What do you do when you want to spice up your sex life? We usually start thinking about new positions, or lingerie or maybe traveling to some exotic location with our spouse. Physical things. But what if the key to great sex was found in a completely different dimension?

Sexual Experience Types & Attachment

The research we’re looking at today will actually have a profound impact on the whole scope of your married life. So this is definitely going to be a pivotal topic for many couples who are reading. We are going to talk about attachment. I know that sounds like something to do with velcro but attachment in the science of relationships is simply about the love bond between two people. So every time you read “attachment” just think “love bond” so that this new term doesn’t throw you off.

What we’re going to see is that the quality and nature of your attachment to your spouse has the largest impact on your sexual satisfaction. If you’re in a sexless marriage, or you have a lot of conflict about sex, it almost always comes back to this attachment issue. The only exception would be if there is a genuine sexual disorder such as erectile dysfunction or vaginismus— those may be related to physiological issues or they may find their root in other things like childhood sexual abuse. But: if you solve the attachment issue you’ll also have a safe place to talk about these other issues, and I would certainly recommend you do so with a qualified sex therapist.

We will look at how attachment affects different ways of experiencing sex, and finish with a look at 7 steps to growing a secure attachment in a sexual context.

Three Experiential Patterns of Sexual Intercourse

The first thing you need to know is that both men and women experience sexual intercourse in one of three patterns:

Relationship-centered orientation: This pattern is all about being connected to your spouse on an emotional level during sex. So it is about the “individual’s feelings of being loved and esteemed by one’s partner and the desire for partner’s involvement, as well as the sense of being the subject of love (i.e. feelings of love toward the partner, and attentional and emotional focus on her/his needs and reactions.) [i]” This is healthy, whole-person sex that encompasses both physical and emotional experience and is focused on both giving and receiving from your spouse.

Worry-centered orientation: This pattern revolves around a focus on you and your own worries over giving and receiving from your spouse. This includes worry about "the personal vulnerability and sense of estrangement related to sexual activity, the negative and immoral meanings of this activity, the lack of partner’s sexual competence, and the potential evidence of one’s sexual inadequacy, along with the occurrence of interfering thoughts[ii]”. This is sex that’s not going well. Anything from doormat sex to abusive sex to my body-is-here-but-my-brain-is-not kind of sex. Or if you’re lost in self-consciousness. It’s not engaged sex.

Pleasure-centered orientation: This pattern reflects sex on a more basic level that's focused on pleasure and not on the emotional experience. It's about “the orgasmic cycle of excitement-pleasure-relief-satisfaction, which is accompanied by a sense of power and strength and two complementary states of mind — cognitive/emotional dissociation from the environment and focused attention on reaching the orgasm [iii].”. This is sex that’s purely about crossing the finish line; focusing on the physical sensations, with no real person-to-person connection.

Gender Differences in Sexual Experience

Remember, men and women both experience sex that falls into these three patterns. But there are gender differences in how much of each they experience and what they are looking for:

Women demonstrate higher relational orientation in their descriptions of sexual intercourse.

“Women’s experience of heterosexual intercourse was more ambivalent in nature i...

Has infidelity impacted your marriage? Do you feel like you need guidance through recovery and rebuilding your marriage?

A few months ago we ran a 15 Day Marriage Challenge and were absolutely stunned by the number of people going through that process who were dealing with betrayal in the form of an affair or infidelity.

Caleb created the 30 Day Betrayal Devotional set as a response to this need. This is a very unique product in the marketplace and in this podcast episode Caleb answers some questions and tells us about it.

By the way, these were written for the more common situation of husband betraying wife. If you are a couple where the roles are reversed, and the wife has betrayed the husband, just switch books and pronouns.

Broken Couples Need to Heal From Affairs Together

The first thing we recognized is that both the betrayer and the betrayed need to be working through their own issues in this process, but they need to be doing so in a way that opens them up to each other. These devotionals comes in a set of "His" and "Hers" and are complementary to each other. They're two separate journals but come in a set.

What happens is that you are working on things that complement and correlate with what your spouse is working on. For example, a few days in Caleb speaks to the betrayer about being willing to acknowledge his spouse's feelings and is talking to be the betrayed wife about sharing her feelings rather than always pursuing facts about the betrayal.  The two parts match up day by day as you go through this journey.

And some good news: rarely is there a couple recovering from an affair where there was not some sort of intimacy deficiency in the marriage. Those couples who make a sincere effort to rebuild and recover often speak of their marriage being WAAAY better than before. What changed? All of a sudden everything becomes open and vulnerable. It's incredibly painful and risky but you have two people who are seeing way further into each other than they did before. As they heal and rebuild, they don't let go of this newfound intimacy!

