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Sexuality and Marital Intimacy

Posted by James Browning on November 14, 2013

A good marriage is best friends with passion. Without the passion, you just have a friendship. For some, being companions is sufficient. But for most, it is not. One of the major casualties of the harried pace of modern marriage is the loss of sexual intimacy. It is too steep a price to pay. While communication is the most frequently mentioned issue in troubled marriages… a diminished sexual relationship at the center of most troubled marriages. Men and women are different. While these differences get debated in some circles, when it comes to sex, they are real and very clear. Unfortunately many couples fail to reflect on these differences and integrate them into an understanding of how to be successful partners. Start with arousal patterns. Men are quick to be aroused and relatively quick to achieve orgasm. The “spike” rises sharply and drops off just as sharply. Men are especially aroused visually; brain research documents this. So looking at other women, at magazines, videos, and online pornography play a much bigger role in the sexual life of men. Women are aroused more slowly and after achieving orgasm, tend to remain at a high plateau of arousal before dropping off. These are very different physiological patterns. No wonder it is a challenge for couples to really experience mutual satisfaction. These differences must not be ignored; instead they must be incorporated into the lovemaking process. It is also important to understand the psychological implications of the different genital anatomies. For men, sexual intercourse is an external act. This has evolutionary implications about the need for prehistoric men to “seed” many partners in order to insure survival of the species. It is part of what allows men to more easily separate sex from love. But, for a woman, to have intercourse means allowing a man to enter her body. That is a deeply personal act and men need to appreciate this. It is why women complain about the need for emotional intimacy before they can be sexually active. Combine this with the difference in arousal patterns and it becomes much easier to understand why it is so important for women to experience meaningful foreplay.

“Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.” –  Simone Signoret

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It’s a Mad World

There’s the waitress who refuses to look in your direction. The oaf who drifts across the highway without using his blinker. And the cheerful, recorded voice that draws you deeper and deeper into voice-mail hell. The most minor annoyance can send us into a fury. But have you ever stopped to think why we get angry? What is anger, anyway? “Anger is a natural emotion,” says Charles D. Spielberger, PhD, a research professor of psychology at the University of South Florida who has studied anger for 25 years. “There is nothing abnormal about it.” Anger might be normal, but it does affect you physically. When you get enraged during a traffic jam or at your kid’s soccer game, your hormone levels increase, your breathing quickens, your pulse and blood pressure soar, you start to sweat, and your pupils dilate. Basically, your body is gearing up for action. This is the “fight” part of the “fight or flight” response. Spielberger says anger has an evolutionary advantage: “Fear and rage are common to animals, too, because it helps them to fight and survive.” The problem is that, nowadays, anger isn’t always so useful. Most of us don’t run into man-eating tigers standing in line at the DMV. The physical effects of anger on your body can be lasting. Some studies have shown a connection between anger and high blood pressure, depression, and heart disease. One study found that people highly prone to anger are three times as likely to have a heart attack or fatal coronary heart disease as less angry people. So what’s the solution? Should you cork up your anger or regularly blow your stack? Experts say neither. Whether you hold it in or explode in a rage, frequent feelings of intense anger may pose the same health risks. The key is to make your anger constructive. Spielberger says that the first step is self-awareness. Don’t allow yourself to fly into a rage. Instead, be conscious of your anger. Stay in control. It’s the only way to figure out exactly what is making you angry. Once you can identify the real problem, you can try to solve it rationally instead of getting pointlessly furious. If you’re angry with someone, talk about it in an assertive, but never aggressive, way. If a certain situation sparks your anger, learn how to prepare for it — or better yet, avoid it — in the future. By R. Morgan Griffin
http://men.webmd.com/features/what-does-anger-do-to-your-health

“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” – Mark Twain

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Build Intimacy in Your Relationship

