Opening Note
Shaunti Feldhahn and Michael Sytsma have spent thousands of hours studying sex and marriage. But no one is an expert on your marriage besides you and God. If something works for 97 percent of couples, you just might be one of the 3 percent. So if something here doesn’t feel right for your story or your spouse, it might not be. Just step around it.
The book may not be right for you at the moment, either. Some couples want help with sex but aren’t ready to work on something that intimate. They may need to treat anxiety or depression first, since both can short-circuit healthy sexuality. They may need to heal from trauma, or deal with a spouse who doesn’t truly honor them. Some issues simply need to come first.
Chapter 1 — What We Want—And How to Get There
The two authors come at this from different directions. Feldhahn is a researcher who has spent twenty years surveying what men and women think and feel. Sytsma is a sex therapist with more than 30,000 hours of counseling behind him, mostly on sexual issues. They write from a Christian point of view, but the book is more practical than theological, and the research draws on people of every belief and of none.
From that work, they found eight areas where couples tend to get things wrong, and eight surprising truths that help us understand our spouse and ourselves. The next eight chapters take them one at a time.
One thing first. No one wants to feel like the only partner working on the marriage. But the authors have seen many troubled relationships changed by one person’s choice. You can’t change your spouse. You can only change yourself. Your spouse is still accountable for their choices. But you can love and pursue them in the ways you can, and trust God to work in the ways you can’t. The place to start is a plain look at what married couples are actually doing.
Chapter 2 — What Are Married Couples Up to in the Bedroom?
Does sex really matter that much to a marriage? The data says yes. Think of a car engine. Without oil, the friction of moving parts would destroy it fast. Sex can be the oil in a marriage. Two people doing life together will always rub against each other, and sex helps smooth the rough edges. But sex doesn’t always work that way. In some marriages, it’s the cause of the friction.
Often the trouble is simply bad information. One couple in counseling was stuck in shame and blame, sure that something was wrong. They didn’t know that the average man reaches orgasm after 5.4 minutes of intercourse, and this husband was lasting more than twice that. They didn’t know the average woman takes about 14 minutes. Once they had the right facts, they could relax into playfulness. Most of us are trying hard. But when we work from wrong assumptions, we try hard in the wrong areas. The authors name three.
The first wrong assumption is that we aren’t normal, and especially that our spouse isn’t. You’re probably more normal than you think, and so is your spouse. Sex is one of the few things we rarely compare notes on, even with close friends, so it’s easy to feel like the only couple with a problem. The average couple has sex about four times every three weeks. But the spread is wide. About a quarter of couples have sex less than once a month, and 4 percent have it daily or more.
Wrong ideas about climax are common too. Many people think intercourse is enough for most women. For roughly 40 percent of women, it isn’t, and clitoral stimulation doubles the chance of orgasm. Yet about half the people surveyed didn’t know that. People also brush off sexual pain. Please don’t. Nearly a third of women feel pain at least every third time they have sex, yet 40 to 50 percent of women with chronic pain never seek help.
Sex is designed to make a husband and wife one. Climaxes are great, but they aren’t the goal. If intercourse is all you focus on, it’s easy to give up when she has dryness or he has erectile issues. Don’t. Think of two teenagers making out in the back seat of a car who’ve decided not to have sex. They can still be powerfully aroused. The same thing can happen years later.
The second wrong assumption is that having regular sex, or not, doesn’t really affect the marriage. The truth is that regular sexual intimacy really matters. Among couples happy with how often they have sex, 94 percent are happy in their marriage. Among couples unhappy with their frequency, only 35 percent are. Sex may make a marriage happy, or a happy marriage may lead to more sex. It’s probably both. Three things make couples happy with their frequency. The first is having sex once a week or more. The second is having similar levels of desire. When desire is similar, 82 percent of couples are happy with their frequency. When it isn’t, only 18 percent are. The third is being able to talk about sex.
That’s the third wrong assumption: talking about sex is hard, but that’s fine, because actions speak louder than words. Maybe so, but without the words, you may not be getting as much action. Most of us don’t talk about sex as well as we think. Nearly half the people surveyed said they talk about it easily, without any awkwardness. But almost half of those same people gave other answers that put them squarely in the “liar, liar, pants on fire” group. People who can talk about sex with their spouse have much more sex, and they’re far more likely to be happy in their marriage.
Without words, couples hear the wrong message. A husband feels distant from his wife and presses for sex. He means, I feel disconnected from you, and sex would help me feel close again. But she hears, He just wants my body. Imagine if he said, “I miss you. I don’t like not feeling close to you.” And imagine if she could answer, “But every night you’re gaming with the guys instead of hanging out with me! I need to feel close to you outside the bedroom first.” They’re both talking. They’re just hearing the wrong things.
