How Much Fantasy Dare We Share with our Partner?

How honest, open, and free do you feel like you can be with your partner about what arouses you the most? 

Together, my wife and I strive for greater truthfulness like this.  We trust the words of Jesus when He said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” and believe they apply not only to our spiritual passions, but even to our carnal passions.

The simple truth we recognize is that we as humans don’t so much choose what arouses us.  It is more like what arouses us chooses us as people, through curious and defining moments along the way of our life narrative.

We are aware of how personal experiences in our growing-up years shape our erotic appetite and desire as adults.  For example, if you were a babysitter discovering a cache of smutty magazines, you might grow into a woman who enjoys exposing and even touching breasts.  If you were a teen lad who had a widowed teacher suggestively flirt with you, you might prefer mature women. You might become curious about bodies of wholesome and respectable mature women, and how they touch themselves in private, the moans and whimpers of their arousal, and what makes them orgasm.

Our different pathways in life leave different imprints on our desire and arousal.  That is not a matter of shame.  Rather, it is something best ventilated by candid sharing and exploring, as well as experimenting in ways that allow us to share erotic new discoveries and affirmation.

My wife was the babysitter whose eyes were opened by dirty pictures hidden in a drawer, and who adored seeing and masturbating to them after the children she cared for were asleep.  I find this cute and endearing on her part.

I was the middle school student whose widowed Spanish teacher kept me after school to “help her move and organize some things”.  She climbed a ladder that she asked me to hold; she wanted me to see her womanly parts in a garter belt with no panties, teasing me in her subtle, clever way.  Afterward she looked defiantly deep into my eyes seeking telltale traces of how much she had aroused me.  The answer was . . . very much.

We all have such stories which, when shared with each other, explain who we are.  They can also explain the peculiarities of our fantasies in our lives as sexual beings.  Our fantasies do not appear from nowhere.  They have an origin.

Aside from the sexual imprinting of our individual selves, we have also been shaped as a species across millennia in ways hard to identify; ways we are only dimly aware of.  Psychologist Carl Jung describes our “collective unconscious” as a species.  It powerfully drives our substratum of instincts and impulses—he calls them archetypes—originating deep within us across generations.

Vacations often stimulate new wrinkles in our sexuality, and a recent one opened our eyes. 

My wife and I were in Southern Spain’s last Moorish strongholds of Andalucia when we veered into something completely different.  We visited Cueva de la Pileta outside of Ronda, way up a mountainside, away from the maddening crowds.  If you’ve heard of the French caves with captivating wall paintings, this was very much like those descriptions.

Lively sketch paintings of wild animals—bulls and goats, fish and turtles—enliven the walls.  The paintings in black go back 20,000 years, those in red 25,000 years, and finally those in yellow from cave occupants 40,000 years ago.  The nature of their lives in deep antiquity fascinated us.  Their line drawings illustrating the walls stimulated our curiosity about their personal and intimate lives as prehistoric inhabitants.

After visiting the cave, we researched these ancient cave dwellers.  Humankind as a species has existed for roughly 250,000 years.  But it has been only 10,000 years that humans have owned and cultivated land, settled into nuclear families, and gathered into towns and states.  Before that, all humankind existed as hunters and gatherers subsisting off the land.  Picture the Native American on the plains, or the tribes of Africa surviving together on the savannahs.

We can’t imagine how radically different their lives were as hunters and gatherers from our owning property, accumulating and protecting possessions—including one’s wife—and gathering in settlements.  Imagine holding all things in common as a small wandering troop.  It wasn’t so much that they were more altruistic or sharing by nature.  Holding all things in common—food, shelter, clothing, children, and clean water—was the only way they survived.  And that complete sharing of all resources and personnel was an ethic stringently enforced, not some kumbaya form of sentimentality.

The sharing of everything was so extensive, some anthropological writers insist that even the wives were shared.  What!?  When hunter-and-gatherer women were ovulating, they were available to all men of their pack.  Is this why women are much louder during sex than men, to alert men of their availability?  Is this how competition among men to service the women and even competition among them for male seed resulted in the strongest boy and girl children?  Is this why alpha women are capable of multiple orgasms in ways we men are incapable of?  Is this why a disproportionately large number of men identify as cuckolds who prefer seeing larger and more dominant men enjoying their wives and giving their wives what they cannot?

Recognizing how ancient ancestors lived and loved can help us understand our own nature today.  My point is that deep underlying forces in our desires as men and women—both individually and as a species—have shaped the erotic fantasies we secretly harbor in ways we have not begun to grasp.  Rather than retreating from that in shame, what if we could be that honest with each other?

Such honesty can help create variety and spice in the marriage covenant, allowing us to keep each other interested over a lifetime and nurture mutual faithfulness.  All that takes is deep love and powerful trust, granting permission to be who we truly are without judgment, and respecting our different paths.

When Jesus was crucified upon the cross, it was the most deeply shameful manner of death possible.  More than humiliating, it rendered its victims into the depths of non-being.  Jesus willingly submitted Himself to such shame to absorb our shame, freeing us from that darkness.  In many ways, true sexual intimacy for Christian couples is walking together away from the darkness of guilty shame toward this light of honesty and openness.  Yes, we can know and share the truth, and those hidden truths can make us free (John 8:32).