3.8 min readPublished On: April 1, 2024

The Mother Load: The Challenges of Having a Healthy Marriage

When relationship experts talk about the challenges of having a healthy marriage, one thing comes up again and again: that it takes ingenuity and effort to have a spouse who is everything you really need – a friend, emotional support, partner in running a household and a lover.

Sadly, most people decide to give up on one of those roles… and that is usually the lover. It appears that the things that make a good partner who supports their mate emotionally can also take the spice out of the romance.

Romance requires more tension — and even a little uncertainty — to create sexual chemistry, and those often go away when “friendship” and “partnership” exist.

I believe that happens because different moments of the week require different attitudes. Couples need to set aside time for spice. It doesn’t just happen by accident.

Before I give you some tips, I must caution you: Know what you are doing before you try anything too new! Once my husband Joe and I had been married long enough to master friendship and partnership, we began to be intentional about having great sex. (Yes, that’s what I was talking about when I said “spice”).

For instance, I read somewhere that new and fun sensations could be created if a man waxed his entire body. So I bought a wax pot, and, incredibly, Joe agreed to let me wax him.

Warning: What follows is graphic, rated PG-13.

I got Joe to lay up on the bathroom counter after I mixed up enough wax for 10 people. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I started with his privates and put on a strip of wax that was quite a bit more than I needed. Then… I ripped it off with visions of the pleasurable time I was expecting later that day. Well, those visions were replaced by a new vision that I still have trouble erasing from memory — Joe screaming on the bathroom floor where he had fallen. Once the blood was cleaned up, Joe was left with one strip of a clean-shaven area. In the end, I’m sure I rewarded him with some fun, but that was the last time we tried that.

Waxing didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped, but the point is that married couples have to try new things. We were created with all kinds of needs, and, contrary to what some think, sexual intimacy is not just for making babies; it’s for enhancing happiness in a marriage, but the default will almost always be a loss of sexual desire, so keeping it spicy must be intentional.

Here are some things that you can do that (probably) won’t lead to screaming (unless that’s what you’re into):

Plan for it.

Sexual attraction needs to be planned for. That’s a fact of reality and human nature. Imagine you both know that Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays are sex days. From the time you wake up in the morning, the attitudes are different. On these days, his primary role is to be your lover; everything else is secondary. You’ll be thinking about it all day and it’ll pay off at night.

Work on physical fitness.

Not only will you feel more attractive, but you will have better blood flow, which increases sexual sensitivity.

Read a book together about having better married sex.

There are lots of great books about this, and even some great Christian books about having a healthy married sex life. Just make sure you’re both reading it, so you don’t get all hot and bothered when he just wants to go to sleep.

Do something erotic at a time and place you wouldn’t normally think of being spicy.

In the kitchen you are usually just cooking and making school lunches. What if it was also a place where you made an advance? Usually those things only happen at night, but what if it happened at 10 in the morning? The odds of some bedroom fun just went up.

Try something different.

It can be daunting to try new positions or add some element like role play, but that is exactly why it works. The different and slightly scary creates a whole new mood and almost mimics some of the chemistry of first getting to know this person. The routine and normalcy is what takes away sexual tension, so creating some with an uncertain element will bring it back.

The most important thing is simply realizing and accepting that, unlike when you were dating, sexual attraction has to be cultivated when you are also best friends and life partners. There is nothing more natural than that, so go with it and have fun!