Christianity and the Sexless Marriage

Below is the letter I sent:

Dear Church Leaders,

Consider this an open letter free to be shared and spread to as many people as possible however you see fit. I have attended several churches throughout my life but to keep my privacy, I sent this anonymously to all of them and several others. This is very painful for me to talk about but also too important for me to say nothing. If this message describes the way things are in your church then I sincerely hope you learn something. If your church has already addressed my concerns then I thank you and pray you continue. I wanted to share my experiences as a warning to other currently engaged and future married couples. It's too late to change the path I'm on but I beg you not to let my story become someone else's.

Throughout my youth, the only message about sex I ever heard from church (which was consistently seconded by my churchgoing family members) was: don't do it. Nobody in the church ever had anything​ to say about it other than to uncomfortably change the subject leading me to believe that I shouldn't even talk about it at all until marriage. Nobody, our pastor included, ever said anything to us about this before the wedding so when I was talking about marriage with my then soon to be bride, I didn't know that sex was a discussion that I should have brought up. I just assumed that once the wedding rings were on, everything would be fine because God would reward us for following the rules and waiting until marriage. I was a fool because I waited for nothing. It turns out that my wife doesn't like or care about physical intimacy very much and she never has. She was raised to believe that sex was an optional part of marriage and it was the higher drive spouse's responsibility to suppress his/her urges for as long as necessary until the lower drive spouse was in the mood, if he or she ever is at all. My wife has almost no interest and so I'm just supposed to accept her decision to limit our frequency to a few times each year. We are barely into our thirties. We never even had a “newlywed phase” and our wedding night and honeymoon were depressingly uneventful and I was crushed. I was promised monogamy but what I got was being forced into a lifetime of near celibacy “for as long as we both shall live, till death do us part.” I no longer initiate or ask for intimacy anymore. The repeated rejection is too painful to handle so I just gave up and now I wait for her to initiate. That doesn’t happen very often but it is easier not to ask than to feel continually rejected by the one person in the world who promised to love, honor and cherish you. It is the loneliest and most depressing feeling I have ever felt and I find it preferable to just avoid feeling anything at all. Alcohol makes this goal a little easier.

I spent years of our marriage angry at her for constantly refusing me and for marrying me without desiring me, and most of those years I was also angry at God for giving me a lifetime of disappointment as my reward for maintaining my purity for a spouse who would not want or care about the gift I had saved for her. After nearly a decade of marriage, I don't blame her or God as much anymore. I blame you in the church leadership. My wife has almost no feelings of physical desire and she has always been this way but when I was growing up, the church's​ aversion to open discussion about sexuality or desire made me think that even talking about such things before marriage was somehow taboo. The church avoided talking about sex because they were afraid our young minds would be exposed to temptation and our lack of willpower would lead us to sin. They believed that the temptation was inherently more powerful than the truth, willpower and God’s power to protect us from that which we cannot handle alone. People learn to resist temptation by being tempted and being taught how to resist, not by being kept ignorant and sheltered from it entirely. Would you rather have that learning happen in the safety of the church with the support of a Christian community or out in the secular world with no Godly message to refute the world's message and possibly lifelong consequences for mistakes? Now because of the church's failure to educate my generation, my wife and I get to spend a miserable lifetime together with me feeling lonely, neglected, deprived, frustrated, and angry, and her feeling guilty for not wanting to be intimate, inadequate as a wife, and used during the few times her hormones allow her guilt to overcome her avoidance. Our marriage is failing and lack of church leadership is why. If we had felt welcome to openly discuss these matters honestly before marriage, we would not have gotten married at all. We are not right for each other and never were but we didn't know any better because nobody would have the uncomfortable conversations and tell us the whole story. We don't have children and likely never will unless my wife miraculously changes her entire personality and suddenly decides she desires me and wants to start working on our intimate life. Your absence of teaching on this issue when I was younger has left me with an empty and unfulfilling life. I am made to feel like a disgusting perverted animal simply because I want to share with my wife the only thing that I can't legitimately share with anyone else. I can fulfill all the other needs in my life outside of marriage except this one.