Recovering From Infidelity Needs a Proven Plan

The second thing that we realized is that couples need a plan. To be honest, we initially didn't want to do a devotional because we didn't want to string together some warm fuzzies and lead people down an unrealistic pathway that was sprinkled with Christian platitudes.

So, Caleb wrote these devotionals with some very challenging Scripture readings but he also integrated them with a clinically proven pathway towards rebuilding and recovering from an affair.

This is a proven process that you're stepping through.

The first ten days help you confront the facts of the affair but move towards owning the feelings and the trauma of the affair: how it impacts the betrayed spouse, but also showing the betrayer how to demonstrate accountability and honesty.

The next 10 days deal with the 'why' of the affair. This is the part where you really start to make meaning of the affair. It's a very touching part of the devotional where you go deep with root causes in order to find the healing. By the end of this, you still won't like that the affair happened or the pain it caused, but you should be able to see that there is hope, there is purpose and that God is going to turn your grief and pain into blessing and recovery.

The last 10 days takes you through the decisions to forgive and reconcile. Do you want to do it? If yes, then it becomes about walking you through that as well. That is a very tough process to navigate through without guidance.

Recovering From An Affair Should Result in Transformation

We would never recommend having an affair in order to catalyze growth and transformation. However, since this has happened and it is a part of what you have experienced, the next thing I'm looking for is how can we take this heart-breaking, profoundly betraying, devastating discovery and turn it into something that is tra...

Do you ever wonder why you can’t trust your spouse? Especially when you think you should be able to?

Before we start, we want to make it clear who this episode is for because it may not be immediately apparent from the title.

We’re speaking to men and women who are struggling to trust their spouse and recognize that this trust issue lies primarily within themselves at this point. There may have been a past betrayal or not. If there was you might say something like, “I know in my head that I can trust him or her now, but I just can’t get past the doubts.”

You know your spouse is trustworthy, but you can’t get there yourself as far as trusting them.

So, if you’re struggling to trust and you cannot, and you are sure this is about something happening within yourself, this article is for you.

On the other hand, if you’ve gone through a betrayal and you’re struggling to trust and maybe your spouse is continuing to act in ways that are concealing or suspicious in nature and your lack of trust is legitimate, this is not for you. Trust your gut.

But if it’s more like you feel something’s wrong in you rather than in your relationship, we’d like to help you.

Finally, if you’ve betrayed your spouse and you can’t get them to trust you, don’t just stick your spouse in the bucket we are discussing today. A severe betrayal takes a long time to recover from. In fact, their discovery of your betrayal was probably a traumatic event and your spouse may be suffering from a variation of PTDS called Post Infidelity Stress Disorder.

Remember, everything said here should be seen as a self-help tool and not as a replacement for counseling!

So…trust.

Trust has been defined as the “confidence that [one] will find what is desired [from another] rather than what is feared.[i] It’s the idea that when I turn to Caleb for something I have this innate confidence that he will provide what I desire. He’s safe. He’s reliable. He’s predictable. Now, if he’s all those things but I cannot trust him, then I have a problem that I need to address.

Trust is implicit in love. 1 Corinthians 13 talks about love, and verse 7 says,

“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Do you hear the trust implicit in that?

Proverbs 31:11 has this really neat little statement talking about the virtuous woman: “The heart of her husband trusts in her”. Trust is an emotional confidence in another person.

That’s why betrayal hurts so bad and why it takes time to heal – because it touches you to the core.

On the other hand, when you can’t trust but you should be able to, then this affects your marriage bond because of that fact that trust is implicit in love.

In terms of why you can’t trust your spouse, here are a few different possibilities that may apply to you.

Lack of Trust as Means of Maintaining Control

The first possibility is that you may be holding onto a lack of trust as a means of maintaining control.

In 2015, some researchers looked at the influence of trust on conflict discussions.

Typically, if you’re a trusting person you tend to make positive attributions about your spouse even in questionable circumstances. You also tend to display more positive emotions than negative when you’re in conflict. On the other hand, if you’re a low-trust individual, you tend towards pessimistic views.[ii]

For example, if you find a long black hair on your husband’s sweater and no one in your family has long black hair, a trusting spouse would remove the hair and that’s it. Instead, a low trust spouse may start the conversation with, “Who does this belong to?”

When you’re less trusting, you often move very quickly towards tactics that really destabilize the relationship or even harm it because you have this underlying belief that your spouse is concealing negative events from you.

