless your life and your marriage. However, there are times that we do what He wants and we don’t get blessings in this life. That’s why you can’t follow the rules in order to get what you want. God isn’t a genie. You don’t do what He says in order to have a happy life. There’s no bargaining or deals here. You have to do what God says because you love Him and because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of what you get out of it. When you start thinking that God owes you a happy life because you obeyed Him, you set yourself up for heartache, disillusionment, and bitterness. God doesn’t owe you anything. You owe Him everything.
That said, I’m very sorry that your married sex hasn’t been what you hoped for. I pray that God will heal your relationship and open your wife’s eyes to see that she’s driving you away. But wishing you had had premarital sex is not going fix anything. Sin is always a bad idea. Perhaps you should have talked about sex and its role in your future married life before marriage, but engaging in premarital sex would have only added to the scars on your wife’s heart. It sounds like her previous premarital sex already produced some.
Also, as long as you keep thinking that you and your wife are sexually incompatible and wishing you would have known earlier, you’re not going to fix the problem. You are not incompatible. This whole idea of “sexual compatibility” is a stupid and erroneous notion designed to excuse premarital sex. It’s a way to sleep around until you find someone who suits you physically (as if that was the most important thing and as if you should be expert in bed up front rather than growing together in sexuality). It’s a way to try people out and discard them when they don’t fulfill your every whim. That is exactly antithetical to what a real marriage is about. Marriage is about serving, not being served. When both people enter a marriage determined to out-serve each other, all the needs are met and everyone is happy. But, unfortunately, we sinful and selfish humans don’t always do that very well. A better way to determine “compatibility” before marriage is to look for that servant’s heart. You don’t need to try sex before marriage to know that.
You and your wife are currently not functioning sexually as you should, but that doesn’t mean you’re incompatible. You are compatible because God has joined you together in marriage and it is His will for you to love each other until death parts you. What you need is for both of you to start serving each other. Of course, you can only control yourself. You can’t make your wife serve you. But you can do your part and leave the results up to God. If you get nothing, that’s sad and your wife will answer for her own actions one day. But we were never guaranteed a happy existence in this life. Remember that no matter what trials we endure in this life, they are all worth it to know and serve the One who knows and loves us more than we can imagine. And the life to come will more than make up for any lack here on earth.
Time to come clean my man. I can relate. Your post has a lot of hurt in it, a lot of rejection, a lot of “I care about sex” and “she simply does not”. Been there. Still there.
Time to lay it out. Hoping it will get better simply won’t do. Your wife needs to know how crucial this is to you. You need to be in counseling. I know you’ve been. You need to go back. Why is she combative? What other issues are there?
Perhaps if you unpack these you’ll discover why she fears intimacy and there will be an awakening. But the sex won’t fix itself.
There is something much larger at work here and you need to open that up and find out the “why”. And in that process, she needs to understand that the status quo won’t work. She just doesn’t get to make a solitary decision in a Christian marriage.
Too often I see wives – Christian wives – just deciding sex doesn’t matter. Many spend time talking with their Christian friends about how they could go the rest of their life without it.
God is clear about what He created sex for, the benefits and the giving. To just decide “I don’t need it” inside a Christian marriage goes against God’s word.
Likewise, as men, we cannot demand sex in the way we want it, how we want it and when we want it. That’s our sin nature putting “me first” — just as big a problem as the ladies wanting no part of it.
Sex and Money are the two key issues that destroy Christian homes. We know better. We know better. The Word is just absolutely crystal clear. It cannot be debated or negotiated. We should not say, “God didn’t really mean ____ what He meant was ____” and twist the Gospel to suit our needs.
Sex is crucial. Don’t leave this “as is” and bake in your own anger, resentment and regret. Get help. Lay this out for your wife. Find out what is going on and above all (as hard as this is) love her as Christ loved the church.
Amen to that!!
If I can just be brutally honest bro, the reason your marriage sucks and your sex life sucks is because you are spending more time on here bashing your wife and her low sex drive than you are pursuing her and loving her as Christ loves the church!! Marriage is not about you man!! Marriage is NOT about YOUR happiness, it’s about Jesus making you more holy!! And I would have to say that probably one of the reasons your sex life sucks is because for you, sex is a HUGE IDOL that you had these incredible misconceptions about, and every time someone sets up an idol in Scripture, it ALWAYS falls!!!! Maybe if you will STOP focusing on what YOU want and start SERVING HER NEEDS then maybe she will feel more inclined to serve yours!! But when you go around acting like you are entitled to her body just because you are married, then your perspective is WAY OFF BASE!!! You need to start loving her and serving her and get over the fact that you are not getting as many orgasms as you want!!!
Love the analogies and believe everything you have written. Of course, this is coming from a fellow Mount Everest explorer. Thanks for sharing!
Megan
You are so right on this – we have to be honest or we have no chance of getting people to listen to us. Plenty of studies (done by those who think promiscuity is just fine) have shown that those in “committed monogamous relationship” (like marriage) have both more sex and better sex than any other group. It is also becoming clear that if you start with other kinds of sex, you tend to mess up what you can have in marriage.
Of course if we tell people to go without sex until they marry at nearing 30 we have another problem. The reality is most will choose something now and less later over nothing for a long time and “better” later. But that’s another issue, and one that requires you to have an asbestos suit!
As one of the 40+-year-old virgins that Hollywood laughs at, no; going without sex is not at all easy or fun, but it *is* possible. Telling people to go without sex until marriage isn’t our problem–it’s theirs. We don’t own the results of speaking the truth in love (Ephesians 4:14-15)–God does. The bottom line is whether or not WE are going to obey and honor God, and in this regard, sacrifice is clearly part of obedience. Frankly, my virginity still being intact is because of God’s grace, and not my own shyness or the public commitment I made at Petra’s “Why Wait?” tour with Josh McDowell back in ’89. I want to honor God, and in the end, I trust He will see to it that I do.
