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

This episode is about praying with your spouse, and what it does to the rest of the intimacy in a marriage. Prayer is a level of intimacy a lot of couples are frightened to step into, and getting past that first attempt tends to pull the other areas forward with it. Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

A marriage has several kinds of intimacy: physical, emotional, and the one we forget, spiritual. They work like the staves of a barrel. If any one of them is short, that is the level the whole thing fills to, no matter how good the others are.

Praying together works because authentic prayer requires vulnerability. It is a time to be open and honest with God, and doing it out loud beside your spouse means they see the real you. It keeps your spiritual lives aligned, keeps you current on what is actually going on with each other, and forces you to make a little uninterrupted time together. When we ran a week of prayer challenge, half the couples who committed to praying together daily reported a 35% increase in sexual frequency.

Start short and simple, or follow a devotional if you are not sure what to say. You can both pray or just one of you. If your spouse will not, ask whether you can still pray with them, model it, keep it safe, leave a gap in case they want to join, and ask again occasionally rather than constantly.

This episode is about a problem common to husbands with new babies: their wife’s breasts have been re-purposed. Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

They used to be his, and now he shares them at best, and usually not even that. Any stimulation triggers let-down and leaking. Nipples are too sensitive to touch. She is touched out, and sometimes even a hug is too much because of swelling. Meanwhile breastfeeding tends to enlarge them, he sees them far more often than before, and looser tops make them more accessible than ever. Larger, more visible, more available, and completely off limits. It would be a tease if anyone meant it that way, and nobody does.

On top of that, drive is usually down. Between pregnancy, birth, recovery, possible postpartum depression and the hormones of breastfeeding itself, desire drops. She is also getting a steady oxytocin supply from feeding, so she feels emotionally connected without needing him for it. He is being teased to death by circumstance and she often has no idea it is happening.

It does get better. It is a relatively short window, you get better at handling it with each child, and things settle down again. Proverbs 5:19 and 1 Corinthians 7:4 both get a look in.

This episode answers the question why can’t my husband just tell me what he needs. It is the other side of last week’s episode. Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

Men generally struggle to express a need, to their friends, to their wife, to anyone. The result is that a lot of men go through life fairly alone with very little support, because they do not know how to ask for it and often do not realise they should.

There are three reasons. Asking for help feels like admitting weakness, and men are taught not to show weakness to anyone, frequently including themselves. Asking requires knowing what you need, and most men are not self-aware enough to have worked that out. And even when a man does know, he often lacks the vocabulary to say it in a way that survives the trip across the room.

Husbands: recognise that having a need is not a weakness, and that identifying it is a strength. Work on self-awareness, on saying it without it landing as an attack, and on burying some pride. Wives: offer support that is not patronising and does not sound like a mother helping a son, make suggestions rather than prescriptions, listen for what he is trying to say rather than what he managed to say, and model what asking looks like.

This episode answers a question I get from a lot of husbands: why can’t my wife just tell me what she wants. It used to drive me mad early in my own marriage, until I worked out the answer. Now I see it as an opportunity rather than a frustration. Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

It shows up everywhere, from what do you want for supper to waiting during sex for her husband to take the lead. Part of the problem sits with the husband: men have been trained to defer to women, to be the Nice Guy, to put her preferences ahead of their own. So when finally asked to state a desire, he says I do not know, because he has no idea how to resolve being asked for the thing he has been taught not to have.

The other part is that she may genuinely not know either, and that telling him would defeat the point. What she wants, consciously or not, is for him to lead. If she specifies it and he then does it, he has not led, he has followed instructions. I look at why that desire is there, from Genesis 2 and Ephesians 5, and at how Genesis 3:16 sets up the conflict: he has the authority to lead and she will be inclined to control. Men carry a mirror of that conflict from the culture, given a role to lead and taught to be submissive.

This episode tackles a question I wrote about years ago and wanted to revisit for listeners who have not heard my view on it: is sex a need or a want? Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

Plenty of people show the side effects of not having sex, or of having it rarely. Those effects can be physical, psychological, emotional and relational, and usually one spouse feels them far more than the other. The question is whether that means they need sex more, or only that they want it more.

Take the common version, sleep against sex. If both are needs, you have a stalemate. If both are wants, stalemate again. If sleep is a want and sex is a need, sex should at least be on the table. And if sleep is a need and sex is a want, the higher-drive spouse looks selfish, which is exactly how this usually feels from the other side: if you do not see sex as a need, then a spouse who wants it is flawed, broken or grasping. It is worth noticing that whoever holds a veto wins by default, whatever the honest answer turns out to be.

1 Corinthians 7:3-5 treats it as a need and commands us not to deprive each other. That is not permission to compel anyone, because Ephesians 5:25-28 asks for love that is sacrificial.