I Feel No Sexual Attraction — Should I Still Pursue Marriage?
00:00:00.000 | Well, in our culture, every sexual orientation gets a label and a definition.
00:00:07.880 | A 26-year-old anonymous female listener has been considering those categories, and she
00:00:11.920 | writes in to us.
00:00:13.600 | "Hello, Pastor John.
00:00:15.240 | What are your thoughts on the sexual orientation category of asexual, of people who experience
00:00:19.960 | no general sexual attraction to others?
00:00:21.760 | This seems to be me currently.
00:00:24.240 | Am I broken?
00:00:25.240 | Is something wrong with me?
00:00:26.240 | Or do you think in the Christian life this would be a God-given signal that one has the
00:00:29.380 | permanent gift of singleness?
00:00:31.560 | At first I thought so.
00:00:33.040 | But then I see another category for those who are demisexual, those who experience
00:00:37.240 | sexual attraction to someone but only after a close emotional connection has first been
00:00:41.680 | formed.
00:00:42.680 | I think I may be asexual, but I don't know.
00:00:45.840 | Perhaps I could be sexually attracted to a man later on.
00:00:48.640 | In light of 1 Corinthians 7, verses 6-11, does the Bible applaud asexuality?
00:00:54.840 | And how should a currently asexual young woman proceed in thinking about singleness and marriage
00:00:58.960 | that embraces singleness and ministry opportunities but leaves open the possibility of marriage
00:01:03.800 | in the future?"
00:01:04.800 | Pastor John, what would you say to this young female listener?
00:01:09.120 | You know, I hadn't planned to say this, but yesterday I took a walk with my wife, and
00:01:15.360 | I said, "Hey, I've been thinking about some APJ questions," and I paraphrased this one
00:01:19.640 | to her about a woman who thought she had no sexual attraction to men as a single woman.
00:01:28.360 | And my wife looked at me and said, "What's the problem?"
00:01:30.840 | I said, "Okay, I'll tell her you said that."
00:01:34.520 | So that response might make a little more sense if I tell you what I was going to say
00:01:39.200 | anyway, but there it is.
00:01:41.440 | That's a short answer.
00:01:43.640 | It might be helpful to start by saying that the vast majority of marriages in the history
00:01:48.880 | of the world have not been based on romantic sexual attraction.
00:01:52.920 | That's a relatively modern criterion.
00:01:56.120 | In a way, it has skyrocketed to preeminence in the last couple centuries in the West.
00:02:03.800 | Most of the marriages in the world have been arranged by family or have been dictated by
00:02:08.180 | other relational and social circumstances.
00:02:10.520 | So just be aware that we live in a weird time with the elevation of personal romantic affection
00:02:17.760 | being the be-all and end-all of how you form lifelong relationships of commitment, which
00:02:24.800 | also means that millions of human beings have been born into the world having been conceived
00:02:36.720 | in moments not of mutual sexual passion.
00:02:41.800 | Most human beings have come into the world not having been conceived that way.
00:02:48.640 | That kind of passion may or may not have come into being in a marriage, but it doesn't take
00:02:56.680 | passion to make a baby.
00:02:58.900 | To be sure, God has lots to say in the Bible about how a male and a female human being,
00:03:09.080 | created in His image, should treat each other with respect and honor and purity in the unique
00:03:16.560 | callings of manhood and womanhood in the act of sexual relations.
00:03:22.200 | I'm not saying those aren't important and that God has nothing to say about it, but He
00:03:27.800 | does not say that the only valid sexual relations—sexual intercourse—the only valid sexual relations
00:03:39.000 | or the only beautiful sexual relations must carry the same mutual passions in a man and
00:03:46.960 | a woman.
00:03:47.960 | Like, they both got to be fever pitch intense for this thing to be right and beautiful.
00:03:53.680 | That's not true.
00:03:55.440 | Those passions vary tremendously from man to man, woman to woman, from season to season
00:04:05.080 | in a marriage relationship.
00:04:06.920 | They're just not of the essence.
00:04:08.560 | They are not of the essence of what marriage is.
00:04:12.400 | It's not an accident that the very first chapter in my book on marriage is titled "Staying
00:04:20.840 | Married is Not About Staying in Love."
00:04:23.560 | That's the way I began my book on marriage.
00:04:26.240 | I wrote it when we'd been married 40 years; I would say the same thing now we've been
00:04:29.680 | married 50 years.
00:04:31.280 | I think being in love in the romantic sense of mutual desire is indeed the ideal of God's
00:04:41.920 | plan, but it is neither essential nor is it the primary means of staying married or staying
00:04:52.040 | happily married.
00:04:54.920 | There are far bigger issues at stake in marriage than being or staying in love.
00:05:03.880 | Marriage is about the covenant-keeping love between Christ and the Church, and displaying
00:05:10.280 | that can happen profoundly even where romantic affections rise and fall, maybe especially
00:05:20.480 | when romantic affections fall.
00:05:24.680 | Number two, second observation.
00:05:27.800 | From what you have told me, I don't see your relative indifference to sex as a flaw.
00:05:36.680 | Now, getting back to Noel's reaction, I would need to know lots more to make a judgment
00:05:46.080 | like that.
00:05:47.080 | My guess is that you—I asked my wife whether she would say this.
00:05:52.280 | She said, "Sure."
00:05:53.280 | I said, "My guess is that you are closer to the norm of how women feel about sex in
00:06:02.960 | general than the sexually spring-loaded and predacious women glorified as normative in
00:06:13.840 | the entertainment industry, which, by the way, are almost all created by men who are
00:06:22.360 | always dreaming unrealistic things about women."
00:06:26.680 | So here's a key question for you.
