Peer Pressure in Marital Intimacy

We demure church ladies do our best not to say too much about sex, or at least to pretend we don’t think about it as often as men do. After all, we’re ladies. Or at least some of you are. For myself, I keep trying to tell folks I’m a quiet and unassuming wallflower, and no one ever believes me.

But while we do think about sex differently, it’s as much of a concern for us as for our husbands.

It’s like this: a woman’s intimate organs are the mind and heart. A man’s intimate organs are proof that God had a sense of visual humor when He created Adam. We need say no more on that.

Men tend to think about intimacy with the physical at the core. The physical is the emotional. And once that clicks over for a wife, you’ll never get mad at your husband again for wanting to make love to you when he knows full well how tired you are. In man fashion, he’s asking for a chance to minister to your heart … okay, well, you’ll get mad less. If they’re honest, they’ll fully admit sometimes they’re all ego and hormones. But so are we sometimes, right?

So for men, the focus on sexual godliness may touch on the hidden thought life, where to keep the eyes when the world hits one in the face with gratuitous images, or remembering to nurture a wife’s heart (yes, they genuinely forget it works differently for us).

Women tend to think about intimacy in emotional terms. The emotional is the physical. For us women, the focus on sexual godliness tends to be directly on the heart. For instance, submission is an attitude of the heart that defines physical actions, which are much more understandable to the male brain than, “Uh oh, she seems to be mad again.”

But since emotions aren’t so easily confined to separate situations as actions are, that can involve a lot of unintentional peer pressure, whether in the community/friendship/ministry sense or even within the marriage.

This means guarding ourselves from a key tendency in spiritual self-help: advice framed as sweeping generalizations. It may work in many or most cases. If yours happens to be one of those where it doesn’t, you may feel like a spiritual failure before God or a failure as a wife. With topics that are difficult to discuss, we tend to pick up books instead of talking. But advice books have necessary limitations and need to be taken for what they’re worth—usually about $15.99.

Those books do not carry the priceless weight of eternity. That’s found in the refuge of Jesus Christ’s cross and its work of rescuing from sin, whether your sin or the damage done to you by someone else’s sin.

…Be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body. —Eccl. 12:12b

As one important example, the standard advice on submission to a husband’s drives is actually damaging under two circumstances: a history of rape, or the incursion of pornography on the marriage.

In those instances, your sense of psychological safety may be infringed upon by the way you’ve learned submission. Your ability to trust your partner may be suffering. The key is in the whole counsel of God, which advocates the sacrificial (yes, self-denying) love of the husband as much or more than the submission and respect of the wife. We cannot rely on just a handful of “proof texts” to fix a whole spectrum of ailments any more than we prescribe one treatment for every disease. Which brings us to another concern.

Avoiding peer pressure in marital intimacy also means guarding ourselves from another key tendency in Christian advice: niche interpretations of Bible verses lifted from their original context. How many children should you have? Should you use birth control? How should you go about finding a mate? What is godly submission to your husband? How should you order the daily dynamics of your marriage relationship?

Notice none of these questions speak directly to sex, but they all speak to a woman’s emotional, intellectual and spiritual life. That means these things are going to affect our sexual perspective. Because we’re that way. The emotional is the physical.

Here’s canon on authoritative prescriptions and proscriptions:

No man can by any means redeem his brother
Or give to God a ransom for him—
For the redemption of his soul is costly,
And he should cease trying forever…
—Psalm 49:6-8

It’s not up to any human authority to save you, save your marriage or straighten you out. And we all should be suspicious anytime such an attitude of control over our personal lives appears in another person. We each have the sole responsibility for our own relationship with God through His Word. You have the right—in fact, the obligation—to search the Scripture daily to see whether these things are so (Acts 17:11).

Trust in the Lord, and do good;
Dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness.
Delight yourself in the Lord;
And He will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord,
Trust also in Him, and He will do it.
(Ps. 37:3-5)