Sheila Wray Gregoire's Blog, page 104
July 12, 2018
When You’ve Never Had an Orgasm: How to Experience the Breakthrough
I’ve had a lot of women write in frustration in the comments of the blog lately that they’ve given up hope for a good sex life. Sex just doesn’t feel good, no matter how hard they try to “think” their way to enjoying it. I’ve been trying to encourage them, and I’m thinking of some resources I can create to help, but in the meantime a long-time faithful reader (who wants to remain anonymous) shared with me her story. It’s awesome, and I want to share it with you today and tomorrow, because I think many of you will get a lot of encouragement from it!
Here she is:
Last week as I was reading Sheila’s post 10 Ways Real Women Rev Their Sex Drives! I was struck by one of the comments left on the post. What hit me is, that was exactly what I could have written eight months ago about myself:
“It’s hard to feel excited when you get nothing out of it. I am a Christian and eagerly anticipated a wonderful sex life when I got married, having believed what the world portrayed it to be. I am slowly resigning myself to the fact that it was all a lie. It’s wonderful for men, of course…and so easy. But women, apparently, need anatomy books, sex position charts, drawn-out mental and physical preparation, ideal self-esteem, and for the stars to align to have any hope of orgasm during intercourse. I thought God created it to be a bonding, life-giving aspect of marriage. Instead, I’m jealous of my husband’s ability to enjoy it as I wish that I could. I thought it would be fun, frivolous, and stress-relieving. Now it’s just something to check off my mental to-do list to make sure my husband’s needs are met. It has been the biggest disappointment of my life.”
My heart broke for this lady and the other courageous women who have bravely shared their hearts on the post. I had replied with some of the practical things I was trying but I simply made her feel like more of a failure and that was not my intent. She could not see my heart or my journey in those few words. I needed to tell her more, to share my journey with her. To come alongside her and say I understand. I’ve been there and some days I still am. Out of desperation I sent Sheila a message and asked her if I could please share my journey with the women who come to her blog. Sheila graciously said yes.
How Sex was a Lost Cause for Me, too
My story began 28 years ago. The first time together was a mental moment of “wow we are one!” This is intercourse. However at the same time it was physically empty. There were no sparks of amazing feelings physically and I was secretly disappointed. I knew I was becoming aroused because my body showed signs of arousal (lubrication, engorgement, etc) but I simply did not feel anything, no pleasure or climax. I never told my husband. How could I? The rules are you protect his masculinity and you do not ever say no because scripture said (1 Corinthians 7:5) you can not deny him and I was a good Christian wife.
After a couple of years we were given a copy of a well known Christian book on intimacy in marriage. I took some time to read this and thought, if we follow this formula it will work. It took me ages to work up the courage to approach my spouse. His reaction was one of shock and his push back was why do we need to get lessons from some book? Isn’t it supposed to be natural, I don’t need a book?
What followed was twenty plus years of ups and downs for me when it came to enjoying sex
I’d read a book and every single time the message was always the same: “It’s all in your head. You need to choose to like it and it will be good and you’ll enjoy it. The problem is with you because you choose not to…” Same old same old. Every time I would summon the courage to try again. I would spend hours thinking the same mantra to myself. This is good. God made it good. The problem was the words and mantra’s did not line up with the physical reality of my experience.
Our 25th wedding anniversary was approaching and my husband was so excited. All he wanted to do was plan a weekend away just the two of us. It was so hard to be excited because I was filled with dread. A weekend away meant sex. Great sex for him. Satisfaction for him. Pleasure for him. For me I knew it meant trying and trying but nothing for me. I just felt sad, disappointed, disillusioned, frustrated, angry at God, guilty over that anger, broken, and defeated. I knew in my heart I would be the one in tears after he went to sleep at night deeply satisfied. And that is just how it was. I did the sex thing because I love him because he is my mate and I enjoy being close to him even though there was no pleasure physically for me.
Over the next year I just slowly gave up on sex all together.
I began to think, gosh, if we took sex out of our marriage then 85% of our conflict would be resolved. I had spent a quarter of a century trying and nothing had changed. In fact it had just made me depressed, I cried all the time. Why bother? Nothing works. I’m broken. I can’t do this anyway. Why did God do this to me? What did I do wrong? Why doesn’t God love me enough to allow me to enjoy this good gift everyone else seems to enjoy?
I became angry and resentful towards my husband (let’s just say I became increasingly difficult to live with). I was both angry and extremely jealous of him. How could he use me like that? How could he keep doing this sex thing to me knowing I got NOTHING out of it! If he truly loved me why doesn’t he do some research and fix it?!! Can’t he see and feel that I’m not participating? Going to bed was stressful because I knew he would want sex and I just did not want to fail again. I did not want to lie there listening to him have ANOTHER orgasm and add another notch to the list of my failures. Most nights I would cry myself to sleep and my poor husband would be just as heart sore. He started checking in on me. Was it better? He tried all sorts of things. He was feeling like a total loser at life because for this woman he loved, he could not satisfy her or make her feel pleasure and orgasm.
'Going to bed was stressful because I knew he would want sex and I just did not want to fail again.' Read one woman's story of how, after decades of getting nothing out of sex, she finally had a marriage breakthrough:Click To Tweet
Sex became an exam we would both sit after each encounter. Did it work? Was that better? Did I succeed in helping you experience what I have? He began to feel guilty over the pleasure he was experiencing, which in turn created a performance anxiety in him. He started asking if he may touch me. Asking my permission to have sex. That made me feel even more guilty. He tried EVERYTHING he could think of.
Sex for him became an exercise in how little can I touch you to get it on and how quick can I come so that I don’t hurt you. It broke my heart. And his.
One day in the dark he quietly whispered maybe we should buy a vibrator because it might do the trick. He was so desperate. I was was so embarrassed. I told him no way. Was I really so broken that I needed sex with a machine? He suggested that maybe I should try self stimulation and find out what works for me. I tried. Hearing that woman can bring themselves off in a few minutes added to my list of failure. I failed at self stimulation too. I finally pitched a fit and told him he was never to ask me again. I felt like enough of failure without having to sit an exam after each encounter.
How Sex Finally Changed for Us
By now another year had gone by. I was still a failure. The tension in my marriage was growing. I was frustrated. My husband was frustrated and burdened. Our anniversary was coming AGAIN. I was fed up with how I was feeling and the impact it had on my marriage.
I sought out the sex section at our local Christian book store and after some time I selected Restoring the Pleasure by Clifford L. Penner and Joyce J. Penner. I felt encouraged to go to my anniversary with hope. However as I knew it would be, nothing had changed other than I had a better attitude and now I really wanted my husband to read the new book and fix things. In our marriage I’m the reader. He works long, physical days out doors which is not conducive to reading self help books and this added to my rhetoric, …IF he loved me he would make the time to read this book so that magically he could do this with me and fix me so I could like sex. It just didn’t happen. That book was great. It had good information and helped me address some issues in my thinking but it did not resolve the deeper issue in me.
In desperation I remembered years ago reading a blog about sex and so went to see if I could find it. I found Sheila’s blog and saw her book The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex. I secretly bought it on my Kindle and read it over a couple of days. I was STUNNED. I had this sex thing all wrong from the beginning. Sheila confronted so many cultural and church lies about my perception of sex. I started to watch my husband. Did God really intend marriage to be that way? Did my husband really feel that way when we did sex? Could things really change? And if they could I realised the changes needed to begin in me.
Little did I know God had already begun this change earlier in the year. I was at an all time low. I was deeply sad and I wanted to be happy. I came across Switch on Your Brain : The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and Health by Dr Caroline Leaf. What a fascinating read. Dr Leaf is a neuro scientist who loves God and sharing how science backs up scripture. I learnt that our brains grow new brain cells (neuro genesis) each night when we go to sleep in preparation for what we will think and feel the next day. I learnt that every negative thought is toxic to my brain and my body. I had a LOT of negative thoughts about my body and sex. Dr Leaf gave me practical tools to learn to combat my negative thinking. I started using those tools to address my attitude about sex.
Things started to change. I enjoyed emotional intimacy. I was no longer passive. I actively pursued him. My husband kept on asking me “What has changed?” the only thing that had changed was my understanding of what God did when he made sex. It did not change my physical reality I was still numb everywhere.
My next mission was to find out how to change the physical aspect of sex for me. I was tired of reading about orgasms, just think your way into it, relax and let it happen. I tell you NONE of that was working for me.
