It wasn’t a change in my approach to sex that changed our marriage.
Sex was a problem in our marriage, but it wasn’t THE problem.
It was my heart that was at the heart of my struggles with sex.
My struggle with sex was simply one symptom of my heart issues. I was self-centered. I had internalized all sorts of negative messages about myself, my sexuality, men, and sex. I didn’t know how to trust God, much less my husband.
God’s transformation of my heart was what transformed my marriage. He used sex to lead me to the places in my heart where I needed to do some work. As I began to heal, my new sex habits took root.
A negative attitude
Sex wasn’t the only symptom of my heart problems. My overall attitude toward my husband was another one.
I treated my husband horribly. I had grown up believing that man-bashing was okay. It was something I learned in the small comments I heard between women: A woman would comment that she was glad when she recovered from surgery so she could put everything back where it belonged. Women talked about having to give their husbands shopping lists because they couldn’t be trusted to remember the one thing they’d gone to the store to pick up. They expressed frustration that their husbands were meticulous with putting their tools back where they belonged but couldn’t bother to close the door of the kitchen cabinet or put their dirty underwear in the hamper. My friends would sometimes speak of their fathers in ways that modeled what they’d heard from their mothers.
I learned was that men were not respectable—and that respect was something that had to be earned. I absorbed the lesson that it was my job to finish the training my mother-in-law had begun. I was supposed to teach my husband what it meant to be a good adult.
Every time Big Guy made a mistake or did something I didn’t want him to, I saw it as validation of my negative attitude toward him.
This showed up in my marriage in my unwillingness to trust my husband. It came through in the way I spoke to and about him—even with the children. It made it easy for me to dismiss my husband’s sexual desire as unimportant or something he needed to learn to get over. I participated in many of those same conversations I’d overheard when I was younger.
I didn’t see my husband as one of God’s children. I saw him as someone who deserved less compassion than I might show a total stranger.
My attitude was about me, not about my husband at all.
Thoughts as memories
As I worked on sex, God showed me all the ways my attitude and lack of compassion had hurt my husband and my marriage. I learned that the first step to uplifting is to stop putting down.
After nearly eight years of working through my heart issues, I want to tell you that the thoughts that accompanied that attitude are all gone. I want to, but I can’t. Even now, those thoughts often come unbidden into my mind.
I recently began to wonder if all this change I thought I’d experienced was temporary after all. Why did that thought pop into my head? Why does it seem that my default idea is to criticize rather than to thank or encourage? What is wrong with me?
The Bible tells us to think about good things:
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Philippians 4:8
I’ve worked hard on this in several areas of my life. I know how to do this. In fact, in some respects thinking about true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable things had become automatic.
So what was going on with those negative thoughts that used to reflect my negative attitude?
I’ve worked to guard (and grow) my heart for my husband. Did these unbidden thoughts mean that I was failing?
Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. Proverbs 4:23
My mind carries all sorts of memories—including memories of the way I used to think. When those thoughts surface, am I really thinking them? Or is it that I’m remembering the thoughts I used to have in similar circumstance?
My memories muddy the waters of what I can see in myself.
Echoes of my past words
Yesterday I overheard a conversation similar to the ones I used to hear among some women as they spoke negatively about the men in their lives.
I’d driven my son to a follow-up appointment with his surgeon. As I sat in the waiting room, a man walked in with his young teen daughter. She informed the receptionist that she would be going into the appointment with her father to take notes. “Are you planning to go into health care? Is that why you’ll be taking notes?”
The girl responded by saying, “No, it’s because my mother doesn’t trust him to pay attention and remember important information.”
I cringed.
As I heard the man’s own daughter speak so negatively about him to someone (right in front of him), I physically flinched. My heart went out to him.
And that was the moment when I realized that my heart had truly changed.
The girl’s words were the kind that I myself used to say without giving it a moment’s thought.
The fact that those words now made me cringe showed me that those words are no longer part of my heart, even if they do occasionally pop up in my mind.
When negative words show up in my own mind now, they are memories. They are but ripples from the past when I encounter similar situations.
They don’t show the current state of my heart. They simply echo the past.
The way I live my life is a better reflection of my heart.
I looked to see what else in my life might reflect my heart change—and I found so much.
I experience genuine disappointment when something interferes with a planned sexual encounter.
I look forward to spending time with Big Guy.
My heart feels warm and gooey when I wake up and find his arm wrapped around me.
I miss him when he’s gone.
I really do believe him when he tells me I’m beautiful or sexy.
My favorite moment of every day is when he walks in the door after work.
