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When I was about to get married, an older gentleman at my workplace said something about sex in marriage. He indicated no man could keep up with a woman who enjoyed sex. Most of my co-workers had on occasion expressed they did not get enough, so he got the expected arguments – which he dismissed with a smile.
Of course, we all know men want more sex than women, right? We know a woman who really likes and wants sex is so rare as to be a freak of nature, right? I say no, this is not right. There are more women who really want and enjoy sex than we think. Beyond this, I think these women are supposed to be the norm. I don’t think God designed the system to produce the level of frustration that occurs in many marriages. I think God designed women to want sex as much, or more than, men and to enjoy it far more than any man ever could!
Indeed, this was the understanding of the Jews of old and I have to assume it was based on experience. While a Jewish woman was not allowed to divorce her husband, the civil law did allow her to ask the courts to force her husband to give her a divorce for one and only one reason; if he failed to provide her with regular sex. Additionally, there was a rabbinical list of how often a man was to have sex with his wife, depending mostly on his job. In short, if a man had a non-physically demanding job and was home every day, he was expected to have sex with his wife every day she was not unclean. That would be daily for several weeks each month! Finally, God said if a man took a slave for a wife, and then took a free wife, the man was not allowed to decrease the amount of food, clothing, or sex he gave the first wife. (Exodus 21:10) It seems God thinks women want plenty of sex!
Why then is the norm in our society men always chasing their wives for sex she doesn’t want? I think it is because we live in a sinful, fallen world. It is also because God did not give women the same kind of sex drive He gave men. For men, sex drive includes a strong physical component. A few women have a strong physical drive, but most not so much, and not all the time like men. When a woman desires a lot of sex, her drive is usually more emotional, mental, and relational. When a woman is free of sexual pain from the past, not exhausted or worried, and has a good solid loving marriage, she may want every bit of sex her husband can provide.
I realise this sounds impossible to you if you fight to have sex a few times a month, but it should give you some hope. I’m convinced God designed her to want sex, and lots of it. Beyond theory, we’ve talked to enough women and couples who are living it to know it does exist. We have also talked to couples who have moved into this after the woman was 40 or even 50 years old. I’m sure there is an age at which this change becomes unlikely, but it’s older than you might think.
How do you get from here to there? Start by believing it’s possible and that it’s what God wants. Beyond that, there are two sets of problems that may be keeping your wife from being the sexually hungry woman she should be.
The first set of problems is things she brought into the marriage – fears, wrong ideas, uptight religious feelings about sex, negative body image, thinking her sex organs are gross, and the effects of molestation, rape, or consensual sex before marriage. To be honest, there’s not a great deal you can do about these things other than not make them worse. Encourage your lady to work on them and give her a lot of grace as she does.
The second set of problems is those you helped create. This includes whatever sex you had with her before marriage, any sexual selfishness, porn use, or adultery, but it goes way beyond the sexual. If her sex drive is based on emotions and her relationship with you, then anything that harms or limits her feelings towards you also reduces her desire to be sexual with you. For some women, it is not that simple, but for many it really is. If you want her to want sex, you will have to give her all those non-sexual things she must have first. The good news is you do have power over these things!
[This post first appeared Feb 11, 2012.]
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True. The 16th century reformer Peter Martyr commenting on Genesis 3:16, “your desire will be for your husband,” said the sexual desire of a wife would be such that even the increased tribulation of childbearing would not deter her from seeking the embrace of her husband. I would guess man-centered sex and lack of masculine-feminine polarity are to blame for much of the seeming disparity in our day, not to mention women stressed by working outside the home.
@Doug – That has always been my reading of the verse.
I know you won’t leave this up, but it’s not meant to be anti-Semitic, or racist or any other pejorative. It’s just that the joke doesn’t really work in standard English. The accent should be a Jewish/New Jersey/Long Island sort of a brogue.
A Jewish mother has decided to have “the talk” with her daughter while the daughter is getting dressed for her wedding.