To be Continued tomorrow in Practical Steps I’m taking to find Sexual Pleasure and Satisfaction.
So glad she has agreed to share her story! I thought many of you could relate. Do leave your comments, and let’s talk about it!
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July 11, 2018
Wifey Wednesday: 3 Ways to Stop Marriage (and Motherhood!) from Feeling like a Big To-Do List
Life just gets busy. And then your life seems to have endless demands on you.
This week my book To Love, Honor and Vacuum is on sale for just $1.99 for the Kindle and ebook version, and I have a soft spot for that book because it was the first I ever wrote. I was a young mom, surrounded by other young moms who were just so harried. And they felt like their marriages were rough. Their husbands took them for granted, they were constantly on the go, and they had no down time for themselves.
Life had become exhausting.
I asked myself, “is this really what it’s supposed to be like?” At the time my husband was working full time, five days a week, and then also on call several nights a week. He was super busy, too. But I did work hard to feel like my life was not an endless to do list.
On the book’s 10th anniversary I wrote an updated version of it, and that’s what’s for sale now! And while I did talk about housework in it (as I talked about yesterday in my post for messy moms), that wasn’t the main focus of the book. The main focus was how can we feel like we have purpose and a relationship-focused life full of joy when we have so many demands on us?
I got my first look at the actual new revised version at a Meet Up I had with some readers in Ottawa a while back!
Getting the revised version of To Love, Honor and Vacuum!
Today I want to give you all a bit of a pep talk, of the kind that I gave in the book.
1. Life today is very different from life 25 years ago, 50 years ago, or 150 years ago. So adjust your expectations of yourself!
Have you ever sat in a huge pile of laundry, dejected, thinking to yourself, “my mom raised four kids and still managed to get the laundry done; my grandmother raised 6 on a farm; and my great-grandmother raised another 6 with no electricity! And she baked bread, too.” What is wrong with you? Why can’t you do what women before you did–even though you have all these modern conveniences?
You’re right–you may not be able to do what your mom and your grandma and your great-grandma did. But the truth is that you are doing a very different job than the one that they had!
Yes, their lives were often more physically challenging. They often lived much closer to poverty than we do. But they also didn’t have to juggle all of the things that you do.
They didn’t have to drive kids to extracurricular activities
They didn’t have to juggle shift work the way many of us do
They tended to live in one place, have the same job (or their husband had the same one or two jobs) for their entire lives; and they didn’t have to worry about retraining as we do
They didn’t have the internet, which eats up time, but which also makes parenting more difficult. You have to monitor what your kids do, worry about social media bullying, worry about porn–and your kids can spend more time online than talking with you
And so many more! As I said in To Love, Honor and Vacuum:
When we think about our jobs as mothers and wives, we often think women in centuries past performed these roles much better than we do. We ask ourselves, “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I cope? Why am I always so tired?” Those are the wrong questions to be asking. Instead of blaming ourselves for how out of control we feel, we should realize that feeling out of control is the logical outcome of our busy society. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with us; there may be something wrong with how busy our lives are.
2. You don’t have to live like everybody else. It’s okay to have different priorities.
It’s okay to live in a small house (or even keep renting) if that reduces your stress. It’s okay to not put your kids in all kinds of extra-curricular activities. It’s okay to choose to get rid of your TV! (In fact, that’s what we did when the kids were really small, and I think that one step helped us make more counter-cultural choices, too.
The key thing is to think backwards. What do you want your family to feel like? To look like? To do? What kind of relationship do you want with your kids?
Then do the things that will get you there.
Don’t just put your life on autopilot, living up to everyone else’s expectations, and think that life is magically going to turn out all right.
In Hebrews 12:1-2, we’re told:
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, 2 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.
We’re supposed to get rid of any weight that holds us back from Jesus, and what God wants for us (and those weights are different from sins!) They’re not bad, in and of themselves. But they’re not God’s best.
If your life is weird, that’s okay. If you pursue dreams that your mom and dad don’t understand, but that you feel a deep calling from God for, that’s okay. If you choose to live your life in a totally culturally weird way, but it means that you have more time as a family, and your kids feel closer to one another, that’s totally okay. Get rid of the things that keep you from what you feel like God is calling you to.
3. It really isn’t about working harder. It’s just about working smarter, and making work part of your family.
If you feel out of control, and like you’re always busy and your house is always a mess, and you’ve been trying different systems and organization habits and it isn’t working, take a huge step back.
It may not mean that you have to work harder. It may mean that you have to work smarter. Yesterday I shared some cleaning hacks to help people who are naturally messy keep their houses under control with less effort. But there’s another element to this.
As a mom, it is a good thing if you stop making cleaning your own responsibility, and start becoming “the family that cleans together.” After all, if you do absolutely everything for your kids, you rob them of the chance to learn responsibility and important life skills! The best job you can give your future daughter-in-law is a son who cleans toilets!
One of the reasons we often feel so exhausted by everything on our to-do list is that we see all of these tasks as taking us away from what we really want to do–namely spend time with our kids or our husband or rejuvenate ourselves. But what if we could change the way we do housework so that cleaning itself helped meet those goals?
What if cooking became a time of bonding between you and your preteen? What if you turned over cleaning the bathrooms to your kids once they reached 8–and compensated them with an allowance so they learned the value of money? You save time, and they get two life skills in one go! What if your kids learned to be responsible, so that they stopped leaving stuff all over the house, stopped demanding you help them with homework 10 minutes before the school bus, stopped forgetting their lunch–and started living up to their potential?
I show you how in the book–how to ask for help; how to convince your family to get on board; and most of all, how to institute the right consequences so you don’t nag, yell, or even cry!
You can do it. Because life doesn’t have to be a long list of things you have to get done. It really can be relationships you get to enjoy. Let me show you how!
Check out To Love, Honor and Vacuum (the book!) now–while the ebook is still just $1.99!
July 10, 2018
10 Weird Ideas to Help Messy Moms Feel More Organized
A reader asked me this question recently:
I grew up with a mom who was an excellent homemaker. She kept the house neat and clean at all times, had dinner on the table at a decent hour, always kept up with the laundry, and still managed to homeschool 9 children. And then there’s me. I hate housekeeping, and my husband and I are very tolerant of mess. Currently there are clothes all over our bedroom floor, our bed is unmade, the laundry my husband only recently folded still needs to be put away, and the dishwasher needs to be emptied and the dirty dishes loaded. It doesn’t really bother me, except for the nagging guilt that I’m somehow a failure because I don’t keep a clean house. I work a couple hours every day, and I have a newborn, but, technically, I have enough time and energy to get housework done. I often choose not to, because I’d rather spend my baby’s naptime writing or reading, and I’d rather spend evenings with my family instead of cleaning. I’m not frittering my time away; I’m just choosing to do other things that bring more meaning to my life, and getting to the housework later….sometimes several days or weeks later. What does this say about me? Am I lazy, undisciplined person, or is it possible to just be messy and have different priorities and not have it reflect poorly on my character?
That’s a great question! I’m not a naturally clean person at all. In fact, my house is a ton cleaner since my mom moved in two years ago! She actually washes the floors (why did I always forget to wash the floors)?
And I’m someone who tended to prioritize other things with my kids as well. We always had projects on the go that were scattered around the house, and I always made a point of doing an outing with my girls everyday (even when they were babies). I never, ever stayed home just so I could clean. So I get it. I really do.
At the same time, I do think that having a super messy house can end up being far more stressful than we may realize.
We had to get super organized when my mother moved in, because all of a sudden we had two of everything, and way more stuff than my house could handle. So I had to do a huge purge. What I ended up doing was figuring out a place for everything in my house, and now I can always find anything. Even if the house isn’t super tidy (because I have knitting lying around), I know where things are. It makes a big difference in how my house “feels”.
I also believe that it’s important to teach kids how to clean. It’s hard growing up in a really messy house, and they may not get the skills that they’ll need in life.
No one has to keep a picture perfect home, but we are called to be hospitable and to let others into our lives. When your house is always messy, you will feel stressed, and you’ll tend to cocoon because others can’t see how you live. So, no, you don’t have to have a cleaning schedule and be perfectly organized, but you do need to get to the point where you can find things and no one has to fear getting a communicable disease in your bathroom!
In fact, that’s the balance I tried to find in my book To Love, Honor and Vacuum, which has the ebook version on sale for just $1.99 this week! And everything I’m about to say is in that book, too.
