To Sex-starved Husbands

Please note that this thread is a series of thoughts which I hope will be helpful and Biblically-based. This is not a substitute for pastoral counseling, and this topic is so complicated that there is absolutely no way that I could cover every possibility in this thread. Please take this only for what it is, compare it to Scripture, and get godly advice from people who know you.

Also, I would like to make clear that this post is assuming a woman who is chronically denying her husband in the bedroom. We are not talking about a wife who is completely exhausted on Tuesday night, so she asks to postpone until Wednesday, and then Wednesday night she has the kids in bed early, a candlelight dinner on the table, and Michael Bublé crooning softly in the background.

In a healthy marriage, this sort of thing should be able to be dealt with through honest communication, submission to biblical commands, and a mutual desire to care for each other. In a healthy marriage, neither spouse is begging for sex. There is spice and sparkle and the husband doesn’t hesitate to throw his wife over his shoulder and carry her off to the bedroom (and she giggles all the way there).

(Stay tuned for a follow-up post on “consent.”)

This post is addressing an unhealthy, sexless marriage.

1. Pray and fast. God can do what no human strategy can. Our flesh wants to go directly to “fixing the problem,” but the reality is that only God can truly do that. He rewards faith, He answers prayer, and the Christian assumption is that He sees and He is not idle.

He calls wives whose husbands are disobedient to the Word to win their husbands without a word by their Godly conduct. (1 Pet. 3)

Husbands must be prepared to do something similar and to love a bad woman just like Christ loved a sinful bride. (Eph. 5, Hosea)

All Christians must have a category for enduring evil by faith and trusting God to act. We do not trust in the arm of the flesh.

2. Take the log out of your own eye (Matt. 7:3). Take responsibility for yourself.

Please note that this does not mean that it is all your fault or even that you have a log in your eye at all. It just means that Christians, and especially Christian husbands, given their position of authority, start by taking responsibility and making sure that they are not contributing to the problem.

You may not be, and that’s great, but you should start by prayerfully considering it.

Jesus doesn’t say that the other person doesn’t have a speck. He doesn’t say you shouldn’t deal with their speck. In fact, you must!

But you need to make sure you can see clearly first.

3. Be secure in Christ. Your contentment and joy have to come from Jesus (Phil. 4:11). A sexless marriage really is an affliction, and it is OK that that is difficult, but you need to give this issue to Christ. The Christian life is not the pursuit of sex. God institutes crosses for all of us to bear, and this is yours at this point. So bear it like a Christian.

Christians throughout the ages have gone without food, gone without sex, gone without housing, even been fed to lions, and they have done it willingly by faith in Christ.

So start by getting the grace to be able to stand secure and satisfied in Jesus, even if God doesn’t take away this very real affliction.

At Gethsemane, Jesus did not pretend that the cup of God’s wrath would be an easy thing to drink. He agonized at the prospect. But He concluded with surrender to the Father’s will.

Incidentally, this kind of secure confidence will make you far more attractive.

4. Love your wife. Keep loving her in a Christlike way even when she is sinning against you. This is not fun, but it is basic Christianity; we do not take our own revenge, but rather overcome evil with good (Rom. 12:21).

Jesus loves His bride, even when she is unworthy.

And this certainly means that the red-pill advice to go get sexual satisfaction elsewhere – or to physically force her to give you sex – are off the table.

Love her. Take good care of her. Flirt with her. Woo her. Romance her. Date her. Not to get sex, but because you are the man and the leader in the relationship.

This must be clearly understood. This is not “jump through hoops so that you can get lucky”, this is “be the man, bro. Love the woman.” This is not something you do to manipulate her into giving bedroom time. It’s something you do because you are a Christ-like man.

Although it does significantly increase the likelihood of bedroom time.

5. Be a man. Work out. Be assertive. Grow a beard. Be non-manipulatable. Walk like you own the joint. Pick up the mantle of authority that God says is yours. Stop asking her permission for stuff. She is not the boss.

Honor her as your queen, but remember that you are the king. Act accordingly. (Eph. 5)

Loving her and living with her in an understanding way and granting her honor do not equate to surrendering your authority.

Nor is surrender in any way attractive to a woman.

Ditch the “hey, excuse me, do you think we could maybe please be intimate tonight?”

Growl like a hungry lion and sweep her off her feet instead. (This does not mean forcing her, see point 3.) Learn the art of dazing your woman.

This masculine presence also entails not going along with manipulative games. If she’s withholding sex to get you to do something, then chuckle and refuse to play along. She needs to know that you are the man of the house and she cannot control you. You answer to Jesus, and while you love and want to bless your wife, you will not submit to her.

Women aren’t attracted to groveling men.

More importantly, Christ is not a groveling husband.

6. Confront her sin. A wife who will not fulfill her marital duty is sinning against her husband. (1 Cor. 7) All Christians are given a process to deal with being sinned against (Matthew 18). Minor sins, we should overlook. But this is not a minor sin.

Part of your responsibility to wash your wife in the water of the Word entails lovingly but straightforwardly confronting her sin. If she will not listen, then the process proceeds to confronting with multiple others, and then eventually with bringing the issue before the church.

For a wife to refuse the marital duty to her husband is sin, and it should be dealt with accordingly.

The cultural idea that it’s completely OK for her to say “no” unless she really wants to is the exact inverse of the Biblical assumption of “yes” barring extenuating circumstances.

7. Be sure to ask “why?” (Jas. 1:19) God’s design for sex is that it is a mutually delightful experience. It is possible that you have a woman with a deep-seated sin issue who needs to repent. But before rushing to that conclusion, it would be good to be quick to hear and slow to speak.

Is there a reason that she is hesitant to be physically intimate? Is she in physical pain? Was she sexually abused as a child? Have you as a couple bought the lie that sex is something that is just for the husband, rather than experiencing it as a mutual delight? Is she so extremely busy that she has no bandwidth for time with her husband?

8. Let’s note that in our culture, there is an assumed solution to that last issue: the husband had better start doing dishes and washing laundry and making sure she gets her girls’ night out. But that is not necessarily the solution.

Yes, husbands do need to be provident in caring for their wife’s needs. They should not hesitate to pitch in with housework if that is what is good for their people. But they should not be doing it as penance.

Leaders get done what needs to be done to accomplish the mission… They don’t apologize for the fact that different people have different jobs.

So instead, there may need to be a frank conversation where you tell your wife that she needs to rearrange her priorities and put your marriage (and the marriage bed) back where it belongs.

If there are logistical issues and she is struggling to get it all done, a husband who is living with his wife in an understanding way (1 Pet. 3) will help her figure that out.

But he won’t do it with the attitude of a whooped puppy who feels guilty for the fact that he has a different job than his wife does.

Please also note that this only works if you aren’t actually being a lazy bum. See points 2 and 4. If you put in your 9-5 and then come home to eagerly live the couch potato life, if you are being apathetic and shirking your God-given responsibilities, then no wonder she feels overwhelmed.

This doesn’t justify her refusing the marriage bed, but it also doesn’t honor Christ… or help anything.

Kings are far more attractive than couch potatoes.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash