Episodes

A wife married over twenty years wrote in. Their sex life is better than it has ever been, they are both devout and involved at church, and her husband keeps introducing things she isn't sure about: a nude beach, explicit music, explicit movies, and a clothing-optional resort where they had sex beside another couple and she kissed and touched the other wife. Now he wants to book a cruise with that couple. His argument every time is the same: we aren't lusting and we aren't having sex with anyone...

A reader wrote in with a blunt question: when a husband says he is the one who wants sex less, can you legitimately suspect he is covering for a porn habit? Check out the blog post here for the charts, the sources and the full argument. I have been answering a version of this for years, and I have generally said that a quarter to a third of marriages have the wife as the higher-drive spouse. This time I went and checked it against our own survey archive rather than repeating it. The number hold...

A couple describes their latest fight. Maybe it's how the dishwasher gets loaded, or what time the kids should be in bed, or whether you deal with a problem the moment it comes up or sleep on it first. The details change, but two things are always true: both of them are frustrated, and both of them are certain they are right. Check out the blog post here for more details and links. This episode came out of the last one. I said in passing during the leadership episode that most marital conflict ...

I saw a video of a wife listing the things that would immediately end her marriage, and the top item on her list was her husband finding God and joining a patriarchal religion. Not a discussion. An instant divorce. Check out the blog post here for more details and links. And I wish I could say I was surprised, but headship has earned its bad reputation, usually from Christians who read a verse or two and build a whole theology out of it. So in this episode I walk through what I think biblical l...

A husband writes in: seventeen years married, two kids, sex about twice a week, and a marriage he describes as "pretty darn good." But his wife will not try anything beyond the basics, and after years of asking he still does not know why she says no. Check out the blog post here for more details and links. Here is the thing: she did tell him why. Four times. He wrote all four answers down in his own letter and heard them as one refusal. They are not one refusal. "I don't want that," "it doesn't...

Scroll social media for five minutes and you will find her: the exhausted wife explaining why she has nothing left for her husband at the end of the day. The world calls it "the mental load," and it is real. But splitting the chores 50/50 does not actually lift it, and this episode is about why. Check out the blog post here for more details and links. The mental load is not a chore problem, it is a leadership problem. When a wife says she feels like she has "another child to manage, not a partn...

At our last Couple's Night I mentioned something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria almost in passing, and afterward one of the guys reached out. He had never heard the term before, and it struck a chord, because he recognized himself in it right away. "I struggle with rejection," he told me, "even when I haven't actually been rejected." Check out the blog post here for more details and links. RSD is not ordinary disappointment when someone turns you down. The word "dysphoria" comes from a Gr...

A deep dive into one of the most consistent findings from our survey of over 1,000 married Christians: couples who can talk openly about sex report dramatically higher satisfaction than those who can't. Check out the show notes here for more details and links. In this episode, we cover: Why so many couples stay silent about what they actually want in bed The communication gap: satisfaction scores by comfort level across manual sex, oral sex, and mutual masturbation Who is actually talking — ...

Solo Masturbation - When You Remove the Other Person From Sex. Check out the show notes here for more details and links. Today we’re continuing with our Sex as Worship series, and in this post, we’re going to be talking about masturbation, which is a highly contested argument in Christianity. Is it okay, is it sinful, it is helpful or harmful? And before I say anything else, I want to share that I didn’t always believe the viewpoint I’m going to share. Also, I don’t really want to talk about i...

Why Sex Gets Derailed Right Before It Starts. Check out the show notes here for more details and links. From time to time I get questions from our anonymous Have A Question page. I received one a bit ago that I thought would be good to answer in its own post because this is a feeling that’s common to a lot of marriages. I’ve heard this same complaint, with very minor variations, from many husbands and some wives. And like this person, if you don’t know what’s going on, it can lead to some bad ...

SWM — Sex as Worship: Pornography, Erotica and AI Companions. Check out the blog post here for more details and links. Pornography and erotica have become ubiquitous and socially normalized, and AI “companions” are increasingly marketed as hyper-sexual substitutes. These offer the appeal of intimacy without risk—no rejection, responsibility or vulnerability—yet they train desire away from real people and covenant relationships. God designed intimacy for embodied, vulnerable union within marria...

SWM 155 - Hookup Culture - When You Take Relationship Out of Sex. Check out the blog post here for more details and links. We live in a world that has learned to separate what God never divided. Hookup culture is the next stage of sex stripped of meaning - where bodies meet, but no one truly connects. I’m continuing this series exploring how, when we remove aspects of God’s intent for sex, we end up with all the examples of sexual immorality we see in our world. Last time, I tackled what rem...

