Sacred Influence (28 page)

All of this comes back to
affirmation
. When you consistently, persistently, and creatively affirm your husband, you remove one of the most compelling reasons for him to get overinvolved at work or to find an escapist hobby that robs his passion for home.

If your husband stops off at the bar on the way home from work, try approaching the problem from this perspective: how can you make home sound more inviting than the tavern? Keep in mind, the people at the bar will act like they’re glad to see him. They’ll serve him his favorite drink — with a smile. They won’t mention the calories or talk about his bulging waistline. On the contrary, when he’s done, they’ll ask him if he wants another drink. They won’t talk to him about what needs to be cleaned or fixed. They’ll let him have all the time he wants so that he can unwind.

Yes, there’s a time and a place for you to address the behaviors and attitudes that need to change — but if your goal is to get your husband more involved at home, then make home a place he can’t wait to return to.

Chapter 14: Pure Passion

Cementing Your Husband’s Affections
and Protecting His Spiritual Integrity

T
he fact that you’ve read this far tells me something: you
truly
care about your husband. It’s extraordinary, really, that you would take the time and effort to study ways in which you can help your husband become the man God wants him to be. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I believe God is proud of you for taking your marriage so seriously and for being so conscientious about loving his son.

In this chapter, I’ll discuss how you can use the sexual relationship within marriage to cement your husband’s affections and help protect his spiritual integrity, which I believe is vital for a healthy marriage. Your husband’s spiritual standing before God will have a major influence on his care for you, his participation in your family, and his growth in character.

I’m not qualified, nor do I have the space, to go into a complete discussion of sexual intimacy within marriage. Since Christian publishers seem to be releasing new books on the topic virtually every week, there’s really no need for me to cover that ground anyway. Instead, I want to help you understand the role that a fulfilling sexual relationship plays in your husband’s spiritual, emotional, and relational health. Sex represents one of the most effective ways by which you can care for — and motivate — your husband.

Threshold to Intimacy

The good news is that the majority of married Christians feel “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their sexual relationship.
¹
According to one
Christianity Today
research report, 53 percent of respondents fit those two categories; only 20 percent felt “dissatisfied” and 9 percent “very dissatisfied.” These aren’t bad numbers, especially when you consider that we ought to expect many of the stated causes of dissatisfaction in the course of a normal married life: busy schedules, children in the home, occasional sexual dysfunction, or a current illness.

This is doubly good news in that a satisfying sexual intimacy is such a key component in your husband’s emotional availability. Dr. Melody Rhode has seen more than her share of couples in the course of two decades of family counseling, and from her perspective “most women want more emotional involvement from their husbands, but most husbands can’t connect with a woman emotionally if their sexual needs aren’t being met. So if women want a deeper emotional connection, they
must
provide the sexual one.”

For many women, participating in a fulfilling sexual relationship is a joy, not a burden. There will always be times when the weariness of raising a family can dampen anyone’s enthusiasm for particular sexual episodes, but most women value the intimate connection formed through years of generous physical affection. It may surprise you, however, to learn how closely connected your husband’s emotional availability is to expressions of physical intimacy.

We’ve already talked about oxytocin, the “relational bonding” chemical more predominant in women than in men. While women normally have oxytocin levels ten times higher than those of men, a man’s oxytocin levels match those of his wife in one particular instance — following a sexual encounter. Neurologically, reports Michael Gurian, “one of the primary reasons that men want sex more than women (on average) is because it feels so good to them to have the high oxytocin — it feels great to feel so bonded with someone. . . . In male biochemistry, sex is the quickest way for a man to bond with a woman.”
²

After the honeymoon and the first year or two of marriage, it is so easy for couples to begin to coast in this area. Sometimes they coast because a baby comes along, and they’re both too tired to think about another physical activity. On occasion, couples may coast because one or both partners simply lose the desire they had at the beginning. Yet sexual coasting, no matter what the reason, endangers the relationship. Studies reveal that coasting physically usually leads to drifting apart relationally.

I stress this because if your husband feels frustrated in this regard, if he feels his sexual relationship with you has waned to such a degree that his sexual advances will more likely receive a “You’ve got to be kidding” than an “Oooh baby, let’s go!” — then he’s going to have a difficult time maintaining the emotional bond so crucial to a fulfilling marriage.

To illustrate how this works, let’s turn the tables. Say a man gave his wife the silent treatment for a week and then expected her to have sex with him. We would naturally assume that such a man knows little about either women or relationships, that in fact his request is cruel, selfish, and absurd. But when a woman consistently turns down a man’s physical advances and then expects her husband to open up to her emotionally and engage in long conversations, essentially the same dynamic is taking place: “We haven’t had sex for a week, and you want to
talk
? Why would I
want
to talk to you?”

Though single men often get caricatured as seeing sex only as a physical act divorced from any emotional involvement, and single women often get hurt because they likely see sex as a commitment rather than a simple activity (though this is changing), in marriage, for some reason, this reality often gets reversed. I think husbands get more emotional when it comes to sex; the husband experiences it far more personally than does his wife. Gurian believes that, neurologically speaking, a man’s “self-worth is linked, to a great extent, to how often and how well he engages in the sex act.”
³

One husband told Shaunti Feldhahn, “When [my wife] says no, I feel that I am rejected. ‘No’ is not no to sex — as she might feel. It is no to me as I am.”
⁴
The wife thinks she is rejecting an activity, but her husband feels she is rejecting
him
. This not only cuts off the opportunity for the oxytocin chemicals to create a refreshingly new bonding experience, but it will tempt him to shut down emotionally.

