I’m sorry to have been away for so long….I was visiting people who needed the Love Goddess in Wales, and having trouble getting onto the net, what with internet connections being what they are deep in continental farmland! Anyway I’m back, and have just read The New York Times for the first time in weeks. I see that a Texas pastor, Rev. Ed Young, is getting great publicity by suggesting that marriage gets better when there’s more sex. He recommends to his throng that they vow to make love every day for a week in order to get the (metaphoric) show on the road.
What strikes me here is the number of phone calls and e-mails I’ve received this morning asking whether I think it’s a GOOD idea or a BAD idea to encourage wedded bliss through more sex, as the Reverend Ed Young is doing. Yes indeed. I think it’s a good idea; a really good idea.
Here’s why. Whether one agrees that encouraging daily sex is a Christian endeavor is irrelevant. So too is whether daily sex opted for the way one opts for a vitamin regime or a workout program is, at first, appealing. What’s important is that several amazing things happen in the process of the opting itself–even if it’s opting consciously for something that we all have come to believe should come naturally. For one thing, in a busy family, it doesn’t come naturally. Second, you’re signing on for something that is, after all, fun.
Did you know that the people who marry to have fun actually have the most fun? It’s true. I once did a survey and five-thousand people responded, and the ones who married for fun (about a third of the respondents) remained happier together than all the others. And had more fun.
Now, if it hasn’t been fun in awhile, and you’ve pulled away from each other because of , oh, kids and work and built-up anger and feelings of aging and all the things that can interrupt good sex (and pretty much everything can) and now there’s a certain amount of dread involved in breaking through the barriers in order to get back to the fun–then facing the dread rather than letting it deaden you forever is important (even if it’s scary). Because what happens ( unless there’s so much rancor between the two of you that the very idea of closeness has become anathema, in which case neither of you is going to say yes to this “sex challenge” anyway) is that your senses literally recall how much they like being close, and your body remembers how easy it once was to fall into that closeness, and the closeness itself does the magic that closeness always does.
It’s like the old saw about riding a bike. No matter how long ago it was you were on one, your body never forgets how. Better still, once you get on it again (or, in our case, get it on again), the whole world of fun associated with it, and with the wonderful world you experienced when you did so, comes back to you as sense memory. And it is delicious.
So too with lovemaking. The first day may be so strained you don’t want to do it the next day. But you made a promise! The next day may be even harder, because you’re dragging yourself to each other with even more dread than the first day because of the “failure” yesterday. But here’s the genius of the sex challenge. You do it again, or maybe a fourth time, and a wondrous thing happens. Your body remembers. How to please this guy you may be estranged from but whom you loved enough to marry. How to relax into sexual pleasure. How to allow pleasure in. How to enjoy even the goofiness of coming together again after a long time. Yes, your skin remembers the joy of being touched. Your sense of humor returns. His sense of humor returns. The whole pattern of intimacy that was shut down by disuse returns just by making the effort. Even if the sex itself isn’t all you’d hoped it would be, you’re back in the saddle again, and you know, what’s more, that you’ll be back at it tomorrow.
Sex, you remember in the deepest part of you, is simply adult play. And here you are, playing with your favorite playmate. The one you chose to play with forever but stopped playing with. Once the game, which you thought was over, begins again, the fun comes back into your whole life.
So yes, yes, yes, The Love Goddess approves of your sex challenge, Rev. Ed Young! To my mind, any church that encourages pleasure, that wants fun for its people, encourages all that’s most wondrous about the word “marriage.”
TLG
Dear TLG
Texas’ Reverend Young’s call for his parish’s married members to commit to “daily sex” for a week felt like an encouraging sign to dissolve the division between church and state of sexuality in our country. Though the media reporting on this “Sex Challenge” was little more than “politically correct” coverage, it did awaken and address an issue that has too long been cloaked and daggered. While memories of Nancy Reagan’s idealistic “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign, the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” gay protection policy, and the late 1960’s “Make Love, Not War” slogan still resound, this new challenge felt a little like “Just say, Yes” – another good-intentioned, packaged, yet superficial slogan.
Maybe with positive change in the air over the last few months, dialogue on this topic may soon inveigle and capture as many headlines as the economy, energy and environment crisis. If we as a society were ever to focus on more loving and truly compassionate human development, other more inspiring and hopeful headlines might dominate our news. After all, most loving and conscious couples (married or not; heterosexual or not) know that we cannot love others until we love ourselves (as a people and as a nation!) How can we evolve, much less survive, if we don’t start making some changes in the way we think, talk, act and behave towards our fellow man. Maybe the idea of “making love” daily could open some hearts, bodies and souls so we can better understand our direction, destiny and purpose as a people,
Why is it that our priorities frequently diminish our sexual desire? Separately and cumulatively money, children, work, worries, success do, at times, undermine love and intimacy. While Texas’ Reverend Young’s challenge seemed to assume that sexual intimacy diminishes with time and that marriage frequently diminishes sexual activity, his message seemed to be that frequency would help marital matters. Is more frequency the answer, more following God’s gifts or is it more about learning to love and making love the priority? I think more intriguing headlines would have had Reverend Young guiding and asking couples more from the daily sex challenge, such as…
• What if we practiced voicing loving, affectionate words and gestures with our spouse each day?
• What if we could act and respond by living by “Love is always the answer”?
• What if we dedicated time and resources to love and romance – rather than just to sex.
• What if we all explored other ways of loving – i.e. tango, tantric or tantalizing talks?
• What if we learned daily intimate devotion?
I think this sex challenge could and should be actually directed more towards challenging America’s acculturation to sexuality than it is about just having sex more frequently…we need more inspiration and guidance than just try it for a week and see how it goes and where it leads.
Dear Winsomewaves,
Your plea to make love a priority in our lives–no, not A priority but THE priority–is one that the Love Goddess was born to expedite in the galaxy and to encourage right here on this planet. Earthly lovers, perhaps because fear has been their strictest teacher, grow up feeling that love “just happens” between two people, and that, with a little “work”, it can even last–as if it’s all a matter of good luck and after that, well, good luck. Devotion, historically, is directed away from physical love as though it were somehow not worthy. Those of us who understand how love can work know that it is THE priority–and FUN priority, not a WORK priority, at that. I think the Reverend’s intent to shake up his flock with a prescription for more sex is at least opening the door for people to say, “This is great! Our pastor approves! Now let’s learn more about it, and about each other, and keep it up.” It’s only a beginning, but a better one than the notion, idealized in many churches, that abstinence is the priority! And that sex education, sexual involvement and sexual focus are wrong.
It will please you to know that the Love Goddess once conducted a survey in a magazine that asked people why they got married. The ones who said they got married “to have fun” were the ones who, years later, had the most fun together. They continued–as you implicitly suggest–to make “fun” (and sex is, after all, adult play) their number-one priority.
How about that for good news!
TLG