Sin, Love, and Sexual Expression
Sin, Love, and Sexual Expression
I have to say that this exploration of healthy and healing sexuality that I’ve been on for the last year has made me look at sin in a whole new way. It was HornyHubby in his epic masturbation post that started this, so I’ll blame him, but I have honestly quit looking at any particular sexual act as being sinful. Context is everything.
The sin in the garden wasn’t sexual. It affected sex, but it wasn’t sexual itself. The sin in the garden had to do with thinking we could be better than what God made us to be. It had to do with thinking that we could have more than he had already given us. Sin is about greed and selfishness and lack of love, but it isn’t about sex.
Sexuality is just who we are. Sexuality is just our naked selves living in community the way God created us to live in the beginning.
Of course, when the sin of greed and selfishness enters into our sexual experiences, sex can get really ugly and really hurtful really fast because it touches the very core of who we are in a way that nothing else does. But when sexuality is truly loving and truly authentically human and truly sacrificial the way God created it to be in the beginning, I can’t help but wonder if some of the things that we’ve always talked about as being “sexual sins” are actually sins at all. Maybe these “sexual sins” are just natural human God-given desires that could have been realized in some healthy way in a perfect world where we weren’t so bent self-destruction. Maybe they can’t be experienced now because we are all broken and damaged, but even if that is true, and these things can’t be experienced healthfully in real life right now, that doesn’t mean they can’t be talked about and shared healthfully within the safe context of our bedrooms.
In The Rose’s recent post titled Sex Guessing Game, we’ve been talking about how one of the most loving things we can do for our spouse is to accept his/her sexuality for what it is. Unless our spouse is trying to hurt us (or others) through their sexuality, we often do more harm than good by telling them that their desires are sinful or ungodly. Because in saying things like that, we are rejecting their most private and most vulnerable sense of self-expression. We are calling into question their very identity as a sexual creature. And when we do that, it can lead to a sort of self-doubt or even self-loathing that is anything but healthy and healing.
In a lot of ways, I think the sexual side of our marriages could be so much healthier if we could banish this idea of sexual sin from our minds within the context of our bedrooms. Don’t get me wrong, Sin is sin and should be taken very seriously. But I don’t think sexuality and it’s various expressions are the sin. Greed, Hatred, Selfishness, these are the sins. And our sexuality is sinful when it draws its strength from these life-stealing attitudes. But when our desire is full of love and full of creative self-expression and full of self-sacrifice, our sexuality is a beautiful thing. And I think that we might be surprised at the new directions our sexuality can take us when we are willing to do the work of separating our sexual desires from our amazing capacity for selfishness and fear.
(Having said all that, though, I do want to clarify that there is a difference between not calling your spouse a sinner and actually following through, hook, line, and sinker, with every aspect of their fantasies. Sometimes, quite apart from the “sin” issue, our spouse’s fantasies just don’t line up with our fantasies. And this is okay. We can still accept our spouse and let him/her express herself by talking about the fantasies, and then thoughtfully consider to what extent we are personally able or not able to follow through on that fantasy. Just as I don’t have to actually go out mountain climbing to support my husband in his sport, so too I don’t have to actually participate in every aspect of my husband’s fantasy to show that I accept that fantasy as being a real and viable part of who he is. Does it mean the world to him if I’d ask him to take me to the climbing wall one weekend? Sure! And so it also means the world to him when I periodically find ways to incorporate aspects of his fantasy into our sex lives. But loving him does not necessitate that I change who I am or go so far out of my comfort zone as to make myself miserable. Just as I need to accept him, he needs to accept that sometimes I can’t go the places he wants me to go. And that is okay. That is part of the give and take of relationship.)
Our sacrificial Christian marriages, if you will, are the one little piece of the garden that we were able to bring with us when we left. Our Christian marriages are our safe place. Our place to go naked. Our place to know and be known. They are our place to be loved and accepted without question and without fear. They are our place to play. Our place to be free.
