In healthy marriages, sometimes the solution really is that you both need to have some sex. But sex cannot fix selfishness or laziness. It cannot fix an abusive relationship. It cannot cure an affair or porn use or lust. It is dangerous to tell a reader to have sex with an abusive spouse. If you are in an abusive relationship, where you feel as if you have to walk on eggshells to avoid setting off your spouse, and you feel unsafe, please call an abuse hotline. Having sex cannot fix serious issues in your relationship….

Sex can’t be intimate if you feel like you don’t matter. In fact, that’s not even sex; that’s only intercourse, and that’s a pale imitation of what God intended. Sex, after all, is so highly personal. You’re naked in a way that you wouldn’t be with anyone else; you show a side of yourself to each other that you would never show to anyone else; you experience passion in a way in which you are most yourself, in which you let go of control and surrender to the moment. Because of that surrender and vulnerability, sex becomes the culmination of you as a couple, not just you as bodies. It is physical, yes, but it’s so much more than that.

This intense vulnerability may be what holds the key to why emotional closeness makes such a difference to women’s sexual satisfaction: emotional closeness brings trust. When you feel close to your spouse and can trust them, it’s easier to speak up: “Hey, you know what I’d like to try?” or “I don’t actually like that, can we try something else?” That’s what’s likely behind our finding that women who experience closeness during sex are far more likely to have husbands who excel at foreplay. Emotional connection simply cannot be divorced from sexual connection. They are meant to feed each other.

Only halfway through, I see that she is not holding back. Good for her. She gets at the meaningfulness and intimacy of sex contrasted with what we are learning in the church. There’s even a chapter on “Bridging the Orgasm Gap” between men and women. Again, very revealing. Each chapter is loaded with graphs of statistics, practical check-ins for the reader, medical support, practical ways to talk about the content with your spouse and grow together, and a “Rescue and Reframing” concluding section, spelling out what should have already been settled knowledge.

[The authors quote] from multiple books but one that has taken the steering wheel on this teaching is Every Man’s Battle and its offshoots promoting “bouncing your eyes” away from women. There are so many harmful premises in this teaching: that noticing beauty itself is equated with lusting, that all men cannot make this distinction, that attractive women are their enemy as threats to their purity, that women must conceal their attractiveness, that married women must view other women as threats to their marriage, that beauty must be consumed, that Christian men are animalistic and unable to conquer sinful thoughts, and that women really can’t trust their husbands. This teaching turns women into slippery slopes—not people. I don’t even understand how we can live under this principle.

It is an eye-opening book. It’s full of graphs and statistics from their research to reveal what sadly isn’t basic knowledge in the church. You know, it’s full of shocking findings such as, “Women who feel their voice matters in marriage report better sex.” We should be surprised that this needs to be said, but studies show that it very much does!

The authors of The Great Sex Rescue are not out to bash men. In fact, they even point out how sometimes women are raised in this teaching and the husbands become horrified to discover how their wives have been thinking for years about their love life in the bedroom. The authors are wanting to help both men and women learn more about how sex is an intimate knowing in the union of marriage which is deeply personal and should be mutually pleasurable. 

There is a powerful chapter on consent in marriage. This is where I about had it. They gave examples from prominent Christian books, like Every Heart Restored, Every Man’s Battle, His Needs, Her Needs, and The Act of Marriage where marriage rape is described and not named and rebuked. The context is usually around the man’s needs and the responsibility is placed on the coerced woman. Predation is normalized. In the church. Let that sink in.