Sex Within Marriage Podcast : Exploring Married Sexuality from a Christian Perspective

A wife married over twenty years wrote in. Their sex life is better than it has ever been, they are both devout and involved at church, and her husband keeps introducing things she isn't sure about: a nude beach, explicit music, explicit movies, and a clothing-optional resort where they had sex beside another couple and she kissed and touched the other wife. Now he wants to book a cruise with that couple. His argument every time is the same: we aren't lusting and we aren't having sex with anyone else, so it isn't sin. Check out the blog post here for the full answer and the scripture behind it.

She asked two questions. Are these things okay? And how am I supposed to decide? I answer both, the second one at more length, because there will always be a next thing to say yes or no to.

I go through her list item by item, then explain why "we weren't lusting" is the wrong test: it doesn't draw a line, it moves the line to wherever you want it to be. Then three questions to decide with, each from scripture. Does it stay between the two of you (Proverbs 5 and 1 Thessalonians 4)? Is it good for us, or just exciting (1 Corinthians 10)? Can you do it without going against your conscience (Romans 14)?

Then the part I'm most worried about: the direction of the list, and the pattern of one spouse always hesitant and the other always persuading. What I would do in her place, a word to the spouse who is doing the pushing, and why her hesitation isn't the problem.

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Free download: What's actually off-limits in the marriage bed? The three questions my wife and I use when something new comes up.

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A reader wrote in with a blunt question: when a husband says he is the one who wants sex less, can you legitimately suspect he is covering for a porn habit? Check out the blog post here for the charts, the sources and the full argument.

I have been answering a version of this for years, and I have generally said that a quarter to a third of marriages have the wife as the higher-drive spouse. This time I went and checked it against our own survey archive rather than repeating it. The number holds up, and what I can now tell you is exactly which marriages it describes. Across all marriages it is about one in five. Among couples who are genuinely mismatched it is closer to one in four. An independent analysis of a representative Australian study lands at 26% to 31% of couples with a large gap, which is the one-third figure. So depending on the question you are asking, it is somewhere between a fifth and a third.

The stranger finding is how invisible these men are. Two in five wives say they are the higher-drive spouse. One husband in twenty-five says the same about his marriage. Same marriages, described from opposite sides. In the one survey built to study this directly, eleven hundred husbands rated both drives, forty said their wife was higher, and fourteen of those wrote anything at all in the comment boxes. That is the entire archive of these men speaking for themselves.

And when you stop asking for an adjective and start asking about frequency, the label falls apart. The median lower-drive husband wants sex about once a week, and among the men answering for themselves it is twice a week. That is more than the median lower-drive wife wants. He is not low drive. He is out-driven. On the porn question, the base rate settles it: porn history is close to universal among husbands in our data, so finding it in a lower-drive husband tells you nearly nothing about why his desire is low. A test that comes back positive for almost everyone is not a test.

Then the second half, which is the part I care most about: if he does have the lower drive, should he still be leading in the bedroom? Yes to initiating, no to leading it. The one with the desire should carry that part of the marriage, whether that is the husband or the wife, and the other should actually follow. I talk through what that means if you hold a complementarian view, why handing the department over is not the same as handing over responsibility, and the thing underneath all of it that no amount of logistics will solve.

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A couple describes their latest fight. Maybe it's how the dishwasher gets loaded, or what time the kids should be in bed, or whether you deal with a problem the moment it comes up or sleep on it first. The details change, but two things are always true: both of them are frustrated, and both of them are certain they are right. Check out the blog post here for more details and links.

This episode came out of the last one. I said in passing during the leadership episode that most marital conflict isn't about right and wrong, someone in our forum asked whether I had ever written about that, and I hadn't. So here it is. Most of what you fight about has no morally correct answer. Scripture doesn't specify a bedtime, and there is no commandment about loading cutlery handle up or handle down. Those are preferences, formed by your upbringing, your personality, your family culture, and a thousand experiences your spouse wasn't there for.

