SWM 150 – Control, sex and marriage

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I watched a video by author Gary Thomas on his Substack account last month, in which he and his wife Lisa discussed how having a controlling spirit can be devastating to a marriage.  It’s an excellent video, and I highly recommend checking it out – the discussion of how to move away from being a controlling spirit in your marriage was great.  Also, the two of them are just adorable together.

But an interesting thing in the video was that the language used to describe control can get really confusing.  He gave some examples of couples where control was something that damaged their relationship, as well as some stereotypical dynamics in which this often occurs.

Along the way, he couched one of his examples a bit by saying that these are bad examples of control compared to the good example of control that God is, when God gives us a choice, and the choice is basically to give up control and follow God, or keep control and do our own thing.  

It’s not that he did a bad job of describing the difference between the two. It’s hard to separate the two ideas of control easily, and that’s something we haven’t done a good job of in Christianity.  In a later comment, Gary said he didn’t consider those loving examples of “control” but rather as “legitimate function,” which is a bit ambiguous – it doesn’t discuss the governance or restrictive aspect of it.  Only that it’s a proper and necessary thing, it still doesn’t do a great job of explaining why it is that God demands we give up control to Him, which is seen as the most moral thing a person can do, but a husband or wife demanding control of their spouse is incredibly damaging.

Is it simply because God is perfect?  If so, that makes this a very difficult question when doing evangelism because the person you’re trying to teach about God likely doesn’t know or trust that God is perfect.  Yet, you’re suggesting that they give up control of their lives to Him.

For those who teach the concept of eternal suffering in hell, this gets even more complicated because this demand of control can come with a heavy dose of coercion as well – “obey me, or be tortured for an eternity.”  If a spouse said, “Do as I say, or else I’m going to torture you,” we would consider that abusive.

Gary mentioned in passing that even if God forced you to follow Him, be perfect and just as He is, you would still improve, and you’d be a better person.  But in marriage, that still doesn’t qualify as being a good reason.  If I went to my wife and said, “Look, I’m in control now.  You will eat what I say you can eat when I say you can eat it, and if you don’t like that, I’m out the door,” then everyone would consider that out of bounds. It wouldn’t matter if she was trying to lose weight.  It wouldn’t matter if it worked, and she was happy with the results.  The setup would still be considered abusive.  The ends don’t justify the means – we all inherently recoil against the idea. Why? Because it’s a violation of free will.  The choice was removed – or at least leveraged in such a way that it makes it difficult to make a real decision.  You are being driven down a single path.  Whether that path is good or bad doesn’t matter.  It’s the violation of our will that we naturally detest.

After all, if she went to a nutritionist and paid them a bunch of money and they said, “alright, well, I’m going to tell you exactly what to eat and when, and if you don’t do it, then you’ll have lost all your money and gotten nothing in return” – that would be considered fair game.  No one would blink an eye at it.  That’s a standard relationship with a nutritionist, someone who doesn’t love her, and it’s merely transactional, but if it’s a husband doing the same thing, even if he had the same training as a nutritionist, that would be a violation.

And so, of course, the reason for our recoil gives us the answer to what the difference is.  It’s the removal of choice along the entire situation.  We, as humans, are okay with giving up choice – so long as we choose to do it.

And it’s a bit embarrassing that the BDSM community has been talking about this idea of consent and how important it is for so long, and yet we as Christians tend to struggle with the same concepts when I believe it’s a core tenet of our faith.  It is one of the reasons I don’t believe in eternal suffering in hell nor the idea of predestination, as both were taught to me as a child with a Reformed/Calvinist Christian background.  They both violate the idea of consent and as Gary Thomas pointed out in his video – love is not controlling.  

“God proclaims His truth, calls His people to respond, but He doesn’t control us.” – Gary Thomas

I 100% agree with this statement – with that caveat that Gary’s definition of “control” implies without consent.

So, is it just consent that makes things okay?  Our society these days would have you believe it is.  “So long as it’s between two consenting adults” is a phrase often touted as a justification for all sorts of behaviour.  Yet a wife who stays with an abusive husband we would not think is healthy.  Why not?  It’s consenting.  She has chosen to stay.  Sure, some are coercive and actively block attempts to leave, but some simply choose to stay.