In marriage then, low-trust spouses are more influential than high-trust spouses.

Even if you're happily married you might find dates with your spouse kind of awkward sometimes. What do you talk about? I know we struggle at times to have an easy flow of conversation, too.

I don’t know what it is about dates that make it difficult to know what to talk about. Sometimes we’re just distracted or exhausted but sometimes if you’re up to date with each other then you’re also not sure what to go over. Certainly, if there’s an ‘elephant’ in the room, that gets in the way too.

This is a good place to start because where couples struggle sometimes is they haven’t dealt with something that’s pretty major. One spouse initiates the date as a way to try to repair or even extend a peace offering.

We could go down quite a rabbit trail with this but I think it would be good just to point out that you want to set up your dates so that you have the same goal/agenda when you go on them.

If your marriage is distressed, be sure that you’re both heading in with an open mind that you’re doing this as one little step to move towards repair and reconciliation. If this is your situation, don’t go in with super high expectations and give your spouse the benefit of the doubt and show some generosity by extending good will.

This is one time that we’d actually recommend avoiding the elephant in the room. If the ‘elephant’, or issue, is too big for you, put that out there before you go and also suggest how you’d like to resolve that: set up a time to talk, ask for help from a spiritual leader in your church, or get some counselling. On the date itself, though, is not the time or place to hash out difficult issues.

What you want to try to do is to set up your dates to allow a little sweetness to percolate into your marriage. Warmth. Kindness: both given and received.

When you’re going on a date in the context of the distressed marriage you want to point the conversation toward topics that help you to build little wee connections with each other again. On the other hand, if your marriage is reasonably healthy but you just need a way to freshen up your dates and your relationship we’re going to point you toward the same topics!

We know that life happens. We all get super busy and because we’re always in the whirlwind we tend to lose track of those little details that are happening in each other’s lives. Remember how when you were dating you used to love finding out those tiny little facts about each other? Well, date conversations should steer in that direction.

Talk About Relationships and Experiences

Generally, and looking at research on conversations that people tend towards, about 55% of conversation times for males and about 2/3 for females is devoted to talking about relationships and experiences.[i] See, most people like to talk about relationships and experiences because these are the most influential forces in our lives in terms of our emotional wellbeing.

A much smaller amount of time goes to work or school-related trips, then to sport, then arrangements for future social activities, then culture and art and politics and religion.

So let me give you a few different ideas about this.

You definitely want to spend more time asking your spouse about the relationships you see less of. For example, how’s it going with their boss, with their mother, with their closer friends that maybe you don’t hang out with as a couple too much. These things are really important to your spouse.

Watch for little hints of emotion there and try to catch those and expand on them to learn more about your spouse’s feelings. Be curious. Rather than assuming you know something, ask about it.

Watch how you add your interpretive layers to what they’re saying, though. You may find more value, instead of thinking about how you see something just to stay with more neutral non-judgmental questions to ask your spouse how they experienced their friend or the specific circumstance at work.

Maybe your spouse has complained to you that he or she just doesn’t feel appreciated. Well, let’s just take that at face value today and work on this whole appreciation thing. It can only help, right?

One of my favorite Bible verses is:

“You must let no unwholesome word come out of your mouth, but only what is beneficial for the building up of the one in need, that it may give grace to those who hear.”

If every word we spoke in our marriages was tested by this verse, we would see some vast improvements!

What Does Appreciation Look Like?

There is a measurement tool used in research called the Appreciation in Relationships Scale which looks at these items:[i]

Telling your partner that he/she is the best

Telling your partner how much you appreciate him/her

Not taking your partner for granted

Acknowledging and treating your spouse like s/he is someone special

Noticing when your spouse does nice things for you and saying thank you, even for the really small things

Feeling struck with a sense of awe and wonder when you think about your spouse being in your life.

Basically, appreciation is any feeling or expression of gratitude for who a person is and what they do. When you perceive that your spouse sees you as valuable, you feel appreciated. This, of course, leads to a greater sense of security in the marriage and also the feeling that you can be confident of how your spouse sees you.

It’s difficult when you’re not sure what your spouse thinks of you. This may be why your spouse is saying that s/he doesn’t feel appreciated. For some reason, they may not actually be sure of what you think of them.

When you take these needs for appreciation that we all have and you bring them into your marriage what you’re doing is shifting your focus away from your own self-interest and really starting to include your spouse’s needs. This shift in thinking is fundamental to showing appreciation because you have to start to mentally position yourself around what you’re giving rather than what you’re getting from the marriage.