When we are living in a truly loving and mutually sacrificial marriage, I don’t think we need to worry about that list of sexual sins because, as it says in Romans 13…
“These—and other such commandments—are summed up in this one commandment: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to others, so love fulfills the requirements of God’s law.” (NLT)
So love, and play, and enjoy your sexuality in freedom! God bless!
So it’s all my fault huh? LOL!
I loved this post. I feel that I have benefited from your study of sexuality over the past year. I’ve enjoyed reading your posts like this as you have learned some new truth. Please keep them coming!
I like this concept you’ve touched on about looking at sin differently. I’ve been on a similar journey myself. But for clarification, let me see if I get what you are saying. You are saying that basically in the context of marriage any expression of sexuality by either partner should be valued as a part of who they are as a sexual person, as long as it isn’t harmful to either spouse or someone else. And as long as the act is done in love, it isn’t sin. It’s only sin when it’s done from greed, selfishness, etc. So any fantasy, desire, act, etc (no matter how “weird” it may be) that wants to be tried should be viewed as an expression of your spouse and you should accept it as part of who they are instead of judging them. Let me know if I’ve summed up your thought correctly.
Now to the questions..haha….These are just some things I’ve thought of as I read this.
1. Due to the nature of sexuality, both partners must participate. So if the husband has a fantasy that his wife doesn’t like or just simply doesn’t get anything out of, how would she accept his expression of it if he can’t express it because she doesn’t want to do it?
2. Let’s say the husband wants to do something the wife finds repulsive or she doesn’t see the practical purpose behind it. How would she accept him and his fantasy when she is disgusted by it? Or she doesn’t see the point of it. (For instance, let’s say he wanted to wear her underwear and have her rub him until he cums and then have her put them on still wet with his cum.) She might look at him like, “Um…ookkaayy…and what’s the point of that?” Plus she may be turned off by wearing wet underwear. But if that’s his fantasy, how can she accept that and him?
The concern is obviously the husband (in this case, but sometimes it’s the wife) shares a particular fantasy with his wife in the hopes of sharing that part of himself. She reacts negatively, which hurts him and makes him retreat into his cave and hide a part of himself from her. But that part is still there so he has to constantly repress it. Over time that can build resentment toward the wife for not engaging in that fantasy. And that might cause him to fixate on that fantasy since it’s the one thing he “can’t” have so it becomes an obsession/addiction for him which further pushes the wife away from it which further makes him focus on it, etc. But she is repulsed by it and/or she doesn’t see the point. “What is the benefit in me wearing panties with his cum on them?” she asks. “Plus they would be wet and uncomfortable…gross!” But he is turned on by that. So how would she accept something like this as part of him without being repulsed by it? (And this can go for anything: BDSM, dirty talk, public sexual adventures, role play, blow jobs, etc)
3. I liked the analogy of the mountain climbing. And I got to thinking, isn’t that what marriage is? Doing things the other enjoys because you love them. I do things my wife enjoys, even if I don’t enjoy them, because I love her. And she does the same with me. And what I’ve experienced personally is that I have come to enjoy some of her interests in spite of having no interest previously. Now I don’t enjoy them so much that I would go do them by myself, but I enjoy doing them WITH HER. So, for instance, you would never find me in a scrapbook/craft kind of store. But if my wife wants to go to one I will go with her and I have enjoyed being with her and I even enjoy helping her pick out paper or supplies or whatever she’s looking for that day. So to apply this to a sexual fantasy/desire, couldn’t we do it out of love for our spouse even if we don’t love the action? And through that we could even come to enjoy the act ourselves when we do it with our spouse? We may never want to do it alone, but we actually enjoy it when we do it with our spouse.
4. What advice would you have to the other spouse who feels that they are just “going along with it.” And because the spouse doesn’t fully embrace the fantasy like they do, they feel it is “fake?” So using the above example, the wife may not like that fantasy, but she goes along with it for his sake, but he picks up on the fact that she is hesitant to put on the panties after he has cum in them and she never gets aroused by it in any way so he feels she is just going through the motions?
