marriage advice

Opening Up

In nineteen years of marriage, my wife and I have experienced incredible highs and profound lows.  Through it all, we continue to work to be the strongest husband and wife and parents we can be.

In recent years, we have focused on improving our sexual communication with each other.  My wife struggled for many years, dining from a different sexual menu than the one that was proven to be efficient and productive.  Gradually, she has opened up and is becoming more comfortable in her skin.

Where once she refused to masturbate (alone or with me), now we mutually masturbate for each other regularly, and have begun to get more comfortable sharing sex with each other when we are apart through technology.

Sexual communication is not easy – but we are working together to respond to each other’s interests and needs. What I once saw as “encouraging,” she saw as “pressuring”.  As I’ve worked to reduce the amount of pressure I applied, she has worked to initiate and respond to overtures from me.  As our trust in each other’s willingness to respect the other has increased, so has our sexual energy.  Now, she has begun welcoming and seeing my “encouragement” as just that – encouragement (she also even took me up on a dare to masturbate in the car while I was driving home from a long trip!).

This awakening is an amazing opportunity for us to reconnect.  The fewer sexual walls that exist between us make it easier to remove any other barriers that exist throughout our relationship.  What was once frustration for each of us in thinking about sex is now a growing excitement to see where tomorrow takes us.

And who would have thought that all those people who say it starts with open communication were right…?  🙂

 

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17 replies
  1. Eva says:

    Ahhh! This is such a wonderful testimony! I’m really glad you shared! You used words like communication, trust, respect. Those aren’t words you typically see on products and publications that are trying to market great sex….but, all us boring old married people are learning they are the real secrets. Haha…those and a nice big jar of coconut oil. 🙂 I’m so glad to hear you are breaking down walls and building excitement. What a great place to be!

  2. Todd Slocumb says:

    It is so amazing how opening up the line of sexual communications between a couple will open up other lines of communications. There is a book that I highly recommend that is published by Focus on the Family called “The Way to Love Your Wife: Creating Greater Love and Passion in the Bedroom”. It is written for the husband to read but is also very good to read with your wife. If any couple is struggling with communicating about sex, then I would suggest the husband take the lead by reading this book.

  3. Stag-on-a-hill says:

    Thanks Married Couple, this is so encouraging. My wife and I also have had such different values when it comes to sex and sexual expression. She is more than happy with sex once or twice a week in the privacy of our bedroom. She loves to sleep right up against me, coming completely over to my side of the bed. And she likes to sleep with my arms around her. She loves to just feel close. She is such a sweetheart! I, on the other hand, love exploration and pushing the boundaries in all aspects of life – and I don’t seem to have any shame when it comes to sex or nudity. I love fashion, I love G-strings, I’d love her going commando, I love outdoor sex, I love masturbating… She isn’t into any of this… And I love nudity, going to nude beaches – you name it – which I started doing as a young person. I don’t go to nude beaches now ‘cos I realise it would be so misunderstood and such a stumbling block by so many Christians – but I have no problem with it, and I have a different view of modesty. And I’m constantly looking for ways that she and I can spend extended time naked together in private or semi private, but she’s just not into it. I guess she is quite fearful and maybe just not tuned in that way. And in many ways we are on opposite ends of the spectrum. This website is helping us begin to communicate… but it is painful and threatening for her and she tends to quickly shut down and get angry and defensive. Talking isn’t necessarily the best strategy! She understands my frustration over the years and often says, ‘You should have married someone else.’ I have been frustrated but I believe in her. I think she’s worth any frustration I may have felt. And anyway, she gets frustrated with me too – for being so into sex!

    One thing I have learnt is to not assume she isn’t sexy. I have learnt she suffers from shame and fear. But she must have married me for a reason, perhaps a secret desire to be free. Or maybe she’s just sexy in a different way… like wanting to sleep every night with the full length of our bodies touching. But I’ve learnt that it’s just so important that I don’t collapse into thinking she isn’t sexy. It’s better if I see through the fact that she wears very plain, shapeless clothes, etc, etc… all the shame-based things she does… the way she finds it so hard to enter into any sexual play or flirting… or show her body… I need to keep seeing beyond all that to a deeper core. She is mega sexy and I need to see her that way so that she can begin to glimpse the truth about herself and be healed. So the whole way I speak to her needs to affirm her as a sexual woman. And I need to keep praying! And yeah, I love her heaps anyway.

    • CMLove says:

      Praying for you and your wife, Stag. I was in the same boat as your wife for a while. Prayer and my husband’s patience and unconditional love is what helped my freedom begin to take hold! God will bless your perseverance. Keep praying! There’s power in prayer and God loves to hear your heart! He loves your wife so much too and desires her freedom also! God’s got your back, brother! Stay strong!

