Here’s a key element in pursuing a cherishing sexual relationship, however: Cherishing sex isn’t about desiring sex; it’s about celebrating your spouse. That makes your spouse feel affirmed. Otherwise she may just feel used. It’s not about your “needs.” It’s about her beauty, her desirability, her loveliness and her pleasure.
In a healthy, cherishing marriage that extends into the bedroom, two Scriptures are showcased. Wives want to hear Song of Songs 6:9: “My dove, my perfect one, is the only one.” If a wife catches her husband watching porn or checking out women on the sidewalk; if the man she dressed to please for their date night turns his eyes from her to watch the waitress walk by, she feels like she’s in a competition that she has just lost. She wants to be “the perfect one, the only one.” The goal for every cherishing husband is to make his wife feel exactly like that. “Why would I look at her when I can look at you?”
But wives, your husbands want to hear, “He is altogether desirable. This is my beloved and this is my friend” (Song of Songs 5:16). If you cherish your husband 99 ways but make him feel sexually undesirable, he’s probably not going to feel cherished no matter what else you do.
Sheila Gregoire wisely warns that “obligation sex” (simply meeting the man’s need for a sexual release) just doesn’t work long-term. No woman can be that altruistic. And no healthy man should be pleased without pleasing his wife. Pursuing a cherishing sexual relationship comes closer to what Sheila describes as a healthy sexual attitude: “Instead of emphasizing his need for sex, then, let‘s emphasize mutually satisfying sex— something that you both want, that you both find pleasurable, and that you both find intimate.” (For more on this, check out Sheila’s book The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex.)
It’s not a coincidence that the typical sexual sin for men is voyeurism, and for women, exhibitionism. Here’s what’s going on spiritually. When a man chooses to become a voyeur, he’s saying to himself, “It’s not enough for me to be satisfied with a woman; I want to find sexual excitement from all women.” That attitude alone sets a man up for many selfish failures and fosters a predatory attitude that makes him a prime candidate to become a poster boy for the me-too movement.
When a woman decides to become an exhibitionist, here’s what’s going on in her mind spiritually: “It’s not enough for me to feel beautiful by being desired by a man, I want to know that men in general find me attractive.”
What the voyeuristic husband and the exhibitionist wife are saying is, “My spouse isn’t enough for me.” How can anybody feel cherished when they are regularly told by word or action that they’re not enough? In both attitudes, sex is divorced from the marriage and fulfillment is sought outside the marital bed where it can never be found, because both attitudes destroy marital sexual fulfillment that God created us to enjoy.
Men, you’ve probably heard this, but the allure of porn is the dopamine rush that hits your brain when you see something new. That’s why an already viewed picture or video won’t “work” like it did before. Excitement comes from the new and the unseen. It doesn’t take a scientist to point out how this is exactly the opposite of marital sex, where you are cherishing the body of a woman you have seen in many ways and perhaps for many years. Neuroscience is pretty clear: You 
can’t cherish your wife fully if you are re-wiring your brain with porn. This is a fight worth fighting.
There’s so much more to say on this topic, which I’m thinking of addressing in an upcoming ebook. For now, let me suggest that you can take your marital intimacy to an entirely new place if you just think about injecting the concept of “cherishing each other” into your lovemaking. What happens next will be different for every individual and every couple. But making “cherishing” the benchmark of each act and the relationship in general can do wonders to help couples walk out of harmful past sexual habits and into new horizons of refreshing sexual intimacy, pleasure and even abandon.
This article originally appeared here.
