A listener wrote in with the question:

"How do you set boundaries with social media? What's acceptable to keep the marriage from the pressures of the world. For example: One spouse doesn't like revealing pictures put out and the other is getting physically fit and feeling the need to parade?"

Listen to the podcast for Caleb's answer!

This week, we have a question from one of our audience members who wanted clarity on her expectations around side effects of her husband's testosterone therapy.

"What experience do you have with testosterone therapy for men? I believe part of the cause of my husband's infidelity is due to much testosterone pellets and an excessive need for sex. I do not excuse him for one minute for the devastation he caused. think If that is going to be an available treatment for a medical condition some kind of information and counseling should be required as to how you will feel.

We are 2-1/2 years past D day finding out of multiple hookups just for sex. We'd been married for 36 years!!! He is 59 and I am 57 right now. I credit my faith in keeping this altogether without telling anyone or counselling. Not a great idea after the fact. He's moved on from the infidelities and I still struggle at times.

Q2: I guess I'm trying to understand if testosterone can make you impulsive and have the need to have sex in abundance. I feel you should be in control if your self, but if you are on the high end of the testosterone scale 1200-1500 can it change you? I do know hormones are powerful and make you feel all sorts of things."

Listen to the podcast episode for Caleb's answer!

This week, Caleb answers a very touching question from Betty*, one of our email subscribers. She asked,

"I responded a few months ago, rather aggressively, may I add, to your husband's question. And of course, he graciously responded with a question that pierced through my pain and frustration and found my heart. He asked," Do you still want to be married?" I thought about it for weeks!! Please let him know that we found a local counselor, who is also our pastor, and have been progressing, to say the least. What you two do is so vital in a world that opposes marriage and commitment in general.Thank you! Thank you!

Anyways, to respond to your request, my question would be  ... " After infidelity strikes, how do you trust your husband again?" I know it takes time to learn how to trust again, but how do you truly grant yourself the space to be vulnerable in that way? Or ... are you bruised for life? Sometimes I feel like I am a shell of who I once was; a child learning to be confident in herself and womanhood, it's embarrassing. 

So glad, this is anonymous! lol . Even if this isn't broadcasted I'd love your take on this."

Listen to the podcast episode for Caleb's answer!

*name changed for confidentiality reasons

Peggy* wrote in to ask about sexual addiction and its effects on marriage. She writes,

"Verlynda,

First, I think your plans for traveling for a year sounds awesome!  What an exciting adventure to undertake.  Your family will be in my prayers that you will only experience slight bumps in the road and have a wonderful family bonding time!

I love the podcasts and feel so lucky to have found you.  I think the first one I listened to was something on infidelity.  

I'm wondering if you might consider doing a podcast on sexual addiction. While the effects on a marriage are similar to infidelity there's a deeper undercurrent with it.  I knew there was something off in our relationship and questioned if my husband was having an affair,  he always answered "no,"  so I just thought he was a workaholic along with the impact of binge drinking.  Finally, in the depths of his addiction he began receiving texts messages and phone calls that tipped me off.  

Sexual addiction has a broad range of activities from porn and beyond.  My husband's issue started with pornographic magazines back in the 70's and escalated to going to bars for lap dances.  It basically followed the invasive changes that sexual addictions has taken in our society and how accepted it has become.  The attitude of" boys will be boys" doesn't help but speaks to the maturity level of some men in the American culture.  He was taken with being desired by other women and became infatuated with several but insists he never loved them only me.  I still deal with the hurt and pain that he could break our marriage vows and the years of deceit and lying.  I really don't feel I was acting co-dependently in this because I was asking if something was wrong and we consulted several marriage counselors over the years.  He admits he wasn't honest with them also.  

I have listened to many podcasts and YouTube's on this topic.  I feel that Marsha Means and Barbara Steffens approach to looking at the PTSD or PISD (post infidelity stress disorder) it causes for the spouse has truly helped me.  Plus I accept that this addiction is rooted in an intimacy disorder.  Many "experts" support divorce but I chose not to take that path because of my religious beliefs.  So I was wondering if you might look at the issues of sexual addictions from a perspective of staying in the marriage. 

Thanks so much,

Peggy*

PS  I have to admit I love both of your laughs!  Keep up the great work!

Listen to the podcast episode for Caleb's answer!

*name changed for confidentiality reasons

Today we have a question from one of our audience members who is asking for help to overcome some significant mental barriers around her husband’s sexual history.

Hi, I have a question. 

I got married just recently and much later in life...around 40 years old.  I was a virgin when I got married. My husband was not. However he shared with me that he had not had any sexual partners for at least three years prior to our being married, because of his renewed commitment to Christ. 

