When I got married, I adored my husband. I was sure he was the right man for me. He was my best friend. He was funny. He loved and protected me.
But marriage didn’t end up being what I was anticipating.
I wanted my husband to love me for me, and it seemed that when we didn’t make love he got ticked off. And so I started challenging all my assumptions. I figured that Keith really didn’t love me–or at least he didn’t love me enough. And I thought that God was supremely unfair, because he made sex to be so fun for guys, but not for women. And then He made men want it all the time! Not just that, but He said that it was our responsibility to actually meet our husband’s needs. I figured people had been lying to me my whole life. Love wasn’t really possible, because it was conditional on sex. And I got really sad.
I was in that funk, off and on, for about three or four years. And then, gradually, the funk faded. It wasn’t just because sex got better. It wasn’t just because we got better at working out our problems. It was because I decided that I didn’t want to be miserable in my marriage. I wanted to be happy. And it seemed to me that the only way to be happy was to start believing that the good things that I had heard about marriage and sex were true.
Instead of questioning God, I turned the tables and started questioning my own experience.
This is true in many areas of marriage, not just sex. Ultimately, we need to believe that marriage is for our good, that God blesses marriage, that we can be happy, that following God’s precepts does make one more peaceful. But these are matters of belief–of faith.
If you feel that your husband doesn’t love you or talk to you enough, for instance, you can focus on that and become depressed and resentful. Or you can focus on God’s command to love and respect your husband, and to find your peace in God. And when we start to do that, often our marriage changes. When you start to act out love, the feelings often return.
The turning point in many marriages comes when a person decides to listen to God and believe.
In other words, and this is so important:
The success of your marriage depends far more on what you believe about God than on how you feel about each other. (click to tweet this!)
When you believe that God wants the best for you; when you believe that God created sex to be physically wonderful and spiritually intimate; when you believe that God will always be enough for you, even if you feel lonely in your marriage, then things get better.
The converse is also true:
Often the reason that we struggle in marriage is not because there is something wrong with our spouse, but because we don’t actually believe God’s promises.
Now obviously there are exceptions to this. If your spouse is abusive, or is having an affair, or is addicted to pornography, simply believing “God loves marriage, and if I cling to that these problems will disappear” is not going to help–although believing that God can give you strength and can be the source of your ultimate peace can help you take the right steps and seek the right counsel on what you should do.
But with many marriage problems, the issue is one of attitude far more than it is anything else.
You’re believing things about your spouse, about sex, about marriage that aren’t true. When you can get your attitude in check, often the marriage starts to improve.
Let’s take sex, for example. I have always felt uncomfortable reading some marriage books, and especially some popular ones, that say something like, “to keep him from straying, you just need to make love a lot”, and “you are responsible to meet his needs. Your body belongs to him.” Are these things true? Yes. But I think the authors are often misdiagnosing the problem. When a woman is truly hurting, and feels that sex is dirty, or it’s not pleasurable, or believes it’s all for him, then telling her “God says you have to make love all the time” isn’t a message that is going to help her have a rich sex life. It may be a message that makes her “do it” more often, but she’ll likely still trapped in the same hopeless attitude, and grow even more resentful. And her husband will feel like she’s just placating him, not that she actually wants him.
I think there’s another road–the one that worked for me. And it challenges you to this:
Do you really believe in God’s goodness? Do you really believe that what God created is good? Do you believe that God intends you for pleasure, intends you to experience deep love and intimacy? He said He did, and it’s now up to you to either believe Him, or to reject Him.
When we frame it into an issue of faith in God, it takes on a new meaning. We’re looking at the problem with the attitude, not a problem with the action.
Actions flow out of attitudes, and if our attitudes aren’t in line with what God said, our actions won’t conform, either.
Yesterday, in church, our pastor was talking about The Battlefield of the Mind, and reminding us of 2 Corinthians 10:5, which says:
We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
When it comes to marriage, your ultimate guide shouldn’t be your experience. It should be what God says.
I’m not saying that your husband is perfect. No one is. The question is, do you want to focus on the negative, or do you want to focus on the positive? Of course, confronting is certainly part of a healthy marriage. But confronting is about making the marriage stronger, not tearing down another person. It focuses first on God’s aim for your marriage, which is an intimate connection.
