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Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose
<page 110>We need a flexible sex drive so that a husband and wife can be sexually attracted to each other throughout a lifetime. If a man could only be turned on by a twenty-two year old, what hope would there be for a lifelong delight in marriage?
As I tried to get back to a normal sex life, I struggled. I was partially impotent, and months of fantasizing had left me confused and unsure of myself. I wanted to please my wife, but my body was unpredictable. Many times I couldn’t get the job done, which left me terribly frustrated.
I discovered that sex was different from just about every other area of my life. With anything else, I could get by without my emotions. If I didn’t like my job, I could force myself to do the work anyway. If I didn’t feel like treating people right, I could be kind by an act of my will. I had years of practice at self-control, but sex required something more. If I was at all upset, worried, or tired, my physical machinery no longer worked. My desire remained, but it only led to frustration.
Unfortunately, the only approach that seemed to help was to be totally selfish and only think about my own pleasure, but I didn’t want to be like that. I wanted to serve my wife, not to selfishly indulge myself.
I realized that a nagging question had been sneaking up on me, and I didn’t want to face it. It had to do with how age would affect our marriage. Two forces seemed to be converging to ruin our sex life. On the one hand, as I grew older I was slowly losing my ability to perform. On the other, as my wife grew older she was losing the youthful beauty that inspired me to perform. These forces didn’t remove the desire for sex …they just made it harder to fulfill.
The problem was only going to grow worse over time. If I was having trouble when we were in our forties, what was I going to do when we were in our sixties? I knew I could give my wife a lifetime of God’s unselfish love. I wasn’t so sure I could give her a lifetime of sexual love.
In short, married sex seemed to contain a fatal design flaw. At the time when men are losing their physical ability, women are losing the outward attractiveness that could make up for that lack of ability.
I didn’t find any answers in the Bible’s book about sex, Song of Solomon. How often did Solomon write about his bride’s wonderful personality? Compare that to the number of times he wrote about her face, her breasts, and just about every other part of her body. For him, sex seemed to be about physical appearance.
In Proverbs, Solomon gave a different picture:
<page 111>Bless your fresh-flowing fountain! Enjoy the wife you married as a young man! Lovely as an angel, beautiful as a rose — don't ever quit taking delight in her body. Never take her love for granted!
(Proverbs 5:18-19, The Message)
There were few, if any, commands that I enjoyed obeying more, but I wasn’t sure how to continue as we aged. Just deciding to take delight in my wife’s body was going to fail me. I needed inspiration. In the past, that had come largely from my youthful sex drive and my wife’s youthful beauty, but these were not going to be an option in the future.
I had hoped I could somehow escape this issue. I knew that any struggle in this area would deeply hurt my wife. Her tendency was to consider my sexual problems to be her fault, and no amount of disagreement from me had changed that. It just seemed to be the way she was put together. To protect her, I told myself that I wasn’t allowed to have any more sexual problems. I had hurt her enough already; I couldn’t permit myself to add to what had already happened.
That was why this current struggle was so distressing. If it hadn’t been for prostatitis, I doubt I would have faced it. It probably would have hit me at an older age, which would have given me an easier excuse for what was happening to me. I would have gone into denial for my wife’s sake and accepted impotence, blaming it on my aging body. We couldn’t do anything about growing old, and I had no right to make her feel bad about it. I would have concluded there was nothing to do but to convince myself that my problems were a natural part of life.
Prostatis, however, had made sex important for my health, and this had opened the door to all sorts of previously forbidden questions. I had to decide whether these questions had been forbidden by God, or if there was some human way of thinking, a stronghold, keeping me from asking them. I decided it was the latter, and I eventually called that way of thinking the Fairytale Stronghold.[79] It told me that if I truly loved my wife, my questions would not only be off limits, they would never enter my heart. My love would keep them from being serious considerations.
It seemed good to me to question the Fairytale Stronghold by transparently considering my questions before God. I did so with a fair amount of fear, knowing that just allowing them to remain in my heart was another risky choice that might damage my marriage. Nevertheless, this seemed to be where the subjective voice of God was leading. My questions were honest expressions of my emotions, and God seemed to be stressing the importance of honesty with my emotions. It wasn’t time to run; it was once again time to turn and face the darkness.
The Bible told me that married love needed to be supported by nitty-gritty wisdom (Proverbs 2:10-16, 6:20-24). I admitted that I didn’t have that wisdom and asked God to teach it to me. For years, an abundance of male hormones, my wife’s youth, and my street-fighting approach to life had allowed me to get by without it. That wasn’t going to work in the future. I needed to understand my erotic desires and direct them in ways I never before had.
I had been a Christian for almost thirty years, and I had heard few, if any, Christians spell out this issue and attempt to answer it. Many people had said that men were turned on by visual <page 112>stimulation, yet I couldn’t recall anyone asking the obvious question: “What should men do when the visual stimulation fades?”
