The Lustful Marriage

Phil and Vicki met in high school. She was independent, outgoing and upbeat. Phil was aloof, a real mystery to Vicki. She states that she saw his rough image as sexy. During their courtship he was the pursuer, attentive and seductive.

 

At the point Vicki came into therapy the couple had been married for ten years. She said that she turned 180 degrees from the girl she used to be. "I have always tried to be at his side through the troubled times we've been through, even though he is often the cause of our problem. But I've become uptight, easily angered, and feeling isolated since he started his pursuit of online pornography."

 

In the early years they were more sexually compatible. She believes that he desired her and describes their sex life as frequent and passionate. But when she got pregnant, things changed for her, and with the demands of being a mother and housewife she became less sexually available to Phil.

 

"I was given an ultimatum when I was 6 months pregnant that if I did not watch pornographic films to ‘enliven’ our sex life, he would leave me." 

 

Vicki told me that because she felt alone, living in a city over 500 miles from her own family and dependent upon Phil's income, she conceded to the use of pornographic film to arouse Phil when they made love. She didn’t enjoy it, and felt objectified by their use of it.

 

She explained that she began feeling even more isolated a few years later when Phil became a graduate student and began keeping separate hours from her son and her. Instead of a regular 7am to 10pm wake cycle, her husband told her that as a graduate student, he had to stay late at the university for research or writing demands. She distrusted his explanation because she had evidence that he was spending time on porn sites. When she confronted him about the behavior, he denied any wrongdoing, blaming her for his lustful behavior. He even accused her of cheating on him.

 

Due to his jealousy, he restricted her ability to interact in women's clubs or social groups. About four years earlier, Vicki stopped working out but she continued to eat the high calorie meals she and her husband cooked. As a result, she gained 40lbs, for which he denigrated her.

 

Phil did not help at all with any of the housework, claiming he was too busy with his graduate coursework and research. “He doesn't even do the typical husband jobs such as cleaning up the yard, mowing the lawn, and shoveling snow,” she complained. “I do everything and I’m tired every day."

 

"And because I’m tired, and I don't feel sexually irresistible, and because I am upset when he goes online looking at women and posting personal ads, I am a bitch,” she said. “My son only sees me yelling and angry with his father. He is too young to understand, and I protect him from knowing his Dad is a sex addict."

 

Vicki had come to me suffering from depression and seeking therapy as a way out. She wanted help to turn her husband around and create the balanced family she always hoped they would be.

 

"I don't want to be a single mom like my mom was. I don't want my son to grow up not knowing his father,” she said. “But I can't be a sex-slave and I won't be constantly comparing myself to women he finds online or fearing that he's going to leave me for one of them."

 

Phil and Vicki's marriage suffers from the sin of lust.

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Lust, in Catholic teaching, is not the same as sexual desire. Lust is a sexual desire that has overwhelmed a person’s self-discipline and dignity. Lust is the replacement of love with sexual desire. In marriage, lust involves a willingness to put one’s own sexual desires ahead of the call to love one’s spouse by putting their needs ahead of your own.

 

In Dante’s Hell, the second circle is a great whirlwind in which souls are buffeted back and forth by hot, terrible winds. These are the lustful, those who in life hurt themselves and their loved ones by allowing their sexual desires to overcome their self-control. Lust tempts us to pursue the fiery pleasure of momentary passion even at the expense of our relationships. The helplessness of the souls caught within these great winds represents the way they allowed themselves to be carried away by their passions and self-indulgence in life. They are buffeted about helplessly by this tempest, unable to ever quite reach one another, to speak or have companionship. Metaphorically, this is precisely what lust can do in a relationship.

 

The lustful marriage is between two persons whose attachment is almost entirely built around a sexual desire for one another. Couples whose marriages are based around mutual physical desire may seem romantic and passionate, when they are constantly touching, kissing, holding hands.

