SWM 144 – Why wives have a complicated relationship with sex and what to do about it

Nov 15, 2024 by Jay Dee in Podcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

One of our supporters posted a question in our forum which led to a bit of a discussion on what men perceive as sexy, and it shook the questioner a bit, because it was radically different from what she had been led to believe her whole life.

This led into a larger discussion about why women tend to have more hang-ups about sex than men do. I shared my thoughts in the forum in a bit of a rant and then realized that I don’t know if I’ve really tackled this a whole lot on the blog and podcast. If I have, it’s been a few years, so it’s time for a refresher for the new people.

So, I’m going to try and make it a little less ranty and a little more coherent and see if maybe I can teach some other wives and women out there a bit about what many men think regarding sex in the hopes that it might help some marriages, present or future.

Now, these are my views, my opinions based on what I’ve seen. I’ll invite the men to join in in the comments section and let me know if these views are shared. That said, I’ve talked to a lot of husbands and wives, and I think this, while not quite universal, is extremely common.

How men and women view sexuality differently

In my experience, while men certainly have their struggles, they tend not to disconnect from the sexual part of themselves when they do. They understand that they’re not a being that just has sex, but that sex is a core part of who they are, that God made them this way and there’s no escaping it. It’s not evil, it’s not good, it just is. What you do with it is evil or good.

Women, on the other hand, I feel are often at odds with their sexuality. They see it as something they do, something they maybe have, but it’s not a core part of them. It’s more like a part they’d rather keep on the shelf and pull out when it’s appropriate, or necessary, or even better, both.

This results in women often feeling shy, even in front of their husband. I have talked to many couples where the wife refuses to be naked with the lights on in the same room as him. Where she goes and changes in the bathroom, or with the door locked when he’s left the room. I’ve had men nearly in tears saying they’ve been married for a decade, two decades or more, and he’s still never seen her naked.

Now, those are some more severe cases, but in a lot more moderate and common ones, nudity may be okay for very brief periods – perhaps she will change in front of her husband, but will do it as quickly as possible. When she gets naked for sex, maybe she gets under the covers first before pulling off clothes, or quickly gets naked then slips under the covers after only a glimpse.

My wife did all these early on in our marriage. It’s as if she was ashamed of her naked body, and I know she was. And, granted, she has had more weight on than she wanted to for most of our marriage, but whatever she was overweight by, I generally doubled it or more. So, why is she plagued with this while I am perfectly comfortable being naked around her? And why is this experience fairly common in marriages? What causes this, and what can we do about it?

Is it just hormones?

Now, what I hear from a lot of people is that it’s simply hormonal. There’s a good reason people believe that. It’s because hormones can mask it. You may find that the wife of a couple suddenly loses a lot of her inhibitions near when she ovulates in her cycle due to a change in hormones. Some women experience similar loss of inhibitions during pregnancy. Others when they hit their mid-thirties when there is another shift. A rare few again during pre or post menopause, though most experience less arousal then.

A much larger group that shows hormones change things are those on Hormone Replacement Therapy, that is, they’re taking hormones they didn’t produce in the form of shots, pellets or creams. Depending on the dosage and their hormone levels, this can make a large difference.

And don’t get me wrong, some people certainly do have low levels of certain hormones and need help, but it shouldn’t be the vast majority of the population.

As well, why is it that alcohol works in a similar fashion? How many wives out there need to have a drink or two or more to help them get in the mood? Alcohol doesn’t increase your sex drive. In fact while alcohol tends to make you feel more in the mood, objectively, it actually lowers sexual response.

What alcohol does do is inhibit feelings of guilt, shame and decision making skills. In short, it gets in the way of your brain assessing whether or not you should have sex.

People are using alcohol, not to get in the mood to have sex with their partner, but rather to shut off their brain that is telling them not to have sex with their partner. In marriage, this is a bit of a problem, because if you need to shut off part of your brain in order to have sex with your spouse, then there is a part of your brain that is malfunctioning. It’s your beliefs, not your hormones.

Where do these beliefs come from?

I’m not the type to go around blaming Satan for everything that goes wrong – we’re plenty evil by ourselves, but in this case, I honestly believe this is his plan because it’s too ubiquitous. We see the teachings that lead to this coming from both our secular media as well as our churches, and whenever they agree on something, we should be suspicious.

Now, they go about it from different angles, but I think they start from the same core – Greek Gnostic Dualism. Particularly the idea that the world is split into two things – the spirit and the material.

This teaching tells people that anything physical is bad and worthless, while the spiritual is pure and priceless.

Unfortunately, much of Christianity has adopted this and woven it into doctrine. This is where we get the false teaching that we have a soul rather than the biblical teaching that we are a soul. Greek dualism would teach that our pure and good soul is imprisoned in a sinful body. The Bible tells us that without a body, we are not a soul, and that we were created with perfect bodies – it’s not until after the fall that they were corrupted.