I suspected that our silence stemmed from the fact that talking about this subject might hurt our wives, but it seemed that someone needed to address it. We can’t deny the tremendous amount of evidence that many men handle it badly. Throughout history, they have settled for a variety of sinful “solutions.”
An early approach was polygamy. When one wife got old, a man could go out and marry a younger one. The first wife, no doubt, found this extremely offensive, but it seemed to work for the man.
Another common approach has been divorce. The term “midlife crisis” brings up images of men leaving their wives for younger women. I have heard many condemn this practice, and rightfully so, but what is the answer to the man’s sexual struggle that plays a role in it? How should he deal with the frustrations that tempt him toward this cruel choice?
Another long-standing favorite has been adulterous affairs. Mistresses and prostitutes have provided youthful inspiration when men have lost sexual interest in their wives.
A seemingly safer alternative had become popular recently: pornography. A man could find an unending supply of youth and beauty to lust after without many of the nasty side effects of divorce or extramarital affairs. With a little research and imagination, he could prolong his virility.
I loved my wife too much to turn to any of these. They would break her heart, and I would be guilty before God for betraying her. Though I was struggling with the slow loss of something I treasured, it was my relationship with her that I treasured, not just sex. I looked to God for a way to continue to take delight in her body.
One fact I had to face was that sex was going to change as we grew older. Our bodies were going to slowly lose their youthful energy. The slow creep of death would work its way into us, and our erotic life would diminish. Prostatitis was the first noticeable intrusion of my final destination making its way into our shared life. It was a sign that my body was not what it once had been. More breakdowns would happen at some time in the hopefully distant future. In the battle between sex and death, death eventually wins.
But I was in my mid-forties …I didn’t want to give up just yet. I asked God to show me how to remain captivated with my wife.
I thought back to how my current approach had been formed. It was at a time when I almost always wanted sex and was upset by the way circumstances kept us from it. Between children, jobs, and church responsibilities, our schedules were so pressed that it was difficult to find opportunities to be with each other. Our frequency was in line with what statistics show for married couples, but like many men, I wanted more.[80]
"You are as beautiful as Tirzah, my darling, as lovely as Jerusalem, as awesome as an army with banners. Turn your eyes away from me, for they have confused me;”
<page 113>(Song of Solomon 6:4-5, NAS)
My wife would walk into a room like an army with banners. Without even trying, she would stir my desires and overwhelm me. My mind would enter a mode where I would minimize anything that could keep us from becoming intimate. I knew that the kids were in the next room, but we could lock the door. Yes my wife was exhausted, but certainly I must inspire in her the same energy she inspired within me. It seemed impossible that God could create a world in which I could want her as much as I did and yet not be able to have her.
Then I would make my move. Even though I knew the outcome before I spoke, the expression on my wife’s face still caught me off guard. It said, “How could you possibly be thinking of sex at a time like this?”
She confused me!
Part of the reason I enjoyed memorizing my way through the Song of Solomon was that I found in it a husband who thought like I did. For example, He showed up after his wife was already asleep and honestly believed she would perk right up and be ready for action.
I was sound asleep, but in my dreams I was wide awake. Oh, listen! It's the sound of my lover knocking, calling! "Let me in, dear companion, dearest friend, my dove, consummate lover! I'm soaked with the dampness of the night, drenched with dew, shivering and cold."
(Song of Solomon 5:2, The Message)
She responded (at least at first) like many of our wives would. She said, “Not now dear.”
"But I'm in my nightgown — do you expect me to get dressed? I'm bathed and in bed — do you want me to get dirty?"
(Song of Solomon 5:3, The Message)
In Solomon’s frustration over incidents like this, he asked his wife to turn her eyes away from him (Song of Solomon 6:5). Looking into them stirred such desire in him that he couldn’t handle her gaze. She confused him.
I developed a different approach. In order to keep myself from becoming frustrated and angry with waiting, I came up with all sorts of subconscious defense mechanisms to hold off my desires until it was absolutely certain that I would be able to follow through on them. One technique was to turn my eyes away from my wife. I avoided focusing on her until I was sure we would be able to make love. She would say, “You only really look at me when you want sex.” The reason for that was that every time I really looked at her, I wanted sex.
Another technique was to get mad at myself for not being able to handle my passions better. I knew my wife wanted me to be more patient, but I just didn’t seem to have the ability to do so. I blamed myself for yet another area of sexual failure, figuring that it was an extension of whatever had gone wrong to produce the smoking fetish. I was tempted to blame God for making me with too much sex drive, but He was God. How could I be mad at Him? I also couldn’t be mad at my wife, because she was the one I wanted to be with.
<page 114>It seemed like the only person left to blame was me, so I got mad at myself. I was engaging in more self-induced emotional abuse, and I paid for it as I got older. Disliking myself may have helped quiet my sexuality in my youth, but it injured me. When I began to have serious problems with prostatitis, I suddenly found myself in a position where I would say, “OK, you can desire you wife now,” but the desire wasn’t there. My unhealthy approach had eaten away at my emotions.