So look at these three wrong assumptions and ask which ones you see in yourself. Maybe your spouse’s once-a-week desire is just as normal as your daily desire. Then ask your spouse to look at the same list, and talk about it without getting defensive or placing blame. For most couples, simple shifts like these make a big difference. And the biggest shift starts before anyone gets near the bedroom.
Chapter 3 — What We See
The surprise in this chapter is that a healthy intimate life starts in your mind, not in the bedroom. What you focus on is what you’ll see, and what you see shapes how you respond to your spouse. The authors describe six shifts in how couples see things.
The first shift is from focusing on problems to focusing on a vision. Picture a wreck on the highway. Traffic backs up for miles as drivers slow down to look. But once you’re past it and looking ahead, everything flows again. Marriage works the same way. So Sytsma has couples create a sexual vision. How often do you want to cuddle? What mix of playful, erotic, and everyday sex feels right? What would be fun and healthy for the two of you? Then aim for that.
The second shift is from believing the worst to believing the best. When a spouse hurts us, we tend to assume the motive we fear most. If my spouse really cared about me, they’d want sex more. Or My spouse cares more about sex than about me. But in Feldhahn’s research for an earlier book, only 9 out of 1,261 people had stopped caring about their spouse. Even in the most struggling marriages, 97 percent still deeply cared. Believing a negative story about your spouse is far more toxic than your actual sexual problems. In Sytsma’s research, the gap in how much sex each spouse wanted didn’t predict much distress. What did was whether the higher-desire spouse believed something false, like they never want to have sex with me.
The third shift is from seeing a bad heart to seeing bad skill. Skill can be taught. Sytsma once counseled a woman whose husband really was emotionally absent. But she had become harshly critical. So Sytsma asked if she’d be that harsh with her preteen son for the same behavior. “Of course not,” she said. “He’s just a kid.” She’d assume she had a good kid who hadn’t learned yet. We don’t crucify our kids for a lack of skill, and it doesn’t help to do that to a spouse.
The fourth shift is from worrying that your spouse is put off by your flaws to trusting that they find you appealing anyway. Nearly half the people surveyed felt self-conscious about being seen naked. Yet 73 percent of those same people wanted to see their spouse naked. Just 2 percent said their spouse’s imperfections turned them off.
The fifth shift is from asking “Are we allowed to?” to asking “What’s healthy for us?” No outside rule settles that, because it’s about the heart, not techniques and body parts. If a practice upsets one of you, or one spouse guilts the other into it, it’s robbing your marriage bed. A good test is how you’d both feel afterward. In Sytsma’s experience, bringing a third party into the bedroom, even through images like porn, always does damage in the end.
The sixth shift is from chasing pleasure to chasing connection. God designed sex for pleasure, but it’s richer than that. If your goal is powerful pleasure, you might have only okay sex. If your goal is closeness and oneness, great sex is more likely to come with it. Paul gave the Christians in Philippi a way to retrain their focus: “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” With that lens in place, the next surprise is about desire itself.
Chapter 4 — You Are Not Broken
Here’s the surprise that frees a lot of couples: in general, for men, desire leads to sex, but for women, sex leads to desire. We’re built differently. Your spouse isn’t broken, and neither are you.
The desire we see on TV, the “I’m hungry for you” feeling, is called initiating desire. But it describes only four in ten people, and in only 5 percent of couples do both spouses work that way. The second type is receptive desire. This person is open to sex but doesn’t think about it as often, and feels desire in a different order. A third type, resistant desire, affects about 7 percent of people and calls for more specialized help.
When the authors asked what one question people would ask a sex therapist, the most common answer from men was “Why isn’t my spouse as interested in sex as I am?” Often the answer is receptive desire. For that person, desire shows up five or ten minutes in, not at the start. They decide to engage, begin to get aroused, and then feel what their spouse felt from the beginning. This isn’t someone having sex they don’t want. It’s someone looking ahead and knowing they’ll want it. As one woman put it, “I will engage in sex for my husband’s sake, knowing I will get in the mood eventually. Then things are usually great!” This pattern is nearly twice as common in women as in men.
Feelings and actions don’t always line up, either. You might not feel desire but reach for your spouse anyway because it’s been a few days and you know it matters. Sytsma calls that “intentional desire.”
