Topics include:
Wife’s love dependent on mood
Why don’t you direct people to God?
Can’t seem to manage other positions
Wife rejects exploration and being seen
Nervous about sex outdoors
Crossdressing rehash
Recently, I’ve noticed a question popping up all over the place. It’s come up in our supporter forum, coaching sessions, emails, comments in our latest survey, and more. This question points to a fundamental tension in many marriages – at the root of it is a self-centric desire. The desire for our spouse to serve our own needs and expectations. Whether it’s about sex or more subtle emotional needs, this recurring question often revolves around a common theme: a wish for partners to be more like ourselves.
For men, this question frequently focuses on sexual matters. Some men wonder why their spouses don’t engage in sex as often as they would like or why they don’t fulfill certain specific desires. On the other hand, when women voice similar concerns, the issues are often more nuanced. Many women express frustration with their partner’s inability to intuitively understand their needs without explicit communication.
And, of course, in some marriages, those dynamics are reversed.
Both scenarios boil down to a deeper, more universal issue: the tendency to project our own needs and expectations onto our spouses, often without fully considering their unique perspectives and experiences.
In this post, we’ll delve into why this tendency is problematic and how understanding our partner’s individual differences can relieve this frustration.
During July and a bit of August, we ran a survey about people’s BDSM experiences. Depending on who you ask, it was either extensive or just dipping our toes into the topic. In the end, we received over 1,000 complete responses from a wide range of couples, some for whom BDSM is part of their daily life, others who were engaging in BDSM activities didn’t think what they were doing qualified, others who wished they were doing such things but didn’t know how to start, and those who thought it was disgusting that I even considered asking questions about such a topic.
or the last three weeks, I’ve spent evenings and weekends digging through the data, coding it, doing pivot tables, building charts, running correlation formulas, and more, trying to get what I can out of it. It’s aptly called data mining because often it feels like sifting through a lot of rocks and dirt just to try and find a nugget of something valuable contained.
Today, I’m going to share what I found.
Last week, Gary Thomas posted an article on his substack on the topic of discipline vs. punishment—not taking a stance but rather offering it up as a controversial conversation starter. Reading it made me curious about something—does your view of hell change your parenting approach? After all, if God is our example, and you believe that hell is eternal punishment, does that then lend to a more heavy-handed approach to parenting versus someone who believes that hell is an act of mercy?
I posted that question in our forum, and it then led to a discussion on using physical punishment on children. I spent a fair bit of time in the last week or two writing on that thread, and so I thought I’d repurpose it here for those who might be curious about how we raised our children.
We, Christina and I, don’t believe hell is eternal torture. We don’t believe such a view is in keeping with the Bible. We grew up in a denomination that taught it was, and it was one of the reasons we left because the doctrine couldn’t stand up to either biblical scrutiny or logic as we saw it. If you want to know why and/or argue that stance, I fully welcome you to read the post What happens when you die? That’s not the point of this post.
The point of this post is to share why we don’t spank our children, and now that my children are growing up into adults, what the outcome of such a choice has been.
Topics Include:
Wife thinks she has to be mean to our children
Golden showers (again)
Wife can’t decide if she loves me or not
Just because you’re experienced, doesn’t mean you’re qualified
Most kids, when growing up, enter a picky stage at some point. Some when they’re toddlers, some when they’re young children, some when they become teenagers. When our 3rd or 4th kid entered this phase, everyone knew the response when they didn’t want to eat something new that we’d made. “It’s good to try new things.” They didn’t have to eat it all but had to try it—a decent try, not a touch to the tongue followed by an exaggerated exclamation of disgust.
Teaching children to at least give something new a fair shot, I think, has applications later on in life as well. I often talk to husbands and wives whose spouses simply will not try anything new in the bedroom. One will bring up an idea, and it’s immediately shot down by the “picky” spouse—the one who is perfectly happy with the flavour of vanilla every night.
Today, I want to talk about why I think it’s good to try new things – not only when it comes to food, but also in the bedroom – or outside of the bedroom, depending on how much privacy you have. We’re going to talk about the interplay between dopamine, controlled risk-taking, adventure and trust in marriages as it pertains to sex and more.
Topics include:
How often should a healthy man need sex?
Clitoral piercing
How do we start talking about sex without fighting?
Is it good to masturbate to stay in a sexless marriage?
Professional nude photos with a male photographer
Newly married wife only interested in the same sexual routine
Becoming a Christian didn’t fix my same-sex attraction
Nude beaches
How to get better at rejection
Struggling with orgasm
I often give beginner homework to my coaching clients. A few of them will likely read this and think, “He was talking about me.” You’re not wrong, but you’re also not alone.
I give it out frequently because it helps combat some fundamental problems I see in many marriages: resentment, unmet expectations, and continued disappointment. Whatever caused the resentment doesn’t matter. If you want to improve the marriage, you must get rid of that attitude first. Resentment leads to contempt, and once you hit that point, the marriage is on life support, and it becomes challenging to resurrect.
Some come to coaching and realize that they have this issue. They recognize that resentment is an attitude, and attitudes can be changed. They know they can fix it; they just don’t know how or need some support, some accountability, or encouragement to keep up the hard work of changing that mindset.
And it is hard work. Reversing that mindset takes time, effort, and consistently following the plan we co-create. There are ups and downs, backslides, and sidetracks. But if they put in the work, then it does happen. Then the fun begins because now we can make some real progress.
Others come to coaching convinced their spouse is the issue and work hard to rationalize and justify their attitude toward them. They want me to change their spouse so that they can be happy. Sometimes, they have one foot out the door already, and this is the last-ditch effort to “save the marriage,” by which they mean that if I don’t fix their spouse, they will divorce them.
Whatever type they are, they get the same homework. It’s not only the first step to reversing the mindset but also a test to see if they’re coachable.
Answering a question from a reader regarding getting breast augmentation due to a lack of self confidence.
Last week, I shared a list of ideas our Couple’s Night group had that helped build a resilient marriage. At the end of the call, we still had some time and started discussing fighting more effectively. Again, the group came up with some excellent ideas I want to share today.
Because fights will happen, I might even say they should happen. When I come across a couple that doesn’t fight in any way – that’s a red flag. It means one or both don’t feel safe in the marriage. They aren’t able to express their views and opinions.
Because if you put two people together for long enough, they will eventually find something to disagree about.
Ideally, a fight won’t involve yelling, screaming, hitting, throwing, or anything else like that, but it’s okay to quarrel.
So, today, we will discuss how to fight more effectively in your marriage so that your arguments can be a source of growth instead of damage.
On the first Tuesday of every month, Chris from TheLionWithin.us and I co-host “Couple’s Night.” Couples from our communities get together to talk about marriage. We discuss struggles, share ideas, tips, and a lot of funny stories. It’s an absolute blast.
This Tuesday, we got together and talked about resiliency in marriage. There were about six couples in the Zoom call, and I thought they all had a lot of wisdom to share, so I tried to quickly take some notes and thought I’d relay them to you.
Because marriages need resiliency, we’re going to face struggles. They might be external, like events happening with your job, your family, your friends, and more. They might be internal, such as the type of struggles two individuals face when you put them together for long periods of time for years on end.
Challenges are normal, but we need to learn how to face them and not only survive them but, ideally, thrive and grow through them.
So, here are the six things our small group came up with.