Laura’s Strengthening Marriage Blog

One of the trends I continue to see in my work with couples is that there is still an ingrained belief and something of a cultural norm that says, “Good girls don’t.”

The idea is that good girls shouldn’t think about sex. Or that good girls don’t do sex, which prior to marriage is true. But the problem occurs when that gets carried over into marriage.

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 I think God wants an army of strong couples with strong marriages. I think he’s working in the hearts of husbands and wives everywhere to build something in their lives that is solid and ready for His use. I think God uses the sexual relationship as a refining fire for couples, turning coal into diamonds (often under extreme heat and pressure). Serious personal growth and development is no picnic. He wants unshakable, unstoppable couples. Read the rest of this entry »

She wrote: “I remember one evening when I could see in my husband’s eyes that he was not exactly ‘in the mood.’ The cares of the day and the weight of work pressures were heavy on his mind, not to mention the fact that he was just plain tired. All of a sudden it dawned on me that I was seeing my husband the way he usually sees me, in a ‘pre-interested-in-sex’ state of mind. It was a weird sensation to be on the other side of the coin. It was a strange new concept to imagine my husband not being automatically ready for sex. That’s when I realized that if there was going to be any ‘intimate activity’ that night then it would take some effort to help him shift gears from thinking ‘sleep’ to thinking ‘sex.’”

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Men need foreplay too. Foreplay is something that helps prepare the mind and body for sex. Sometimes women like to think that they have the corner on the market when it comes to needing some help to shift from daily cares to more sensual activities. But as evidenced by this couple, it was the husband (not the wife) that particularly needed some foreplay to get his mind headed in the right direction.

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The mechanics of “having sex” are fairly simple, but really “making love” and developing a good intimate relationship takes some time and effort. Movies, pornography and other media tell us that sex is–or should be–easy, which is a set up for problems in a real relationship. For those who have ingested pornography, it’s difficult to have a healthy and accurate perspective of sexuality, and to separate fantasy from reality.

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