So here are 10 tips to help messy moms become more organized. None of this is about sticking to a schedule or learning to love cleaning or anything. They’re simple things that take almost no time but will help you feel more organized.
And no one has to do all 10, either! Remember my Top 10 Tuesday philosophy: try to identify 2-3 that may bring huge dividends to you, and do those.
1. Pick Your One Thing that Helps you Feel Like You’ve Accomplished Something
For me it’s making my bed everyday.
My bed in the summer. And, yes, I knit the blanket.
Rebecca (who is also a little bit messy!) says she has to have a clean bathroom and a clean coffee/tea station.
She fully admits that the coffee station is only this clean because of her unhealthy dependence on caffeine.
For others it’s doing the dishes every night. Choose one thing that you will make sure always, always gets done.
2. Add One Thing to Your Morning Routine
Similar to the one above, but this time you’re choosing something for a specific time of day. And your husband can pick one thing, too! Keith always empties the dishwasher in the morning. I tend to pick up everything on the floor of my bedroom. Other people swear by putting on a load of laundry (we can’t do that here in Ontario because electricity is expensive in the morning!) The point is to put something easy and quick into your morning routine.
Struggling to keep a clean house when you're naturally a messy person? Check out these 10 tips just for you:Click To Tweet
3. Turn Cleaning into Playing with Your Kids
I always prioritized time with my kids, too. I didn’t want to do housework; I wanted to spend time with them.
The solution? Combine the two! When they were 3 and 1 I’d let them lie on the bed while I made it, throwing the sheet up in the air and covering them with it. It meant that making the bed took a good 15 minutes while they were laughing, but it got done, and the girls felt like I had spent undivided attention time with them (which also meant they were more likely to leave me alone later!)
Other things we did as they got older: We folded laundry together. When they were 2 and 3 they folded the facecloths and dishcloths into fourths while I folded everything else. Eventually they did the towels into sixths. They loved it.
When they were 3 I’d give them a spray bottle with water and a cloth, and when I cleaned the kitchen, they would “clean” the kitchen cabinets. Hey, it’s hard to clean near the floor! They’d actually help, and they loved it. When I was doing dishes, I often filled one sink with soapy water for them and had them stand on a stool and do all the plastic stuff.
4. Use a Timer
She says she’d rather spend her time doing something else, so she doesn’t have time to clean. But honestly–cleaning doesn’t take that much time. It really doesn’t. Set a timer for 10 minutes twice a day and see how much you can get done! Tidy during one of those periods, and vacuum and dust or mop in the other. You’ll find it doesn’t take nearly the time you think it does.
Let's stop an 'all or nothing' approach to housekeeping and get back to basics--here are 10 ways for messy moms to feel their home is more organized & clean!Click To Tweet
5. Fold Laundry While Watching TV
I always did this–I fold and iron (yes, I still iron) in front of the TV. If you watch on an iPad or laptop computer, you can also carry it around with you and use your screen time to tidy, dust, or do dishes.
6. Use All Your Phone/FaceTime time to Clean
Every morning around 9:15 I have my shower and get dressed and clean my room (and make my bed!) And 95% of that time I’m talking to one or the other daughter. If a friend phones during the day, too, I immediately stop whatever I am doing, get up, and do the dishes or do laundry or dust. Every time I’m on the phone I clean. You can get so much done!
7. Make Use of Washcloths and Facecloths!
I keep a Norwex cleaning cloth right in my shower, and whenever I have a shower I also wipe off the surfaces, scrub the floor, or clean off any dust that’s accumulated. It takes no extra time, and I’m there anyway (and I always like the excuse to stay under hot water for longer).
And every time I have a facecloth that’s wet that I need to put in the laundry, I do a quick wipe of surfaces or floors. Sure, it won’t get things perfectly clean, but it keeps the dust away while you’re waiting for your bigger clean.
8. Choose Furniture with Storage
Why do things often get untidy? Because we don’t have a place for them! When you’re buying furniture, choose ones with drawers. Our coffee table has drawers. Rebecca’s dining room table has drawers that they keep little things like quick snacks, extra cutlery, and salt shakers in. Then choose what particularly you will put in each item of furniture.
9. Store Things in the Room You Will Be in When You’re Finished with It
Here’s something I learned from Marie Kondo’s The Magic of Tidying Up! When you’re deciding where to put something, stick it where you will put it away, not necessarily where you will be when you first need it. Why? Because if you need something you will walk to get it. But when you’re finished with something, your tendency is to put it down where you are.
For instance, rather than keeping all of your cleaning products under your kitchen sink, keep your toilet bowl cleaner under the bathroom sink. If you have more than one bathroom to clean, it’s okay to have to walk to get it. But then you can store it under the sink of the last bathroom you cleaned.
10. Use Fewer Dishes
You can serve things in the pot it was cooked in (as long as you have heat protectors on your table!). Kitchens are one of the places that get out of hand really quickly because dishes seem to pile up faster than you use them!
When Rebecca and Connor moved into their current apartment, they lost about half the kitchen counter space they had in their previous one. So Rebecca decided, “We’re just not going to use many dishes.” They only kept four bowls, 2 small plates, 2 dinner plates, and 2 mugs in their kitchen. Everything else was stored away for when guests came over. She started making more slow cooker meals and fewer meals that required a main, a side, AND a salad. Their dishes were cut in half and it made cleaning the kitchen go by quicker (which made it more likely to get done in a timely manner).
Pinpointing where your biggest issues are with cleaning can be helpful because it shows you where you need to downsize. Throw out the 5 million tupperware containers you use for the kids’ lunches and get each of them a lunch box with sections for different foods that they have to wash every night. Go through everyone’s clothes and only keep the necessities if laundry is an issue. If it’s craft supplies being strewn all over the house, organize them into project bags and put everything you’re not currently using away in a closet to be taken out later.
Figure out the bottleneck and then do what you can to fix it.
I understand being messy.
I understand saying, “I’d rather spend my life on other things.” But mess is stress in the long run. It actually wastes time because you can’t find things. It costs money because the kitchen can be too messy to cook. And it leads to a feeling of chaos in your home.
And clean does not have to take that much time! So just try a few of these things, and see if they make a difference.
But the real key to it all? Change the way you think about housework and your purpose! It’s so freeing. And it’s the focus of To Love, Honor and Vacuum (the book!). And it’s on for just $1.99 this week–so don’t miss it!
Find To Love, Honor and Vacuum on Amazon right here! Or look for it at your own ebook seller.
Tell me: do you have any life hacks to keep the house less messy? Let’s talk in the comments!
July 9, 2018
Reader Question: Should You Let Unmarried Couples Share a Room when Visiting?
Every Monday I like to post a reader question, and this is a thorny one that I don’t think has an absolute yes or no, so Rebecca and I are just going to discuss it in a video!
Here’s what the reader wants to know about how to host a couple that is living together and they visit–can you have separate rooms?
When I married my husband, we were both older, and he was divorced with kids. Those kids later went on to have children born out of wedlock. We felt strongly that they were wrong in this (to live together before marriage), but by that time they were out of our home and adults and there was little we could do. Both kids later married the parents of the babies and are still married and apparently happy and we love our in-laws. But this was awkward, hospitality-wise when we had them over (we have a lake home they enjoy visiting) as we both (or at least I) felt we should stand by our convictions and not let dating couples share a room in our home – but it only came up once after the babies were born, I think, and I think we did let the young family share a room.It just seemed ridiculous at that point as they were planning to be married. But the PRINCIPLE of it – still bothered me. After all, I had often gone to this lake house when we were dating – with my boyfriend/fiancé (later husband) but was always careful to bring other people and sleep in my own room. And I still have mixed about it, feeling very Pharisaical making a loving, committed (??) couple sleep in separate rooms because of my strong convictions about sex before marriage. Now we have friends who want to visit, in the same situation. They are 60-something, but our house will be full that weekend so they’re staying at the resort next door. I think she knows better than to invite herself with her live-in “boy”friend to share a room at our house. And part of me feels bad about that. What if we DID have room? What do you say? I just want to stand for civilized, Biblical living in a world that is fast becoming a godless world I don’t recognize. Marriage is important. It’s a Big Deal, not just for people but for our civilization.
I totally understand what she’s saying. Marriage IS different from cohabitation, and certainly just from dating. Marriage DOES matter. Marriage should have its privileges.
And we do believe that sex before marriage is wrong, and so letting people share a room seems like you’re endorsing wrong behaviour.