I've been a Christian since I was a youth and my husband had also been a Christian since he was a child however he was not sexually abstinent in his relationships.

We did not have sex prior to getting married. Since we have been married we have had a great sex life, but I have struggled with the fact that he's had previous sexual partners.

My question is how can I best deal with my husband's previous sexual history and not let it interfere with our sexual relationship now.  Of course, this is a vulnerable issue for me since I came into the marriage without sexual experience... So I get feelings of insecurity...wondering if he is comparing us to other relationships...etc. These thoughts can be intrusive for me. 

Now, today I had a bomb dropped on me when I got the results of a recent Pap smear saying I tested positive for HPV.  It's very upsetting to find out that after being abstinent all these years and waiting for my husband to have sex; that he gave me a STD that could cause cervical cancer. The strain I have is the dangerous strain and will require more testing. 

I've already been struggling with feelings over his sexual past and now it's intensified a thousand fold as a result of contracting this STD  from him.  I feel like this is definitely going to affect my feelings toward him and toward sexual intimacy with him. 

He was tested for std's before our marriage but there is not a test for men for HPV, so in his defense he could not have known he had been exposed unless his previous girlfriend knew and told him. 

I'm hoping and praying that my immune system will fight off this virus and I will be okay, but unfortunately I've had previous health problems that have weakened my immune system so I'm really upset and stressed that I may end up not fighting it off. 

I'm just disappointed, sad, upset and hurt that I have to deal with an STD after waiting all this time to have sex with one man in my life.... My husband. 

I'm sure this is going to cause me anger and resentment for his choices and not being abstinent as a Christian man who proclaims Christ. 

I really have to say, at the risk of sounding judgmental.... That I am so tired of Bible believing Christians completely ignoring the word of God when it comes to sexual integrity! Why is it that people just wink at this sin like it's no big deal ??? People that I see at church every week that are living with their boyfriends and girlfriends that are having sex and acting as though it's not a sin.  I don't understand it's very frustrating!

Christians act as though it's inconsequential and casual...

Please pray for me that I can be full of grace and forgiveness toward my husband and that we would grow stronger and more in love and that I won't withdraw from him like I feel like doing at this moment. 

The last piece of this puzzle is the question of fidelity?? Has he had sex with someone else during the time we've been together and contracted this STD and now passed it to me??  I really, honestly in my heart and soul, mind and spirit are telling me that he is being truthful about his sexual history and hadn't had sex for 3 years before we met...and that was his previous girlfriend for a couple years. But, my question is...why wouldn't she had let him know she had HPV. Most women know they have it because of their annual Pap smear. She would have known either back then or since then. They broke up in 2013. And they remained good friends.  So wouldn't a good friend tell you this??

Jason* wrote in to say:

"First all, huge thanks for what you are doing. My marriage is still in trouble, and it's even getting worse and worse. But thanks to your podcasts, I'm more ready to forgive and to accept my wife after her infidelity disclosure.

The question is as follows. How do I fight for my marriage and my family (there are children) and my wife while she's undecided to stay or to leave as she feels in love with her affair mate?

She's saying she can't imagine to be my wife anymore while she can't imagine losing me as a father of our children and part of the family. In other words, she wants to do life together, but not as husband and wife..."

Listen to the podcast episode to see what Caleb had to say to Jason.

*name changed for confidentiality reasons

Joshua* writes:

My wife and I started dating, got married the next year, had our first child a year later, and then our second child the following year. Around the same time as our second child was born, an ex-girlfriend texted me.

Conversations started as just "Hey, how's life?" but quickly escalated to sexting as we used to do when we dated. Right before I could tell my wife, she saw the texts and got very upset. I had already ended communications with this girl and just couldn't strike up the nerve to tell my wife what I had done.

Fast forward a couple months and we had been through about a month of counselling session. Things were getting better between us and then I had to go on a business trip. I had a few friends I had planned on meeting with while there, but there was one in particular my wife was not comfortable with me talking to. So I told her I wouldn't meet with that friend, but I lied. She later found out and again had to start mending our relationship.

Things have been going pretty well, except now I have a week long business trip coming up and she keeps bringing up the past issues. I know what I've done and how I've messed up, but she keeps bringing it up. I ask her not to because it still hurts so bad, but she does anyways. What can I do in this next month or so in order to help build her trust again and help her to stop bringing up my past mistakes?

Listen to the podcast episode for Caleb's answer!

*Name has been changed for confidentiality reasons

The common perception is that you can be super busy OR happily married. What we wanted to know is if you could be super busy AND happily married. Do you need to change your lifestyles, or are you good to go? No pressure!