My sexuality had never been properly nurtured so that it could become what God had created it to be. Instead, I had bullied it into forced submission, treating it as if it were an unpredictable delinquent that had to be kept locked up except during brief moments of blissful release.
I could now sense the Holy Spirit changing that approach. He was affirming my sexuality, telling me that it was a good gift that needed healthy care. I remembered that the Song of Solomon and Proverbs portrayed male sexuality in a positive light. I hadn’t allowed myself to feel that way about myself, because it seemed too dangerous, but I now saw that I needed to take the time to non-judgmentally consider my sexuality before God – to treat it with respect.
I began to gain a vision for what it could be and started to see how to practically embrace it as something beautiful that God had created. He was teaching me how to experience it as a source of anticipation leading to ecstasy rather than a source of fear punctuated by occasional rapture. Where previously my drives had taken me through great highs and lows, I now began to see them more as predictable friends that would support my marriage.
The changes helped a good deal with impotency, but it eventually became obvious that my problems were at least partly physical in nature. I decided that it was time to use some medicine. I believe God has graciously given us doctors to help us deal with the effects of aging, and I am grateful to live in a country where that is available to me. I talked to my doctor, and he prescribed pills to help with the physical side of the problem. When combined with the emotional changes, this allowed me to continue to serve my wife.
I was making progress, but I hadn’t fully answered the question of how to sexually love my wife as we became older. The new mindset helped with my emotions, and the pills helped with my plumbing, but I still needed inspiration.
The answer came to me after I had spent a good deal of time wondering why God had made our sex drives so flexible. People are turned on by the strangest sights and activities. Some men are attracted to many women, others to only one. Some like obese girls; others shun all but the thin. Some men like men, and some women like women. Some find smoking sexy, others various articles of clothing. I even heard a story about a man who got in trouble at his workplace for fondling women’s feet (a foot fetish). The list of sexual turn-ons is endless. We seem to have an ability that is far too flexible for our good.
One day, I realized that the answers I sought concerning my struggles were found in understanding flexibility. We need a flexible sex drive so that a husband and wife can be sexually attracted to each other throughout a lifetime. If a man could only be turned on by a twenty-two <page 115>year old, what hope would there be for a lifelong delight in marriage? Only a flexible drive can handle the tremendous number of changes we go through from youth to old age.
This insight opened my eyes to see answers about my sexuality that had eluded me up until this point. I realized, for the first time, that the part of my sexuality that had twisted into a smoking fetish was the part that I needed for lifelong delight in my wife. Only that flexibility to focus on something not tied to youthful beauty could enable me to become so enraptured with her that I wouldn’t care how old she was. I saw that this destructive obsession was not based in total sickness. Instead, it was sick twisting of a good gift – and I needed to regain that gift in order to maintain an intimate fascination with the woman I loved.
Please don’t misunderstand what I have just written. I don’t want to imply that we should have unhealthy desires for our spouse. There are all sorts of fetishes and unusual orientations that should never be a part of marriage. What I am saying, however, is that the part of us that is capable of warping into these perversions is the part that God created for lifelong sexual intimacy. He has put spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical machinery within us that can become so attached to a spouse that we see in them an erotic beauty that transcends physical appearance. We have heard the phrase, “Love is blind.” When love works right, it is better than blind. It turns the one we care for into the fulfillment of our wildest dreams!
Solomon called this near-fixation as strong as death, cruel as the grave, and a most vehement flame. A person would be willing to give up all of their wealth to satisfy it.
… For love is as strong as death, jealousy as cruel as the grave; its flames are flames of fire, a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, nor can the floods drown it. If a man would give for love all the wealth of his house, it would be utterly despised.
For me, the devil had taken this love and turned it into a smoking fetish. He had deceived me and perverted it into a tool for destruction. My entire sexuality hadn’t been perverted, which was why I had been able to desire my wife for so many years while suppressing the part of my personality that had turned to the fetish. The fetish was, however, based in a piece of my sexuality that contained the key to remaining sexually excited with my wife as we grew old. It was what would allow me to look at a wrinkled old woman and say, “You still make the mystery move in my heart.”[81]
I knew by faith that God was going to reclaim what had been stolen. He would renew my passions so that they would focus on intimacy with my wife. I didn’t know how to make that happen, but He did. I figured that if He had given me a spiritual education while facing the three roommates in my wife’s dream, He would find a way to finish the job.
The changes came in the following years. It was scary to allow God to rework me at such a deep level, but it was also incredibly satisfying. He helped me discover parts of my sexuality that I had chased into hiding decades earlier, and my middle aged experience often felt like a second honeymoon. There were some tough times also, but it was a pleasure to enjoy the wife I married as a young man – to never quit taking delight in her body (Proverbs 5:18-19).
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