5. You said it doesn’t mean you go so far out of your comfort zone that it makes you miserable, but wouldn’t it require that you DO go out of your comfort zone some? And wouldn’t there be some discomfort that you would need to push through for the sake of engaging in the act? What suggestions would you have to the person who needs to step out of their comfort zone for their spouse’s fantasy/desire?
6. One concern I would have is if a couple uses this concept to justify something that WOULD be sinful. Like what if they both said they wanted to watch porn together while they have sex. And since they both want to do it, and it’s done in love, they say it’s okay. Or they want to invite another couple into their bedroom not to swap, but to watch each other have sex. And since they aren’t swapping, and they both want to do it, they justify it by saying it’s done in love and it’s just fun between consenting adults. And again since no swapping is going on, each couple is still staying faithful to their marriage. It would just be like “live porn” instead of watching it on a screen. The enemy can (and does!) twist anything. And it sometimes seems that the more powerful a truth is and the more freedom it brings, the more likely it is the enemy will twist it somehow with someone. So this could very easily happen. Because your post has a lot of powerful truth that can really bring freedom.
So if we adopt the idea that there is no sexual sin within marriage, what guidelines would you suggest to guard against something like that?
Let me know what you think about all this. I look forward to the discussion this post will bring.
HH-so, yes, I think you are paraphrasing what I am saying accurately. As for your questions, really, it seems like 1-5 are all about trying to figure out how to get the hesitant spouse to accept and engage. And this is the obvious problem and is honestly why I write things like this in the first place. I have a theory that for those of us (usually Christian women) who have been trained by our culture and our faith communities to look on all sexuality and frivolity as suspect, we sometimes need permission to find the goodness and wholesomeness in the sexual and the playful. We have a whole lifetime behind us telling us that play is for children and for men and that imagination is the realm of storybooks and Disney movies. We have years of youth group lessons teaching us that sexuality is the key to a downward spiral that will destroy our lives and our self worth. And those attitudes that took so long to form in us don’t just disappear over night. As Christian women, we have been trained to believe that fun and sex are not allowed, and we need a new paradigm for looking at sex and play to help us see their inherent worth and goodness in our own lives.
I know for me, part if my paradigm shift happened when I realized that accepting my husband’s fantasies was a way I could love him more. Before, I thought that the best way I could love him was to help him overcome his strange desires. My goal was always to love him. I just didn’t understand that I could love by opening up to new ideas and relaxing into the play of the moment.
So I wrote this post bc I think one of the first steps for all of us is to find some freedom from this suffocating idea of sexual sin that we’ve grown up with.
And after that, it’s a journey, and a compromise just like anything else in marriage. Like my rock climbing or your scrapbooking thing. Once the spouse stops viewing the “rock climbing” and “scrapbooking” as a sin, it Opens the door to a whole host of possibilities. You still maybe wouldn’t choose to do it yourself, but you might find you can enjoy doing some small aspect of it with your spouse. Likewise, I might not specifically see the point in wearing cum drenched panties, but I might be able to enjoy a few minutes of it when I see how much joy it brings my husband. Or, I might find I get a nasty rash from cum drenched panties (I don’t even know if that’s possible, but just for the sake of the conversation….) so maybe I don’t wear them at all, but instead tell my husband fictional stories about wearing them. In so doing I accept his fantasy rather than condemning if, but I don’t actually engage in the fantasy myself. It’s a compromise.
And every couples compromises will be different and many couples compromises will evolve over time. I know for us, things changed over time. At one point it was a really big deal for both of us that I could just listen to him describe his fantasy while we were having sex and not feel upset about it afterwards. Now, though, I am much more engaged and enjoy contributing my own ideas to the fantasy.