Success in marriage is far more common when you start aiming for that and believing that.
When you start despairing about your marriage, can you take that thought, hold it up to God, and ask, “what’s your perspective here? What are the promises you have given me?” When you start having really ugly thoughts about sex, can you take those, and hold them up to God, and say, “what do you say about sex? What do you say about whether it’s good or not?”
Sometimes God’s promises don’t seem real because we haven’t experienced them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. It just means that often we CAN’T experience them until we first BELIEVE them. Marriage success is a matter of faith.
I understand that many of you are lonely. I understand that many of you are resentful, and desperate, and angry. I understand that for many of you, your marriage isn’t going well right now. When I wrote The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, I tried to write it thinking about women just like you. Many of you are really hurting, and you don’t want to be just told “you’re sinning”. You want to be told that there is hope that things can get better, and that God wants beauty for you, because He does.
So that’s what I did. I wrote a book that says, “God has something so amazing for you. You may not see how you’re going to get there, but believe it, walk in it, and then it will come.” But it’s a matter of faith.
This week, when you start to feel down, or resentful, or bitter, take those thoughts captive. Look at them, and ask, “what is God’s truth here?” Then act on His truth, not on your feelings. I truly believe that that is the key to marriages turning around.
Sheila Wray Gregoire has been married for 25 years and happily married for 20! She loves traveling around North America with her hubby in their RV, giving her signature "Girl Talk" about sex and marriage. And she's written 8 books. About sex and marriage. See a theme here? Plus she knits. Even in line at the grocery store.
This article is so rich and full of truth and encouragement. I love how you said not to trust on our own experiences, but on what God has promised us. Thank you!
SO true! Our home pastor at Antioch Community Church in Waco, TX always says, “Let God be true and every man a liar.” If God said it, we stand by it, even when it doesn’t line up with our experiences, etc. You explained this beautifully! Thanks!
This is so true. This is an incredibly hard but important shift in attitude and thought process that we all need to make. And it is one that will revolutionize our lives and our marriages if we do.
I think this is the best and most important post you have ever written! When we start truly believing God’s promises and who we are in Christ, our lives change! We are new creatures in Christ. We now walk in newness of life and are called saints. The battlefield is in the mind. We can do ALL things through Christ who strengthens us, including loving our husbands and enjoying sex.
Thanks, Lori! I appreciate that.
This is very true and marriage is a three way cord . Marriage is from God, He is the third part of the three way cord. Connecting to Him will always give you the best results. Putting Him first will always give you the answers you need in every marriage challenge you meet. We just have to remember that marriage is first about loving, obeying, praising, worshiping our Father. And by doing so we will reach everything we desire from our wife/husband.
Thank you for this post. I recently came to a similar realization… that I could complain about my marriage and how it wasn’t what I expected, or that I could change my own attitude and be more positive about the wonderful guy I married and what we do that does work. We’ve been through some tough times together, but we’re still together. 🙂 I think it’s also okay to realize that marriages have ups and downs, or different seasons (as Gary Chapman says), and that the season will change – especially if your attitude changes. Thanks for the reminder to focus on God and his promises for our marriages. 🙂
SO TRUE. And just not just for sex, but for the whole of marriage, and the whole of life. My mom was able to turn her entire life around simply by “renewing her mind” and training herself to dwell on God’s truth instead of all the negative crap she had built up in her head over several years. Long story. But what a testimony. It didn’t happen overnight – there were times when she was feeling so miserable and she would just mutter the same scripture over and over and over again under her breath for long periods of time. But she never stopped believing and God made good on His promises!
That’s awesome, Melissa! And it brings to mind something else I should have mentioned–the importance of memorizing Scripture. I’ve actually got a list of the 50 best Bible verses to memorize, because you have to start somewhere! When we fill our minds with truth, it’s easier to keep the right attitude, like your mom figured out.
Excellent post. We all need to step out in faith that God can do amazing things in our lives and believe that His grace will cover everything we do.
I think that another reason above just our own unmet expectations is our tendency to compare our spouse and our marriage to what others have rather than seeking God about our own personal lives.