So what do you do? I don’t think there’s a perfect answer to this, so Rebecca and I go back and forth on it here. The main takeaway? In everything, act in such a way to preserve your influence over people. Here we go:
Again, I do think there’s a difference between kids and peers. And I do think it’s okay to enforce your own standards in your home, especially with those close to you. But there also comes a time when the relationship becomes paramount.
This is a really hot button topic and I’m sure many of you will disagree, so have at it in the comments!
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Sheila Wray Gregoire has been married for 26 years and happily married for 21! She loves traveling around North America with her hubby in their RV, giving her signature "Girl Talk" about sex and marriage. And she's written 8 books. About sex and marriage. See a theme here? Plus she knits. Even in line at the grocery store.Find Sheila Here:YouTube
Sheila's Favorite Posts on To Love, Honor and Vacuum:
10 ways to initiate sex
10 Effects of Porn on Your Brain, Marriage, & Sex Life
Why So Much Marriage Advice is So Trite
How can Sex be Hot and Holy at the Same Time?
Check out some of Sheila's Books:
The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex
31 Days to Great Sex
9 Thoughts That Can Change Your Marriage
To Love, Honor, and Vacuum
Check out Sheila's Courses:
The Boost Your Libido Course
The Whole Story: Talking to Your Daughter about Sex, Puberty, and Growing Up
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July 6, 2018
The Woman in the Bible Who Gets The Worst Rap
And often the Bible leaves us with stories without giving any commentary on them. We’re supposed to read the stories and draw our own conclusions. Indeed, that’s why the Bible is filled with stories; because there are so many different nuances and different conclusions to be drawn, and they’re so rich that you can mine them afterwards for new things.
Because the Bible gives little commentary on specific aspects of stories, it’s all too easy to see them in a black and white way. And I’d like to stand up for a woman today who is often maligned. Recently I read another book where the author called her “The Disrespectful Wife”, and warned us against following her example.
On the contrary, I think we should all learn from her, and honour her in history.
Her name was Vashti, and here’s what happened:
Vashti was a queen, married to an absolute tyrant (Xerxes). The tyrant could order anyone killed on a whim. You weren’t allowed into his presence without an explicit invitation first–even if you were married to him! People were peons to him.
He decided to throw a huge banquet for all the military leaders and nobles in his kingdom. When our story opens, they had been eating and drinking for a week already. They were royally inebriated!
And in the middle of that, the king asks his wife, who is very beautiful, to come and parade herself before these drunken guys.
Here’s what the story says:
On the seventh day, when King Xerxes was in high spirits from wine, he commanded the seven eunuchs who served him—Mehuman, Biztha, Harbona,Bigtha, Abagtha, Zethar and Karkas— 11 to bring before him Queen Vashti, wearing her royal crown, in order to display her beauty to the people and nobles, for she was lovely to look at. 12 But when the attendants delivered the king’s command, Queen Vashti refused to come. Then the king became furious and burned with anger. (Esther 1:10-12)
Some Hebrew scholars believe that “wearing her royal crown” is better translated “wearing ONLY her royal crown”. In other words, she was being ordered to parade naked before all the drunken nobles.
Even if that interpretation isn’t correct, she was still obviously being asked to parade in front of drunken men so they could leer at her.
And Vashti said no.
The Bible tells us enough of the story so that we understand the King’s request was unjust and would put Vashti in an awkward, objectifying situation at best, and a dangerous situation at worst. If the main point in the story was that wives should not disobey husbands, I believe this bit would have been left out.
The pagan leaders frame her refusal as “sowing discord”. That does not mean God saw it that way.
Later in the passage, the king seeks his nobles’ advice about what should be done about Vashti’s refusal. This is the advice he gets:
Then Memukan replied … “Queen Vashti has done wrong, not only against the king but also against all the nobles and the peoples of all the provinces of King Xerxes. 17 For the queen’s conduct will become known to all the women, and so they will despise their husbands and say, ‘King Xerxes commanded Queen Vashti to be brought before him, but she would not come.’ 18 This very day the Persian and Median women of the nobility who have heard about the queen’s conduct will respond to all the king’s nobles in the same way. There will be no end of disrespect and discord.
19 “Therefore, if it pleases the king, let him issue a royal decree and let it be written in the laws of Persia and Media, which cannot be repealed, that Vashti is never again to enter the presence of King Xerxes. Also let the king give her royal position to someone else who is better than she. 20 Then when the king’s edict is proclaimed throughout all his vast realm, all the women will respect their husbands, from the least to the greatest.”
Just because the king and his nobles thought that encouraging discord among wives was evil does not mean that God thought encouraging discord among wives was evil--especially if it meant not obeying a sinful command. After all, the Bible tells us that Xerxes was a pagan king who had enslaved the Israelies. His nobles were enemies of God, too. So why would we take their concerns at face value?
Remember the New Testament story of Ananias and Sapphira? Sapphira was struck dead because she followed Ananias’ lead to hold back some money they had pledged to the early church (Acts 5). Remember the story of David and Abigail? Abigail went against her evil husband Nabal and in the end saved the lives of her servants (1 Samuel 25). Instead of listening to pagan nobles’ fears that wives may not respect their husbands, let’s listen to God’s design throughout Scripture that wives follow Him first, and never follow their husbands into sin.
I believe that the rush to demonize Vashti is rooted in an unhealthy view of marriage, where obedience to a husband is seen as the greatest good, and sowing discord among wives as the greatest evil.
No, the greatest evil is substituting something else in the place for God.
The rush to demonize Vashti is rooted in a very unhealthy view of marriage: Click To Tweet
Jesus does not want us blindly obeying our husbands. Jesus wants us following Him, wherever it leads. And often what Jesus calls us to do is to take a stand when our culture–or even our marriage–is going off the rails.
This is why I often cringe at “Wives of the Bible” type studies and books.
Too often they hold up the examples of wives of the Bible as either “good” or “bad” depending upon the effect on their marriage–rather than their effect on the kingdom of God a a whole.
'Wives of the Bible' Bible studies often make me cringe, because wives are called either good or bad depending on their effect on the MARRIAGE, rather than their effect on the kingdom of God.Click To Tweet
A better way to do it is to start from first principles: How is it that God wants us to live? That’s what I did in 9 Thoughts That Can Change Your Marriage. Let’s start with Micah 6:8:
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
So we’re to act justly (walk in TRUTH); love mercy (show LOVE); find the balance between the two by walking humbly before God.
That points us to doing God’s will and knowing God before anything else. So don’t limit the Bible passages about marriage to only a select few. That’s when we’re likely to read too much into things and draw the wrong conclusions. Instead,
Keep Jesus front and centre (Hebrews 12:1-3).
Always seek to obey God, not human beings (Acts 5:29).
And above all, put on love (Colossians 3:14).
Want to explore this idea more? Read this post on how the Bible has more to say about marriage than just 5 passages.
Vashti has been dead for thousands of years now.
She likely spent the last few years of her life in misery. But she was a hero. She was one of the first recorded instances of a woman saying, “I refuse to be treated like a sex object, because that is not what I am.” She stood up for the dignity of women, something, by the way, that Jesus did, too. In that culture that despised women, she said, “no more!”
Vashti doesn't have to be bad in order for Esther to be good. Maybe both were standing up to injustice:Click To Tweet
Today we honour heroines like that. Think of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for going to school and taking exams. After her recovery, she refused to back down, believing that she could be an example to other girls who wanted to be educated. She stood up for her God-given dignity.
Rosa Parks was an African-American woman who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus for a white person. Coming home from work one day in 1955, she was tired. She wanted to sit down. And she refused an evil act that said that she was not as much a person as someone who was white. She stood up for her God-given dignity.
They didn’t set out to be heroes. They were just going about their normal business. But when someone tried to stop them from acting like they were fully human, they said no.
So did Vashti. Vashti did not succeed in her refusal. But maybe she was the impetus for many other women in the future saying, “I want to be treated with dignity, even if it costs me everything.” Maybe her sacrifice inspired others.
Yes, God used Vashti’s refusal to usher Esther into the palace and ultimately rescue His people. But I do not believe God despised Vashti for her actions. I believe that she did the right thing, and I believe that God left the details of why she refused the king in the story as a way to honour her. So I hope that we can stop maligning this woman as “the disrespectful wife”, and instead appreciate the immense sacrifice she made in defence of the dignity of all human beings.