This theology leads to the belief that sex is a necessary evil, which the church held as doctrine for many centuries. While most denominations no longer preach this explicitly, I’d say about half of the wives I talk to about this topic still believe that to be true, despite knowing that the first commandment God ever gave was to have sex (be fruitful and multiply) and nowhere did He rescind that order.

Churches often also errantly teach that childbirth was the result of the fall rather than pain during childbirth is the curse given. If you’ve been taught that childbirth is a curse, then it stands to reason that pregnancy and thus sex is also a curse, despite the Bible repeatedly telling us not only to have sex as married couples, but also that children are a blessing, not a curse. As I often say, they will destroy your life in the best way possible.

On the secular side, they take a slightly different route. Because the material realm doesn’t matter, only your mind, then it doesn’t matter what you do with your body. Media tells women that they might as well use sex to get what they want because it doesn’t matter anyways, and it’s not really a part of you. After all, you’re your mind, not your body, so do whatever you want with your body, it doesn’t matter. Hold it over men as a weapon or a bargaining chip. It’s a commodity to be leveraged and traded. Whether they come from the stance that your self is the most important, so do what you want with your body, or that people only want you for your body and don’t value your mind, either way it sends the same message – that you and your body, that you and sex, are separate things.

These days this is getting pushed even further with transgenderism ideology that tells us that your mind tells you what gender you are, not your body, because the body is worthless, it’s what your mind thinks that dictates the true reality. This is a direct modern interpretation of Greek dualism.

Both secular media and teachings and mainstream Christianity teach the same thing – that your body and soul are separate things, so why would you feel that you’re a sexual being.

It’s no wonder you don’t feel like an integrated person, that sex is awkward and embarrassing, that you have to shut down part of your brain to have sex. That when you do let go and enjoy yourself, the next morning you’re embarrassed about what you’ve done sexually with your own spouse, because your aroused brain is very different from your unaroused brain and you may retroactively reevaluate things.

It is not unheard of for women to go from begging for something in the bedroom at night, to blaming their husband for doing the thing they were begging for the night before. This is what happens when you have a self that’s not integrated – you become in conflict with yourself when you’re in different states.

Stop blaming men for this

Now, I’ll admit, in the past men contributed to this. The church that corrupted these teachings were led by men. The media outlets that pushed the teachings of the sexual revolution were men. It was men who named, in Latin, women’s genitalia after the root word “shame”. But these were centuries ago in a lot of cases and generations ago in others.

When I talk to men, they don’t hold these views. Yes, there are some old holdouts, but by and large, most men, at least those you’re going to end up married to these days don’t objectify women as much as women objectify women.

We see our wives as sexual beings, not just a body that happens to have a person in it. In fact, we tend to focus more on the person as a whole than the body. We don’t care if you wear heels or flats. Many of us prefer our wives without makeup on rather than with. We love you in yoga pants or sweats and a t-shirt. We don’t care what you smell like – we like how you smell without perfume. We don’t care if you had a shower recently. We don’t care what color your hair is. We don’t notice how long your eyelashes are, we don’t care about your fingernails being painted. Jewelry is just something that gets snagged and tangled on and costs a lot of money for some stuff they find in the dirt. Gold and diamonds, outside of industrial uses, are only valuable because you accepted that they are. It’s usually not men buying them, unless they’re buying them for women.

It tends to be the wives that get upset that their husbands don’t notice physical things – new haircuts, new clothes, new shoes, new accessories. What men will notice more is a change in who you are as a person – a change in personality, behavior, or attitude. Why? I’d argue because most husbands care more about who you are than what you look like. In fact, in a previous survey we did, 96% of husbands said they were more attracted to their wife today than when they got married. The 4% that didn’t – the relationship was not good. That’s what soured their attraction.

So, I’d argue it’s not men who are objectifying women and judging them based on what their body looks like.

But along with these bad teachings, both from the church and our media, there is another element piled on top – that the world teaches us now that men are evil and stupid, so don’t listen to them.

This perpetuates a cycle of women piling more and more expectations on women who won’t listen to their husbands when we say we love you no matter what you look like – that you can drop all that and just be content with what you have. That we want to see you naked, stretch marks, cellulite, extra weight, and everything else included. We don’t care about any of it. We likely won’t even notice them. Because we want you – not just your body.

I’m currently working on a workbook to help wives send sexy photos to their husbands, and the wives in the focus group are the ones struggling to find pictures that they think their husband will like. The husbands tend to love all the pictures, even the ones the wives don’t think are that good. Why? Because it’s a picture of them.