Divorce and suicide are both sins so that leaves me with only one option left. I wait for the end of my life and hope to have a car accident, heart attack, or some other fast and aggressive terminal illness to grant me early release and mercifully take a few years off my life sentence. I never realized the significance on my wedding day that the words “till death do us part” would become a goal. Until that wonderful day finally comes though, I pray daily for God to take away my desire for intimacy with my wife so that I can at least stop wanting what I can't have, but so far He has never answered my prayers. We are roommates and financial partners but that is all now. I honor our marriage contract and fulfill my duties to be a provider, maintain our home, do a share of the household chores, and remain “faithful” to her but what was once effortless and done joyously is now begrudgingly tolerated and requires a constant struggle against daily temptations. She contributes​ to the household income, helps organize and pay bills, does a share of the household chores, on rare occasions comes to me to satisfy her physical needs and does her part in maintaining our public facade of being happily married but it is all for show. Because of the lack of physical intimacy between us, our emotional connection has nearly died. We are still mostly civil and often friendly and care enough about each other not to be intentionally hurtful but there is little passion or romance and there probably never will be much. What I felt before marriage was an amazing anticipation of having a close, intimate connection with the woman I was to marry. Those expectations were never realized and I feel like the victim of a shady salesman’s bait and switch scheme (my church leaders being the shady salesmen).

The church has failed us. What is done cannot be undone. All I ask is that you don't let this happen to anyone else. Have the awkward talks with young people to show them the right message that sexual intimacy is a beautiful and necessary part of marriage that strengthens the bond and builds up both people. Stop hiding Song of Songs from the teenagers because they're​ going to read it anyway and it has to be a better message than whatever garbage is out in the secular world. They need to hear more than just the negative message about what not to do. They need to hear about what they GET to do within the bonds of marriage. Force engaged couples to have the frank and open adult discussions and clergy: Refuse to marry them if they don't or won't. Talk about 1 Corinthians 7 and make sure that both people understand what it means before going through with the wedding. Make sure that both are aware of all the parts of a marriage and make sure that they either agree on what their marriage will be like or knowingly and fully accept a mutual compromise with each other. Don't let people get married without having all the information and don’t allow people who feel no desires to marry unless they are willing and eager to do whatever it takes to keep their spouse satisfied in this area. It's an important decision that will affect both people for the rest of their lives.

Again, I want to say that there are some churches, pastors, and Christian educators out there who do confront these issues head on and provide a positive voice for marriages. I sincerely hope yours is one of them. If not, please, I beg you, rethink the effect this will have on the marriages of your congregation. We are just one couple. If this happens to too many more naive young people there could be mass disillusionment that could jeopardize the church community as a whole​, not to mention a lack of children to carry on your church’s traditions. I know my faith has faltered and still falters many days. I struggle daily to see how a marriage like mine fits into God’s plan. I also know that some people never come back to the church after a crisis of faith this drastic. Then what?

Sincerely,
A Hopeless Husband

H, have you considered changing to a faith that accepts divorce? There are many, including many Christian faiths that do that.

Do you mean "a faith" or "a church/denomination"? Because strict Baptists and lax Methodists technically are the same faith.

I just wanted to share the letter I sent. That was months ago before I got very involved here. I'm at the point where I have set a timetable and will look into divorce anyway if things don't get better. The letter was my vent to the organizations that neglected to teach us about something extremely important. I typed it up and sent it around the time when, if you remember, I was asking you all for advice on how to kill my sex drive. A window into my mindset back then. Anyway, I'm done pleasing an organization that does its job so carelessly. If they don't like the decisions I make in the coming months, I don't really care anymore.

Sexless marriage is absolutely a violation of marriage vows. Understanding that helped me finally believe that I was free to leave. Below are a couple of links that I learned a lot from. They were never tools to try to get my refuser to change – they were for me.

www.divorce-remarriage.com
The site uses frames, so you need to click the Playmobible link in the left column to get to an awesome illustrated explanation of the four biblical causes of divorce. It's hosted on Facebook, so you can share with everyone you know IRL! Or not, lol.

oneinjesus.info/books-by-jay-guin/but-if-you-do-marry/
This one is a scholarly paper that gets pretty theological. Not light reading, and not for everyone, but I learned a lot.

You can always cite Martin Luther, the great reformer, as authority for your choice. In 1522, he wrote a tract/essay entitled The Estate of Marriage. In it, he gives three legitimate reasons for divorce: adultery, abuse and abandonment of the marriage bed.


Tell her to take it up with Luther.