When this shift takes place, you’re now expressing behaviours that help to maintain and build up your relationship. This is the whole point of appreciation!

How Appreciation Blesses Your Marriage

Here are five ways that appreciation benefits your marriage. We’ll show you why this works and what it does for your marriage so that you can really become intentional about putting this into place.

First, Appreciate Your Spouse and Your Spouse Will Appreciate You

A study from 2012 showed that “feeling appreciate by one’s spouse promotes one’s own appreciative feelings….people who feel more appreciated by their romantic partners report being more appreciative of their partners. In turn, people who are more appreciative of their partners report being more responsive to their partner’s needs.”[ii]

Appreciation begets more appreciation. When you appreciate your spouse, your spouse is more likely to appreciate you back. Appreciation starts a healthy cycle in your marriage – as one partner considers the other before self, the other partner starts to do the same, and the relationship as a whole benefits from this.

Second, Appreciation Leads to Commitment and Protects from Divorce

Further results of the 2012 study showed that people who are more appreciative of their partners are more committed and more likely to remain in their relationships over time.[iii] In this way, displays of appreciation are protective against divorce and separation.

Anything that contributes to the happy longevity of your marriage is really worthwhile!

Third, Appreciation Positively Changes How You View Your Marriage

Different research, from 2010, discovered that one of the benefits of expressing gratitude (which is just one way of expressing appreciation) positively changes how each partner views the relationship, specifically in terms of the communal strength of the relationship.[iv]

Intimacy is one of the deepest needs of the human heart. We all crave it and we all enjoy it when we experience it in our marriages. Today, you need to pause and consider how you’re doing on the intimacy in your marriage.

We experience and express intimacy in different ways, so think of this as an intimacy checkup. You go to your family doctor for your annual physical, well, today is your annual relational!

Intimacy is a full person experience: it’s your mind, heart, soul and body all in one. In the world of marriage research, we talk about cognition, emotion, physical intimacy, and spiritual intimacy. Rather than get all “woo woo” talking about intimacy, we want to keep it very real. Intimacy is nothing more than an exchange or a mutual interaction.[i] It’s a sharing between two people.

You can share your thoughts, your emotions, your spirituality, and your body. When you share all of those things in a deep way then you have deep intimacy. We’re going to go into each of these areas one by one so you can consider how you’re doing and if it is an area where you need to open up more.

But first a caveat: If you’re in an abusive marriage, more intimacy is not going to help. You need safety in order to share more intimately. If you give intimacy to someone who is not safe, you’re really giving them knowledge. And knowledge is power, and if that power is abused it is going to lead to even more hurt.

On the other hand, if you’re both healthy people – even if your marriage is unhappy and distressed and you both get your ugly on – becoming more intimate and showing your softer, deeper emotions and thoughts will give your spouse something easier to embrace. If this is reciprocated, you start to create healing and something new and much healthier in your marriage.

Cognitive Intimacy: Sharing Your Thoughts

Ever used the expression, “A penny for your thoughts!”?

Think about that request: we say that when we want to know someone more intimately. When we say “a penny for your thoughts” we’re asking to be invited into the world of their mind.

Here’s a good quote from a study in 1993: “The amount of personal information individuals disclose is positively related to how intimate they consider their relationship and positively related to marital satisfaction.”[ii]

Remember, we defined intimacy as an exchange. In cognitive intimacy, or in the context of our minds, this is just an exchange of information. When we disclose our thoughts to one another, this is cognitive intimacy.

Caleb gave me a man's perspective on this. He said often he has WAY more stuff going through his head than what he verbalizes. (I tend to think out loud, so this is a foreign concept to me…) He has to put sincere effort into disclosing his thoughts. He’s not holding back intentionally, he’s just in his head.

But here’s the deal: self-disclosure significantly predicted ratings of intimacy by husbands and wives on a day to day basis, meaning that you feel more intimate if you’re sharing what’s going on in your head. There are a few parts that go with this and you need all of the following parts in order to do this type of intimacy well:[iii]

Obvious, but you have to share your thoughts. This is called initial disclosure and is the starting point. Your spouse needs to do the same.

The next critical point is called partner responsiveness which just means that the listener has to audibly and visibly react to the disclosure in a way that is relevant to the content that has been shared. Respond in a way that is relevant and that communicates that you understand, you care, and you confirm your spouse’s perspective.

This part is the hardest – the sharing person has to perceive the response is understanding, confirming and caring. The perception needs to match reality. In addition, wives’ increases in intimacy are more strongly dependant on this perception of feeling understood, validated, accepted and cared for by her husband.

