The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love (5 page)

A heart patient provided the best description that we have heard of what the act of marriage means to a man. Warned by his doctor that any unnecessary physical exertion could kill him, he continued love relations with his wife. At times he endured a body-rending experience of shock afterward—his heart palpitating, his face losing its color, and his extremities turning cold and clammy. Sometimes it took one or two hours before he could even get off the bed. When I suggested he might kill himself some day in making love to his wife, he quickly responded, “I can’t think of a better way to go!”

The most beautiful aspect of all this is that God created the experience for man to share only with his wife. If he loves and cherishes her the way God commands him, a warm and affectionate relationship will develop to enrich their entire married life; the exciting and pleasurable experience of mutual lovemaking will be shared several thousand times during their marriage.

Napoleon Hill, in his very practical book for businessmen,
Think and Grow Rich,
betrays a common misunderstanding of the male sex drive when he cautions salesmen to limit the expression of their sex drive because it will tend to demotivate them.
²
Nothing could be further from the truth. A sexually satisfied husband is a motivated man. Hill was probably a victim of the false notion characteristic of the past generation that held that sex demanded such a great expenditure of energy that it certainly must sap a man’s strength. Unless he is speaking of an abnormal frequency of several times a day, his advice is simply not valid. A sexually frustrated man has a hard time concentrating, is prone to be edgy and harder to work with, and, more important, finds it difficult to retain lasting goals. By contrast, the truly satisfied husband refuses to waste his business day on trivia; he wants each moment to count so he can get home to the wife and family who give all his hard work real purpose and meaning.

Two letters sent to “Dear Abby” less than ten days apart bring a chuckle but well illustrate our point. The first one, from an irate husband who complained about his wife’s lousy housekeeping, admitted to one positive trait he liked: “She’ll go to bed with me whenever I want.” The second letter came from a salesman who asked Abby to tell the first man to be grateful for his marital blessings: “If I had a wife like that, I’d be motivated to make enough money to hire her a maid to clean the house!”

Marabel Morgan, author of
The Total Woman,
³
suggests that a man has two things on his mind when he gets home at night—food and sex—and not always in that order.

Sex Drive and Thought Life

The most consistent spiritual problem faced by the average red-blooded Christian man relates to his thought life. The male sex drive is so powerful that sex often seems to be uppermost in his mind. Any man in military service can testify that 95 percent of a serviceman’s off-duty conversation revolves around sex. Dirty jokes and stories punctuated by four-letter words become a constant verbal bombardment.

Shortly after he becomes a Christian, such a man is convicted by the Word of God and the Holy Spirit to change his thought patterns. Our Lord, of course, knew this universal male problem, for He admonished, “I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:28). Such mental adultery has probably brought more sincere men to spiritual defeat than any other single sin.

Many Christian women fail to understand this male problem, and this is one reason why they often adopt such scanty dress. If they realized the thought problems that their indecent exposure causes the average man, many of them would dress more modestly; but since they are not so sexually stimulated at the sight of a male body, they do not readily perceive the male response. I caught this message as a G.I. stationed at the Las Vegas Army Air Base. After nineteen days on K.P. I received what I anticipated to be the greatest duty assignment possible—sweeping out the Wacs’ barracks. To my dismay, after checking out the smallest whisk broom I could find, I found the barracks empty; all the women were working. I returned to the quartermaster for a regular-sized broom, but during the cleanup I became aware of something rather startling: not one nude male pinup picture appeared in the two decks of that facility. By contrast, the 197 men in our barracks sported 193 pinup pictures of girls! Not until the recent overemphasis on sex have women reflected an increasing problem in this area. But they apparently have to cultivate it; men get it by nature.

Another illustration of the fact that women seem to lack the visual lust problem occurred recently in our home. Looking through
Sports Illustrated,
I came upon a picture of Mr. America. As I was admiring his bulging biceps and rippling muscles, Bev came up behind me, saw what I was looking at, and spontaneously responded, “Ugh, how grotesque!” Women have their own brand of spiritual problems, but mental-attitude lust is seldom one of them.

We have reviewed all this to make an important point. A loving, sexually responsive wife can be a great asset to her husband in keeping his thought life pleasing to God. That is not to suggest that his victory in Christ is dependent on his wife’s behavior—that is never the case. In fact, God has promised to give a warm-blooded, affectionate man the grace to live with a cold, indifferent woman. But many a carnal Christian husband has used his wife’s sexual rejection as an excuse to compound his spiritual defeat further by periods of mental-attitude lust.

A loving wife who understands her husband’s temptations in this regard will restrain the desire to squelch his advances and, because she thinks more of his needs than of her own tiredness, will give her love freely to him. Her reward will be his ready response to her mood, and together they can share the rapturous experience of married love.

Notes

1
. Catherine Parker Anthony,
Textbook of Anatomy and Physiology
(St. Louis: Mosby, 1963), 46.

2
. Napoleon Hill,
Think and Grow Rich
(Cleveland: Ralston, 1956), 274.

3
. Published by Revell, Old Tappan, N.J., 1973.

Three

What Lovemaking Means to a Woman

Fortunately for women, men and cultures are changing! It is reported that a generation ago many men appeared to be selfish lovers, and society helped contribute to the “he-man” self-images that made them seem like animals in the bedroom. Sexual pleasure from the little woman was assumed to be their divine right, and their relations were usually one-sided experiences that left an affectionate wife with the frustrated feeling that she had been used, not loved.

Such men were (and some still are) sexual illiterates, totally failing to comprehend a woman’s emotional or physical needs. Assuming that he had the gift of intuitive knowledge in this department, a man took his innocent bride to their love nest and taught her only what she needed to know to satisfy
his
sex drive.

