There’s an Elephant in My Bedrooom

My dad told me to keep my legs closed…

My mom told me nothing…

The church told me to wait until marriage…

School cautioned me to the STDs…

It’s something I’ve managed to avoid doing and talk about up until I got married. Imagine spending over a year in a dating relationship being very intent about protecting our purity, and when we’re finally ‘allowed’ to have sex on our wedding night… I can’t! Instead, we order room service and as he’s eating his burger my now husband is looking at me like ‘would you like to phone a friend?!’ LOL! I can laugh at it now, but this area of our marriage continues to plague us. It’s been such a taboo topic for so long that even 5+ years into our marriage it’s something I can’t talk to my husband about. Recently, we had a conversation in which he described it as “something we do in secret.” I would say I am fully aware that sex is a gift from God, but the honest truth is if I were in fact fully aware then it would not be such a reoccurring issue in our marriage.

Newlyweds honeymooning in Jamaica. August 2010…

For so long, I imagined sex as being something that would happen naturally. We’d be walking past each other in the house, and then this overwhelming passion would just erupt in us that we’d get it on right then and there because there would be nothing holding us back. That aligns with everything I saw in the movies. To be honest, that’s where I ‘learned’ most about sex. The church preached wait until marriage. Me, being the obedient Christian girl I was, did just that… I waited! Not to say I wasn’t tempted or didn’t get close to the line. It’s crazy because it’s been shared with me that “Satan will do everything he can to get you to have sex before marriage, and everything he can to get you to refrain from it after.” Unfortunately, nothing has ever been so true. My sex life is impeded by my own insecurities of my husband’s past sexual experiences, things he’s seen in media, my own lack of experience & the feeling of not being sexy enough.

It’s crazy how ill-prepared I was for my wedding night. As I reflect back on it I literally feel like I was thrown to the wolves. My poor husband! I’m not sure he even knew what he was getting himself into by marrying a virgin. I literally knew nothing!!! Accompany a lack of knowledge on my end with a wealth of experience on his end, and the summation is a significant amount of insecurity in me. Surrounding sex in our marriage, I always think about his previous partners and the things he’s seen and wants to experience and I tell myself I cannot compete! I think I’ve told myself this lie for so long that I’ve actually begun to believe it and use it as a crutch to why we do not have a thriving sex life.

In the midst of drafting this blog post, I came to the conclusion that I’m over it! I challenged myself to 7 days of educating my mind about sex & actually being intimate with my husband for 7 days straight. At the end of the challenge my husband thanked me for “paving a road where [he] thought there was a dead end in our marriage.” These words saddened me, but at the same time gave me life and a new found hope. My own personal take away from the seven day challenge is a sense of empowerment of being more informed about my body, as well as being able to move in a direction toward becoming more comfortable having certain conversations with my husband. I also feel empowered to begin having these conversations with other women in the Christian community and even outside of it. The message of the church needs to go beyond “wait until marriage.” We need not to tiptoe around the topic, but we need to get into the nitty gritty of it all.

I share this post not to condemn anybody, but rather to encourage other women who might be dealing with similar issues in their marriage. I feel as though I need to hide 1 Corinthians 7: 2-5 in my heart, “…each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” There’s so much meat to chew on here, but the main thing is that we are called by God to enjoy each other in a very intimate way in marriage. I appreciate how Grace and Mark Driscoll sum up the benefits of such intimacy in their book, Real Marriage. They describe the benefits as follows: (1) Pleasure, (2) Procreation, (3) Oneness, (4) Knowledge, (5) Protection & (6) Comfort. There is a sense of oneness that can serve as a safeguard in one’s marriage. At least that’s true for my marriage! I look forward to continuing to pave a road in my marriage in such a way to fully enjoy the ride, if you know what I mean! LOL!