A Spiritually Tight Marriage

Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.

Proverbs 3:3

HAVE YOU EVER PAUSED TO CONSIDER THE ALMOST HEROIC VULNERABILITY WE assume when we get married? We pledge to be sexually and spiritually faithful to a person whose body can easily succumb to disease, accident, and corruption—and the Bible doesn’t offer sexual prenuptial clauses! If your spouse were to have a medical accident and end up in a coma and on a feeding tube, you would still be obligated, out of reverence for God, to remain absolutely faithful to him or her. If this happend to your wife, there would be no leering glances at other women. No pornography. No inappropriate relationships with any other female. Your Christian obligation would call you to remain true to your wife until the day she died. Like some of the couples who have written to me, you might well be facing the possibility of never again experiencing sexual intercourse—but still, your Christian duty calls you to remain completely and utterly faithful. That’s the commitment you made on the day you entered Christian marriage and promised each other that, as long as both of you live, he or she will be the only, the sole, the exclusive object of your sexual desire.

You might think realizing how vulnerable our spouses made themselves on our behalf would make us beside ourselves with gratitude. You might think, from a spiritual perspective, a man would go out of his way to be a generous and grateful lover. If a wife fully understood the risks her husband was taking on her behalf, you might imagine she’d naturally respond by becoming an extravagant and enthusiastic lover.

But why is this so often not the case? Why, in fact, is it usually the exception? The answer: We don’t have spiritually “tight” marriages.

Most men, even Christian men, don’t truly make themselves this vulnerable. They opt for a conditional faithfulness, like the French count who responded to the question, “Are you faithful to your wife?” with a droll, “Frequently.” If their wives cooperate in the bedroom, then they’ll remain mentally faithful. But if their wives cool down, ignore them, get too busy, or the men themselves just get bored or restless while traveling on business or away with their buddies, then they make exceptions and allow themselves to look, to fantasize, to take sexual pleasure (either directly through an affair or indirectly through the eyes or mind) from another woman.

Women, spiritually intuitive as they are, know this. And the marriage enters a gray wasteland. The husband is neither faithful nor vulnerable, so the wife feels no gratitude. Together, they never experience the true heights of sexual fidelity and faithfulness.

It’s no coincidence that the stereotypical sin for men is to become voyeurs, while for women it’s to become exhibitionists. Both sins assault God’s perfect plan for the exclusivity of marriage. Though God calls a man to focus all his sexual attention on one woman, he decides to seek sexual satisfaction from women in general. He looks wherever he wants to look. Sometimes he even touches whomever he wants to touch. He has spent his entire life seeking satisfaction from the female gender instead of waiting and then setting his desire on one female in particular. This makes him less inclined to move toward one particular woman, and it rips apart the exclusive foundation on which an intimate marriage is based.

In the same way, a woman may be tempted to shift away from finding her sense of fulfillment in pleasing one man, and instead act and dress in such a way that she hopes might excite sexual interest from men in general. Receiving this attention—and perhaps even comparing it to the lack of attention she gets from her husband—a woman feels less concerned about her husband’s connection to her. As long as she feels appreciated, she doesn’t need any particular man’s affection. Once again, the intimate wall has been breached.

The man is not faithful, the woman is not grateful, and they never experience a spiritually healthy sex life.

Consider this analogy. If I snack all afternoon long, when I come to the dinner table, I’m not going to eat with relish or with thankfulness. I’ll nibble—if it tastes good. I’ll notice it—if it’s special. But I won’t feel hungry. I won’t truly desire that meal. And it won’t cross my mind to express gratitude that my wife has gone to the trouble to prepare it. My wife will sense this meal isn’t really important to me. Over time, she’ll learn that she wastes her efforts in trying to make it special, so the quality of the meals plunges. Eventually, she may understandably ask, “What’s the use?” and throw a cold pizza my way—and I may have become so used to snacking that, in one sense, I hardly even notice and, worse, really don’t care. I’ll just be thinking about the snacking I can do later.

How sad—but that’s the truth in many a marital bedroom.

What’s the way out? Become more absolute. Become more extreme. Keep the marital circle completely tight.

Listen: God designed marriage based on need: Adam needed a helper (Genesis 2:18). God also said that Eve’s desire would be for her husband (Genesis 3:16). The language is so explicit here that one commentator called it a spiritual desire “bordering on disease.”^a We need each other! Voyeurism and exhibitionism destroy the psychological and spiritual basis of pure desire. A diluted focus creates a diluted desire. Husbands and wives who nibble all day long stop needing each other. Not needing each other, they show no particular gratitude when sexual desires are met—because the marital bed becomes just one place among many where sexual desires get fulfilled.

Repentance is the first step on the way back to Eden. We need to remain absolutely, utterly, and completely faithful to each other. Men and women alike must focus 100 percent of their sexual desire on their spouses, recognizing that he or she is the only appropriate person on whom they should lavish their mental, physical, and spiritual affection.

Repentance is the first step on the way back to Eden.

A wife should take great pleasure in arousing her husband’s interest. She should revel in that power—God gave it to her! She should delight in the hold she has over this man. She should be generous and grateful that he would make himself so completely vulnerable on her behalf. And she should be eager to reward his exclusivity, for as long as it is in her power to do so (as he should eagerly reward hers).

Men, if we are selfish in the bedroom, focused on our pleasure over our wives’, we are taking advantage of their vulnerability. The only appropriate response to the vulnerability of marriage is to pursue becoming an excellent lover.

One man experiencing sexual relations with just one woman—for an entire life. No sex before marriage. No sex with anyone else during marriage. Not even thoughts of sex with someone else. If, for any reason, sex as a couple becomes impossible, each partner remains obligated to maintain the exclusive sexual relationship.

While this sounds extreme and absurd to a lust-riddled society, I’d put the sexual satisfaction of a couple who lived their life this way against that of someone with wandering eyes or immodest appearance any day of the week. A couple focused on each other experiences something other couples never do: a satisfaction that touches the depths of the soul. God knows how he made us; his instructions for how we should relate are based on knowledge the world denies. We are not evolutionary accidents for whom the sexual urge is merely a naturalistic response. We are intricate spiritual beings, created for God’s pleasure and designed to give each other pleasure. This design goes far beyond physical nerve endings to include the spiritual and emotional reality of being created in the image of God. Therefore, in the more transcendent part of our souls, we value fidelity, belonging, and holiness over the mechanical eruption of an orgasm. Not that we disdain orgasms. Far from it! But we recognize the appropriate place for sexual climax. Outside its proper context, “the act” loses its spiritual beauty, its emotional meaning, and its ultimate purpose.

Keep the marriage “tight.” Become extreme. Throw yourselves at each other while becoming blind, sexually, to everyone else.