Not sure if that gave you the specific examples you were looking for or not….but I guess my bottom line is that once you stop thinking of your spouses desires as sinful or disturbing, it opens the door for you to negotiate a compromise just like you would in any other aspect if your marriage. The more adventurous spouse still might not end up getting all of his (or her) fantasies fulfilled, but hopefully he at least won’t feel like damaged goods just for voicing them.
Number six….I’ll work on answering that later….this comment is long enough already…
Eva, I think you are so profoundly spot on in all you said here! So helpful and specific enough! I was so blessed with you reply here. Thank you!! God bless you my friend. LH
HH, ok, on to #6…. I didn’t forget.
Ultimately, it all comes back down to love and commitment. It comes down to the fact that in marriage we are called to throw our lot with that other person. We are committing that their outcomes will be our outcomes. That our pain will be their pain. We are committing to be “one flesh,” or in other words, one kinship, one family. We made this commitment because physical intimacy is an incredible act of vulnerability, especially for a woman, and because sex makes babies, and because babies are a dangerous business that require a stable and nurturing family system in order that their young vulnerability is not compromised.
The bible is all about protecting the vulnerable. The bible is about the weak becoming strong.
My problem with these ideas about partial swinging or whatever you want to call it, is actually not the traditional idea that it goes outside the one man/one woman archetype. My problem is that in these sorts of situations there is no commitment, no long standing bond. There is nothing holding these couples together to protect the vulnerable. They are not a family, a kinship. They are not one flesh. They are a fling. Like college hook-up culture. They are selfishly motivated and lacking in the sacrificial love that Jesus taught.
Somewhere, on the fringes of American culture there are some people, Christian and non Christian, who are experimenting with ideas of group marriage. They call themselves tribes. They call themselves poly-cues. They’ve written some books. They host an annual conference. These people are interested in the idea of expanding their sexual sphere beyond the bounds of a one man one woman marriage. But they also believe that sex without marriage/commitment/sacrificial love is fruitless and dangerous. And so they are prepared to commit to more than one person, to throw their lot in together. To be united as a family, and as one flesh.
I don’t know if these marriage tribes will work out in the long run or not. They seem complicated and draining to me. But There are certainly plenty of examples of other cultures–and among them, biblical cultures, that have embraced some form of institutionalized polyamory, and sometimes it has been fruitful and protected the vulnerable and sometimes it has done the opposite. So, I will be interested to watch what the future holds for them. If, someday, our children’s children have figured out that these group marriages can work, I might be willing to advocate them as a faithful way to satisfy this universal human craving for “more than one.”
But in the meantime, for me, these ideas about porn or swinging, or live viewing or whatever all come back to this idea that there is seldom deep relationship/connection/security in these relationships. There is no trust. No “catch me if I fall” mentality. There is no relationship to ground the man who is vulnerable to addiction. There is no protection for the woman whose husband coerces her into the swinging. There is no thought of the life lived by the woman in the video. There is no protection for the children from public scorn when their parents escapes suddenly become public knowledge.
And so, when you ask how to keep away from the slippery slope, just like in everything else, the answer comes down to love. And it comes down to loving others as we love ourselves. It comes down to saying….this would be stupid. It could mess up our marriage, our family, our life. Or, in the case of porn, it it perpetuating a system in which women are objectified and dehumanized.
Most of the time, these instances you mention are motivated by selfishness. And that is not love. Like everything else in our lives we must test our own spirits. We must know what motivates us. And here’s the thing. Legalism has seldom motivated anyone to anything good. But love? Love is the greatest motivator in the universe. So let love, true sacrificial love, for all parties involved motivate your choices, and I suspect you will not fail in your quest of a good and faithful life.
I think I’ve told you before, but I’ll tell you again: I like the way you think. 🙂 And I like the way you explain things. I especially like the point that there is no commitment in watching porn, being in the same room as someone else, swapping, etc. And that is very true. And I think that is a good way to take a step back and see the bigger picture.