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Sheila Wray Gregoire has been married for 26 years and happily married for 21! She loves traveling around North America with her hubby in their RV, giving her signature "Girl Talk" about sex and marriage. And she's written 8 books. About sex and marriage. See a theme here? Plus she knits. Even in line at the grocery store.Find Sheila Here:YouTube
Sheila's Favorite Posts on To Love, Honor and Vacuum:
10 ways to initiate sex
10 Effects of Porn on Your Brain, Marriage, & Sex Life
Why So Much Marriage Advice is So Trite
How can Sex be Hot and Holy at the Same Time?
Check out some of Sheila's Books:
The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex
31 Days to Great Sex
9 Thoughts That Can Change Your Marriage
To Love, Honor, and Vacuum
Check out Sheila's Courses:
The Boost Your Libido Course
The Whole Story: Talking to Your Daughter about Sex, Puberty, and Growing Up
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July 5, 2018
Who Reads To Love, Honor and Vacuum? Our Poll Results about Who You Are!
One thing readers of the blog may not know is that I send out emails on a regular basis. The blog goes out daily to those who want it, and then I send out weekly and monthly emails with extra content to those who want them. Recently, I hired a new assistant to help me with emails (you may remember her from the post in March on Why I Rushed to the ER on Tuesday). She and I decided to try sending out weekly surveys to the folks signed up for the weekly newsletter and we’ve had SO much fun with it. We wanted to know our readers better so that we could plan some upcoming posts and just know more about where everyone is with their marriage.
We thought we’d share the results of the last several surveys with you.
If you’re not getting any emails from me, sign up here! My subscribers get extra video content, behind the scenes looks at what’s going on in my life, and more! And I am starting to answer more reader questions in the emails as well. And I’ve got about 40,000 of you reading now at least on a monthly basis!
I’m going to hand this over to Joanna to explain our survey results (though I may interject a bit, too!) Here’s Joanna:
Why do you read Sheila’s Posts?
First off, we wondered why people read the blog: is it because they want help working on their emotional connection with their spouse, or because they have questions about their sex life? And also… how many unmarried folks read the blog?
Here’s what we found: the vast majority of those who responded are married (94%)… but there is a group of unmarried folks (6%). And while there were big groups for both emotional connection and sex life, sex life won the day with 60.6% of married readers choosing it.
How long have you been married?
Next we wondered how long people have been married. And we found that we have lots of readers who have been married for less than 5 years (hi, newlyweds!) AND we also have a small group of subscribers who have been married for more than 50 years (we all want to be like you!)
Sheila says: I’m in the 21-30 years group myself, and it’s interesting to see that that’s still a fairly large group. I wonder how many of you have grown with this blog? 
July 3, 2018
10 Ways to Enjoy Awesome Vacations–Even with Young Kids
Yesterday was the official Canada Day holiday here in Canada, and tomorrow is July 4 in the U.S. (well, it’s July 4 everywhere, but I hope you all know what I mean!). So we’re in the throes of holidays here in North America. And so I thought it was time to talk about holidays with kids!
I’m taking a few days off right now, but Lucy Rycroft from DesertMum sent me this just awesome post I have to share about how to make vacations with kids easier. Here’s Lucy:
Last summer I read Sheila’s post about how amazing family vacations can be. It was wonderful, confirming everything I’d ever hoped would be true for the vacations my family would take together.
Except.
My kids are young. When I read Sheila’s post, they were 7, 5, 2 and 2 – and we had just returned from a fairly stressful trip. I longed for the kind of vacation Sheila described – but the reality was full of non-stop childcare: mealtimes, snacktimes, changing, bathing, sleepless nights. It seemed we could kiss goodbye to any notion of reading a novel or visiting places of interest.
Here’s the thing: it is possible to have vacations which are restful, life-enhancing and bonding, even when our kids are small – but they look a bit different, and take some planning. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Don’t Blow the Budget when Vacationing with Kids
That exotic trip to Bali might sound appealing, but when all your time is spent finding a toilet for your 4 year old, or constantly heading back to the hotel so your baby can nap – not so much.
The more money you spend on a holiday, the more pressure you will feel under to enjoy yourself. Your children’s needs come first, and if the meeting of their needs prevents you from being able to truly make the most of your holiday, then you could return home unrested and with a big dent in your bank balance.
Is it worth it? Your children really just want you, regardless of location. So plan a holiday where you can simply enjoy being together, with no pressure of finances or a long journey. Save the luxury cruise for when everyone’s a bit older and will enjoy it more – and you’ll be taking away the pressure that comes from an expensive holiday.
Our family has done some house-swaps in recent years. You do need to be careful, making sure you trust whoever you’re swapping with (friends-of-friends come in handy here) – but it’s a wonderful way to bring the cost of a holiday right down.
2. Having said that, Be Realistic about What You Need from a Holiday
My ability to enjoy a holiday doesn’t rely on the weather – which is a good thing, since we live in the UK where it is entirely unpredictable. But if you’re someone who won’t truly relax unless you’re on a beach with guaranteed sun, don’t book a week in Wales.
My husband isn’t a camper. He’s building up to it, as he’s realised the benefits of camping once our kids get a bit older – but camping with preschoolers is one step too far for him. So we don’t (yet) camp.
Be realistic about what you (and your family) need, but bear in mind my point about it being low-stress. Find a balance which works for you.
3. Get Organised with Packing
Packing is one of my worst things. I hate, hate, HATE it! But do you know what? Last time we were packing to go away, our computer broke, which meant I couldn’t access any of my packing lists. I was lost!
I realised that, much as I hate packing, it’s actually very do-able if you have a list. So: make a list! Save it on your computer and you’ll have it to hand whenever you’re going away. (Although maybe have a back-up copy too…)
If you really want to ace your packing, order the list according to which room everything can be found in. List all the bathroom stuff together in one place, then everything you’ll find in each of your kids’ rooms, then your room, the kitchen, and so on. It’ll save time and stress the night before your holidays.
Also, from the time they can read, give your kids their own packing lists. It’ll give them important ownership over things like what they want to wear on holiday – and save you time!
(If all this is a new idea to you, why not sign up to my mailing list, and I’ll ping you over some packing list templates!)
4. If You Can, Vacation with Others
The main reason of course is FREE CHILDCARE!!!
I mean – ahem – the oportunity to spend valuable time with extended family or friends.
But also – FREE CHILDCARE!!!
Every year, my parents-in-law generously rent a big house for a week’s holiday with our wider family. It isn’t all about childcare! It genuinely is a lovely time to spend together, getting to know each other better and creating memories which become much-told anecdotes at future mealtimes.
But it does also makes things easier with the kids. It means my husband and I can go out to dinner, or take the older kids to the cinema. It means we don’t have to do the bulk of the cooking or sorting out, which is a huge help.
It’s also the primary reason our kids have such good relationships with their grandparents, and I love how excited they are each year to go away with the Rycrofts.
I don’t imagine it’s a very relaxing week for my long-suffering in-laws – but for us, we genuinely come home properly de-stressed. Not everyone would feel the same after a week with family – but going on holiday with some friends, especially another family with kids, can also be great fun, and very relaxing as you can share out the cooking and babysit for each other.
5. Give Each Other Lie-Ins
An absolute must for us on holiday is to get some time to sleep in! And even if we can’t sleep much beyond 7.30am (hello, parent body-clock), it’s nice just to have that time to read or pray or think. We alternate whose turn it is to get up with the kids, and it works well.
6. Make the Most of your Evenings
I’m a big believer in enjoying every stage of parenting – and one of the great advantages of having young children is their early bedtime. Hooray!
Holidays are great for building all the relationships within a family – and that includes your marriage – so use your evenings well.
Bring some games to play or things to chat about. Get a takeaway, buy a luxury ready-meal, crack open a bottle of wine or indulge in some special chocolates. Whatever floats your boat, do it! This is your holiday too, and your chance to de-stress from whatever’s been going on for you this year.
7. Plan for Some Great Sex
Well now, I couldn’t blog for Sheila without mentioning sex, right?! She practically makes it a compulsory element of a guest blog.
We all like the idea of spontaneity – and spontaneous sex can be great! But I think we also know that sometimes you have to schedule things – even fun things – to make sure that they happen, and happen well. (Sheila’s written a great post on that here!)
Holidays are a great time to intentionally develop your sex life, because many of the pressures which hold us back are not there. You’re off work, without your usual commitments, and hopefully catching up on sleep.
