SWM 147 – How do you know if you’re sexually compatible

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The most common argument I hear for premarital sex is, “You need to know if you’re sexually compatible before getting married. Otherwise, you might end up stuck in a sexless, unfulfilling relationship.”

And it sounds like sound reasoning.  We test-drive cars before buying them.  We have probation periods for people we hire at work.  We sample foods before purchasing them.  Shouldn’t sex, which is one of the most intimate parts of marriage, be tested beforehand to make sure you’re a good match?

It’s a compelling argument that convinces many people to abandon their principles.  It makes you question your morality.  It promises both immediate and long-term gratification.

However, it’s based on a flawed premise – that sexual compatibility is something that is discovered instead of something that is built.  A good spouse, including sex, isn’t something you stumble across.  It’s something you create together over time through love, trust and commitment.  Your spouse is bespoke to you – custom-made by both you and them.

This flawed premise causes a lot of strife in marriages. As a result, accepting it and either sleeping around or cohabitating before marriage statistically does more harm than good, leading to higher divorce rates, lower marital satisfaction, and intimacy that’s more about performance than connection.

Let’s dig into why.

Why do we think sexual compatibility exists as something to be discovered?

Our society tends to believe that sexuality is something that is buried deep within you, like a diamond waiting to be discovered or a volcano lying dormant.  

It’s as if it’s set when you’re conceived and then lies in wait, waiting to be found, when in actuality, we know sexuality is built.  Some of it was definitely built during our formative years, but it doesn’t stop there.  It is constantly adapting, growing and shifting.

Some are built based on how we grew up or how our brain operates.  

For example, if you have parents who are both lesbian, your chance of identifying as a homosexual when you grow up increases by 150% for females and 400% for males (data from the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study).

Another example is that there is a high correlation between adults with ADHD and adults who engage in what is considered kinky behaviour (Study: Let’s talk about sex… and ADHD). Now, because ADHD is inherited and ADHD tends to express itself in the bedroom often as kinky behaviour, this leads to the shocking revelation that kink is sometimes inherited – not directly, of course, but through ADHD.  

So there are definitely some things that can be influenced from birth or a young age.  Sexual abuse also, for obvious reasons, tends to affect people’s sexuality.

But that doesn’t mean we’re stuck with whatever hand we’re dealt. Our brains are incredibly plastic. We can adapt to an impressive array of situations and dynamics, and we do.  

I know men who considered themself homosexual who managed to change their attraction and have a happy and fulfilling life married to a woman.  I, sadly, have talked to sexually conservative people, being led to experiment with threesomes, sex clubs and more, to the detriment of their marriage. Porn use also changes people’s sexual appetites and desires.

And, of course, people’s sex drives and interests can change drastically due to health changes, stress, hormones and more.

All this is to say that our sexuality isn’t set in stone waiting to be uncovered.  It grows with us and shifts based on our context, for good or bad.

But because many people believe sex is the foundation of a successful marriage, they feel compelled to test their future spouse’s sexual compatibility to ensure they’ll want to maintain those activities for the rest of their lives.

In Reality – Marriage Changes Everything

Sex within marriage, however, is an entirely different thing than sex before marriage.  Often, people see a shift in their sexuality, seemingly instantaneously on occasion.  Many women, in particular, who were highly sexual before marriage find that something shifts overnight or even faster – sometimes, between the wedding ceremony and the honeymoon.  It happens so often that there’s a common joke:

What’s a girlfriend’s biggest turn-off?  A wedding ring.

Because for a lot of women, as soon as they get married, suddenly the sexual context shifts.  What was taboo and exciting is now considered a duty.  Should it? No, and we can work on that mindset, but that doesn’t change the fact that it feels like that for many.  

It’s not intentional, and it’s not a bait and switch, but it does preclude any “test-driving” of sexual desire, drive or adventurousness because all of that can change in the amount of time it takes to say the vows.  I talk to many wives who were excitedly waiting for their wedding night to have it arrive and feel themselves shut down, leaving both them and their new husbands very confused and often hurt.

Now, if you go into marriage without having had sex, this is a disappointment, but also in line with what we see on TV.  I mean, we hope that we picked a spouse who likes sex, but decades of TV shows have taught us that wives don’t want sex, so we’re at least somewhat prepared for that.  If you had been having sex before the wedding with no issues with a girlfriend and then a fiancee who has a high sex drive, then you think you won!  Then, suddenly, it shifts; that’s a much larger shock.