What happens if your marriage really hasn’t been that great but you’ve been sticking it out for the kids, or for some other reason. Let’s say the reason you’ve been sticking it out is no longer relevant… Now what?

If the purpose for staying married is no longer relevant, is your marriage toast? Or can you do something to redeem and reconfigure your relationship so that new life is breathed into it?

Barriers and Rewards in Marriage

Why do people stay married? In 2003, two researchers set out to answer this. They cited past research that showed that people typically stay married due to either rewards (positive outcomes associated with being in a relationship) or barriers (psychological forces that restrain people from leaving relationships).[i]

Happy marriages often stay together because of rewarding aspects of marriage, while unhappy marriages often stay together because of barriers to ending the marriage.

The researchers were interested in specific rewards and barriers that kept marriages together and used data from a 17-year longitudinal study of marital instability to find some answers.

In this study, couples were asked to list (1) specific barriers that prevented them from moving forward with divorce, (2) specific rewards that kept them together, and (3) whether they stayed due to a lack of alternative relationships.

The results showed:

When couples were asked why they stayed in their marriage, 74% listed various rewards, 25% listed barriers, and 1% listed lack of alternatives.

Of those who listed barriers, the number one barrier to ending the marriage was staying for the sake of the children. The second largest barrier listed was religion.

“People who attributed the cohesiveness of their marriages primarily to barriers (such as staying for the children) tended to be relatively unhappy with their marriages and were likely to be thinking (or acting) in ways that might lead to divorce.”

“Thinking about marital cohesion exclusively in terms of barriers predicted divorce up to 14 years later, even after controlling for marital happiness and divorce proneness.[ii]

The researchers also noted that barriers were not as powerful as rewards in maintaining cohesion. Without a strong attraction between spouses (as reflected in love, friendship, or positive communication) many people eventually find ways to overcome existing barriers and leave their marriages.

For example, couples that are concerned about the effect of divorce on children may wait until their children are older or have left home before divorcing.

Here’s the point: what’s keeping you together now could lead you to your ungluing later.

You can think of this from a Scriptural perspective, too. Marriage, in terms of purpose, is cast in Ephesians 5 as a way to express the relationship of Christ towards his people on earth: there’s communication, intimacy, covenant faithfulness, loyalty and commitment, and deep, unfailing love.

If your marriage has been carried along on the winds of any other kind of purpose, it’s time to seriously consider how you can remanufacture and build something that is aligned with the divinely ordained purpose. Surely, this is a far richer, far more joyful, perspective!

But, just because you’re staying together for the wrong reasons doesn’t mean divorce is inevitable! If there’s pain in your marriage, why not find a place for the truth of redemption to be expressed in your marriage? Surely this is a better route than the devastation of divorce.

Don’t Wait to Get Help

Based on the research (above), marriages that stay together for the children are often unhappy marriages that could be headed for divorce once the children grow up. What should these marriages do? How can they find help?

A large part of the problem is that many unhappy marriages don’t seek help at all.

Other research shows that “most distressed couples do not seek marital therapy” and those who do wait an average of 6 years ...

Here's today's question:

"Background: I grew up in an abusive home (my father is an addict and a bully, but my mother never reported his abuse to authorities or tried to explain that what he was doing was wrong- we just pretended that nothing had happened afterwards) and my husband grew up in a home with not much affection or healthy communication.

I am a newly trained mediator and I know we have issues (small issues but after 11 years they have grown to cause serious problems) but when I try and utilize my training, his radar goes up and he shuts down, Even though my communication is pretty terrible when I'm not using mediation (or at least, we have these awful cycles---he says he can't talk to me when I'm upset (voice raised or if I'm panicky or angry) he brings up things unrelated to what we are discussing (which granted, yes, need attention, but if I'm trying to resolve something that's bothering me and I want peace and harmony and to be a TEAM instead of petty ineffective blamers, imo, he sabotages the conversation and I go back to reptilian brain, angry or hurt mode and everything shuts down.

So my question is, I'm trying so damned hard....I know he would like this stuff resolved too....but how on earth can things get fixed when he seems to prefer our dance of dysfunction????

And also, side note, I had a dream last night about being sad and single and so lonely and thinking of ways to meet someone to love and cherish me and be on the same side together....only to realize in my dream that I'm married (in my dream I had forgotten apparently) dark, foreboding stuff. :(

Signed,

Sad and ready to give up in Alberta"

Listen to the podcast for Caleb's answer!

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!