    • Stag-on-a-hill says:

      Thanks CMLove. It’d be great if you could actually meet her somehow and share stories… that’s the kind of thing that would really help her. Oh well, MH is next best thing… if she’ll read it!

    • Married Couple says:

      Best of luck. Learning not to resent her different needs was an important step for me. What you see as “needs”, she sees as “desires” – simply because the two of you don’t share the same perspective on what “needs” are.

      Over time and through a true commitment to communicating – the two of you can work to redefine your sense of “needs” while she works to reconsider her view of her own “desires”.

      The goal isn’t for the two of you to have the same “needs”, but rather to have more agreement among your shared “desires”.

      Hope that helps!

    • Eva says:

      Stag- Ah, now I see why you were so interested in the conversation about shame!

      You know what I’ve been thinking about lately? I’ve been thinking about how God created us for pleasure. And I keep thinking I should write a post about it, but I’ve been too busy to go back and refind the references that I’d want to cite to make it a actually sound intelligent. 🙂 but I’ve done some reading about the biology of our sexuality. And there are all these little clues that God actually created us with the idea that we would be highly sexual creatures. You know, when God gives an elephant a long trunk,,he expects the elephant to use it. And when he gives the giraffe a long neck, he expects her to use it. Well, God gave human males really large penises relative to the size of their bodies. And he gave men testicles that hang on the outside of the body, which acts as a cooling mechanism and allows human males to have sex more frequently than they would if that part of the genitalia was internal as it is in some other animals. And human females also have special little sexual gifts as well. The human female is available for sex throughout her cycle, which from what I understand is a relatively rare characteristic among the animal kingdom. And the females external sexual organs, her breasts, are visible to the male throughout her cycle as well. Many other female creatures have sexual swellings as well, but they are only swollen when the female is available for copulation. Well, and then there’s the female orgasm. God created females with the capacity to have multiple orgasms in a row, with no obvious sexual benefit other than pleasure (though, the idea that the female orgasm aids in pain and hormone management and in birthing does seem to be gaining some popularity…which I feel like is a whole other awesome idea to explore especially in relation to the pain in childbirth curse when Adam and Eve left the garden).

      But anyway, I say all that to say that it just rips my heart out to see how ashamed we all are of who God created us to be. And we all do it….in different ways, but we all do it. I mean, I feel like I’ve broken through a lot of my sexual shame over the last few years, but awhile back there were a couple conversations on here about urination. One husband wrote how much it turned him on when his wife wet her pants. Another husband talked about how he and his wife find it is a really important aspect of their intimacy that they feel free to use the restroom when the other is present. And it’s not that those things just don’t turn me on, those stories downright kick my shame meter into hyperdrive. If im honest, my gut reaction is pretty repulsed. But if I think about it, I realize my shame about pee is the same thing as this shame about sexuality. God didn’t create us to feel that shame either! When have you ever seen your dog or your cat be embarrassed to pee in front of you? No! You take your dog to the park so he can pee on every bush he sees in front of dozens of people! And dozens of other dogs!

      It’s not that there’s actually something wrong with our sexuality or our bodily fluids. It’s that we are ashamed of who we are and who God created us to be. God created us to be free to enjoy our sexuality. He created us for pleasure. I don’t think God wants this shame for us. I think he wants freedom for us. And when we believe in the love of God that sent Christ to die on the cross, then we can start to believe that we are lovable, we can start to believe that our very existence isn’t shameful. We can start to believe that we literally don’t have to do or be or achieve anything on our own to have worth, but that our worth comes from the fact that we are children of God, created in his image, created exactly the way he wanted us to be.

      Anyway, my heart breaks for you and your wife. My heart breaks for all of us.

  4. Stag-on-a-hill says:

    Thanks Married Couple and Eva, I’d like to hear more re ‘needs’ versus ‘desires,’ thanks Eva for what you just said. Man, that is so great – ‘We were created for pleasure, not shame.’ As always, I’d love to hear more and more! My woman is such a sweetheart she has agreed to read a MH post each day! I so want her to feel sexy and juicy, not ashamed. Wow! how cool if she thought she was ‘made for pleasure.’ I definitely have always felt that way. Please, please write more – this strikes to the core of the issue. Thanks MH

  5. Hot Milk says:

    Eva
    Could start your own thread on here, love your words of wisdom , and these are just a few thoughts of yours! Wow! Really think God is going to use your words to unlock and help others here!

    Stag on a hill
    Love that name, says so much, I really feel your heart and your longing and love for your beautiful wife, I pray for her that she would be released from all shame , that God would begin to unearth new territory for her, I pray that her hormones will become intense around the time of her ovulation, that she would begin to open like a flower in every healthy sexual way, but most of all I pray against fear and deception in Jesus name!
    May Gods blessings abundantly blow you away !!

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