A lot of research and marriage advice points to the importance of spending time together as a couple, but perhaps this is not the most important factor when it comes to a healthy marriage.

How Do You Treat Each Other When You Are Not Busy?

It turns out that how you treat each other when you do have time together is what actually matters.

In 2004, researchers looked at a particular type of marriage that tends to be particularly hectic – the medical marriage. These researchers wanted to analyze correlations between busyness, marital adjustments, and overall satisfaction with work/life balance in marriages in which husbands worked as physicians. (Stay tuned, we’ve got a wife-as-physician study next!)

What they discovered is “more than hours worked, it is how a couple treats each other when they are not working that most powerfully determines the quality of contemporary medical marriage.”[i]

How were these successful marriages treating each other? The researchers found these qualities in the marriages that self-identified as satisfying:

Husbands didn’t let work stress negatively affect their at-home behaviour (good job, guys!)

Husbands often indicated their concern about how their work/life balance and busyness required them to spend time away from family (that’s sweet)

Wives found ways to keep themselves busy when their husbands were working long hours. Wives who were satisfied with their marriages learned to “accept this role without rancor, to build their individual support systems, and to carry on with family activities during their husbands’ work-related absences.”[ii] (that’s wise)

Wives held specific perspectives about their husband’s work – that it was done for noble reasons (common mission!)

In summary, “these busy couples did not have marriages that were less satisfying than those of other people in general. Quite the contrary, despite the hectic nature of medical life, physician’s wives claim to be quite satisfied with their marriages.”[iii]

Even if you’re not a doctor, if you’re plain busy and you have these elements in your marriage, you should be good to go!

Let’s switch genders and see what happens. In 2013, researchers looked at medical marriages in which the wife was the physician. They interviewed spouses of internal medical resident and faculty physicians, as they wanted to know how these couples made their marriages work in the face of the inflexible schedules of doctors.

These three themes emerged from these interviews in terms of what these husbands of doctors felt was important to the health of their busy marriage:

Having a set time for synchronizing schedules: Couples in these hectic marriages would often set a specific time where they would sit down and do their best to synchronize their schedules. Often schedules revolved around the physician’s schedule out of necessity.

Frequent verbal support: This was important in both directions. Husband’s verbally supported their wives’ busy careers. Wives verbally supported the husband’s sacrifices, work, and willingness to take care of things at home when they were not able to.

Shared decision-making: “Joint decision-making within physician families serves to increase the personal agency of female physicians’ husbands and may reduce work-life stress for physician wives.”[iv]

So it looks like you CAN have a hectic life and be happily married!

The Importance of Mutuality and Intimate Partnership

Much of the advice from these two studies applies to marriages in which one spouse is extremely busy and the other spouse is not, but what about marriages in which both individuals are living hectic lives?

A study completed in 2003 pointed towards the importance of mutuality in dual-earner coup...

Jealousy. This can drive some people absolutely nuts - and their spouse feels completely justified.

It’s a real conundrum. And it’s particularly worse when the jealous spouse has had prior reason to become jealous — a betrayal has occurred.

What does a person do?

Healthy And Unhealthy Forms of Jealousy.

Research shows that jealousy can have positive or negative effects on a relationship, depending on the type of jealousy that is being displayed.

There are three kinds of jealousy:

Reactive jealousy: the degree to which individuals experience negative emotions in reaction to a betrayal/unfaithfulness.

Possessive jealousy: the effort jealous individuals can go to to prevent contact of their spouse with individuals of the opposite sex.

Anxious jealousy: a process in which the individual ruminates about and cognitively generates images of a mate’s infidelity, and experiences feelings of anxiety, suspicion, worry and distrust.[i]

It is important to note that, in contrast to reactive jealousy, neither possessive nor anxious jealousy actually need a rival or a betrayal to be triggered.

Results from the same research showed that individuals high in anxious jealousy had lower relationship quality, as did individuals married to spouses who were high in anxious jealousy.[ii] Remember, anxious jealousy is just about rumination thoughts – there isn’t necessarily any reality to it.

The conclusion here was that anxious jealousy is bad for your marriage. Other clinical studies show that this type of thinking is characteristic of pathologically jealous individuals who, in general, experience great relationship distress.

If you’re the anxiously jealous individual, I’m guessing that you’re not enjoying being that spouse any more than your spouse is enjoying your jealousy. Ruminating is not fun. It takes a lot of energy and creates a lot of negativity. I want to encourage you to get some help. Life doesn’t have to be this way.

