Is Sexual Attraction Essential for Marriage?
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Alex, a young woman, writes in to ask this.
00:00:07.480 | Pastor John, is sexual attraction
00:00:09.600 | at the beginning of a relationship essential for marriage?
00:00:13.520 | Should you court someone you are not sexually attracted to?
00:00:16.520 | I'm currently praying about the possibility
00:00:18.400 | of courting a man who is on fire for the Lord
00:00:20.440 | and who pushes me to be a better woman for Jesus,
00:00:23.400 | but I'm not sexually attracted to him,
00:00:25.240 | although I am emotionally.
00:00:27.180 | What should I do?
00:00:28.680 | I was so perplexed and moved by this question,
00:00:33.060 | I talked to my wife about it.
00:00:34.880 | So, this is a little bit of overflow from our conversation
00:00:39.180 | 'cause I'm not sure I can get inside
00:00:41.220 | the skin of women very easily.
00:00:43.140 | So I wanted to check with a woman.
00:00:45.540 | At one level, this is easy to answer,
00:00:48.840 | and at another level, not so easy.
00:00:51.180 | The key word that makes it easy is the word essential.
00:00:55.260 | She says, is sexual attraction
00:00:58.600 | at the beginning of a relationship,
00:01:00.200 | I would say any time in the relationship,
00:01:02.620 | essential for marriage?
00:01:05.120 | And the word essential means of the essence.
00:01:08.160 | Does sexual attraction belong to the essence of marriage?
00:01:11.520 | And the answer is no,
00:01:13.240 | it does not belong to the essence of marriage.
00:01:15.520 | Now be careful, I didn't say sexual relations,
00:01:17.480 | I said sexual pleasure.
00:01:19.040 | Sexual attraction doesn't belong to the essence of marriage.
00:01:24.600 | The essence of marriage is the making and keeping
00:01:28.820 | of a covenant between a man and a woman
00:01:32.860 | to be husband and wife to each other
00:01:35.200 | as long as they both shall live.
00:01:37.040 | That's the essence of a marriage,
00:01:39.000 | covenant making, covenant keeping,
00:01:41.700 | to be a husband and a wife.
00:01:43.320 | And to be sure, that covenant includes the promise
00:01:47.560 | to give oneself to the other in sexual relations.
00:01:53.120 | First Corinthians 7, three,
00:01:55.000 | the husband should give his wife her conjugal rights
00:01:59.040 | and likewise the wife, her husband.
00:02:02.240 | But there is nothing in the Bible
00:02:04.740 | that mandates any particular degree of physical pleasure
00:02:08.720 | in that relationship.
00:02:10.440 | And there are two other reasons for this view,
00:02:13.400 | why I don't think sexual attraction
00:02:15.840 | or sexual pleasure is of the essence.
00:02:17.920 | One is cultural.
00:02:19.400 | Throughout most of history, I think,
00:02:22.080 | and in most cultures, marriages have been arranged
00:02:25.200 | by parents.
00:02:26.360 | Couples did not look around
00:02:28.400 | to see who made them sexually aroused.
00:02:30.600 | They accepted the cultural pattern.
00:02:32.760 | And this means that most marriages in history
00:02:35.740 | have not started based on a sense of sexual attraction.
00:02:39.500 | That had to come later if it came at all.
00:02:42.000 | And those were real essential marriages.
00:02:46.400 | And the other reason for saying this
00:02:48.880 | is that marriage has seasons of life
00:02:53.880 | as you grow older together.
00:02:55.880 | So we've been married 45 years.
00:02:57.500 | We've walked through some of these seasons.
00:02:59.360 | We're still doing it.
00:03:00.760 | And this issue of physical pleasuring
00:03:05.440 | of each other rises and falls.
00:03:08.520 | I mean, it can rise and fall when you're young
00:03:11.000 | because of all kinds of issues that come and go in life
00:03:14.280 | with broken children or strained relationships.
00:03:17.600 | And if you said that sexual attraction were of the essence,
00:03:21.480 | then aging would be the gradual end of marriage
00:03:25.160 | when in fact, the glories of marriage
00:03:28.160 | may increase with aging
00:03:30.480 | and with the waning of sexual pleasure.