I know many men can tell their wives thousands upon thousands of times that they think they’re gorgeous, and their wives won’t listen to them – why? Because they’ve been taught that your opinion means nothing. They’re catering to the world, not to their husband. And that’s pretty messed up. It’s understandable, but it’s not okay.

I think maybe men get blamed out of jealousy. We don’t subscribe to these beliefs. Most men don’t believe they can trade their body or sex with them for anything, so we don’t see sex as a commodity we can trade. We don’t buy that sex isn’t a part of us, because we feel it as a part of us every day. For whatever reason, God saw fit to pump us (as a gender, individuals may vary) full of testosterone so that we could never forget that we were made to have sex – it’s a part of us.

Instead, the world, both inside and outside of the church, has decided to hand the reigns regarding sex over to the gender that struggles with it, and then to pile on teachings that makes it even harder for them to handle that responsibility.

And so, we have the blind leading the blind and telling each other not to listen to the people who can see because they’re all evil and stupid when they’re the only ones who can see the path forward.

How do you fix this?

Well, there’s two problems to solve, today’s and tomorrow’s. Most people focus on tomorrow, or rather the next generation. Most will admit that we have a problem in our churches and we need to fix the teachings, which is true. We know there are problems with our media and we need to combat that, which is also true.

But what do we do with the marriages of today? Do we just cut bait and say “well, we’ll fix it for our kids, we’re already too messed up?” I don’t think so. I think it can be fixed, and I believe this for two reasons.

The first is that we’ve had over 150 wives go through our Becoming More Sexually Engaged course where we teach what the Bible says about sex, marriage and our bodies. We also teach wives about hormones, how they work and how to understand them – not to change them, but to appreciate them. Lastly, we teach wives about husbands, to undo a lot of the bad teachings out there and helping to translate from guy to girl, because sometimes it does seem like we speak a different language.

In short, we teach proper theology, psychology and philosophy – we work on mindset. You know what happens? These wives start becoming less inhibited. They enjoy sex more. They have sex more. They ask for sex more. They have more orgasms. They get more adventurous. They let their husbands lead where he’s been built to lead, and they actually enjoy being led.

I’m not going to lie and say it fixes all the problems. Many wives come back for a second pass (at no cost) through it because they realize they weren’t ready to adopt it all the first time around, and they see even more improvements the second time. Even that is just a start. It begins the journey.

Most people can’t throw away a lifetime of indoctrination overnight, especially when they’re being taught it both from church and the world. My wife helped me write the course nearly a decade ago and we’ve recently made some massive breakthroughs in this area. In fact, only a few months ago we were talking about this topic and she asked “well, how do we fix this?” because she was still struggling with it. But the good thing is that it’s not a lightswitch – you don’t have to wait until the transformation is complete before turning it on. It’s more like a dimmer, little changes can make big differences and give you light to see what’s next to do.

Our marriage started rough. I rarely saw her naked. She changed in the bathroom or in the dark. We never went to bed at the same time. We had a sexless marriage. It’s because of all these reasons that I shared more that are in the course that I can’t post in a single episode, and likely more that we still haven’t uncovered. She had no history of abuse. We have no prior relationships with baggage , we were both each other’s firsts for everything sexual – just being in the world can damage you enough without anything else.

These days, I cannot believe how far we’ve come. We have sex every day, often morning and night. She now looks for opportunities when we can sneak some more in. Our sex is wild and adventurous, and always with the lights on or in the middle of the day. We have 5 kids whom we homeschool, so they’re always home. It doesn’t stop us. It did in the past, but those weren’t reasons. They were excuses. The reason was mindset.

I’m very glad to have a wife who was willing to change her mindset. She’s very happy about it too because she lets me lead, and I lead her to ecstasy as often as I can.

And I know this is light on details on what exactly changed. We’re still talking through that and exploring, but rest assured, when we figure that out, we’ll let you know. It will probably become part of the course, or the next course we make.

Now, if you want to get started on this, I invite the wives to join our Becoming More Sexually Engaged course. We’re going to be running a cohort in the new year. And I know, if I was better at marketing, I would have timed this with that, but there’s no sense starting a course near December when everyone is busy with Christmas and family. I’ve tried it, and it added more stress than was necessary.

That said, I’m likely going to be raising the cost of the course in January because the world has gotten more expensive, including all the tools I use to deliver it, so if you want to jump in now, you can get the current pricing.

Husbands – do not push your wives to take it. She has to want to change her mindset. If you force it, there’s a bigger chance it will harden her heart. I’ve seen it happen.

But if you’re a wife who is tired of being at odds with her sexuality and wanting to live as a more integrated sexual being, as I believe God intended, come check it out. Read the testimonials other wives have left. See if it’s for you.

Not sure yet, but want to be reminded of it again later? Click here

Tagged with: Mindset