There is a distinct relationship between love, sex and marriage. In an ideal world, sex is a natural component to love and marriage. However, we often confuse and blur the lines whether it’s based on personal experience, popular culture or something else. There is a statement that I read in a relationship guide book once that said: men need to have sex to feel loved while women need to feel loved to have sex.
In general, I think this statement is true. Many women will not commit to a sexual relationship with someone they don’t feel actively cares about them. Whereas men may feel that they are not cared about when the sexual portion of their relationship is lacking. If you are thinking this is an area where conflict may be easily aroused – you are not wrong. When a marriage is troubled or there are disagreements between the parties, wives may turn off to the idea of sex. This can lead to more upheaval in the marriage as husbands feel shut out.
Sex & Disagreements
This is actually not an easy topic to write about and the following advice is going to sound bizarre to most women. But it’s based off personal experience and a little understanding of the above statement. First and foremost, don’t use sex as a weapon – ever. Sex is meaningful, pleasurable and an open way to express intimacy and closeness. When you and your spouse are arguing, disagreeing or in general fighting – cutting off sex as a option to expressing caring for each other can send signals that keep you at arms length from each other.
The truth lies in the fact that men and women are different. You have to say this to yourself over and over and over again. You see, when a wife feels slighted, angry or hurt – she doesn’t want to have sex with her husband. If you are going through a particularly troubling time in your marriage – where emotional distance is a factor, you may resist sexual overtures. The reason why we do that is because we feel that by having sex with our husbands when we are upset with them – we are saying everything is all right.
Most husbands are a lot more intelligent than that. What they hear and feel when we tell them we don’t want to have sex is that we don’t find them appealing, we don’t feel the same level of caring about them that they do about us and that we are closing them out.
So how do we cope with this?
It’s important to remember that wives need to feel understood and loved in order to have sex or make love. Husbands need to have sex and make love to feel loved. When you understand these needs that are completely at odds with each other.
These conflicting feelings can be so at odds that they create more discord in a marriage, especially when you’re not connecting with each other. When you are arguing or in the middle of a disagreement, it’s not at all unusual for a husband to want to make love. He’s not just thinking about sex, he’s wanting to recapture the feeling that he is loved. A wife may be turned off by what she perceives as a shallow reaction to her personal unhappiness – but this is where you need to understand the differences between men and women.
So what does it boil down to?
Husbands, you need to recognize your wife needs to feel loved before she has sex. She needs to feel that you care about her. That you are commited to her. That you are reaching out and want just her – arguments be damned.
Wives, you need to recognize that your husband needs that physical demonstration of your closeness. He needs it to feel that love. He needs it to reconnect and feel that commitment once more. He needs to know that you still care.
So the best advice is to take sex out of the battlefield. Don’t use it as a weapon to punish each other. Don’t take it away like you are grounding a kid from the candy store. Don’t demand it as the only way to connect with each other. Instead, use sex and making love to celebrate your commitment to each other. And frankly, sometimes the middle of an argument is a great time to share some consensual love making – but it should never be forced physically, emotionally or mentally.
When you can make love, even when you are disagreeing, you can expend some of that emotional energy that fuels the disagreement. You may find that you can talk about things with more clarity afterwards. But most of all, you can find that the two of you are pulling together instead of pushing apart. That’s more important than anything.
So, where do you go from here? Try the following: husbands shouldn’t make sex the first thing they want when there is disharmony or discord. Wives shouldn’t make sex the last thing they want when there is disharmony and discord. Leave the extremes on the fringes of the marriage and meet each other in the middle.
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