You’ve probably had some very real, even traumatic experiences or really, really significant disappointments in very important relationships, but there is healing. It doesn’t have to go on like this. The best thing you can do is take this to a good therapist and work with them towards finding a less anxious way to evaluate the world around you.

The study also found positive associations between relationship quality and reactive jealousy.[iii]

When a spouse reacts jealously to a betrayal, it is likely to be interpreted by their offending spouse as a token of love and caring and can even enhance the relationship. While reactive jealousy is good – you should be jealous if your relationship is threatened, we don’t recommend inducing reactive jealousy as a way to enhance your relationship. There are many other, safer ways to work on your marriage!

Another finding from the study was that possessive jealousy was not found to be consistently related to relationship quality.[iv] Remember, that possessive jealousy is considerable effort a person goes to in order to prevent contact with the opposite sex. What the researchers felt is that this depends on how this jealousy was expressed.

If you are buying flowers or romancing your spouse to keep them interested, it may help your marriage. In contrast, when you use threats or violence or debasement to prevent unfaithfulness, that will reduce the quality of your marriage.

In either case, you need to ask yourself if this possessive jealousy is coming out of a place of fullness or a place of neediness. Fullness is – I appreciate what we have so much, I’m going to guard it. Neediness is – I can never be sure of what we have so I’m going to keep slapping romance Band-Aids on my anxiety to try to reduce the pressure. That is not healthy.

Relabeling Jealousy in Your Relationship

If your spouse is jealous and you have found this frustrating in the past, you might consider reframing it. For example,

If your marriage is sexless, there is a way back to rekindling intimacy. It’s not easy, but it might not be as impossible as you think, either! We’ll help you understand some potential causes and then give you some direction to start point your marriage relationship back towards the wonder and joy of sex.

The Problem of Roommate Marriages

Sexless marriages are more common than I thought. In fact, research has found that 16% of marriages identify as sexually inactive.[i] However, what is surprising is that the research is not as common as you might expect. This topic was more difficult to find research on!

The first study we found looked particularly at marriages in which one spouse greatly desired sex to be a part of the relationship, but was forced to remain involuntarily celibate (desiring sexual contact but not receiving it for 6 months) due to the wishes of their spouse. This is a common situation in sexually inactive marriages.[ii]

The 6-month mark was someone arbitrary, but the researchers suggest that the length of time one has been celibate is not as important as whether one self-defines as involuntarily celibate.[iii]

The bottom line is your marriage is sexless if your spouse thinks it is, or you do.

Another study looked at whether sexually inactive marriages were less happy and stable than those with sexual activity. Donnelly found that sexually inactive marriages were correlated with the following:

Unhappiness in the marital relationship

Increased likelihood of separation

Lack of shared activities

Few arguments over sex.

She concluded that “although sexually inactive marriages are not uncommon, they are not happy, stable marriages in which the partners simply do not have sex. Lack of sexual activity may be a danger signal for many marriages.”[iv]

Perhaps it would be more useful to think of sexual inactivity as a symptom of a problem rather than thinking it is the problem itself.

Think about it; if it doesn’t change, and your marriage remains sexless, you’re at risk of seeking to fill that cavity elsewhere. That’s not good.

Consider thinking of it as a symptom because if you take care of the relationship you’ll probably see this take care of itself. In fact, when Caleb does marriage counselling, he spends more time repairing and reawakening the bond that exists between the couple. When that secure, emotional connection is thriving again, most couples sort out the sex issues by themselves.

To those of you who are withholding sex… I want to challenge you. I get why you might be doing that, but there are consequences that I want you to be aware of. Here are some of the consequences of sexless marriages, all taken from the same study[v]:

“some of the most common responses to involuntary celibacy are sexual frustration (79%), feelings of depression (34%) or rejection (23%)”

26% report problems with concentration

35% described deficits in self-esteem that occurred as a result of being rejected.

If you’re unhappy in your marriage, I can see why you’d withhold sex to kind of force the issue or try to regain some power, but in all likelihood, it’s actually really working against you – if repairing the marriage is what you want to do.

If your husband or wife is acting like a monster, why would you want to have sex with him or her? I get that! At the same time though, withholding sex is not a successful strategy for moving towards repair. The Bible even talks about the danger of withholding sex in 1 Corinthians 7 – we’re not to do that.

Yet, I would guess the reason why you’re withholding or your spouse is, is because you want intimacy – not just sex. If your spouse is not abusive, a better strategy would be to address the lack of intimacy rather than just highlight it by withholding sexual intimacy as well.

So let’s get practical here. How are couples who find themselves in this situation supposed to move forward? There is not a lot of research on this,