So – plan wisely! Pack some nice lingerie and a luxury bubble bath. Buy Sheila’s “31 Days to Great Sex” to read together, or take The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex to read on your own (and then summarise for your spouse!). Go to bed early. Try the Deck of Dares or the Sock Monkey Kama Sutra. Whatever you and your spouse enjoy: plan to make it happen!
8. Plan Realistic Activities
Much as it sounds fun, that ceramics factory tour might not be as enjoyable if you’re taking your two year old who likes to smash things. And a boat trip would be awesome, but if you’re outnumbered by children who don’t swim, then perhaps the safety risk isn’t going to help you to relax.
I’m not saying you should spend every day of your holiday in a play centre – I am saying that if your children are happy, then you will be happier and more relaxed too. You can always return to the same place in a few years’ time to explore the places you couldn’t get to this time around.
By all means, introduce your children to your passions though! Take them to museums and art galleries, stately homes and gardens – speak with them about what you’re experiencing. Take advantage of any activity which has been laid on for children, even if that means you spend an entire afternoon decorating animal masks.
9. Loosen up your Usual Schedule
Unless it will negatively affect your children’s well-being, be prepared to do things a bit differently on holiday.
When our eldest was one, we holidayed with some friends who also had a one-year-old. We ended up going out most mornings, and driving back after lunch, when both kids would fall asleep in the car. The difference was that their daughter would transfer to the cot when we got back to our cottage – and they could then enjoy an hour or two of reading and general relaxation – but our son woke up and wouldn’t be put down again.
It really stressed me out – but what I should have done was accept the different routine, relax and enjoy the special downtime with our son. If my husband and I had been on the ball, we could have taken it in turns to watch our son at this time, meaning the other one could have some time to themselves.
10. Lose the Guilt over Screentime
When we’re on holiday, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we must provide non-stop, ‘wholesome’ entertainment for our children. But even on holiday, they need downtime. After all, we adults look at our phones or watch TV to relax – so why shouldn’t our kids be allowed some screentime too?
Don’t feel guilty if you switch the TV on to make mornings easier, or to wind down at the end of a busy day sightseeing. It’s your holiday too and you need some time to rest. It can even be a good opportunity to sit and watch with your children. Despite my pre-parenthood intentions of always watching what my children were watching, life gets too busy to be able to do this consistently. A vacation is the perfect opportunity to enjoy a show together.
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Lucy Rycroft, blogger at Desertmum, freelance writer and stay-at-home mama.Lucy has a degree in Music from Oxford University and spent several years teaching teenagers in schools, and then teaching teachers! Since starting her family nine years ago, she's stayed at home with no regrets. Besides being the PTA chair at her children's school, helping with worship and kids' work at church, and leading a weekly Parents' Bible Study, she blogs at Desertmum, and writes frequently on adoption for Home for Good. Lucy lives in York, England, with her pastor husband and four kids.
Find Lucy Here:Some of the best posts from Lucy:
#shetoo - Can I protect my daughter from being a victim?
Should children be allowed to run around in church?
Five ways my toddlers are different from yours
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June 29, 2018
Why Men Go Missing in Bed: Sometimes It’s the Relationship
We’ve been talking about marriages where the wife has the higher libido this week. Often, higher libido simply means that she’s on the higher end of average libido, and he’s on the lower end of average libido. But it can also mean that while the wife has a normally functioning libido, her husband’s libido is almost completely gone.
We’ve talked about porn and a husband’s libido, and we’ve talked about ED killing a man’s libido, but what about the relationship aspect?
Today we have Stephen Snyder, author of Love Worth Making: How to have ridiculously great sex in a long-lasting relationship, on the blog talking about how sometimes a husband’s lack of a sex drive is a symptom of a greater dysfunction in the marriage.
Check it out:
The first thing David tells me when he sits down in my office is that he’s only here because his wife Gwen insisted on it.“She’s going to divorce me,” he says, “unless I start initiating sex.”
David is a handsome man with a good-natured smile. Given the situation, he looks surprisingly relaxed.
David tells me his wife found my name online.
“Is she going to join us?” I ask.
“No. She insisted I see you alone.”
“Why?”
“She says she’s tired of trying to fix me.”
Hmm. That doesn’t sound good.
Who’s more likely to eventually lose desire in a marriage—the man or the woman? Most people would say it’s the woman. But as a sex therapist, in the past decade or two I’ve noticed a shift. Now when a couple comes to see me, it’s very often the man who’s gone missing in bed.
“Are you still physically attracted to her?” I ask David. He says he is, and that when they have sex he still gets turned on.
“So what happens when you try to initiate sex?”
“That’s the problem,” he says. “It’s like there’s this invisible force field that stops me.”
“Any idea what that’s about?”
“Not really. All day long at work, I’ll be thinking about how when I get home I’m going to start something up with her. But the closer I get to home, the less I feel like it.”
“Why? What happens?”
“I don’t know. She’s usually complaining about one thing or another. She works hard. But I work hard too, and after a long day I really don’t feel like listening to her complain.”
He shifts in the chair. “Most of the time, I end up just shutting her out.”
“I assume she doesn’t like that very much.”
“Yeah, she hates it. She never stops talking about how I never pay her any attention.”
He stops for a moment and looks around the room.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t think she likes me very much anymore.”
What Men Really Want
Don’t men automatically want sex? Well, for the most part we do tend to be fairly simple that way. But in a marriage, there are other things we need just as much.
You know how most women need to feel desired?
Most men need to feel welcomed.
There’s a certain smile a woman wears when she’s really pleased —a big, welcoming smile of pleasure that says, “Hey, I’m so glad you showed up! Come on in!!”
When a couple is just getting started, she usually smiles at him a lot. The trouble often starts when he first sees her disappointed or unhappy. Especially if he’s caused it.
We men tend to hear any female unhappiness as criticism. That puts us in a bit of a bind, since we’re ordinarily expected not to just pout or cry if we feel criticized or under-appreciated. Instead, we’ll usually just try to adopt as confident a pose as we can and hope the hurt feelings will pass.
That tends not to work so well. Eventually, out of desperation, a man who feels criticized or unaccepted will usually just withdraw. Which of course only tends to cause more mischief:
He feels criticized, so he withdraws.
This makes her angry, and even more critical of him.
He withdraws further—and so on, and so on.
When he withdraws emotionally, he’ll often withdraw sexually too. Which she’ll of course usually interpret to mean he doesn’t desire her anymore.
A wife who no longer feels desired will almost never show her husband that special welcoming smile of hers. Which of course he’ll take to mean that it’s no longer safe to approach her. Which of course is totally nuts, since the only reason she never smiles anymore is because he hasn’t touched her in a month—but that’s the way these things tend to go.
By the time it’s gotten to this point, he’s usually lost all confidence in his ability to make her happy. He may try to make the best of the situation, by being good to her in other ways. Or he may regress to silly, childish behavior—like telling stupid jokes, or pulling pranks. He may just try to act like everything’s OK. But he and she both know these are all just poses—and that underneath he’s in despair because his confidence is gone.
Can This Marriage Be Saved?
Let’s look more closely at the situation above. She’s not feeling desired by him. And he feels hopeless about pleasing her. That’s obvious, right? What’s less obvious, is that they’ve both become so needy that they’ve ceased to function well as individuals.
One of the things people tend to expect when they first get married is that their partner will provide them with unqualified support and approval. But that tends not to last very long. Even the most ideally-matched couples sooner or later find themselves facing some degree of disappointment. Sooner or later the well of unconditional positive regard runs dry. It’s normal to feel terrified, insecure, and even angry when you realize your spouse doesn’t always like everything about you. When that happens, though, the key thing is to take a deep breath and begin to take more responsibility for your own emotional needs.
That might sound unromantic—but it’s actually much more romantic, if you do it right.
For David, who’d stopped initiating sex because he felt Gwen didn’t like him anymore, the first step was to realize how much power he’d given Gwen over his self-esteem. He decided to take a deep breath whenever he felt criticized by her, rather than just reacting or withdrawing. Once he stopped giving her so much power over his self-regard, she began to respect him a lot more. At that point, they were on their way to a better marriage.
There are many other reasons a man might go missing in bed—from low testosterone, to depression, to compulsive porn use. But very often a sexual road-block like David and Gwen’s is just a symptom of something more ordinary: two normal people, neither of whom have figured out yet how to strike the right balance between emotional togetherness and emotional independence.
That can take awhile to figure out. But once you do, it’s totally worth it.