And it’s not only just appetite for sex in general, but also specific activities as well.  Probably the most common complaint that husbands have, besides just a lack of a sex drive, is that oral sex suddenly disappeared from their repertoire — that could be giving, receiving, or both.

The test-driving theory doesn’t work because the person you marry will not be the same person you dated or were engaged to. Their context changed, and that made them change.  

Marriage provides the framework for building an even better sexual relationship

That doesn’t mean that a married sex life is hopeless. It only means that you can’t assume you can hit the ground running.  But what marriage has as its benefit is time.

If you’re married and take your vows seriously, you only have two choices – suffer or get better.  Because let’s face it – most of us aren’t good lovers at the start.  

Men tend to be too excited and orgasm too quickly.  We rapidly push for new and exciting things when we haven’t become proficient in our existing repertoire. 

Women tend to be timid about exploring and speaking up about what they need and want – if they even know what they need and want, which many don’t. 

Both spouses tend to love the fun differences between genders but have little patience, understanding or grace for the more challenging differences, like differing sex drives or orgasm-ability.

The average time to orgasm for a man is under eight minutes, whereas 70% of women don’t orgasm from penetration, and if they do, it generally takes much longer than eight minutes.  About 14% of women under 35 have never experienced an orgasm (Study: Determinants of female sexual orgasms).  Many more don’t until later in their marriage.  I have talked to wives who didn’t even know they could orgasm until over a decade into theirs.  Others knew it was possible in theory, but maybe not for them.

But over time, these things can change. We can grow, adapt, and become better lovers of each other—both in giving and receiving.

As a result, those who dedicate time and energy to becoming better lovers for each other have fantastic sex lives into their 40s, 50s and even later.  Many have sex far more often than any 20-year-old that’s hooking up on college campus every weekend, and far better sex at that.

For myself, I would say the sex we have now, both of us being in our 40s and married for over 20 years, is incomparable to the sex we had when we were younger.  It’s better for both of us. It’s more frequent, more adventurous and lasts much longer.

My wife says that her capacity for pleasure has grown indescribably higher in the last few years – in large part because we’ve been playing with edging.  I could only wish I enjoyed as much pleasure as she does from sex. Despite me having a much higher sex drive, she gets far more pleasure out of it, which I may be a little bit jealous of but also proud of.

Marriage does have its sexual ups and downs

But it’s not straight linear growth, either. Many things can cause hiccups along the way.

Women, in particular, tend to get a lot of speedbumps when it comes to sex.  Getting married changes your mindset and context, as we already discussed.

Then, when many women hit 30, their hormones tend to shift.  There’s another shift in their 40s, then around 50 with menopause.

Trying to conceive tends to shoot women’s sex drives into overdrive, and then pregnancy tends to do the opposite.  Yes, some women have a higher drive during some trimesters, but that’s hit or miss.  Unfortunately, this sudden shift from the trying-to-conceive “I want sex all the time” to “I’m nauseous, my back hurts, and sex isn’t appealing at all” is pretty drastic and again tends to make men feel a bit like they’ve been tricked.  More than one husband has thought, “Well, they got what they wanted (a baby) and now don’t care about what I want.”  Particularly when birthing and breastfeeding tend to lower their sex drive further.

And the biggest problem is that there often aren’t good conversations about these things.  Men tend to be demonized for wanting to have sex during this season of life.  “She just had a baby!” is often heard – and that is a good reason not to want to, but you know what – it doesn’t remove his drive to want to be close to her.  And he can handle not having sex, but handling not being able to express himself or share how he’s feeling, feeling demonized for being alone – that’s pretty rough to go through at the same time.

Having kids also tends to shift women’s priorities towards their children and away from their husbands.  Now, part of that is needed; after all, a baby will die if you don’t care for it, as will a toddler and up until they’re an adult – teenagers do some stupid things, after all.  But if you still want to have a marriage when they all grow up, you’d better prioritize your marriage.  

Too often, I see people put their marriage on the back burner, thinking, “Well, we’ll get back to it when the kids grow up,” only to find that they don’t know or like each other by that point. “We’ll focus on each other when they’re gone” turns into “staying together for the kids,” which leads to the phenomenon of empty-nest divorces.

And on top of all this, there’s work stress, family stress, church stress (far too often), medical issues, relationship problems, crisis of faith or life, porn, affairs and more that can either cause blips or outright nuke your sex life for a while.

We’ve had multiple times in our marriage where sex just didn’t happen for months.  Some of them were for good reasons – like a broken back.  Some were not – like earlier on when our marriage was clinically sexless because – well, we were both bad at being married.