Eva, I want to say a lot more about this but it’s Christmas and I’m pre-occupied… (and I haven’t had a chance to read HH’s response). But I did want to say something about love from Romans 13 that has been brewing in my head while I’ve been reading your posts for some time now.
Yes, love is the fulfilment of the law, but for Paul – as Romans 13 makes clear – to say that love is the fulfillment of the law, doesn’t mean, that if we love, then we’re at liberty to break any of the other commandments that we want. What Paul is saying is, If we truly love, we will be keeping these commandments, because to steal, to murder, to commit adultery, etc, etc… in the last analysis can never be justified on the basis of quote ‘love’ unquote. They are all failures to love. The ultimate Sin of Adam and Eve (and all of us) is to not trust God’s word, his boundaries, his way, his law, his Word… these all show us the way to truly love.
So some thoughts on love… What is love, (if I dare to try to define it a bit based on what the law of God and God’s word and Christ seem to be saying)? Love is treating the other person, the other community… or the other part of God’s creation and God himself with the respect owed to something that is other than myself – or than ourselves. Failure to love always results in a movement of grasping and distorting by drawing something into my framework, so that I’m making this object too much like me, instead of respecting it for what it is.
Or conversely, the other way to fail to love is to push it away, and not allow a proper relationship to develop between me and it.
So much of our Western world today does those 2 things at the same time. With some things we grasp them to ourselves, and try to squash them into what we want and need them to be. And then other things, we say ‘That’s not a concern of mine, just let it go – I’m not even going to think about it.’
But true love establishes a relationship with the beloved. Whether the beloved is another person, another community, or another part of the planet on which God has put us. Love respects it for what it is, and love develops the appropriate relationship with it.
In my marriage I had to stop trying to get her to fulfil some desire/fantasy of mine (and bending the word of God in the process), and learn to respect and value her for who she is. I discovered that this was actually more sexually fulfilling for me, more transcendent – just loving her for who she is. Getting her to be my fantasy was not fulfilling. I believe our sexual desires can be insanely disordered. We begin to hunger for what is transgressive, forbidden, out of the ordinary – pushing the boundaries further and further – women degrading themselves for male amusement etc, etc, rather than the wonderful joy of entering into a deep metaphysical union with our spouses through simply communicating to one another through words and sexual actions that ‘What I enjoy most about sex with you is just you – exactly the way you are, just doing whatever comes naturally, because what I care about sexually is you.’
Stag- so I think your thoughts on your wife and the journey you have been on with her are absolutely brilliant. The impetus to change is always personal and should never be coerced of another. My husband never begged or pleaded with me to change my views on the subject of his fantasy life. In fact, he tried to change his fantasy life himself, but all to no avail. When my attitude on the subject changed, that was a result of a work God did in my heart. It was a matter of me personally deciding that this was something that I needed to change. It was never the other way around.
I fear that you feel I am belittling the amazing journey you have been on. But that is not at all the case. In many ways, you and I have been on the same journey. Your journey was to accept her for who she was. My journey was to accept my husband for who he was. In both of our cases, we both saw that we could love our spouses more by making a change in ourselves. And so we both did, and so despite the vast differences in what we were accepting, I think we both loved as we have been called to love, and have, in so doing, fulfilled the law of Christ.
You are also worried about my attitude toward the law. And this is fair. But the truth is, the law contains within it rules that are opposed to one another and can sometimes create situations that are the opposite of goodness when it is applied carte blanche without consideration of love. The law says do not murder, but it also says to stone a woman who has been caught in adultery. The law says to do no work on the sabbath, but Jesus healed the sick anyway on that day and let his disciples pick grain to feed themselves. The law was highly cultural with strange rules about cooking and menstrual cycles and women marrying men who raped them that make no sense to our 21st century western sensibilities.