Most of us have a primal craving to be truly known by someone before we die, to build a deeply committed relationship based on honesty, trust, self-disclosure, respect, appreciation, interdependence, and togetherness. But the sexes often define intimacy differently. When women want to draw closer, we face each other, lock eyes in what has been called the “anchoring gaze,” and proceed to reveal our hopes, our worries, our lives. To women, intimacy is talking face-to-face—a behavior that probably evolved millions of years ago when ancestral females spent their days holding their infants up in front of them, soothing them with words. Men, however, often regard intimacy as working or playing side-by-side. Sure, they might discuss a bad week at work, even troubles in their love lives. But rarely do they share their secret dreams and darkest fears. (When they do, they often use “joke speak,” camouflaging their feelings with humor.) And men almost never look deeply into each other’s eyes. Their approach to intimacy probably also harks back to prehistory: Picture ancestral males gathering behind a bush, quietly staring across the grass in hopes of felling a passing buffalo. They faced their enemies but sat next to their friends. This is why, to build intimacy with a man, I do things with him—side-by-side. That way, when I talk, he isn’t threatened by my gaze. Curious to find out more about such gender differences, I asked 4,876 members of the Internet dating site Chemistry.com , “What would you do as an intimate activity with a partner?” and offered various choices. I found that men were far more likely to regard “debating” as intimate. I wasn’t surprised: Intimacy requires being in your comfort zone, and men’s testosterone is associated with competitiveness. On the other hand, women were more likely to consider “organizing a neighborhood or community party together” and “taking a vacation together with a crowd of your closest friends” as ways to be close. Because estrogen is associated with social skills and nurturing, I wasn’t surprised by this either. What I didn’t expect was that 95 percent of all respondents rated “talking heart-to-heart with your partner about your relationship” as something they’d do to be intimate, while 94 percent felt that “doing something adventurous together” spelled togetherness—with hardly any difference between the sexes. If these results are any indication that men are learning to appreciate women’s need to talk, while women are understanding the male way of showing love (“actions speak louder than words”), then bravo! There are, of course, many other things you can do to cultivate togetherness . Help your partner achieve his goals. Face your problems as a team. Develop a private spiritual or religious world. Choose a new interest to pursue jointly. Do chores together. Play. And get the oxytocin flowing. Oxytocin is a brain chemical that produces feelings of trust and attachment. Men get a blast of it when they kiss, women feel a rush when they hold a lover’s hand, and during orgasm, both partners are flooded with the powerful substance. So last but not least, enjoy each other physically. Good sex really does build intimacy. By Helen Fisher, PhD
http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Building-Intimacy-Gender-Differences-in-Intimacy

“Once you love someone, you love them forever. People fall out of trust, intimacy, and respect, not love.” – Rashida Rowe

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False Sense of Control

Obsessiveness is common in many ways – not being able to sleep at night because of hurting someone you love, for example, or developing a childhood fascination with dinosaurs that never leaves and you eventually become a paleontologist. Then there is an addiction to obsessiveness which stifles creativity. Obsessiveness is not only boring, it also lacks any faith in process. Process is always out of your control. You must be open to finding out what will happen instead of seeking a false sense of control. An example of this false sense of control would be to think: If I always know where you are, you can’t have an affair. Part of the control of obsessiveness is to nurse hurt feelings, exaggerate disappointment, and constantly blame the other for not coming to the rescue. Obsessiveness is very interesting because there are two sides to it: the positive side is creative passion that helps you know what really matters; the negative side is an addiction which makes you unable to prioritize anything. As a result, things have the same weight. Is s/he having an affair? Just how clean can my house be to prove I know what’s what? Are all those towels really folded correctly? Obsessiveness is a focus on what is NOT. Truly focus on the here and now in the moment and the obsession will change itself. Obsession is a substitute for action. Both polarities of obsessiveness are available. What is more mentally healthy, especially as we age, is sorting out what is important and what to let go of. Ultimately letting go is the final lesson of death. One of the many wonderful aspects about raising children is that elegant dance of knowing what’s important combined with the letting go work of adolescence and not knowing. The not knowing leaves room for respecting their choices as different from your own ideas of who they should be. Too many parents stifle and interrupt children’s abilities to make their own mistakes and their own choices. From “Anxiety, Control & Codependency” by Rhoda Mills Sommer, L.C.S.W.
http://therapyideas.net/anxiety.htm

“Love without sacrifice is like theft.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Are you chasing holiness as desperately as you chased your sin?

http://desiremercy.wordpress.com/2013/11/02/are-you-chasing-holiness-as-desperately-as-you-chased-your-sin/

November 2, 2013 by

I once heard a preacher say this:

The depths to which you indulged in your sin will be the depths to which you’ll need to live in holiness.

That has stuck with me.  What this means to me is simple:  The degree to which I chased after my sin and wallowed in it will be the same degree to which I need to chase after holiness and rest in God.  

A friend recently wrote, “powerful passions have to be met with a powerful response.”   Amen.

Paul opens his letter to the Romans introducing himself as a “slave to Christ” (Rom. 1:1).   He was delivered from much, and his life seemed to reflect such a single-minded focus on Christ which is rarely found in churches today.

I desire to be a slave for Christ, and know I have much deeper waters to yet tread in my pursuit of holiness.   By God’s grace He is drawing me there, and I’m thankful for the freedom such slavery brings.

How powerful is your response against the powerful passions that have plagued you?