So, then consent isn’t enough.  Rather, I think it is a mix of consent and love.  It has requirements on each side.  One side must be willing to give up control, and the other must be willing to act in a way that is loving – at the very least, in the other person’s best interest. While we may not say the nutritionist above is necessarily acting in a loving manner, they have to at least want the best for their clients.  If they were attempting to poison or starve them, this would not be okay, even with consent.

Then if consent and love are the requirements – how far does this extend?  I’ll give two examples from our marriage which I’m sure will open me up to a lot of scrutiny and perhaps criticism, but it’s where we’re at, and these are concepts I’ve been thinking about. 

The first is finances.  My wife hates to deal with money.  It stresses her out; she doesn’t like math much, and she hates feeling anxious about bills, investments, and everything else related to it.  So, in our marriage, I deal with the finances.  I track the accounts, I build the budget and watch it, I choose our investments, and I analyze our portfolio and make our retirement plans.

She is rarely involved except when I adjust the budget, and it affects her. I tell her what I’m doing with our finances, but she’s not terribly interested in giving input.  If there’s a charge or income and I can’t figure out what it’s for and how to categorize it, then I ask her, but by and large, she does not want to be involved in the finances.  She just wants to know that if she goes to the grocery store, the gas station, or wherever else, she can tap her phone, and they’ll let her take the stuff she wants home. 

Now, that’s not to say she isn’t conscientious about our money or how we spend it – she is.  But never has to stress about the larger picture or most of the details.

So much so that a month ago, we had someone help us with a financial review.  They wanted us both to be present, but for every question they asked, Christina would invariably look over at me, including questions about investments under her name.  At one point, they asked about her retirement investments, and she said she had none, being a stay-at-home mother, which I corrected and gave the balance of.

Now, on the other side of the spectrum, I have a brother and sister-in-law who don’t share accounts.  They’ve been married for nearly two decades now, and they still keep their finances separate.  They each pay their part of the bills and then have their own money.  I’m sure they think what I’m doing is domineering, controlling, overbearing, or some other word, but it works for us.  It’s our deal, entered into with both consent and love. 

The other example is sex.  Many years ago, Christina decided she would no longer say no to sex.  Now, that was the ideal she set for herself – it wasn’t my idea.  She chose to give up that control.  Now, the reality is that it took us a long time for both of us to accept that shift.  It was actually harder for me to accept it than her.  But now, nearly a decade later, we’ve slowly evolved this into me completely controlling our sex life, only really taking the final steps of that in the last little while.  When, how, what, how long and more.  That means sometimes we have sex multiple times per day.  Sometimes, it’s for a few hours in a day.  Truth be told, some of this (on top of everything else we have going on) is contributing to why I’ve written less lately. This is a fairly new development, and we are having a lot of fun with it.

And I’m sure someone is going to read this and go, “Yeah, sure, you’re having a lot of fun, but your poor wife…”  But I mean it; WE are having a lot of fun with it.  She has been happier, smiley, affectionate, and more joyful all around than she has ever been before. 

Surrendering control of our sex life seems to have lifted a large burden off of her, and she just gets to enjoy it.  I think it does help that I quite enjoy giving her pleasure (and lots of it) and tend to focus on hers more than mine.

These days, I’m trying to grow into the role of accepting that control as fast as she’s willing to give it up.  A lot of our small conflicts now are her asking why I didn’t ask for more when she could tell I wanted it, but I was trying to be considerate.  She actually now wants me to be more selfish, which I really struggle to do.

I think a big part of it is that we men are trained all our lives to defer to our wives – well before the time we have one.  All of our stories, TV shows, movies, jokes and more tell us that the wife will be in charge, and any husband who thinks otherwise is fooling himself – especially regarding sex.  As I said, it’s been harder for me to deprogram that than it has been for her.  Or perhaps she started sooner than I in the process, and it wasn’t until we hit a certain point that I started having to grow to keep up.

Now, it isn’t all one-sided. Christina is far more interested and knowledgeable about chickens than I am.  She has full control of the chickens.  Which to breed, which to sell, which to cull or butcher, which eggs to eat, which to hatch, and which to feed to the dogs.

And it seems there’s a pattern emerging in our marriage – that whoever has the interest gets the control.  We don’t fight over it, if anything we fight more with ourselves to accept this dynamic of giving and taking control rather than fighting with each other trying to wrestle control.