The point is things go up and down.  Be gracious to your spouse because whatever the reason, at least one of you thinks it’s a good reason.  Most spouses aren’t malicious towards each other.  But keep loving communication open. When you shut down talking about it, dismiss their feelings, and prioritize your own wants or needs over theirs, then you run into trouble.  Don’t do that.

Marriage isn’t the same as dating

All of the above is why marriage isn’t the same as dating.  With dating, if anything happens, you can walk away.  Ideally, you have no shared assets, no kids, and haven’t had sex yet.

But a marriage should be harder to leave.  There’s a reason most couples share everything – bank accounts, kids, vehicles, the house, a bed, and everything else.  Everything we do that intertwines our lives makes it harder for us to just up and leave.  Now, some don’t like that.  

More and more couples choose to keep their finances separate, they sleep in separate beds or even separate rooms.  Some go on vacations separately.

There’s even a growing idea that marriages should be time-bound, with a renewable contract that could exit at some standardized interval. This idea was popularized in the book Brave New World. Sadly, many seem to have missed the point that it was a symptom of a society in which Marxism had succeeded in its goal of destroying the idea of family and lauded the idea of transient relationships – which is precisely what is promoted in our society today.

Those who think that way have missed the entire point.

Marriage is not supposed to be escapable.  It’s the inescapability that makes it completely different from any other relationship.  It’s why you can’t test-drive a marriage.  It’s an entirely different experience than having a girlfriend, boyfriend or fiancee.

And the stats bear this out – test driving doesn’t work.  

Living together before being engaged increases your divorce risk by 50-80%, according to Focus on the Family.

That’s the opposite of what you’re trying to accomplish – finding a good spouse.  You’re more likely to lose them.  The risk of divorce drops in the first year because it’s less of a transition but then increases after that (Study: Cohabitation Experience and Cohabitation’s Association With Marital Dissolution).

It also lowers marital satisfaction, dedication and confidence (Study: The Pre-engagement Cohabitation Effect: A Replication and Extension of Previous Findings).  So, not only are you likely to lose them, but they won’t be as happy if you manage to keep them.

The likelihood of negative communication patterns increases as well.  Everyone has these, but why would you want more of them?  It also leads to higher rates of domestic violence.  

And the longer you cohabitate before marriage, the worse these stats get.  If you live together when you’re dating, you’ll be worse off than if you lived together first when you’re engaged, which is worse than if you lived together first when you’re married.

Lastly, it slows down the relationship. The old adage “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” has truth to it—if you’re looking for a spouse, living together will slow that process down.

So, when someone tells you to make sure you’re sexually compatible – the question is – what are you willing to risk for that? Apparently health, safety, happiness, and, ultimately, your marriage – all to test something that cannot be tested.

You are not supposed to be able to test-drive it.  It’s a leap of faith in many ways.  We are supposed to marry someone who is not perfect for us – that’s how we grow. That’s how they grow.

Our spouse was not created for us.  They become bespoke to us as we are in a relationship with them, and we to them.

The sexual compatibility mindset focuses on the wrong thing

Ultimately, the idea of being able to test the relationship focuses on the wrong thing anyway.  It’s all about selfishness.  About getting what you want and being sure you’ll keep getting what you want long term.  It doesn’t work, but that’s the goal.

But, as I wrote in my last post, that is not a mindset that makes for a good marriage in the long term.  So, if you go into it with the idea that “Oh, I’m going to make sure I get what I want, “you’re intentionally starting out with the wrong mindset.  Most people have that mindset, but it’s not overt.  They think they’re loving, but the sexual compatibility argument explicitly goes the other way – it’s about serving me.

So you will enter the marriage with the idea that if it changes, if I’m ever not satisfied with them, then I’m out because that’s what’s important. That’s priority #1.

It’s no wonder it doesn’t work.  Even the idea of testing it causes damage to the relationship.  This is not what marriage was designed to be.

It also missed the point of sex.  Sex is about serving each other, not serving yourself.  That’s when it gets really good.  Marriage and sex are about loving sacrificially, and you can’t test someone else for something that needs to be cultivated in you.

So, no, I don’t think you can test for sexual compatibility.  Right off the bat, it sets you up for failure because the mindset is all wrong.  Then it goes downhill because the person you’re testing is not the person you’ll marry, let alone the person they will be 5, 10, 20, 30 or more years later.

You can’t test for real love and sexual compatibility long-term.  You create it, nurture it, and continuously reinvent it throughout your shared journey.