How you handle a mismatch matters more than the difference itself. Sytsma has often heard a wife describe her husband pouting or pulling away when she says no. She may have been interested at first, but now she looks over and thinks, Not with that. So start with curiosity. Curiosity can’t live alongside contempt, criticism, or blame. Stop sitting on opposite sides of the table, arguing about who does what, and sit on the same side to solve it together. That might even mean scheduling sex. This is something you’ll always need to work on. The spouse who doesn’t think about sex as much needs to do things that bring it to mind. The spouse who thinks about it often needs to work every day on the attention their partner needs outside the bedroom. And that raises the question of how much desire each of you really has.
Chapter 5 — “I Want You to Want Me”
Conflict over desire is normal in marriage. But a different level of desire doesn’t mean a lack of desire. If the type of desire is like a car being in drive, neutral, or reverse, the level of desire is the fuel in the tank. Sometimes a spouse who doesn’t seem to be moving is just in neutral. The fuel is there. It just hasn’t been put to work.
We’re also not as far apart as we think. Both spouses want connection, pleasure, and intimacy. We just go about it differently. One wants a leisurely drive, the other a high-speed chase.
In fact, both spouses often want more sex than they’re getting. When you’re unhappy about it, it’s easy to pout in the corner and assume your spouse is fine. They probably aren’t. And once you both see that, everything changes. Instead of the higher-desire spouse asking, “Why aren’t you having sex with me?” you both ask, “Why aren’t we having sex?” Maybe one of you stays up late cleaning the kitchen, and the other falls asleep first. So you clean the kitchen together and go to bed at the same time. Now you’re on the same team.
The lower-desire spouse rarely feels powerful, but they tend to control how often sex happens. Meanwhile, the higher-desire spouse wishes they had some way to make it happen more. So the authors speak straight to the lower-desire spouse: you hold much of the power in your sex life. Sytsma has seen that once a lower-desire spouse realizes this and leans in, the marriage can become especially playful and rich. And for the higher-desire spouse, your spouse’s lower desire doesn’t mean you aren’t desirable.
We may long for sex, but we don’t “need” it the way we need food, water, or human connection. Research has tried and failed to prove otherwise. It’s a drive God designed, and we’re called to discipline it for good. But that cuts both ways. Choosing not to make sex a priority is no more acceptable than demanding it. When we refuse to work on intimacy, we put selfish wants ahead of our spouse, and that always does damage.
Desire also isn’t fixed. Sleep, exercise, sunlight, and a healthy diet can raise it. Regular sex, or even looking forward to it, raises testosterone, which helps drive desire for many people. Going without makes it drop. So less sex can become a vicious cycle. But choosing to have sex can start a good cycle that keeps itself going.
So get curious and ask each other the basics. How often does each of you want sex? What would fill your tank, and your spouse’s? Then try forty days of a chosen pattern, like once a week or every other day, and see what works. One husband said, “I finally realized: My spouse is choosing me. She doesn’t feel the physical urge as strongly as I do, and she is choosing me anyway! That is radical. It makes me feel loved and desired.” Feeling chosen like that touches something deep, and the next chapter explains why.
Chapter 6 — Sexual Healing
All of us carry insecurities hidden deep inside, and the sharpest ones beg for comfort. Across twenty years of research, Feldhahn has found that the deepest fears of the heart tend to differ between most men and most women.
For most women, the core questions are Am I lovable? Am I beautiful? Am I worth loving for who I am inside? Marrying a great guy doesn’t answer them. They just turn into Does he really love me? Does he think I’m beautiful? That’s why most women long to feel cherished and pursued. Whatever makes her feel that way, even a midday text that says “I love you,” isn’t just nice. It’s powerful, because it speaks right to her deepest insecurity.
For most men, the core question isn’t “Am I lovable?” but “Am I able?” Do I have what it takes? Being a great dad or a famous CEO doesn’t settle it. It just turns into Is she proud of me? Men tend to project confidence, but privately many say it’s a mask. In one survey, 76 percent of men said, “I am not always as confident as I look.” And three in four men said feeling inadequate was far more painful than feeling unloved. If they had to choose, they’d give up feeling loved to feel respected. Most women wouldn’t make that trade. Most men would. That’s why most men long to feel appreciated and believed in. Even “Thank you for cleaning up the kitchen” speaks right to his deepest insecurity.
It isn’t your job to make your spouse feel good about themselves. Each of us has to fight our own battle with insecurity. But as your spouse fights theirs, you’re handing them ammunition, either for confidence or for insecurity.
Sex can also mean different things to each of you. Both want closeness, but the order is often different. Women tend to think, We can do that once you touch my heart. Men tend to think, You touch my heart by doing that. When women are hurt, they tend to pull back sexually. When men are hurt, they tend to pull back emotionally.