Adapted from Love Worth Making: How to Have Ridiculously Great Sex in a Long-Lasting Relationship by Stephen Snyder, M.D. Copyright © 2018 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.
So glad Stephen allowed me to share that! I know it may get many women’s backs up, but I hope you will listen and just ask yourself if the way you’re interacting has become toxic. I don’t think we realize how much our unhappiness sounds like criticism to him, but it does. Because men want to be able to fix things, they assume that when we’re unhappy, it’s because they haven’t done their job. I’m not saying we have to force ourselves to be happy; simply that maybe we need to take responsibility for some of our own feelings, too.
What do you think? Have you ever seen this dynamic in your marriage–or in a marriage that you know? Let’s talk in the comments!
June 28, 2018
Is Erectile Dysfunction Killing Your Husband’s Libido?
This week I’ve been writing for higher-drive wives, and today we’re turning to another reason why a husband’s sex drive might be sub-zero: If he’s suffering from erectile dysfunction. Yesterday we looked at how porn kills a man’s libido, and today we’re going to look at the further effects of sexual dysfunction.
When I did research for erectile dysfunction for my book The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, here’s what I found:
According to the National Institute of Health, chronic erectile dysfunction (ED) affects 4 percent of men in their 50s, 17 percent of men in their 60s, and 47 percent of men over 75. Transient, or temporary, ED affects about 50 percent of men between 40 and 70. About 70 percent of chronic ED has physical roots, while the rest has psychological and emotional roots.
“Erectile Dysfunction (ED) Overview, Incidence of Impotence,” Remedy Health Media, http://www.urologychannel.com/erectil....
So 50% of men will experience ED erratically between the ages of 40 and 70. And quite a few will before that age, too! As we looked at yesterday, that’s often due to porn use, even if the guy quit pornography years ago. Because porn rewires the brain so that what’s stimulating is an image, rather than a person, and because porn use is usually accompanied by masturbation, a man can get used to needing a lot of stimulation to maintain an erection. Being with the same woman doesn’t always do it (because he’s retrained his brain so that sex is not about intimacy, as it’s supposed to be, but about variety).
And erectile dysfunction is not the only sexual problem, either. Premature ejaculation, where the man ejaculates within 2-3 minutes of starting intercourse, affects quite a few men, too. I’ve had so many frustrated women comment on the blog lately about how sex doesn’t feel very good, and from their comments it’s quite clear that it’s not lasting long enough for them to get aroused. Sometimes women don’t always realize that this can be a sign of sexual dysfunction, since men should be able to control themselves and go for longer. If they can’t, there could be neurological or chemical issues that doctors can help with, or they could have a porn problem.
Here’s more information on premature ejaculation.
Nevertheless, not all erectile dysfunction (or premature ejaculation) is due to pornography.
Erectile dysfunction largely stems from four things:
Health issues or medication issues (which exacerbate with age)
Emotional problems or relational problems
Performance anxiety from previous problems (the vicious circle of ED)
Pornography
Until relatively recently, ED was thought of as an older man’s issue, and health problems would have been the #1 reason. That’s what Viagra was created for!
But more recently that hasn’t been the issue. A large scale study out of Italy when I was writing The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex found that most new cases of ED were now of men under the age of 40. It’s not a physiological issue. It’s a porn issue.
So let’s just separate these two issues for a minute.
When Erectile Dysfunction Has a Physical or Emotional Cause
If erectile dysfunction is transient (like it comes and goes and only happens occasionally), and it seems to stem from either stress or some health issues, then watch how you react. What you don’t want to do is to feed that vicious circle that comes from performance anxiety! Just be matter of fact about it. “This happens sometimes, it’s not a big deal, it’ll be fine next time we try, let’s just watch a movie instead.”
If it does happen more frequently, do see your doctor. It may be an early warning sign of a more important health issue that needs to be dealt with.
And don’t be afraid to try Viagra. It doesn’t make him less of a man or make him a failure. I need glasses because my eyes aren’t perfect. If you need something to give you a boost because your body isn’t perfect, that’s totally okay.
Most erectile dysfunction with physical or emotional roots, though, occurs in slightly older men. Most of you reading this blog are younger. And so I’d like to talk about the most common cause for you, which is:
Porn Induced Erectile Dysfunction (PIED)
But then there is porn induced impotence, or PIED, which is becoming increasingly more common. Covenant Eyes has a great in-depth FREE download on PIED, that goes into the biology of it, and has quite a few stories of what it’s like facing this and how you can defeat it. I read it this week and was really impressed. One woman wrote:
“My husband could not keep an erection, and it was very difficult for him to climax right from the beginning of our marriage. For the next six years our sex life suffered until he confessed that [he] had been addicted to porn since he was very young.”
They also included a story from Noah Church, who now runs a porn-recovery website. He doesn’t come from a Christian background, but honestly, this story is pretty much like so many that I get in emails:
“I found myself as one of the first people to grow up in the age of the Internet when it was common for homes to have a computer with Internet access. Starting at around age nine or ten, I was using porn most every day, one or two times a day, sometimes more.
I started to escalate to types of pornographic content that really didn’t jibe with my natural sexuality. They were extreme and shocking, but I found that as time went on, I needed those more extreme stimuli to get the same amount of arousal that I was getting before.
By the time I was 18 years old, I was with my first serious girlfriend, and we decided we loved each other and wanted to experience sex together. This was something I had been looking forward to all my life.
I was really attracted to her. But, when the time came [to have sex], she was naked in front of me, and I just didn’t have any physical response.
I was shocked. I thought of myself as a person with a high sex drive. I always thought about girls and was masturbating most every day, so I was really confused and shocked about what was going on in that moment. I thought it might just be nerves because it was my first time, so we tried many more times and it just never worked.
I turned to Google for help, searching for phrases like ‘young man can’t get it up’ or ‘erection problems,’ and most sites indicated that it was either performance anxiety or some biological problem like blocked arteries. I pinned it on performance anxiety because I had no trouble getting an erection while looking at porn (which excluded the biological problem as an explanation).
[After a few years] I thought, ‘Maybe I masturbate too much.’ So I’d stop for a few weeks and quit looking at porn too, but that didn’t work either. Man, this wasn’t just a sex issue, because it was devastating on my self-esteem, my self-confidence, and my sexual identity. Because I couldn’t have sex, I was sexually broken.
My emotional health was a mess. Because I was feeding my brain so much dopamine through watching hours of porn, my brain craved more and more stimulation. And, unlike drugs–where there’s a rush of neurochemical activity giving that ‘high’ and then it’s gone–with porn, I was able to keep that dopamine level raised for hours clicking from video to video. We call it ‘edge’: delaying orgasm so that I could keep watching porn. Over years of doing this, my brain figured out that nothing in the real world could compete with the porn rush. Everyday things just became less stimulating. My friendships became less interesting. I didn’t want to do homework, because compared to porn, who wants todo homework?
I was numb to the world. From the age of 10 to 22 or maybe 23, I didn’t cry a single time.”
Read Noah’s story, and how he recovered, in Covenant Eyes’ FREE book.
There’s so much in that story that we’ve talked about yesterday and today–how porn causes men to be cut off from their feelings; how it makes sexual arousal with a person so difficult; how porn makes one self-absorbed and you miss out on real life and real community.
But what I’ve also found is that many Christian women have no idea that what their husbands are going through is not normal
Because we value waiting until marriage to have sex (and I totally, completely believe in that), and because sex is often difficult to talk about, and because many of us are in communities where it isn’t talked about, we don’t know what “normal” is. And I’ve received so many letters from women who talk about how they just can’t reach orgasm and sex doesn’t feel very good, and then only later do you figure out that he’s reaching orgasm within 2 minutes of starting. Or I’ve had emails from women who are married, and sex isn’t working, and only after some prodding do you realize that he doesn’t actually have an erection. Because she didn’t know what to expect, she didn’t know how to describe what’s wrong.
Porn-induced erectile dysfunction is increasingly common, but it’s also something that can be beaten by quitting porn and masturbation, getting in a recovery group, and learning how to get in touch with your feelings and with intimacy again. It takes some serious work of the Holy Spirit, but this is the kind of thing that God loves doing. He is the God of healing and reconciliation!
Ezekiel 11:19 says:
And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh,
God wants us to feel again. He wants us not to be cut off from each other, but to be tender to one another. And He will do this, when we submit to Him.
James 4:8 says:
Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
It doesn’t happen automatically. We have to choose to draw near to God; we have to choose to cleanse our hands (which means quitting porn and masturbation!). But if your husband does this, God will change him.