The trouble starts when a preference gets promoted to a moral issue. Once the fight becomes right versus wrong in your head, compromise stops feeling like flexibility and starts feeling like losing, your spouse's disagreement stops being a difference and becomes a character flaw, and you are no longer negotiating, you are prosecuting. Along the way in this episode: reality tunnels, and why marriage makes them worse rather than better; how Paul handles two live church disputes in Romans 14 by refusing to rule on either one; three questions that tell a preference from a principle; where the guardrails sit, because abuse is never a preference-level issue and agreement is not a moral sanitizer; and four things to do when it turns out to be a preference after all.

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I saw a video of a wife listing the things that would immediately end her marriage, and the top item on her list was her husband finding God and joining a patriarchal religion. Not a discussion. An instant divorce. Check out the blog post here for more details and links.

And I wish I could say I was surprised, but headship has earned its bad reputation, usually from Christians who read a verse or two and build a whole theology out of it. So in this episode I walk through what I think biblical leadership actually looks like, based not on one or two verses but on the model of leadership that runs through the entire Bible, including how God leads us.

Five principles: freedom flows down while responsibility flows up, following is an invitation rather than compulsion, good leaders choose long-term flourishing over short-term comfort, trust gets earned so it doesn't require understanding, and if you have to reach for your authority, you have already failed to lead. Along the way: why the meal-planning question is really about mental load, the treadmill rule my wife asked me to enforce, when a wife should not submit, and why the clearest picture of headship in the Bible is a man on the floor washing feet.

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A husband writes in: seventeen years married, two kids, sex about twice a week, and a marriage he describes as "pretty darn good." But his wife will not try anything beyond the basics, and after years of asking he still does not know why she says no. Check out the blog post here for more details and links.

Here is the thing: she did tell him why. Four times. He wrote all four answers down in his own letter and heard them as one refusal. They are not one refusal. "I don't want that," "it doesn't feel good," "it's gross," and "maybe some other time" are four different problems wearing the same coat, and each one needs something different from him.

In this episode I work through what each of those answers is likely to mean, including why "gross" is almost always a moral word rather than a sanitary one, what our data says about premarital sexual activity and later sexual satisfaction, and why the detail that gives the whole thing away is not the oral sex at all. It is the flirty text she also will not send.

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Scroll social media for five minutes and you will find her: the exhausted wife explaining why she has nothing left for her husband at the end of the day. The world calls it "the mental load," and it is real. But splitting the chores 50/50 does not actually lift it, and this episode is about why. Check out the blog post here for more details and links.

The mental load is not a chore problem, it is a leadership problem. When a wife says she feels like she has "another child to manage, not a partner," she is not asking her husband to do more tasks. She is asking to be led. In this episode I make the case that biblical headship, rightly understood, is the solution the world keeps fumbling toward in the dark.

We start in the bedroom (because that is where the first complaints usually show up), walk through why "choreplay" falls short, work through what Genesis actually says about leadership and the fall, and land on three concrete levels for solving the mental load: carry less, build a system, and own whole domains completely.

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Scripture referenced: Ephesians 5:25, Genesis 3:16, Genesis 4:7, 1 Timothy 2:13, Genesis 2:16-17, Genesis 2:18, 1 Corinthians 11:8-9, Genesis 2:23, Genesis 3:9, Romans 5:12-19, 1 Timothy 3:4-5, 1 Timothy 5:8, Matthew 11:28-30

At our last Couple's Night I mentioned something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria almost in passing, and afterward one of the guys reached out. He had never heard the term before, and it struck a chord, because he recognized himself in it right away. "I struggle with rejection," he told me, "even when I haven't actually been rejected." Check out the blog post here for more details and links.

RSD is not ordinary disappointment when someone turns you down. The word "dysphoria" comes from a Greek root meaning "hard to bear," which is exactly right: it is a wave of emotional pain intense enough to feel almost physical, it arrives in an instant, and it lands well out of proportion to whatever actually happened. The strangest part is that the rejection does not have to be real. A curt text, a certain look, a spouse who seems distracted at dinner, or a "no" you are bracing for before you have even asked the question. It is most strongly tied to ADHD, where emotion tends to arrive at full volume, and where a nervous system that has spent years collecting "you're too much" and "you're not enough" learns to flinch before the blow lands.