“After the wedding, when ya get to the hotel room, he’s gonna wanta do something to ya. Ya not gonna like it.”
I think I first heard that joke done by a Jewish comic doing a standup routine. With him telling it (accent and all), I think I laughed until my belly hurt.
I’m going to provide a contrarian take on this. I don’t think it has anything to do with women “wanting” sex in the modern sense we think of it as being horny. We think almost exclusively of sex in terms of physical satisfaction because we have almost entirely separated sex from its main purpose, reproduction. Women in OT times we’re extremely fertility-positive and desired to have as many children as possible (think of Leah hiring Jacob for the night with her son’s mandrakes; she wasn’t after a rip-roaring orgasm, she wanted the possibility of another child; think of Lot’s daughters getting him drunk and sleeping with him so they could conceive; think of Tamar dressing up as a prostitute to entrap her father-in-law, not because she was desperate for a good time after so long of widowhood but because she was desperate to have a child and her time was running out); whereas men might be reluctant to take on the responsibility of more offspring, for whatever reason (think Onan). These laws appear to have ensured that a husband wouldn’t leave his wife with the ultimate cultural shame, no or few children. Sorry guys, I know it is exciting to think of us being as or more horny than you, but I don’t think you can read that into these texts.
@Susanna – The desire to procreate was certainly a part of it. But it doesn’t explain it all. Women certainly understood the timing of sex and pregnancy. So wanting sex all month makes no sense if they are just after children.
Then we have 1st Timothy 5:11 – which I should have put in this post. Paul is telling Timothy about who to put on the widow’s list. He finishes by saying “But refuse to enroll younger widows, for when their passions draw them away from Christ, they desire to marry”. Yes, passions has a sexual tone to it. And context and culture tell us that Paul is talking about not putting any widow under sixty on the list. He is saying a fifty-five-year-old widow is going to get horny and remarry – well past menopause!
Perhaps the desire to have children helped women be fully sexual. And once they did that, they learned to like and want it for other reasons.
I think your final point has some truth to it. I am sure wanting to be maximally fertile provided an incentive for women to have relations that we now lack. We’re now left with the bare physiological reality of most women’s lower desire, and given that for us moderns sex is almost exclusively about desire/pleasure, if that’s lacking so is most incentive to have sex. Anyway this has led me to a whole train of thoughts that probably are too involved for a blog comment.
Susanna—good observation! How would you explain the huge romance-erotic novel industry in which women are predominantly authors and readers? These works are not generally about having children.
Unless there were romantic-erotic novels in the old testament, doesn’t seem applicable 😝
Oh Susanna, lol. Potiphar’s wife to Joseph—”Give me a child!” No doubt women have largely turned from the “natural function” as Romans 1 states, but nonetheless God has always intended for his women to be greatly pleasured as well. “God richly gives us everything to enjoy.” As a woman this should be your expectation in bed.
You appear to be reading way too much into my comment. My contention wasn’t and isn’t that women never felt any kind of sexual desire or enjoyment. You’ve also gone out of the context of the OT covenant people the texts we were discussing apply to. My thesis was that those texts have more to do with providing women the children they desired, than some kind of imaginary world where men have to be told to have enough sex with their wives because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to keep up with them. Unless women have somehow massively evolved (devolved?) since those times, that interpretation seems quite improbable, although I get why it appeals to men.
Susanna, no doubt children are closely associated with sexual relations—but not inextricably connected as you seem to imply. The Song of Solomon has zero reference to procreation. What about Abraham and Sarah until their 90s? From the beginning sex was meant to be a bond—the two shall become one flesh. Many women have suffered sexual neglect by husbands who looked at sex as only for procreation. It is effectively love neglect and love is highest on the scale.
Well, again you’re going pretty far out of the context of the passages referred to in the post and what I was attempting to say, so I think we’ll have to leave it that we’re ships passing in the night of intellectual discourse.