Want to learn more about how to recover from PIED? Check out Covenant Eyes’ free ebook, recoverED.
Now let me know in the comments: have you ever dealt with this? Share your story!
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Sheila Wray Gregoire has been married for 26 years and happily married for 21! She loves traveling around North America with her hubby in their RV, giving her signature "Girl Talk" about sex and marriage. And she's written 8 books. About sex and marriage. See a theme here? Plus she knits. Even in line at the grocery store.Find Sheila Here:YouTube
Sheila's Favorite Posts on To Love, Honor and Vacuum:
10 ways to initiate sex
10 Effects of Porn on Your Brain, Marriage, & Sex Life
Why So Much Marriage Advice is So Trite
How can Sex be Hot and Holy at the Same Time?
Check out some of Sheila's Books:
The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex
31 Days to Great Sex
9 Thoughts That Can Change Your Marriage
To Love, Honor, and Vacuum
Check out Sheila's Courses:
The Boost Your Libido Course
The Whole Story: Talking to Your Daughter about Sex, Puberty, and Growing Up
The FREE Emotional Intimacy E-Course
Are you ready to take your marriage to the next level?
Sign up for our emails and get access to the TLHV free marriage and parenting resource library. We have over 25 downloads and are constantly adding more. Sign up here!
June 27, 2018
Wifey Wednesday: When Porn Is Stealing His Sex Drive
We’re talking this week about women with the higher sex drive in marriage. On Monday and Tuesday we were looking at women with a high sex drive when there’s nothing wrong with him. After all, sometimes the wife has the higher libido simply because he’s on the lower end of normal and she’s on the higher end!
Increasingly what’s happening, though, is that men have a low sex drive because something is stealing it. And the number one culprit is pornography.
So I’d like to switch gears today, for Wifey Wednesday, and look at how porn can steal a guy’s libido, and what you can do about it.
Some links below are affiliate links.
What can cause a man’s low libido? I deal with all the reasons your husband may not want to make love here, but in general, they are:
Stress
Emotional or Sexual Issues (like attachment disorder, homosexuality, etc.)
Medical Conditions or medications
Relationship Issues
Pornography
If you look back on studies from the 1970s and 1980s, about 15% of women in marriages had the higher sex drives. Today it’s around 30%.
So why has it doubled? Well, if you look at that list, only one thing has significantly changed, and that’s access to internet pornography.
The number of marriages where SHE has the higher sex drive have doubled in the last two decades. And the reason? Many men are killing their sex drives with pornography.Click To Tweet
If you have a higher sex drive than your husband, it absolutely does not mean that he’s using porn. But if he honestly never wants sex, and if he isn’t overweight, depressed, or on medications, I’d certainly look into it. I don’t mean a guy who just has a lower sex drive than you, as J explained in her post on high drive wives on Monday. I mean a guy who truly never wants to make love. That’s just not normal, it’s a major red flag in marriage, and what I’ve seen, over and over again, is that porn is the culprit.
I’ve actually written quite a lot about pornography on this blog, because it’s one of the most common questions I get. In fact, just this morning I woke up to this comment on the blog:
[This is] so much like what I experienced for so many years – feelings of rejection from my husband not wanting me physically even after stopping porn several times over the years of our marriage, and hundreds of nights spent crying myself to sleep. And yes, the frustration of your own sexual needs not being met! Eventually he always went back to porn, and I always went back to ignoring it and just staying distant from him…
Here’s another recent one:
I also was so confused on our honeymoon when my new husband seemed to have little interest in me! I kept waiting for the whole “newlywed stage” to happen and it never did. Lingerie means little to him still. Sex has been the one ongoing marriage issue that we have had. Sometimes I feel like it was all a waste, my whole twenties were spent begging for and waiting for my husband to show an interest in me. Ultimately I found out porn was an issue for my husband, he has been three years free of it now. The hard thing right now is that after marriage counselling , my husband has rededicated his life to Christ and is a completely different man than he was six months ago. he is loving and kind to me and affectionate, but still has little sex drive and some ED and it’s just heart breaking that as good as everything else is right now , that we just can’t get that part of our marriage right.
Porn kills a sex drive, because it associates sexual arousal and sexual response with an image rather than a person, and then you can’t get aroused by a person. It also trains a man to need really intense stimulation to orgasm (because he’s masturbating at the time). Finally, perhaps more importantly, it teaches him to run away from his feelings, and since it’s emotional vulnerability that builds closeness and often sexual desire in marriage, he doesn’t have a chance to build desire because he doesn’t know how to build closeness.
Porn use kills a guy's sex drive for his wife, but do we understand WHY? Here's the explanation: Click To Tweet
I thought rather than write more about it I’d share it here:
Here are other posts that I’ve written on pornography and a guy’s sex drive, and how to recover from it:
The Effects of Pornography: What porn does to your marriage, your brain, and your sex life
Why Doesn’t My Husband Want to Make Love? (A 4-part series)
4 Things You Must Do When Your Husband Uses Porn (with links to other posts in that series as well)
Recovery After a Porn Addiction–How to rebuild intimacy
Finally, here’s another comment that I received from a woman recently:
We recently unplugged our internet router and sold my husbands iPhone for a flip phone without data. He suffers from internet and pornopraphy addiction. We have come to realize that eliminating internet except on my phone simply to pay bills and check email is our only remaining option. This is a lifelong decision as he will never again own a smart phone or have home access to WiFi and internet. We are one step away from losing our marriage to pornography. I hope the inability to access it will be the breakthrough he needs. The pain this has caused to me is almost unbearable. My self worth has dissipated, I know I’m beautiful because I’ve been told my entire life I am but when i look in the mirror I don’t see beauty. If I didn’t have two children ages 2 and 4 with him I would already be gone. I can’t bring myself to raise them in poverty and tear them back and forth. This thought only adds to my depression. He wants to quit and he says he loves me. Maybe we have a sick idea of love.
My heart breaks for her. It really does. She’s just decimated by this, and I hope that men reading this article understand what porn use does to women. Many wives of porn users actually have characteristics of PTSD!
But let me also say this: I truly believe that in her situation, things can get better. First, they have installed controls on their computer. An internet filer won’t cure a porn addiction, but what it does do is provide the foundation so that now you can actually start looking at a cure! It’s like when an alcoholic pours out all the bottles that are left in the house. That doesn’t cure the alcoholism, but it is a necessary precondition for them to get better. So this step is a good first one! (And everyone with a porn addiction really does need controls on their computer. And everyone with teens in the house does as well. Let’s stop addictions before they start!)
Then, once the temptation is a little further removed, get into a recovery group so that you can talk about what drew you to porn and see the repercussions it’s had.
But the final one is really what I was talking about in the video, and it’s likely the most important one: learn how to be real about your emotions. So many porn users don’t deal with emotions because they run to porn instead. When guys start being able to be emotionally vulnerable–that’s when real spiritual healing takes place, and that’s when the libido will return.
I just want to say, too, I am so sorry for those of you who are walking through this with an addicted spouse. Truly sorry. My heart honestly breaks for all the pain that this is causing. And I pray that you can get to the point where there is a real breakthrough soon.
Have you ever had to walk through a porn addiction? Does this idea of hiding one’s real emotions resonate with you? Let’s talk in the comments!
Author
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Sheila's Best Posts
Books
Courses
Freebie
Sheila Wray Gregoire has been married for 26 years and happily married for 21! She loves traveling around North America with her hubby in their RV, giving her signature "Girl Talk" about sex and marriage. And she's written 8 books. About sex and marriage. See a theme here? Plus she knits. Even in line at the grocery store.Find Sheila Here:YouTube
Sheila's Favorite Posts on To Love, Honor and Vacuum:
10 ways to initiate sex
10 Effects of Porn on Your Brain, Marriage, & Sex Life
Why So Much Marriage Advice is So Trite
How can Sex be Hot and Holy at the Same Time?
Check out some of Sheila's Books:
The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex
31 Days to Great Sex
9 Thoughts That Can Change Your Marriage
To Love, Honor, and Vacuum
Check out Sheila's Courses:
The Boost Your Libido Course
The Whole Story: Talking to Your Daughter about Sex, Puberty, and Growing Up
The FREE Emotional Intimacy E-Course
Are you ready to take your marriage to the next level?
Sign up for our emails and get access to the TLHV free marriage and parenting resource library. We have over 25 downloads and are constantly adding more. Sign up here!