00:06:30.800 | Can you imagine yourself spending the rest of your life living with a caring, mature,
00:06:38.280 | responsible Christian man, and do you have any desire for that to happen?
00:06:46.080 | Another question.
00:06:47.080 | Do you ever dream about this?
00:06:49.920 | Did you, when you were a teenager, ever dream about this?
00:06:55.000 | Or would you just as soon have an ordinary home of your own, maybe a housemate, maybe
00:07:02.800 | not, for the next 50 years, and you could very happily conceive of things that way?
00:07:08.760 | None of those is judgment questions.
00:07:10.680 | They're just knowing yourself kinds of questions.
00:07:13.400 | If you say, "No, I don't dream about spending my life with a man," then my question would
00:07:19.440 | be, just to clarify, has any man, real or imaginary, ever wakened such a longing in
00:07:27.320 | you?
00:07:28.320 | Do sexual relations seem unclean to you when you imagine having sex?
00:07:35.200 | Does it seem gross?
00:07:36.200 | Now, you may wonder, "Why were you asking that question?"
00:07:39.520 | I'm asking that question because I've dealt with couples.
00:07:42.560 | I'm thinking of one in particular that divorced within a year after I did their wedding, and
00:07:47.760 | she simply said, "It's just gross.
00:07:49.320 | I can't stand it.
00:07:50.320 | It's gross."
00:07:51.320 | So she clearly walked into this thinking that she didn't know what she was in for and had
00:07:58.560 | a horrific issue to deal with from her past that she hadn't come to terms with.
00:08:04.920 | Or does it seem boring?
00:08:06.560 | Does it seem frightening?
00:08:08.920 | Does a sexual relationship with a man seem beautiful?
00:08:11.040 | Does it seem godly?
00:08:13.720 | Does it seem like a necessary evil for making babies?
00:08:17.320 | And I just want, in that conversation, to discern just what is your inner heart world,
00:08:25.840 | what's really going on in your heart.
00:08:29.000 | It would make a huge difference whether you thought sex would feel dirty or whether you
00:08:37.320 | thought it would simply be a godly way to bless your husband, even though you yourself
00:08:43.840 | didn't have any passionate pursuit of it.
00:08:48.200 | Maybe one story from my experience and a closing encouragement.
00:08:53.520 | When I was madly in love with Noelle in college and desired everything about her, sexually
00:09:03.080 | and every other way I wanted her, fully expected to marry her, which I eventually did, there
00:09:09.040 | was another young woman about a year into our relationship, about her age, same age,
00:09:16.840 | that I felt no sexual attraction to at all.
00:09:22.720 | But this young woman was a poet, and I was writing poems, lots of them in those days,
00:09:30.040 | and she liked my poems that I wrote, and she gave me some of hers.
00:09:38.680 | This created in me something that you might—I'm talking to you now—you might perhaps experience.
00:09:47.240 | I was deeply moved.
00:09:50.400 | She touched something deep inside of me that she appreciated what I wrote, shared what
00:09:56.840 | she wrote.
00:09:57.920 | I was drawn to her.
00:10:00.000 | I was drawn to her.
00:10:01.000 | I wanted to spend time with her.
00:10:03.600 | I thought she was quite homely.
00:10:06.560 | I was drawn to her.
00:10:09.360 | It was not sexual.
00:10:11.400 | I didn't even think she was pretty, but it was deeper than that.
00:10:16.920 | I had to stop talking with her.
00:10:20.080 | I had to stop reading her poems for a season and sharing mine.
00:10:26.480 | Something was going on inside of me that was profoundly bonding.
00:10:32.440 | And now here's my point.
00:10:34.040 | You might experience something like that.
00:10:36.900 | If Noelle had not existed, would that relationship have moved toward romance?
00:10:45.940 | Would I have been eventually desirous of her body as I was of her kinship in poetry?
00:10:54.480 | And I don't know the answer to that.
00:10:55.720 | I don't know, but I felt like it was very possible.
00:11:02.000 | So my encouragement is, accept your present indifference to sexual desires.
00:11:09.120 | Just accept it.
00:11:10.120 | Like Noelle said, what's the problem?
00:11:12.160 | Seek to love and serve people with all your gifts.
00:11:17.640 | Be joyful in the Lord and mature and wise and strong and humble and honest.
00:11:23.440 | Be a great, mature, deep sage of a woman.
00:11:29.760 | Don't go out of your way to make relationships happen.
00:11:33.080 | But if a worthy man shows an interest in you, go with it in all purity until it's plain
00:11:44.280 | that there is or there isn't a sense of desire or a sense of calling to spend your life with
00:11:52.240 | him in a growing intimacy of every kind.
00:11:57.960 | Seek delight in Christ, serving him and in serving others.
00:12:01.920 | The life of faith looks similar to us all.
00:12:03.920 | Pastor John, thank you.
00:12:05.880 | And to all of you who wrestle with singleness and marriage, thank you for listening along
00:12:09.640 | and for subscribing to Ask Pastor John in your favorite podcast app or YouTube.
00:12:13.280 | We really appreciate having you along for the ride.
00:12:16.640 | Next time we look at really what is the most important key in our victory over sin, it's
00:12:20.240 | hard to overstate what we're going to look at next time.
00:12:23.320 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:12:24.720 | We will see you on Wednesday.
00:12:26.800 | Thanks for listening.
00:12:27.680 | [end]
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00:12:31.680 | 4. What is the most important key in our victory over sin?
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00:12:33.680 | 6. What is the most important key in our victory over sin?
00:12:34.680 | 7. What is the most important key in our victory over sin?
00:12:35.680 | 8. What is the most important key in our victory over sin?