IMO, one of the most compelling truths in all of this is 1 Corinthians 6:18: “Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body.”
Exactly what the consequences of sinning sexually are, Scripture doesn’t delineate, but it’s easy to believe God when all you have to do is take a good look at the mess around you. Like Jamie Hyneman would say: “You heard him–don’t do it!”
But even the Smart Car vs. Lamborghini analogy is problematic, because you are again trying to suggest pre-marital sex is kinda lousy. For unmarried people who are having a nice time in the sack, they are going to look at you like you don’t quite know what you are talking about. And you might appear to be suggesting that all married sex is awesome, and sadly we know that’s not true if the couple isn’t working at it.
Instead of trying to convince the world that “our way is more awesome than yours,” you should make the point that “I believe in God’s parameters on sex, I live this way, and I am happy to do so.” Boom. Trying to argue beyond that is somewhat pointless.
As someone who has had premarital sex, I can be honest and say, yes, it felt good. But it left me feeling cheap and worthless. There was no value to it except what my body felt. My heart and brain suffered. I’m getting married soon. (As in a month, it’s intense, I’m so excited!) My future husband and I have NOT had sex. We decided against that at the very beginning, and that was WITH him knowing that I was not a virgin and had made mistakes. With him, I feel priceless, like the most important woman that has ever existed. I am something special. Something to be treasured, not used. The comparison is astounding. I’m not at all worried about what our sex life will be when we are married. I have intention of having sex with my husband often. But knowing that he waited for me, knowing that there is no SHAME in what we are doing? That’s a testament to God’s grace and forgiveness, and I think He’s gonna bless our married bed with amazing sex, because we have done what is right in the eyes of God. And let me tell you, I’m pretty dagum excited about it! 🙂
Congratulations! May God bless you and your marriage richly. 🙂
The Christian message can also be discounted when sex in marriage is not as good as we say it is. God’s design for sex is not only that it is for marriage but that it is only a foreshadow of the pleasures of heaven. The true fulfillment of our sexual desires is not marriage it’s heaven. That’s what I try to show in my blog.
A very thought-provoking post! Recently, my Garfield “Well, DUH!” moment was realizing that (although we sometimes do) we cannot blame God for sin in ANY form that occurred before, or during, marriage. It seems clear to me that broken marriages are a result of sin, and while God is not responsible or accountable for our sin, He is willing and able to (as others have shared) bring healing and restoration IF both husband and wife are willing to be obedient and responsible enough to follow Him and selflessly love each other. Obviously, even non-Christians reap the benefits of faithfulness to one another within marriage–especially if sexual sin (past or present) has never been part of the picture.
I’ll be honest J.
On my wedding night my husband and I were each others firsts. We had a great sex life and all but after year four something happened…I started to slip away emotionally. Like I said I’ll be honest. I had an emotional affair but came clean because honestly I didn’t realize how far I was gone till it was too late. We tried to fix it by almost just pushing it under the rug and rushed right back into things. With that being said I committed adultery physically. Looking back on it (and yes my husband and I have talked about EVERYTHING) my husband says I got jipped. We both agree that I went through taking my marriage through mud, risking everything I have and have worked for…for what? For something that wasn’t near as good as what was in my marriage! He and I have and are still mending but I have to say we are stronger than before. We don’t just have a “hedge” of protection but something more like a steal fence with barbed wire on top, some kinda killer force field to stun anyone trying to get in our out and most of all a mirror on top so if one of us tries to escape it lets us see what we are risking. I regret what I did but I now realize that sex isn’t just for him, it’s for me too…it helps me connect to him and lets him show me how much he loves me. People don’t get that, heck I didn’t get that from any relationship before or during marriage, that connection that only marriage brings, and how much more fun, relaxing, satisfying, enjoyable it makes sex.
haha love the list comparison! And I especially love love love this post!!
While what you wrote is absolutely true, its a tough argument to make to someone on a sexless marriage. In your Smart Car vs Lamborghini analogy, I have a Lamborghini in my driveway that I am allowed to drive to the end of the block and back once a month, and that is it. Period. Meanwhile I watch all the Smart Cars driving by, and so the notion of being able to drive a smart car anywhere I want, every day, or even every other day, is very attractive, and the once-a-month Lamborghini starts to look less and less attractive.
(insert here an argument that its better to deny onesself on earth and gain entry to heaven than it is to enjoy onesself on earth and suffer the fires of hell) I guess some of us have missed our chance to enjoy either sinful or holy sex. I try to acknowledge this and not be bitter, but its hard.
I am not going to preach to you. You clearly know that the better things are seeking the will of God, no matter how difficult that may be. But YEAH, YOUR SITUATION IS DIFFICULT. It pains me greatly to know that there are marriages where one spouse has denied the other not the “right to have sex,” but the intimate experience of joining as one flesh in marriage. That is what God has in mind!
(Plus, now I’m wondering if I should have said Big Wheel tricycle instead of Smart Car. But that’s just how my brain works.)
My heart is saddened for you, and I pray that you can find the strength to continue giving selflessly to the relationship and that your spouse will come to realize how important the physical intimacy is to your marriage.
Thank you J … that helps
Thanks for your Post J! You’re right. I foolishly thought I missing out in college but now I know that sex in a Godly marriage is the only sex worth talking about. I plan to share that message to my children when the time comes.
Stephanie
Happyafterthewedding.blogspot.com