Marriage is the most rejection-loaded relationship most of us will ever have, and the bedroom is where I see this do the most quiet damage. A healthy nervous system files "not tonight" as bad timing. An RSD nervous system files it as "I am unwanted, I am undesirable, I was a fool to even try." Over time the higher-desire spouse stops initiating altogether, and the lower-desire spouse has no idea why, because they never said no to you, they said no to one moment. It runs the other direction too: repeated initiation can land as "you are never satisfied with me." In this episode I walk through the five things that actually move the needle, why letting your spouse in on it is the one that matters most, and why so many people with RSD end up on an SSRI that does very little for it.

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A deep dive into one of the most consistent findings from our survey of over 1,000 married Christians: couples who can talk openly about sex report dramatically higher satisfaction than those who can't. Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why so many couples stay silent about what they actually want in bed
• The communication gap: satisfaction scores by comfort level across manual sex, oral sex, and mutual masturbation
• Who is actually talking — and how many couples are stuck wanting to but don't know how
• What openly discussing preferences actually does to sexual satisfaction
• Why the gender picture is more surprising than you'd expect
• Why the silence persists — and how it calcifies over time
• A note on couples who don't discuss it and are doing fine anyway
• How to start the conversation if you've been sitting on something unsaid

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Solo Masturbation - When You Remove the Other Person From Sex. Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

Today we’re continuing with our Sex as Worship series, and in this post, we’re going to be talking about masturbation, which is a highly contested argument in Christianity. Is it okay, is it sinful, it is helpful or harmful?

And before I say anything else, I want to share that I didn’t always believe the viewpoint I’m going to share. Also, I don’t really want to talk about it. It’s still an embarrassing topic, and I know I’m going to get a lot of flak for it. People will unsubscribe. Sometimes I get messages saying they hope to see me in hell.

But, I don’t think I can skip it. This is a topic I see damaging so many marriages, so how do I leave it alone?

Also, this is my second rewrite. I tried to make the first one more clinical, and after recording it - frankly, I hated it. I was bored from recording it. So, I rewrote it. Let me know what you think.

So here we go, take number two.

I grew up in a church culture where masturbation was not discussed. It wasn’t encouraged, but also wasn’t warned against. There were jokes here and there, hints and side comments, but more or less the message was that it was private and not to be discussed.

Why Sex Gets Derailed Right Before It Starts. Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

From time to time I get questions from our anonymous Have A Question page. I received one a bit ago that I thought would be good to answer in its own post because this is a feeling that’s common to a lot of marriages. I’ve heard this same complaint, with very minor variations, from many husbands and some wives.

And like this person, if you don’t know what’s going on, it can lead to some bad assumptions. Maybe this has happened in your marriage. Here’s the question:

Am I going crazy or is my wife subtly sabotaging things?

I've often pointed out to my wife that there's a clear distinction in how she approaches our plans based on whether it's something she really wants or it wasn't really her idea. I've seen her move mountains and leap over obstacles in some areas of our life together. But in others she's a never ending fount of potential issues, problems and risks. They seem reliably separable into categories of what she really wants and what I possibly want more.

One area, I see this and is making me feel like I'm going crazy, is our sex life. If we're going on a holiday and she wants to have a lot of sex, she will plan ahead, bring outfits, lube and be very vocal about it. It's great, fantastic even. If it's a regular day we've scheduled sex, she won't exactly say no, but the likelihood of some kind of ailment popping up just on time is about 75%. Tiredness, tummy/digestive problems, a slight cough or cold; just enough to be a dampener.

I particularly enjoy going down on her, but upon approach she will just mention something wrong. (some version of "I haven't washed up" or "I had an upset stomach earlier"). I like to make out, but after the first peck she'll says something like "Not too much though, I was getting some sniffles yesterday". Moreso in the past, she would physically behave like someone who would rather not be touched, as an almost knee jerk reaction to my affection. It's just too much of a coincidence that when we're getting intimate she will bring up some of the most off putting topics in a way that perfectly sabotages the mood for me. Sometimes it'll just be something completely unrelated and left field.