It is no wonder that many wives began to lose a desire for sexual intercourse and lovemaking turned into a chore. Even worse, some frustrated wives became evangelists of coolness toward sex. Consequently young brides went into marriage dutifully warned that homemaking, motherhood, and a good reputation were wonderful—but the one drawback to marriage was the “bedroom scene.”

The modern Christian husband has been challenged by the Word of God and his pastor, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church…. Husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies” (Eph. 5:25, 28). Thus a Christian man today enters marriage more sensitive to the love needs of his bride and more concerned with her satisfaction. He respects her as a special creation of God who should be accepted and understood. During the past decade several books on marriage dealing quite frankly with the subject have given men a greater understanding of women. Unless a man’s head remains in the sand, he can learn many things about her. And the more he knows about her, the more he can tailor his affectionate passions to her emotional needs.

A sage once said, “A woman is the most complex creature on earth.” Certainly no reasonable man would claim to understand her fully. However, after dealing with hundreds of these delicate creatures in the privacy of the counseling room, my wife and I have discovered to a greater extent what the act of marriage means to a woman. Every man can profit from reading this chapter; the more a husband knows about his wife’s erotic needs and what the act of marriage truly means to her, the more he and his wife can enjoy each other, not only physically but in every other area of life.

Let us consider these five significant areas that show what lovemaking means to a woman:

1.
It fulfills her womanhood.
Self-image psychology is the rage today. Every bookstand carries several self-help publications, and many are best-sellers. We Christians do not agree with all their humanistic conclusions, but we certainly cannot deny the important truth that lasting happiness is impossible until we learn to accept ourselves. Surely this is true of a married woman. If she considers herself unsuccessful in bed, she will have a difficult time accepting her total womanhood.

It should not come as a surprise that almost every bride feels insecure when she marries. From ages eighteen to twenty-five few people are secure. It often takes from one-third to one-half of a lifetime for people to accept themselves. Naturally, being a Spirit-filled Christian contributes to a good self-image, but marriage is one of the most important decisions a person makes in life; consequently any normal person will face it with a degree of trepidation. If a major part of married life proves unsatisfactory, it complicates one’s self-image. Not incidentally, we have yet to counsel a woman who has a good self-image if she has no desire for sexual intercourse.

One way to understand the function of the female mind is to contrast it with the male thought system. A man has the God-given mandate to be the provider of the family. Consequently his mental psyche is so oriented that he gains much of his self-image from successful occupational pursuits. That is the reason a man’s goals and dreams take a vocational tack early in life. Ask a junior-age boy what he wants to be when he grows up and he will usually reply that he wants to be a fireman, a policeman, a doctor, a baseball player, or a jet pilot. Although he changes that goal several times as he matures, it does indicate his vocational psyche. Ask a little girl what she wants to be when she becomes a woman and she will usually answer “a mother” or “a housewife.” In adulthood and even after thorough vocational training, many women still list the role of homemaker as their main vocational objective.

When in Jackson, Mississippi, for a Family Life Seminar, I was interviewed by a young woman reporter. It took only a moment to detect her hostility arising from the humiliation of having to interview a minister. Most newspapers assign cub reporters to the religion desk, as in her case. Obviously she would rather have been assigned to someone “important.” Accepting her hostility as a challenge, I decided to break through her tough veneer of professionalism by asking her the question I have presented to scores of people as I travel around the country. I had previously learned that she was a journalism major in college, determined to be the “best reporter in the state.” I also discovered that because of an unfortunate love affair at the age of twenty-two, she “hated” men. When she finally became a little friendlier, I began, “I’m taking an informal survey. Would you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

Every curious woman responds affirmatively to that approach. I continued, “What is the one thing you want most out of life?”

She deliberated a moment and replied, “A home and a family.”

Somewhat teasingly I asked, “And a husband?”

She blushed a little and said softly, “I guess so.”

Even I was a bit surprised to find a woman who seemed to be a card-carrying member of the feminist movement confessing the natural longing of every woman’s heart—to be a homemaker.

This intuitive tendency is, in our opinion, the primary drive in a woman. She should never be ashamed of this psychical phenomenon; God made her this way. The most frustrated women in the world are those who stifle or substitute that tendency for a lesser priority. If our assumption is true, and we believe it is, then her rating as a wife is all-important to a woman.

You may be asking, “What relation does that have to the act of marriage?” Everything! A wife is more than a mother and homemaker. She is also a sexual partner to her mate. Like the male, if she does not succeed in the bedroom, she fails also in other areas—for two reasons: first, few men accept bedroom failure without being carnal, nasty, and insulting; second and more important, if her husband doesn’t enjoy her lovemaking, he will make his disapproval obvious by blaming her. A woman receives major portions of her self-esteem from her husband. In fact, we have yet to find a woman with a good self-image who disapproves of herself as a wife. This, in our opinion, is one reason divorcées often marry beneath themselves the second time—they have been beaten down by their husbands and forfeited the self-acceptance that is vital to everyone.

An anxious woman came for counseling to ask my opinion as to whether she or her husband was right. “I think sex is unnecessary in a Christian marriage. My husband doesn’t agree.” Sexually well-adjusted women and all men would side with her husband, but our research indicates that some sexually frustrated women would agree with her. This lady dogmatically announced, “I can live the rest of my life without sex!” Is it any wonder that she ranks as the married woman with the lowest self-image we have ever counseled? When confronted with the challenge that she would never learn to accept herself as a woman unless her husband accepted her as a wife, she returned to her marriage bed with a new motivation. In time, and with God’s help, that new attitude transformed both their relationship and her personality. Today she is a mature woman with a reasonably good self-image.