SWM 154 - Sex before marriage - when you remove covenant from intimacy. Check out the blog post here for more details and links. In my last episode, I talked about how sex is an act of worship because having sex, the way God intended, gives worth to Him. It honours what He created by using it as He intended. However, our society is doing its best to invert that by taking away elements of God’s plan so as to distort sex. To make it not something that’s worship and creative, but rather destructi...

SWM 153 - Sex as an act of worship. Check out the blog post here for more details and links. The other night, after my wife and I had sex, we were lying there in that sweaty, happy pile you end up in when the oxytocin kicks in. As I often do, I asked her what she was thinking about. She’ll tell you I probably ask that too often, because I’m endlessly curious about what’s going on in her head. Her answer surprised me. She said, “Sex is an act of worship.” I asked her to explain, and she said, ...

June - August 2025 Questions from our anonymous Have A Question page. Check out the show notes here for more details and links. In this episode, we are tackling the subjects: My wife’s nightclothes are killing my attraction Is using a vibrator wrong? How do I get my husband to initiate sex? Need something to spice up our sex life How does scent factor into spouse selection Recovery after pregnancy Is using classical conditioning on your spouse wrong? How do I keep myself from becoming d...

AQ - Oral Sex Norms, Fantasy Guilt & Rekindling Passion. Check out the show notes here for more details and links. We haven’t done a round up of our anonymous questions for a while. These are actually questions going all the way back to January of this year. For those who are new, these questions come in from our anonymous Have A Question page. They have no contact information, and so we only get whatever they put in the text box as we can’t reach out to get more context. I posted the questions...

SWM 150 - Control, sex and marriage. Check out the blog post here for more details and links. Last month, I watched a great video by Gary Thomas and his wife Lisa on how a controlling spirit can harm a marriage. It got me thinking: In Christian circles, we often struggle to define the difference between healthy leadership and damaging control—both in marriage and in our relationship with God. Why is it that surrendering to God is seen as good, but demanding control from a spouse is harmful? Th...

My daughter's speech - Transgenderism is a lie. Check out the show notes here for more details and links. Today we're going to do something a little bit different. For those who have been listening for more than a year, you know that my kids are in 4H and every year they have to deliver a speech. For the last few years, my eldest daughter has been delivering speeches about transgenderism based on her research and her own personal experiences. Now, these are difficult topics, and in a lot of cas...

SWM 148 - 14 red flags your marriage is drifting towards divorce, affairs or lifelong unhappiness. Check out the blog post here for more details and links. Have you noticed how quickly disagreements turn into demonization these days? Whether it’s politics, religion, or even marriage, we’ve gotten stuck in a cycle of contempt—where the ‘other side’ isn’t just wrong, they’re evil. And it’s destroying relationships. I see this in my marriage coaching practice all the time: spouses who’ve spent ye...

SWM 147 - How do you know if you're sexually compatible? Check out the blog post here for more details and links. The most common argument I hear for premarital sex is, "You need to know if you're sexually compatible before getting married. Otherwise, you might end up stuck in a sexless, unfulfilling relationship." And it sounds like sound reasoning. We test-drive cars before buying them. We have probation periods for people we hire at work. We sample foods before purchasing them. Shouldn't se...

SWM 146 - Legalistic vs Loving Approach to Marriage - Shifting from Rules to Relationship. Check out the blog post here for more details and links. In my work as a marriage coach, I often see couples transition from one type of marriage to another. There’s no clear line between these states, no set of rules that definitively places someone in one category or the other. Yet, by observing how they handle conflict, express themselves, and interact in small ways, you can often tell which state thei...

AQ - Handjobs, sex on a full stomach, routines, sex tapes and more. Check out the show notes here for more details and links. Welcome to the new year. I took a bit of a hiatus in December due to travel, sickness, holidays and, honestly, just feeling a bit burnt out. But we’re getting back on our schedules, and I thought we’d kick it off with catching up on our Anonymous Questions. These are questions that have been submitted over the last few months to our anonymous Have A Question page. They c...

SWM 144 - Why wives have a complicated relationship with sex and what to do about it. Check out the blog post here for more details and links. One of our supporters posted a question in our forum which led to a bit of a discussion on what men perceive as sexy, and it shook the questioner a bit, because it was radically different from what she had been led to believe her whole life. This led into a larger discussion about why women tend to have more hangups about sex than men do. I shared my th...

Redefining sex - How to have a thriving sex life despite sexual dysfunction. Check out the show notes here for more details and links. I feel like I have some explaining to do. A couple of weeks ago, I shared that lately, Christina and I have started having sex a lot more than usual. We had more sexual encounters last month than there were days in the month. We’re at about 30 for this month already. This has led to some questions by some people. I wrote a large thread in our supporter’s forum ...