So for many women, sex begins in the kitchen. Your attention to her through the day, even over breakfast, sets the stage for her interest at night. Holding her hand or texting “you’re beautiful” answers her “Am I lovable?” question and helps her feel close to you. As one wife said, “If he’s not listening or valuing me during the day, then I don’t want him to put his arms around me at night. That affection feels like a farce.”
For many men, it works the other way: sex is what brings closeness. For your husband, it’s also about feeling that you want him. One wife asked Sytsma, “What is with men and sex? Bad day at work? Sex—he’s fine!” Sytsma told her she’s never responsible for changing him. But she could press the reset button on her husband anytime. If he senses distance during the day, he may reach for you sexually to close it. You may think it’s crazy that he wants sex when you’re at odds, not realizing he’s reaching for you because you’re at odds. When he climaxes with you, a bonding hormone called oxytocin is released in his brain, and he feels close to you again. Seeing all this in your spouse takes a certain kind of attention, and that’s the heart of the next chapter.
Chapter 7 — The Magic Touch
The surprise here is that curiosity and playfulness make sex more erotic and meaningful than perfect technique. Picture three kids walking into a playroom. The first heads straight for the same toys as always. The second is critical of every toy. The third lights up and explores everything, and when something doesn’t work, tries it another way. Which one would you want to be?
Albert Einstein once said, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” Once you really want to learn what makes your spouse tick, curiosity turns out to be a sexual superpower. What matters most to your spouse, in and out of the bedroom? What do they really enjoy, and what do they just put up with?
The research backs this up. If your spouse sees you as curious, you’re both more than three times as likely to be very happy with how often you have sex. Curiosity is also one of the clearest ways to show you care. When people praised their spouse, they often used the word “considerate,” and being considerate takes curiosity. So if your wife doesn’t seem aroused, don’t pull away feeling like a failure. Ask what might work. If your husband seems passive, ask, “What’s up?”
Curiosity also eases anxiety. Sytsma once counseled a couple where the husband had always hoped his wife would try oral sex. “I don’t know how,” she said. “I feel clumsy. And I feel like he’s comparing me to previous partners.” He wasn’t pressuring her, and she wasn’t opposed, just afraid. So Sytsma suggested she trade “I don’t know how” for “I wonder.” Instead of trying to get it right, she could play and explore. She ended up enjoying it once it became about exploring with no expectations.
Curiosity is mostly a mindset that becomes a habit. It starts with admitting you don’t know everything about your spouse. If you need help talking, read a book out loud together. One wife said, “When we finally read a book together, it was like, ‘Now this isn’t personal. We can blame it on the author!’” And one husband said, “Even though I try and fumble about and ask silly questions and try again, I hope that she would give me grace in that effort. There’s mystery to her that I’m not sure I’ll fully understand, but so much more intimacy comes from trying.” And trying starts with how you reach for each other in the first place.
Chapter 8 — Getting Started
The surprise in this chapter is that an easy way to signal interest, and to receive it, builds connection and prevents a lot of pain. When a couple feels frustrated, like “I never know what answer I’m going to get,” they tend to blame someone’s sex drive. But the real issue may be how sex gets started.
It starts with living seductively, which mostly means not letting your worst self come out with your spouse, like being cold in bed over something said at breakfast. You already know how to do this. It sounds funny, but you seduce people at work every day. You don’t demand what you want from your coworkers. So you bring your best self and draw out the best in others. The same skill works at home.
The first skill is sending a signal to create a spark. It can be spoken, like “Wanna get naked?” Or it can be subtle, like taking an evening shower and not rushing to put on pajamas. One husband learned that his wife deeply valued his help with chores. So he flirted with her while doing the dishes, and it gave them both anticipation time, even if sex happened hours later. His wife said, “Instead of foreplay, we call it choreplay.” The second skill is making sure the signal isn’t just sent, but received well.
The third skill is being clear about what you’re sparking. Think of intimate touch in three kinds: cuddling, making out, and sex. Having words for these helps. “I don’t think I have the energy for sex, but I’d love to cuddle.” Sometimes the higher-desire spouse only wants to cuddle, but their partner pulls away, assuming they want sex.
The fourth skill is knowing how to say and hear no. Reaching for your spouse is vulnerable, so it’s easy to hear painful messages in a turndown: You aren’t desirable. I don’t care about you. Almost certainly, none of those is true, but they feel real. So both the one saying no and the one hearing it need to send and receive one message: the timing isn’t right. It still stings, but it’s a world away from You aren’t appealing. It helps most when the person saying no explains why and offers another time. “Oh honey, I’m so sorry. Today was grueling. Can we have a date Thursday after I get back from my shift?” Even with good signals and kind answers, though, some disappointments won’t go away, and the next chapter is about those.
