Sex matters in marriage. When sex is mutual, intimate, and pleasurable for both, sex makes you feel connected. It minimizes minor tensions and makes you laugh. It helps you sleep and makes you feel more relaxed. And it contributes significantly to marital...
More sex does not fix a marriage. In our study of 20,000 women for The Great Sex Rescue, we found that more sex made good marriages great. Good sex, in a healthy marriage, definitely helps that marriage thrive. But sex can’t fix a bad marriage. And, indeed, having bad...
Should women get to have a say in when they have sex? I would think that the answer to this is pretty obvious. I don't have time for a long post today, but I want to talk about a social media trend that's been occurring, I think because of my obligation sex series. ...
Is there a way forward after obligation sex? If obligation sex has been the norm in your marriage, and if it's been affecting your libido and your marriage, what do you actually do about it? How do you recover from it? This month on the blog we've been looking at...
Obligation Sex is the idea that a wife is obligated to have sex when her husband wants to. It’s that simple. It was one of the beliefs that we studied in our survey of 20,000 women for our book The Great Sex Rescue, and we found that when women believed this message...
This week, Focus on the Family actually published something healthy. Now, before I go any further, this does not mean that I think they’re a healthy organization now. They still promote all the same unhealthy authors in their store. They still don’t condone divorce...
I have met the most incredible, insightful people over the last few years. For ten years, my circle online tended to be the typical Christian authors. I was friends with many of them. I blogged with people who supported their ministries. I was right in the middle of...
Last week, there was a Twitter dust-up because megachurch pastor Jonathan Pokluda objectified women in a sermon. The clip went viral, and this tweet by @laurchastain22 (Lauren Chastain) made huge splashes among Christians:I'm so pleased that Baptist News allowed me to...
What's Wrong with Vanilla Sex? Valentine's Day is coming up just around the corner, and that means that we're going to start to see lots and lots of articles about how to have hot sex. They will be on magazines. They will be in Christian media. How can you have the...
We need to deal with our double standards of sexual expectations in marriage. This month we're looking at entitlement in marriage, and how the entitlement mentality can kill a marriage. One of the things we were talking about last week was that reasonable expectations...
We all want amazing lives filled with joy and passion and wholeness. Who wouldn't want that? But too often that is not what people experience. I've been sitting in my yellow chair trying to write the final post for our "digging yourself out of the pit" series, and...
When we're trying to get out of the pit our sex life is in--sometimes we're the one who needs to grab the ladder. We're near the end of our series on getting our sex life out of the pit that one--or both--of us have dug for ourselves. Often the issues are...
Were you ever told as a teen that if you have sex with someone, you will bond with them? That if you have sex you will feel so bonded that it will be hard to ever bond with anyone else again? And that when we have sex, we release the bonding hormone oxytocin? What...
If we want sex to be awesome, then we need to be able to feel like sex is for us too. We need to feel like we matter. Sex is supposed to be mutual, intimate, and pleasurable for both, and mutuality and intimacy means that you are both coming to the bedroom willingly,...
It's the podcast where we redefine sex--and talk about how it's about more than the penis! Today on the podcast I'm introducing the series we've been going through this month on the blog--how to recover when one of you, or both of you, have dug your sex life into a...