God on Sex: The Creator's Ideas About Love, Intimacy, and Marriage (12 page)

A healthy relationship shows confidence and commitment. Each will know of the love and devotion of the other. Shulammite could say with bold assurance “My love is mine and I am his.” They enjoy an intimate and exclusive love. Like 90 percent of Americans, they believe extramarital affairs are wrong. However, unlike the 35 percent of women and 45 percent of men who allegedly cheat on their spouses,
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they are determined to be true to each other. “He feeds among the lilies” indicates that he enjoys the love and pleasures she has to offer. Again, because she is confident of their relationship, she freely gives herself to him. Security is essential to maximum sexual and marital enjoyment.

YOU MUST KNOW YOU WANT EACH OTHER (V. 17)

The couple longs for marital union and sexual consummation. Because they belong to each other, they want each other with no barriers standing in the way. Thinking ahead to what they will enjoy, Shulammite invites Solomon to come unto her with the agility, strength, and beauty of a gazelle or young stag (cf. v. 9). Her invitation includes an episode of all night lovemaking. Would any red-blooded, sane male say no?

The “divided mountains” (NKJV “mountains of Bether”) is literally “hills or mountains of separation.” This would seem to be a not-so-subtle reference to the woman's breasts (cf. 4:6). With all her desire and passion she welcomes him. “Before the day breaks” (lit. “breathes”) “and the shadows flee away” (in other words “all night”), be my lover and enjoy the fruits of our love.

Shulammite has come a long way in her own personal self-evaluation. The unreserved love of this man who has entered her life has effected a great change. She is now the woman God created her to be. Together the two of them are far better and more beautiful than they could have ever been alone. Love will do that when we pursue it God's way and with all our heart.

Norman Wright tells the story of “The 8-Cow Wife.” Now before you wonder if I have lost it (or if he has), just read on and see if God doesn't teach us all something very valuable.

When I married my wife, we both were insecure and she did everything she could to try to please me. I didn't realize how dominating and uncaring I was toward her. My actions in our early marriage caused her to withdraw even more. I wanted her to be self-assured, to hold her head high, and her shoulders back. I wanted her to be feminine and sensual.

The more I wanted her to change, the more withdrawn and insecure she felt. I was causing her to be the opposite of what I wanted her to be. I began to realize the demands I was putting on her, not so much by words but by body language.

By God's grace I learned that I must love the woman I married, not the woman of my fantasies. I made a commitment to love Susan for who she was— who God created her to be.

The change came about in a very interesting way. During a trip to Atlanta I read an article in
Reader's Digest.
I made a copy of it and have kept it in my heart and mind ever since.

It was the story of Johnny Lingo, a man who lived in the South Pacific. The islanders all spoke highly of this man, but when it came time for him to find a wife the people shook their heads in disbelief. In order to obtain a wife you paid for her by giving her father cows. Four to six cows was considered a high price. But the woman Johnny Lingo chose was plain, skinny and walked with her shoulders hunched and her head down. She was very hesitant and shy. What surprised everyone was Johnny's offer—he gave eight cows for her! Everyone chuckled about it, since they believed his father-in-law put one over on him.

Several months after the wedding, a visitor from the U.S. came to the islands to trade and heard the story about Johnny Lingo and his eight-cow wife. Upon meeting Johnny and his wife the visitor was totally taken back, since this wasn't a shy, plain and hesitant woman but one who was beautiful, poised and confident. The visitor asked about the transformation, and Johnny Lingo's response was very simple. “I wanted an eight-cow woman, and when I paid that for her and treated her in that fashion, she began to believe that she was an eight-cow woman. She discovered she was worth more than any other woman in the islands. And what matters most is what a woman thinks about herself.”
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Chapter 6

The Case for Marriage

THE SONG OF SONGS 3:1–5

Marriage is one of the greatest things going. In a recent book entitled
The Case for Marriage,
Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher argue convincingly, and against a great deal of contemporary “wisdom,” that married people are “happier, healthier, and better off financially.” Amazing, isn't it? Popular culture is now discovering what many of us already knew.
God knows best!
Yes, even scientific research is now vindicating the Creator's idea of marriage and the family. For example, when we examine evidence on sex, marriage, and children, we discover God knows best.

SEX

In 1993 it was reported that sixty-eight million Americans had a sexually transmitted disease.
¹
Approximately 15.3 million Americans contract an STD annually. One in four of the victims is under age twenty. Five of the eleven most commonly reported infectious diseases in this country in 1998, the last year for which data are available, were STDs. And that doesn't include the most common STDs, herpes and human papilloma virus (HPV); the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) don't collect data on these. HPV causes over ninety percent of cancer and precancer of the cervix, which, in turn, is causing the deaths of approximately five thousand American women yearly.