Chapter 9 — Love the One You’re With
The surprise here is that accepting your spouse isn’t everything you wanted is what lets you enjoy what you’ve got. As the authors put it, in the end, all counseling work is grief work. Something about your spouse isn’t what you were hoping for. You have to grieve what isn’t and accept what is before you can move forward.
Each of us is married to an imperfect person. The best partner probably gives about 80 percent of what we’d want. Maybe you pictured sex as playful, but your spouse treats it like an engineering problem. Or maybe you’re in a neurodiverse marriage, and your spouse’s ADHD leaves you feeling seen only in glances. We want the problem fixed. Instead, we have to grieve what we wanted and accept things as they are. The authors lay out four steps.
The first step is realizing that change is up to you. No one can make your spouse change. But if they have to change before you can be okay, you’re trapped by whether they will. So you push, and pushing usually backfires. In the survey, people who hadn’t come to terms with the gap between what they wanted and what they had were 3.5 times more likely to have an unhappy marriage. Those who had come to terms with it were nearly three times more likely to be happy.
The second step is grieving what isn’t the way you wished. That isn’t the same as excusing unhealthy behavior. But to accept who your spouse is, you have to let go of who they aren’t. It’s like losing someone close. You work through a lot before you accept they’re gone. A wife says, “I know he’s ADHD off the charts, but I need him to sit on the couch and just listen.” Or it’s heavier, like a husband’s loss of erections after prostate surgery. If you keep wishing for what you’ll never have, you’ll miss what’s wonderful about the person you’ve got. Accepting who your spouse isn’t lets you see who they are. We do this more easily with our kids. Once we grieve that they’ll never be the athlete we wanted, we can celebrate the artist they’re becoming.
The third step is extending grace. Compare couples giddy with love before their wedding with couples in crisis, and one big difference stands out: grace. In marriage, grace means choosing to see the best in each other despite the real ways you both mess up. You might choose to see your spouse as persistent, a trait you love, instead of stubborn, a trait you don’t.
The fourth step is honoring them. If you don’t grieve, all you see is what your spouse isn’t. It’s like standing an inch from a scratched-up porch column. All you see are the blemishes. Grace is stepping back several yards so you can see the whole house. Honor is looking at that house and realizing it’s beautiful. It means celebrating the 80 percent, and it’s the difference between accepting and tolerating. A higher-desire wife once told Sytsma, “I’ve accepted that having lower desire is just the way my husband is.” He pushed back. “No, you are tolerating it in him. That isn’t acceptance. How long will you be able to tolerate it before you crack under the weight of your frustration and shift to resentment?” Couples who reach real acceptance are more playful in bed and talk about sex more freely. And that points to what sex was designed to be all along.
Chapter 10 — A Higher View
Genesis says that Adam yada his wife, Eve, and she bore a son. The Hebrew word yada is usually translated “knew,” and it means “to know.” It’s easy to treat it as a polite way of putting it, but it’s a powerful choice of words that shows God’s higher design for sex. Sex is about learning each other and fully showing each other your innermost selves. At its fullest, it creates a oneness that often takes years to reach.
For years, scholars taught that the Song of Solomon was only a picture of Christ’s love for his bride. Surely God would never speak of something as base as physical pleasure, right? Except a plain reading shows it’s about both the spirit of the act and a loving couple having sex. Our culture goes the other way and stresses only the body. Sex becomes a sport, all about technique and playing to win.
For sex to be complete and truly great, it has to be incarnate: fully body and fully spirit. If either spouse focuses only on the physical, like bigger and better orgasms with no care for the other’s heart, the deeper meaning starts to tear apart. If either focuses only on the spirit, like “I’d rather never have sex again, I just want to be close,” something essential is missing.
Consider Sam and Jasmine. Sam is the higher-desire spouse and often focuses on the body. When he reaches for Jasmine, she often answers in a way that says, “We can do that after you touch my heart.” She’s asking for the spirit of the act. After Sam takes her on a date and cares for her heart, Jasmine wants to be physical. They stressed different things, but they let each other influence them. They kept sex about both body and spirit.
So be curious and explore each other. Don’t just accept your assumptions. Talk through the ideas in this book together. And enjoy spending the rest of your marriage discovering each other. The journey may not always be easy, but it will be rich and well worth it.