 

At its best, such marriages are companionable marriages between two people who get along well outside of bed as well as in it. However, such marriages are usually doomed to failure if their only basis is sexual. Inevitably, over time, one member of the couple cools toward the other. It may be press of career pressures or running a household, it may be changes in physical appearance like weight gain or aging, or it may just be a gradual boredom with a body that has become familiar.

 

In many couples, loss of desire stems from an inability of one or both partners to accept love from someone who would love them. This paradox is often rooted in deep, personal problems. People who have been deeply wounded—abused, abandoned, betrayed—may suffer from a hidden lack of self worth that seeks to assuage its loneliness in sex, masquerading as love. But the lover they choose is often an abuser, who will further wound them and add to their self hatred. Even when the lover truly desires them, they frequently turn away, rejecting as unworthy any love that would accept them.

 

When the use of each other's bodies for sexual satisfaction fails for one of the partners, the couple often finds they have little else in common. The rejected spouse may demand sex as a right, scheduling sex nights or setting up reward schedules. Sex provided in these ways usually becomes increasingly unsatisfying, until both partners are ready to abandon the marriage.

 

The essence of the spiritual economy, which makes it so hard, is that there can be no bookkeeping. One lover gives to the other as unstintingly as they can, making no demands and understanding that loving is an end in itself..

 

Lust enters this spiritual economy, interrupting its perfection, at every level. Lust occurs when one spouse starts focusing on reciprocity. Instead of trusting in love, they start keeping account books of how much they’ve given and how much they’ve gotten. It damages the relationship when the spouse airs these resentments and husband and wife enter into arguments about who is doing what for one another and who is getting how much of the other.

 

Sex becomes detached from love when it becomes part of the checks and balances of marriage:

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• “Now that we have kids we need to schedule regular sex nights because I still have strong sexual desires and she doesn’t.”

• “Since I support her, it’s only fair that she have sex with me.”

• “When he starts remembering our anniversary and spontaneously brings me flowers once in awhile, I’ll have sex with him again.”

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When a wife pursues romance by setting up a sex schedule, arranging date nights, and offering sex as a reward for attention, when she trades sex for romance, then she is not being given what she desires: her husband's selfless, self-giving  love expressed by little gifts of time and energy and attentiveness.

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St. Thomas Aquinas gets to the heart of the matter when he says: “the man who is too ardent a lover of his wife acts counter to the good of marriage if he use her indecently, although he be not unfaithful, he may in a sense be called an adulterer.”

 

Lust is not just excessive thoughts of a sexual nature. It is the use of another to fill the holes in our lives through sexual pleasure. In the Greek it is called porneia, which Aristotle defines as “excessive desire for others,” and from which we get our word "pornography."

 

Many people confuse lust with the desire to share sexual intimacy with our spouse, the being that we love, our partner and our friend. But there is no sin involved in feeling sexual desire for our spouse. However, when we are willing to manipulate or exploit our spouse to meet our sexual desires, if we begin to think of them as objects for our physical desire rather than persons whose feelings and desires are as important as our own, we enter into the sin of lust.

 

The problem frequently arises when one member of the couple is filled with a desire to have sex with their partner but the other is not in the mood. If one persists, against their spouse’s objections, then one may reduce their partner into thinking they are nothing more than an object to be used, a cheap lay.

 

There is an irony in the differences of sexual performance for many men and women. In many studies, men will desire to have sex, and become more and more physically aroused during sexual play, whereas for many women arousal must precede sexual play in order for her to desire sexual touch and intercourse. Over time, familiarity may diminish sexual interest, affecting women's performance to a greater degree as it becomes more necessary for the man to stir arousal and passion in order for her to desire sexual contact. In certain circumstances the man is not psychologically or mentally prepared to do this and is hurt and frustrated by his inability to arouse his spouse.

 

One way to understand the spiritual affliction of lust is to look at the behavioral literature on sexual addiction. Sexual addicts tend to have low self-esteem. Sex addiction is their way of dealing with the emptiness, pain and loneliness in their hearts.