Another man told Feldhahn, “[My wife] doesn’t understand how even her occasional dismissals make me feel less desirable. I can’t resist her. I wish that I, too, were irresistible. She says I am. But her ability to say no so easily makes it hard to believe.”
⁵

I know you probably don’t feel as though you are rejecting your husband when you say no to sex or if you seldom initiate physical intimacy — but that’s exactly what it feels like to him. You’re unintentionally telling your husband that your pillow is more irresistible than he is — and that carries a tremendous emotional impact, whether you intend it to or not. Feldhahn makes a good point:

I believe that most of us aren’t manipulatively withholding something we know is critical to our husband’s sense of well-being. Much more likely is that after a long day at the office or with the kids, we just don’t feel an overwhelming desire to rip off our husband’s clothes and go at it. I suspect we simply don’t realize the emotional consequences of our response (or lack of one) and view his desire for sex more as a physical desire or even an insensitive demand. Once we truly comprehend the truth behind our husband’s advances, we’re more likely to
want
to respond.
⁶

A man who feels sexually fulfilled is much more motivated to become emotionally and spiritually intimate with his wife, as well as to want to please her. He is far more likely to be more heavily involved and invested in the home if his wife pursues him sexually. By being considerate, thoughtful, creative, generous, and energetic in this area, you can create a more stable foundation on which to make over your marriage — and you can open the door to the emotional intimacy you so rightly desire.

The Spiritual Good of a Physical Act

For your sake, for your children’s sake, and for your husband’s sake, the best way to influence your husband is to encourage his growing
intimacy with God
. A man who is deeply in love with God, who regularly listens to God’s voice, and who seeks God’s kingdom above all else will feel more motivated to love you, keep his focus at home, and to purify himself out of reverence for Christ. Probably 90 percent of the changes I’ve made in my marriage have come out of prayer and Bible study, not out of conversation with my wife.

An experience of compromised sexual purity is one of the great threats to your husband’s spiritual intimacy with God, and therefore to the welfare of your marriage. The older I get, the more pastoral I feel toward many husbands for whom this area produces great struggle. In fact, responses to Promise Keepers surveys reveal this issue as the single most common temptation men face, and therefore the single most common threat to a man’s continued relationship with God and his family.

Though sexual temptation plagues women just as much as it does men, the dynamics of your temptation differ significantly from those of your husband’s temptations. Your brain is wired differently, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, for you to truly understand the internal sexual temptations your husband faces, including the violent struggle in your husband’s heart when he passes a pornographic billboard or sees a woman “dressed to kill.” Many wives simply don’t understand how much effort it takes for some men to remain sexually faithful to one wife.

Let me be clear: there is no excuse, and no reason, for a man to use pornography. I don’t care if his wife has doubled her weight or if she refuses to have sex for six months in a row. I’m not blaming any woman for a man’s failure in this regard. But having said this, it is also true that a wife’s seeming indifference to her husband’s sexual needs
does
make a man’s struggle more intense. Where these wives see sexual relations as a burden or a chore, I see God’s sons wanting to be faithful, trying to be pure, working harder than you can imagine to keep lust at bay.

Satan will try to use your husband’s sexual temptations to drive a wedge between your husband and you
and
between your husband and God. Illicit sexual activity, once chosen, tends to escalate in all the wrong directions. The husband soon finds himself spending far less time thinking about pleasing his wife and far more time trying to figure out how to hide, and indulge in, his fantasy life. Furthermore, a man whose mind brims over with inappropriate sexual fantasies will have a difficult time praying, studying the Bible, and meditating on God’s truth. Temptation will bombard him every time he closes his eyes or tries to quiet his mind. Thus his sexual sin will bleed out into other areas of your marriage. When he stops spending intimate time with God, he will probably become, in general, more impatient, more critical, and more selfish.

I know you don’t want that for your husband! God doesn’t want it either. He broods over your husband’s welfare with a passionate concern. He has called your husband to a holy lifestyle, and he zealously desires the growth of your husband’s integrity. That’s why he has anticipated your husband’s sexual drive. He created marriage, after all, and while marriage is about much more than a holy sexual outlet, such an expression is part of it — and even provides one reason for considering marriage, as the apostle Paul observes: “But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion” (1 Co rinthi ans 7:9).

God knows exactly what it’s like for your husband, because every day he sees every thought, every temptation. In the midst of your many responsibilities, you can easily forget about your husband’s struggles — but God sees every one. Even more than that, God became a man in human form and lived within a man’s body. Though Jesus never sinned and never entertained a single inappropriate thought, he certainly realizes what it means to live with a man’s body and face a man’s temptations.

Knowing what it’s like for a man, God created marriage as a holy and healthy outlet for a man’s sexual desires. In the ideal world, a man would marry a woman who understands her husband’s situation, who cares about his spiritual integrity, and who accordingly lavishes her affection on him (while the husband remains thoughtful, unselfish, caring, and romantically inclined). She realizes that her husband will, at times, feel in desperate straits spiritually as he tries to remain faithful to his God, his family, his marriage, and his own integrity. She also will realize that she, by God’s design, is the only appropriate outlet for her husband’s desires. Anything she denies her husband becomes, by definition, an
absolute
denial, because he has no other place to which he can go to find satisfaction in a healthy or holy manner.