I don’t know if that comes with age, wisdom, length of marriage, trust, or experience – most likely, all those work together to build a foundation that allows for this because why isn’t this the default?  Why aren’t we taught this?  Now that we’ve reached this stage of our marriage, it seems obvious.  Why would you not let the person with the most interest in something lead it – assuming they can do so in a loving and competent way?

And in some areas of life, these are considered acceptable. The one who has more interest in cooking should probably cook more – it doesn’t mean they have to cook all the time, but take the lead.  

The one who is more interested in a clean house should take the lead there – again, that doesn’t mean they’re responsible for cleaning, but in our marriage, that’s not me.  I clean until Christina’s happy, not until I’m happy, because I’m happy so long as I can move freely around the house – I won’t even notice piles of laundry in the living room waiting to be sorted.  I’m sure some wife will claim it’s “malicious incompetence,” but that only tells me that you have no idea who I am or just how little I notice the things around me.  I’m a terrible multitasker, and that extends to being able to walk towards whatever task I’m doing and not noticing things around me.  Those are two separate things, and I can’t do both.  But the thing I am focused on? That I do very well, thank you.

It’s why, though I like cooking and cook far more than Christina, I only make one-dish meals – because I can’t track two things on the stove.  I have literally burned a boiled egg before because I was trying to watch TV at the same time. That was decades ago, and I learned my lesson.

I used the example of finances – why would you hand over finances to a spouse who is financially illiterate?  It makes no sense.  Give it to the one who likes learning about stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs, knows what an MER is, what the difference between tax-sheltered and tax-deferred investments are, between capital gains and dividends and the tax implications of each.  If that’s neither of you – then get a financial advisor. 

The one interested in fitness and health should be planning outdoor activities. The one interested in homeschooling the kids should lead in that, doing the research of choosing a curriculum and planning what it’s going to look like.

And again, this doesn’t mean that person has to be 100% responsible for it.  Only that they should lead.

So, why don’t we do this with sex?  Why do we default to the one with the least interest in leading that area of marriage?  Why not give control to the one that is going to nurture and build that part of the relationship?  Of course, this still has to follow the two rules above – that control has to be given freely and accepted with love. 

Now, does this work for every marriage?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that the couples where I see the lower-drive spouse giving up more and more control in their sex life to the higher-drive spouse both end up happier.  They have more frequent sex and better sex, and it shows in the rest of their lives. They’re more loving towards each other, they communicate better, they manage conflict better.  Every aspect of their lives improves when they move towards this model.  I see it in my coaching practice and in the wives in the Becoming More Sexually Engaged course.

Here is the catch, though – the lower-drive spouse has to want to do it themselves, of their own accord.  It can’t be coerced out of fear, guilt, or any other sort of manipulation.  If you try, then you’ve now disqualified yourself as a candidate for being in loving control.  It doesn’t mean it will never happen, but you’ve damaged your chances.  

I see this too in both coaching and in our course, particularly with the wives.  If a wife signs up for the course and I find out her husband told her to take it – I immediately offer her money back and warn her that if she feels pressured to take it, it will not work, in fact, it will make things worse.  

I have actually seen wives who didn’t disclose that this was the reason they took the course (I ask at the beginning, but I can’t force them to be truthful), and I find out at the end, and sure enough, all the metrics that we use to gauge the benefits from the course actually invert.  They lose contentment, they lose confidence, and they drop in marital and sexual satisfaction.  In the same cohort where others are growing and seeing a revival in their marriage, these wives who were pushed to join experience the opposite – a hardening of their hearts and the solidifying of the hurtful dynamic in their relationship.  

So, if you’re a higher drive spouse reading this post or listening to the podcast episode and think, “I need my spouse to read or listen to this” – be very careful. I’m not saying don’t send it to them, because some relationships can handle that sort of exchange without it leading to conflict, but for many, it’s going to lead to pressure, guilt, hurt and resentment.  If there’s a good chance of that happening in your marriage, then there are other things to work on first, like trust and communication.

If, on the other hand you’re interested in trying this out, give it a try. If you need help, check out the course or coaching as they can give you a path to follow.

And if you’ve experienced this in your own life, share your experience below in the comments.