I’ve only read the first and last page of this thread.
I’m 55, been married 34 years this summer, and dated my husband for 6 years before we got married. We were virgins on our wedding night, although we had done some pretty heavy making out.
A lot of posters on this thread have said some very wise words, and I urge the OP to study these.
Perhaps someone has already said what I’m going to say, but I’ll go ahead and say it. Desire for sex decreases after couples are married.
Oh, I know there are exceptions. There are people on CAF who say that they still have sex with their spouse three or four times a week. Wow. I marvel at these couples.
But for most couples, the chores and responsibilities of daily life, along with the pressing need to stick to a budget, and the constant disasters that occur in a family (basement flooding, mice in the house, car breaking down, kid in conflict with school teacher, Grandma getting a serious illness, dog dying, etc.) make it very difficult for a couple to drum up the time and energy to have sex. It becomes just another chore to many women and even to some men.
Women especially suffer from what clinicians call “Lack of desire.” Once children arrive, many women have a hard time getting interested in a roll in the sack, because their minds are so full of all the responsibilities that they are shouldering. The To Do List is endless and overwhelming for many women, and even when the husband helps out, it’s still exhausting. Many women don’t want sex at night–they just want a few hours of sleep, and resent the demand for sex that deprives them of 20 minutes of sleep.
Now I think that a wise woman will figure out a way to accommodate her husband’s needs, and sacrifice that 20 minutes of sleep to make love. But many women don’t learn how to do that until they are older and their children are not so dependent on them and they have a little more free time. And when they get to that point, many women learn, to their dismay, that their husbands are now experiencing “middle-aged health issues” that make it difficult for a man to have sex.
Sex is an art–couples have to learn how to manage a sex life! Everything in our society teaches us that monogamy is boring, so Christian couples have to figure out how to defeat that fallacy and make sex more fun and exciting through the years and various phases of their lives. A lot of couples give up once the honeymoon phase is over. (50 percent divorce rate in the U.S.)
So…in summary, don’t marry because you want to have “licit” sex. You are thinking that things will go on the way they are right now and you will always have the hots for each other, but that’s not the way it works in most cases. The desire for sex will diminish, and then your marriage will flounder because you’ll think that you’re not in love with each other anymore. My question for you is, “Are you really in love with each other right now, or are you in love with the excitement of a relationship in which sex is always simmering under the surface and occasionally boils over?”
If I were the two of you, I would ask a counselor to give you both one of the Marriage Assessment tests." These tests assess the compatibility of two people, and help them to p(name removed by moderator)oint areas of potential conflict and incompatibility. Sometimes, the areas of incompatibility are deal-breakers–better to make that decision before a wedding rather than after. The Assessment will help you to determine whether you really have grounds for a marriage, or whether you are just infatuated with each other and using each other for sexual pleasure.
Good luck to both of you. Godspeed.
). Neither of us is cut off from God’s love because of mistakes we have made, because we make God’s love a part of our lives.