My heart
As I sat in the waiting room realizing that I had cringed to hear my old thoughts spoken out loud, I thought about a picture I took several years ago at the lake behind my parents’ cabin.
I stood on the dock in the bay, looking at the shoreline. There was so much brush that when I looked that direction, that’s what drew my attention. I barely noticed the trees for all the vegetational clutter.
Then I looked at the water. It was so still. I became still. Be still, He said, and know that I am God.
Reflected in the water, I saw the tall evergreens displayed against the northern blue summer sky, reaching heavenward.
Sometimes the reflection is clearer than that which it reflects.
As the picture came to mind, I was able to set aside my concerns about the negative thoughts that sometimes surfaced in my mind. Those thoughts are memories, clutter and brush that draw my attention away from the way my heart has been reaching Heavenward.
The heart that is reflected in my life is one that has been transformed from its old ways.
As water reflects the face, so one’s life reflects the heart. Proverbs 27:19
Image credit | Chris Taylor
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Beautiful. Thank you, Chris. It’s our heart that God is most interested in. As a husband my attitude also stinks and is selfish. I love the way your attitude to sex with your husband goes hand in hand with your attitude towards God. Father God truly does change our hearts as we work with Him. What an adventure! Many thanks.
Sadly, the attitude you described in the Dr’s office is not confined to wives and daughters. Popular culture seems to be one of the biggest offenders. Yes, it probably hurts a lot more at the personal level, but the real damage is done in a wholesale scale. I have no personal knowledge of the details, but I would be willing to wager that the majority of the culprits (writers, producers, etc) are men.
There is no monopoly in misrepresentation. I wonder how many men do their part in ensuring that their sons and daughters truly honor their mothers. How many have taught thru their actions that their wives are to be revered and honored, rather than just giving lip service. I remember back when I was a teen and I said something disrespectful to my mother within earshot of my dad. After I picked myself up off the floor, he told calmly and clearly that he would beat the hell out of any man who spoke that way to his wife, and I was no exception. While the lesson might seem harsh in this day, I recieved it loud and clear. He wasn’t perfect at showing his reverence, but it was there. My own son pushed the boundaries a time or two as a young man, and while I didn’t knock him to the floor, I relayed the message to him that I heard so many years earlier.
There is room for improvement for all of us.
Yes, I think most of us have room for improvement.
I think most of your post is good.
However, being frustrated that your husband can’t put it is dirty underwear in the hamper is not man bashing. The husband that doesn’t put his dirty underwear in the hamper is being disrespectful to the wife and is also modeling similar behaviors for his children.
My husband was not raised that way. Even though my dad contributed little to keeping the house clean, he also never did things to add to someone else’s burden. It seems like there have been a lot of posts lately that women can’t be frustrated by such behaviors. I don’t understand that.
I know when my kids were little, if I was having to pick up my husband’s dirty underwear as well as trying to keep up with the kids assorted messes that would have just added to my frustration.
Also I see a difference between reporting an actual behavior vs actual man bashing.
There’s nothing wrong with being frustrated about a guy not putting his dirty underwear in the hamper. I do think there can be a problem in how we talk about it, though. If a woman expresses a frustration and asks for advice, or if she shares a frustration but says mostly positive things about her husband in other ways, I don’t think it is necessarily a problem. However, when the only purpose of sharing that is to complain and add to the pile of “my husband is so bad he does x” comments in a conversation, it can add to an overall attitude of disrespect. My experience was that I heard all sorts of negative comments about men, without a whole lot of positive ones to provide a sense of balance.
I appreciate that frustration, because I have absolutely felt it. And I do believe that spouses should communicate when they need help and support. Oftentimes, that’s in the little things like this, and it’s not man-bashing to be frustrated or express your concerns to your husband.
However, I also know that I held onto bitterness for too long in my marriage because I indeed believed my husband’s oversights were outright disrespectful to me. When they weren’t. It helped me to realize one day that it wouldn’t have mattered who my husband lived with, he would still leave his shoes strewn about the bedroom because he simply did not see them the way I did. It wasn’t personal. When I flipped that switch, I went from spending a lot of time in my head being angry to just deciding I could spend a few seconds putting away his shoes when I saw them. Now, of course if that was his entire attitude toward our household, that would be a bigger issue. But I do think we need to be careful assigning motives to our spouses when they may not be what we think.
Oh, and as for modeling those behaviors to children? We raised our sons the same on this one, and one turned out to be a very neat adult and the other a very cluttered one. Go figure. I’ve told the messy one to either get much better or plan on making enough to hire housekeeping.