 

Both men and women may suffer from sexual addiction, but current data suggests that

most sex addicts are men. Sexually addicted men will be immersed in self absorption and lust, and will usually go to extreme lengths to justify their behaviors to avoid owning up to their responsibility. Some men seek to inspire guilt in their wives, essentially claiming “if you were only giving me more sex I wouldn’t be this way” as a smoke screen. Since the wife did not cause the underlying problems that lead to the sex addiction, she can’t, therefore, fix it.

 

Often, however, wives will buy into this guilt and try to make things better, as Vicki did. "His sex addiction ruined the little bit of self-esteem I had back then, and there wasn't much of it to begin with.  It put me on guard for everything. I was afraid that if I wasn't ‘perfect’ he would leave me or stray. I dieted, focused on exterior beauty – hairstyle, makeup, fitness. I made him my everything, which was wrong, but then he cheated on me with a prostitute and it devastated me."

 

Many women who marry sexual addicts were neglected or abused by their fathers growing up, and they marry men who mirror their fathers emotionally: detached, workaholic, emotionally unavailable.  Some women marry their husbands with a hidden motive of resolving their childhood hurts by “fixing” their husband and creating the “perfect” marriage and home as a way to resolve their emotional wounds. In time these women usually come to realize that they are primarily sexual objects to their sexually addicted husbands--and often not the only one.

 

Women sometimes come to see Dawna complaining that their husbands are pushing them to either "put out" more frequently to keep up with his needs, or because he has turned to self-pleasuring through pornography and masturbation, or because he has begun an affair. Sometimes, as in Vicki’s case, all three occur. Women are often seeking from me things they can do to fix these problems with their husbands. Unfortunately, wives can’t cure their sexually addicted husbands, and because of this they cannot resolve the hurt in their hearts.

 

Spouses also sometimes are troubled when one partner frequently masturbates. While masturbation is not usually physically or psychologically damaging in itself, it can lead to a self-gratification mindset that interferes with healthy sexual relationships. This is especially true when coupled with pornography, which often teaches unhealthy expectations about sex, and contributes to the objectification of sexual partners. Most men--some studies say as many as 95 percent--get hooked on porn in their teen years.  This means that men struggling with their marital sexual relations are often fighting something that's been a lifelong practice. This is no easy task. Finding freedom from sexual addiction is always a process, not a one time event.

 

Think about this fact: in every survey taken, at least 50 percent of the men in the church have a problem with porn or sex addiction. This means that 50 percent of the wives in the church will at some point, when their husband's struggle comes to light, have to deal with the pain of their spouse's adultery.

 

While some women also seek out emotionally detached relationships with multiple anonymous partners or use of pornography, most women who struggle with sex addiction usually look to sex for power or control. They also use sex to seek attention or praise. A need for multiple partners, or an escalating reliance on fantasy, results from an inability to sustain the feelings of power, control or esteem the lover initially provides. Initially, a sex addict may take her sense of self-worth from her partner, using her sexuality to make her partner feel loved, needed and happy. However, sex addicts cannot sustain this. Eventually new lovers--real or fantasized--are needed to continue feeding the addicts’ need for what they take to be proof of their worth.

 

Women and men may exhibit many of the same signs of sex addiction, but women suffer greater social stigma. Men are far less likely to be shamed for having multiple partners or sleeping around, while female sex addicts are often saddled with shame and guilt. This in turn diminishes their sense of self worth and increases their need to pursue validation through sex.

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All studies of sex addiction agree that the sex addict's behavior is not cause by anything their spouse has done, and that nothing the spouse can do will significantly help the sex addict deal with their issues. But it is almost impossible for spouses not to feel guilty or responsible, and to be drawn into the manipulative actions of their spouse.

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Lust is an especially challenging sin for married couples because it is a perversion of a great good. As an expression of love and intimacy, sexual pleasure is one of the gifts of married life, and sexual intimacy is a necessary part of any healthy marriage. It is when sexual desire becomes an obsession, when it eclipses other genuine expressions of love, or when a partner’s sexual demands exceed the capacity of their spouse to share, that sexual desire destroys relationships.

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