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

Valentine’s Day is a few days away, and if reading that made you sweat, I feel for you. I think it is potentially one of the most dangerous days of the year for a married couple. Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

The arithmetic is simple. Expectations are high, stress is high, and communication is low, and high expectations plus high stress plus low communication reliably produces a failure to meet expectations. It is a holiday built on fantasy rather than reality, which sets couples up to want a fairy tale and then be disappointed when they get a Tuesday.

It is also a day of contradictions. It is supposedly about love, but in practice it is about meeting a manufactured expectation out of fear. You are meant to guess what your spouse wants most, and if you guess wrong it is your fault. The prize for winning is great sex, the cost of mediocrity is obligatory sex, and the punishment for losing is no sex, on the one day of the year you have been told everyone else is having it. A thoughtful gift or a nice dinner on any other day reads as romance. On the 14th it reads as the bare minimum.

Three things that help: celebrate on any other day, which also gets you cheaper flowers, easier bookings and an available babysitter. Have sex before the big meal rather than after it. And if you are buying something, buy something that lasts and draws the two of you together.

This episode is about morning sex, meaning sex when you first wake up. I get asked why does my husband want sex in the morning often enough that it earned its own episode, and there is more going on than most people realise. Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

Most of it is chemistry. Testosterone, the hormone that drives desire, peaks in the morning. Cortisol, the stress hormone, is at its lowest, and since cortisol works against the dopamine that sex depends on, the morning is when the deck is most stacked in your favour. Sex then produces more testosterone, plus oxytocin, dopamine, and the body’s own antidepressants and anti-stress agents. Testosterone leaves you feeling confident and assertive, oxytocin leaves you feeling connected, and dopamine leaves you feeling like you accomplished something, all before the day has started.

The obstacles are real too, and worth naming rather than pretending away: switching gears from asleep to interested, having sex with the lights on when you carry body image concerns, children who are already awake, and morning breath.