Thanks for sharing!
Megan
I agree with you on this. Actually, one evening not that long ago, we were talking about just that. Not sex, but choosing to focus on positive instead of negative(which is not the same as ignoring negative, as some people might think). Our young daughter was playing close by and later that night, she sang a song that she made up called, “Think about Happy Things” . When something didn’t go her way that night, she stayed calm and told me that she was going to think about happy things instead of being angry that she had been told no. Staying positive has helped us not just in our relationship, but in our relationship with our child.
One night not too long ago, on the way home from work, I heard the song on the radio, “You don’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find, you get what you need.” That combined with the “Sacred Marriage” idea, that marriage is more about making you holy than about making you happy – it resonates so much with me. I would never dream of wanting anyone other than my husband, but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to live with him all the time. Actually, most of the time it’s pretty difficult. He’s severely depressed, he ignores me, he refuses to talk to me, he refuses to spend time with me, he rarely has sex with me. I know this is because of his depression, but just because it’s understandable doesn’t mean it’s easy to deal with! It hurts. I freak out sometimes when he ignores me or doesn’t want anything to do with me. But being with him for the past nine years has changed me so much – for the better. I am much more understanding, and much less judgmental. I support and encourage him always. I love him strongly no matter what. I seek to please God with a gentle and quiet spirit, and to bless my husband with the same. Maybe not everything is exactly the way I want it, but it has matured me. It has forced me to grow up, and it has made me realize the entirety, fullness, and reality of what love really is.
Jen, that’s beautiful. It’s wonderful how you can see the good that God is bringing out of your situation, even if the situation itself is not good. We’ll keep praying for you!
Thank you! 🙂 You’ve been a great encouragement to me, Sheila.
And I’m not easy to live with either! I have lots of….quirks, to put it nicely. He has learned to deal with my eccentricities lovingly, gently, and with great understanding. He loves me no matter what. I am blessed to have him in my life.
Hello Shiela, I am sorry to hear that. I also believe that marital success is a matter of attitude, I hope and I know that you are okay now. I will pray for you too.
Why is it that everything I read on every page of your blog touches my life somewhere in the past or the current? I adore your words and appreciate that you don’t take a back seat on these hard issues that women deal with. God has truly blessed you with a gracious way to handle it. Thanks bunches!
I started reading this thinking that I really need to get my wife to read this. But, as I read I realized the truths you put here are not just for women, but also men. As I read this excellent article, I just kept seeing so much of our marriage in your words, and realized I have to take control of my own attitude, and let God take care of my wife’s.
Thank you so much for sharing this.
You’re so welcome, Brad! Glad I could be an encouragement.
Brad,
Your comment reminded me of years ago when I would sit in church and smugly sit and think to myself how my husband needed to hear the message, and he needed to hear another message. It got to be so bad that I was not hearing the message directed to me. That message was how arrogant I was being and thinking I didn’t[t need to hear what was being said. Things changed when I believe the Lord showed me my arrogance, in a very humbling way. There is nothing quite like being reprimanded by the Lord. That was when I changed my attitude, and started to listen for my own benefit.
Your last sentence is very correct, I needed to change my attitude and let God take care of my husband’s.
This has really touched me. Because of my anxiety, I used to rely so heavily on what I was feeling anxious about, that the anxiety became my truth. Its only now – in the past couple of months – I am learning that my feelings aren’t always the truth. There is a foundation or a standard that goes beyond what I think or feel – and that is God’s word. I hope and pray for the strength that in my most anxious of moments, I will be able to rely on God’s word and His truth.
As a newly wed, I know I’ve been working on learning to appreciate and respect my husband in everything. He is a wonderful man, and he inspires me to be a better person, so it’s funny when I focus on the little things instead of being thankful for all the amazing things that God has blessed me with, in this one person.
Thank you for the reminder 🙂
This is a very timely message. I have ( just yesterday) told my self things like this.. And determined to dwell on the positive God helping me, to love even when i think my expectations are not met,and to always remind myself i also am not perfect.
I´ll bookmark this page and read it as often as possible as a reminder. Thanks and God bless you.