00:03:33.180 | So my answer to the question is just to flat out no.
00:03:36.520 | Sexual attraction is not essential for marriage.
00:03:40.800 | Now that's the easy part of the answer.
00:03:43.080 | Here's what makes it not easy
00:03:45.280 | is I'm not sure what to counsel this woman.
00:03:47.560 | I don't wanna say this is unimportant here.
00:03:50.880 | She says she is not sexually attracted to him,
00:03:54.280 | but she is emotionally attracted to him.
00:03:58.120 | That's what I had to check with my wife about
00:03:59.880 | 'cause that's hard for me to get a handle on.
00:04:02.120 | Now, I admit it is hard for me as a man
00:04:05.440 | to get inside her skin and know what that's like.
00:04:10.440 | A man may be sexually attracted minus emotion.
00:04:15.680 | He can be very animal-like in his sense, in the sense,
00:04:20.080 | but for women generally, they're more whole,
00:04:24.160 | more integrated.
00:04:25.280 | Their emotions are much more closely connected
00:04:28.440 | to their sexual pleasures.
00:04:31.280 | And I think that's a beautiful thing, a good thing,
00:04:33.880 | and a very, very good thing for men to realize
00:04:37.320 | and own up to and adapt to.
00:04:40.680 | It means that a man should never treat a woman
00:04:44.260 | as a mere source of titillation.
00:04:46.880 | He should seek to know her and engage her personally
00:04:51.200 | and emotionally so that her experience of sex
00:04:54.760 | is person to person, eye to eye, heart to heart,
00:04:57.920 | not just body to body.
00:05:00.760 | So that's what I would say to her.
00:05:04.080 | Can you see yourself gladly yielding
00:05:08.720 | to this emotional intimacy to your husband's desires
00:05:12.980 | for physical intimacy so that it becomes part
00:05:17.680 | of the emotional intimacy?
00:05:20.040 | I think right there's the issue for her,
00:05:22.360 | an extension of it.
00:05:24.320 | Can this emotional intimacy she has,
00:05:26.720 | can she see it blending into a happy, glad,
00:05:31.720 | satisfied yielding to her husband's physical intimacy,
00:05:36.420 | even if that moment she may not be having
00:05:38.640 | the same sensations that he has?
00:05:41.520 | If that seems unpleasurable to you, Alex,
00:05:46.520 | or even painful or unpleasant to you,
00:05:49.300 | this could be a serious problem and cause you to hesitate.
00:05:52.900 | I married a couple one time.
00:05:54.540 | This is a sad story.
00:05:56.500 | The marriage did not last because I failed to see
00:06:01.500 | that this woman really hated the thought of sex.
00:06:06.300 | She's got all kinds of reasons, I discovered later, for why,
00:06:09.260 | but she hoped marriage would fix it.
00:06:11.500 | She despised it.
00:06:13.560 | She thought it was dirty and therefore it was over.
00:06:17.200 | I mean, she would not have any sexual relations
00:06:20.620 | with this guy, and he walked away from her.
00:06:23.640 | So I would say to this woman, test yourself.
00:06:26.200 | Sexual pleasure is not essential to marriage,
00:06:29.480 | but the absence of the desire for it at the beginning
00:06:33.840 | could signal deeper problems of distaste for sex
00:06:38.640 | or resistance to the male desire,
00:06:41.680 | and I would try to see that changed before moving ahead.
00:06:46.400 | - Thank you, Pastor John.
00:06:48.620 | And we talked about what it means to be
00:06:50.980 | in a marriage covenant back in episode number 165.
00:06:54.680 | It's an episode we titled,
00:06:56.160 | Is My Husband's Porn Addiction a Marriage Deal Breaker?
00:07:00.680 | Be sure to check that out, episode number 165.
00:07:04.200 | Well, Bible memorization is important and it's hard work.
00:07:07.560 | It takes time, willpower, concentration,
00:07:10.520 | and that means we need really good motivations
00:07:13.320 | for doing it in the first place.
00:07:14.840 | And tomorrow, Pastor John will do that very thing.
00:07:17.760 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:07:18.640 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:07:21.240 | (upbeat music)
00:07:23.820 | (upbeat music)
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