Last week, an insightful, little book by Aileen Challies was brought to my attention. It is entitled, "False Messages: A Guide for the Godly Bride". This helpful, yet challenging book is geared toward married, Christian women, and it is about sex. With permission, I will be sharing it here, piece by piece, with the hope that it will open up avenues of discussion and healing for husbands and wives.
WHAT HE REALLY WANTS
A couple of years ago I read a book by Sharon Jaynes called Becoming the Woman of His Dreams. In her research Jaynes surveyed and interviewed hundreds of men as she tried to understand the qualities men desire in a wife. You won’t be surprised to hear that sexual fulfillment was at the top of the list (like we didn’t see that one coming, right?). This leads her to call sex the superglue that holds a marriage together. Here are a couple of examples of what men said about their sex lives. “What is the one thing I wish my wife understood better about me and what I long for? The need for her to be more sexual. I wish she’d be more creative and enthusiastic about it. I wish sex would be more fun and more of a priority in our marriage.” “The woman of my dreams would want sex as much as I do. I don’t think women really have a concept of how ‘wired’ for sex men are. It can’t make sense to them, not exactly sure why myself. It seems petty, but it’s real.” Her research showed what I think we already knew or at least suspected: for your husband, sexual fulfillment is not a want but a need. It’s a need that arises from the very core of who he is.
In my discussions with other married women I’ve seen clearly that sex, for many couples, is the one thing they fight about most (It’s not just us!). At least from the wife’s perspective, it usually comes down to a pretty simple fact: she simply doesn’t understand why sex is so important to her husband. Because she doesn’t understand, she continues to see it from her perspective and dismisses sex as unimportant, an annoyance, a chore, perhaps an occasional indulgence. She gives herself to him every now and again, hoping it will get hubby off her case for a couple of days, but she does so out of obligation or duty, not delight.
Can you identify with this? I think most women can, at least at times. But if Jaynes is right and sex truly is the superglue that holds a marriage together, we, as wives, need to get it right, don’t we? We need to make sure that we are not eroding our marriages from within because we can’t or won’t understand sex. (Pg. 5)Stay tuned for part 2, or if you are impatient like me and want to read the whole thing at once, you may do so here:
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