Week 8 - Expectations

Week 8 – Expectations

Hey everyone!

Gotta be honest, this has been a great week. I’ve had some very productive days this week, and I’ve spent some great times with friends and family. Recent events and developments just have left me pretty happy, got to be honest. Hope you’ve all had a great week as well, and I’m sorry if you haven’t. Now, onto this week’s material. I’ll be honest with you upfront; it deals with sex and intimacy in marriage. If you’re sensitive about that, then feel free to gloss over this week’s post, but I really do hope you’re comfortable talking about that at this point.

We talked about physical intimacy for the first half of the week. Class this week did an excellent job informing me of some key differences between men and women pertaining to this subject. For example, men and women are very different in the moment when making love. Men are a lot quicker to go through the motions of arousal, plateau and climax, whereas for women it takes a lot longer to go through those phases properly. Also, men peak sexually when they’re around 18 whereas women peak around 30. Our biological clocks vary greatly in this subject.

That brings me to what it is I wanted to talk about. In today’s culture, there seems to be an over emphasis in being satisfied sexually with your partner. Don’t get me wrong, there must needs be that interaction with your spouse, but people seem to be looking at it wrong. I’ve talked to a lot of friends who’ve wondered about someone, asking themselves if they’d be satisfied sexually with them before everything else. For one, I do believe that this train of thought leads to difficulty in the relationship and in marriage. I believe that sex should be an efficient manner of connecting with your spouse, not just being physically satisfied. When we focus on satisfying our own desires and pleasures through spending time physically with our partner, we forget why it is that we are able to be intimate with someone in the first place.

It can be difficult to connect with someone, considering the differences between men and women. This is a struggle because when one and the other connect well physically, it can have great benefits in their marriage and bond. Take now the idea of looking out for your own pleasure and basing the idea of a successful relationship on that level of satisfaction. When one focuses on themselves during sex they subject themselves and their partner fully and with no support to the “weaknesses” or differences of the opposite gender. For men, it might become easy to use women simply for their own pleasure, leaving the woman feeling lonely and used, perhaps even abused. For women, it could lead to dissatisfaction with their partner, and might cause them to desire other partners who can give more. Neither of these things lead to a stronger marriage and bond and betrays the whole reason why we are able to be intimate with our partners.

With this growing idea of wanting to be satisfied by sex with our partner, people have become more and more insatiable with it. The more you feed that self-centered desire to be satisfied sexually, the harder it becomes to feed it. Hence, more and more people turn to pornography and affairs. Both of these are equally evil and damaging to the relationship and to the self-worth of people involved with it. Pornography, for one, provides people with an endless supply of material designed to satisfy people’s more intense fantasies. The more one subjects themselves to that material, the more they grow accustomed to it. When the participant grows used to it, their fantasies become more and more intense and strange, leading them to search out more and more intensely sexually graphic material. On the other hand, affairs cut at the very foundation of a strong marriage: trust. When someone decides to turn elsewhere for that sexual satisfaction, or runs away with the idea and the invitation, that bond suffers greatly. What was once special and sacred to the husband and wife has now been given freely to people who haven’t put in nearly enough work to earn that trust.

These are things that happen far too often in our society. It’s concerning, to say the least. On the brighter side, one of the last things I remember talking about with my class is a healthy sexual relationship with your spouse. My professor mentioned that many found joy and increased satisfaction when they let go of their own preconceived notions of being pleased and instead focused on their spouse. This coincides with the purpose of our ability to be intimate with someone. When you focus on your spouse, you begin to put them first, not just intimately, but in most other things as well. Sex is no longer just about satisfying a desire, like eating a sandwich when you’re hungry. It’s something that strengthens your bond with the other.

I would hope that people are able to build healthy and strong marriages. Intimacy in marriage is critical to that, so it’s vital to remember that there’s pitfalls that should be avoided at all times. We should remember that it takes two to tango. In marriage and intimacy, you’re not you and your partner. You’re one. One in purpose, wants, needs.

Thanks for reading this week! I know it was a lot, but I truly believe that this is important, and I hope that I’ll remember all this for the future. Really, I’m writing this for myself in the future. Good luck, future me.

-Caleb