The number of lifetime sex partners is highly correlated with the likelihood of contracting an STD. Studies from the CDC clearly show that, on average, the younger a person is when he or she starts to have sex, the more partners he or she is likely to have. Hence, delay sexual activity until marriage and avoid STDs. Furthermore, the likelihood of contracting an STD during marriage is negligible. Thus, more marriage means fewer STDs.
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And keep this in mind: many STDs are incurable; others can render you sterile; and some are potentially fatal. It is an amazing reality to think that if we would simply do sex God's way, one man with one woman within the covenant of marriage for life, every single STD would disappear from the planet in one generation.

We now know sex is more satisfying for those who wait until marriage. A survey of sexuality, which was called the “most authoritative ever” by
U.S. News & World Report,
conducted jointly by researchers at State University of New York at Stony Brook and the University of Chicago, found that of all sexually active people, the people who reported being the most physically pleased and emotionally satisfied were married couples.
³

One writer was rather straightforward, “Promoting marriage in America will mean for a lot more happy men and women.” Sex in America reported that married sex beats all else. For example: “Married women had much higher rates of usually or always having orgasms, 75 percent, as compared to women who were never married and not cohabiting, 62 percent.” And, the researchers wrote, “those having the most sex and enjoying it the most are the married people.”
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Not only is sex better in marriage, it is best if you have had only one sexual partner in a lifetime. We now know “physical and emotional satisfaction start to decline when people have had more than one sexual partner.”
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God knows best about sex. God knows best about
marriage.

MARRIAGE

Married people have healthier unions than couples who live together. Research from Washington State University revealed, “Cohabiting couples compared to married couples have less healthy relationships.”
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Married people are generally better off in
all
measures of well-being. Researchers at UCLA explained that “cohabitors experienced significantly more difficulty in [subsequent] marriages with [issues of] adultery, alcohol, drugs and independence than couples who had not cohabited.”
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In fact, marriages preceded by cohabitation are fifty to one hundred percent
more
likely to break up than those marriages not preceded by cohabitation.
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“Wife beating” should more properly be called “girlfriend beating.” According to the
Journal of Marriage and the Family, “
aggression is at least twice as common among cohabitors as it is among married partners.”
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Married people enjoy better physical and mental health. Dr. Robert Coombs, a biobehavioral scientist at UCLA, conducted a review of more than 130 studies on the relationship between well-being and marital status, concluding that “there is an intimate link between the two.” Married people have significantly lower rates of alcoholism, suicide, psychiatric care, and higher rates of self-reported happiness.
¹⁰

Those in married relationships experience a lower rate of severe depression than people in any other category.
¹¹
The annual rate of major depression per one hundred is as follows:

The most careful recent study of the mental health of the married and unmarried looked at a nationwide sample of nearly thirteen thousand people. Married women were about thirty-three percent more likely than unmarried to rate their emotional health as “excellent.” Unmarried women were more than twice as likely as married women to rate their emotional health as “poor.”

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts say married people experience less disease, morbidity, and disability than do those who are divorced or separated. Their explanation: “One of the most consistent observations in health research is that the married enjoy better health than those of other [relational] statuses.”
¹²
One study concerning men in particular revealed that nine out of ten men married at forty-eight will still be alive at sixty-five, while only six out of ten single men will be.

Men and women are at much greater risk of being assaulted if they are
not
married, reported the U.S. Department of Justice in 1994.
¹³
The rates per one thousand for general aggravated assaults against both males and females speak for themselves:

CHILDREN

The best environment to raise children is in a home with a father and a mother who are married to each other. On average, children do better in all areas when raised by two married parents who live together. One of the most authoritative works done in this area is by Dr. Sara McLanahan of Princeton University. In
Growing Up with a Single Parent,
she explains, “Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up … with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parents' race or educational background.”
¹⁴
Adolescents who have lived apart from one of their parents during some period of childhood are:

• Twice as likely to drop out of high school.
  
• Twice as likely to have a child before age twenty.
  
• One-and-a-half times as likely to be idle—out of school and out of work—in their late twenties.
  ¹⁵
  

A study conducted at the University of Utah said that parental divorce hurts young children because it often leaves them in the care of highly stressed and irritable mothers.
¹⁶

“Children without fathers more often have lowered academic performance, more cognitive and intellectual deficits, increased adjustment problems, and higher risks for psychosexual development problems.”
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Violent children are eleven times more likely not to live with their fathers and six times more likely to have parents who are not married.

Children not living with both biological parents are four times as likely to be suspended or expelled from school.
¹⁸
The
Heritage Foundation
noted in June 2000, “A million children a year see their parents divorce.” Only forty-two percent of teens aged fourteen through eighteen live in a “first family,” an intact, two-parent married family.