The truth is, there are times when the law of love and the law of Moses overlap and there are times when they don’t. And when they overlap, decisions of faithfulness are easy and sensible. But when they don’t overlap, and we choose to obey the law of Moses over the law of love, we fall into the ugly trap of heartless legalism that was the lot of the Pharisees. On the other hand, when they don’t overlap and we choose the law of love, we cannot go wrong. Because in choosing love, we choose what Jesus chose. He chose to love us as we were, and in so doing he made us better than we ever could have been. And when we choose to love our spouses through our sexuality, be it loving the way you loved your wife or the way I loved my husband, we are modeling Christ’s love for them in a way more intimate than anyone else can. And they are better for having experienced that love, and we are better for having given that love.
I also want to say I love what you had to say about love establishing a right relationship and the two ways that love fails in pushing away and distorting. I am getting tired now, but I think I agree with that completely. I honestly can’t decide if there is something we actually disagree about or not. Possibly we disagree about something regarding the nature and application of the Old Testament law….but I am not sure of that.
At any rate…I’m starting to get so tired, I’m afraid I might not be making sense anymore. So I’ll stop now.
Dear Brothers,
It seems that in every MH post it takes like 3 min to get your wife to cum. i have not made my wife cum yet and i really want to know whats going on. I always blow my load to fast. 🙁
Please help,
All4HIM
There are a couple of things my Sweetie and I have tried over the years that work pretty well. One is wearing a condom at least at the start of sex and as most wives will tell you don’t rush to raise the mizzen and set sail. My wife and I don’t get a lot of time together these days. When we do get together there is a lot of heavy petting and naked wrestling that goes on for quite awhile before getting down to business. Just having her naked skin to press against your naked skin will go a long way to letter her relax and prepare to receive boarders.
Another way that works well for me is to do what we call “Interval Training”, This works really well for me and always leads to prolonged “boarding parties”. We discovered it one Friday night while the kids were all out and we had the house to ourselves. You set an agreed upon limit of 3 to 5 minutes for each sexual position and you alternate who get to choose which position. I don’t know why it works, but by having to check the clock every few minutes, I think it distracts you just enough to keep you from cumming too soon. The interval between positions and the occasional bathroom break on the part of the wife seems to enable to keep me going and going. The first time we did this we went through at least 12 positions in about an hour and a half. It was very empowering, watching my wife enjoy taking me in over and over and made me feel like a real stud. It took some serious work to cum after that duration, but with my Sweetie urging me on it was a blast for both of us. That said this is the real world and it doesn’t always go that way, but we still do this on a frequent basis. About half the time I catch her trying to cheat on time, but if I stick to the time limit it is always worth the wait.
Patience and enjoy yourselves.
Thanks marriedman0217! I was able to last for about a half an hour with that technique. And boy was my wife having a blast. She keeps begging me for sex! May God bless your marriage!!
Outstanding! Very glad to be able to help.
Merry Christmas ALL4HIM and everyone at MH! Regarding your post, believe us, it does not take only 3 minutes for us to climax, lol! Not laughing at you, laughing with you. It all depends on the situation, mood, setting, stress and so much more.
Sometimes my husband K seems to last forever, other times, its a quick roll in the hay-Wam, Bam, thank you M’am.” There are times a girl just wants a quick hard fuck; other times, like fine wine, we want a slow, gentle sensuous sharing of our souls as we make love together.
It all depends. There is no “proper” time limit to climax.
When he eats me out, K has to tongue and finger me just right, or else I will not climax. Even when not cumming, his warm mouth and tongue feels magical between my legs, even though he may not be bringing me to orgasm. I don’t have to cum every time to enjoy his touch. Its the intimate marital heat we are generating together that counts.
And when I go down on K, after years of practice, I can suck him off usually very quickly, or “prolong the agony” as he puts it and edge him for quite a while, lol. Don’t put undo pressure on yourselves. Enjoy the intimacy and go with the flow, you both will know what to do. Openly communicate with your bodies, souls and your words.
I hope this helps you guys. make this a Christmas to remember!
Lady Garden (Kay & K)
Thank you so much lady garden. That was very helpful and reassuring.
May God Bless you and your husband,
ALL4HIM