by Patsy Rae Dawson ~
Harold confided in me about why his wife divorced him after a decades-long sexless marriage saying, “I never learned how to love a woman emotionally and sexually.” He didn’t say “my wife.” He said “a woman.” He didn’t know how to love any woman emotionally and sexually.
He continued, “If my wife had had sexual experiences before we married, she would have known what a sick puppy I am…how incapable I am of loving a woman. I never put in the effort to learn how to do better. Now it’s too late.”
Absence of emotional and sexual love makes cheating more likely.
Harold’s wife Maggie thought that since he wasn’t interested in sex with her, he was adultery proof. How wrong she was. She discovered in their later years that he had cheated on her for most of their marriage—perhaps being unfaithful even during courtship. She suffered from being unloved and untouched while being secretly betrayed.
She had it exactly backwards. Sexless husbands experience stronger temptations for cheating than emotionally and sexually loving men do. Sexual addictions along with mental and physical cheating provide opportunities for secret release with little intimate attachment to the object of their lust.
After years of working with both male and female sexless spouses, Dr. Douglas Weiss observed in Intimacy Anorexia that “very few men and only some women avoid sex. However, both the men and the women actively avoid intimacy” with their mate.
We now know why when a man is caught in an affair, he often tells his wife, “She didn’t mean anything to me. So it shouldn’t be such a big deal to you.”
He tells the truth. She didn’t mean anything to him. But his wife doesn’t mean anything to him either. He avoids emotional intimacy with both the other woman…and his wife. His lack of emotional love for anyone helps him move on quickly from the botched affair while his wife struggles for years to forgive and forget.
The same is true for female anorexics, or cougars, who can be either dry flirts or active cheaters. The Bible preserves the portrait of such a cougar stalking a young man in Proverbs 7:6-23. I devote two chapters in God’s People Make the Best Lovers to showing why the sex between this game-playing wife and her lover was both emotionally and sexually unsatisfying for both of them.
Rather than adultery-proofing the mate, a lack of emotional and sexual love makes the person more susceptible to temptations and deviations, such as preferring self-masturbation to sex with a live person.
But Harold also failed the intellectual-love test.
He grasped only two-thirds of why his marriage failed. Not only did he not know how to love a woman emotionally and sexually, but he also didn’t know how to love a woman intellectually. He didn’t respect, value, or honor his wife as a woman or a unique person with talents, thoughts, goals, and desires of her own.
Maggie explained, “He grew up hearing his father make fun of his mother every day at the dinner table. His dad disguised his resentment for his wife with humor. Harold and his siblings laughed at their dad’s jokes…even his mom laughed.”
Through his dad’s abusive humor, Harold was programmed from a child to believe women are inferior to men and objects of ridicule. When he married, he failed to examine his unloving upbringing and didn’t chart his own course for a passionate relationship.
When he tried to ridicule Maggie the same way his dad made fun of his mother, she didn’t laugh. Instead, she insisted he quit making her the brunt of his jokes. He stopped the public putdowns, but he continued to harbor them in his heart.
His disrespect for Maggie’s femininity allowed him to justify withholding emotional and sexual love from her, which made Harold feel sexually normal. He got away with this abuse until Maggie found evidence of cheating and discovered that he was not adultery proof after all.
The Song of Solomon emphasizes the three kinds of love.
In the Bible, the Song of Solomon love triangle pits King Solomon’s fetish for virgin bosoms against the Shepherd boyfriend’s admiration of the Shulammite maiden as an intelligent, caring person with ideas and desires of her own. To the Shepherd, she was not just a beautiful body, but a person whose value equaled his own.
The King’s 140 wives at the time would swell to 1000 young virgins whom Solomon deflowered over a 40-year reign. This averages just over two weeks spent with each new bride from the courtship to the exchange of vows through the wedding week. Then Solomon was off on his next quest to find the perfect feminine body to end his loneliness.
Solomon’s three-day whirlwind courtship of the Shulammite maiden reflects this pattern. Three times the maiden begged the palace attendants to allow her and Solomon to get to know each other and fall in love before marrying. Finally, with Solomon’s lustful description of what he wants to do to her body echoing in her ears, the maiden runs into the arms her of shepherd boyfriend.
Even with all of his God-given wisdom for ruling his kingdom, Solomon was just as ignorant as Harold was about how to enjoy lifelong passion with a woman. He died at around 56 as a prematurely decrepit old man still pursuing young virgin breasts.
God preserved Solomon’s pitiful story for over 3000 years for people like you and me…and Harold. The expressions of intellectual and emotion love between the shepherd and the maiden culminate in promises for passionately speaking God’s beautiful language of love in each other’s arms for a lifetime.
It was too late for Harold to learn about the three kinds of love necessary for long-term passion and to save his marriage. Is it too late for you to learn how to love the opposite sex intellectually, emotionally, and sexually? Only when you give yourself totally—intellectually and emotionally—to your mate can you experience ecstatic sexual coupling for a lifetime.
Are you willing to learn about and practice the three kinds of love the Bible teaches is necessary for lasting passionate love?
Patsy Rae Dawson is a Christian sexless marriages and joyless bedrooms coachand consultant. Learn more about the three kinds of love and the secret of the vaginal orgasm from her book The Song of Solomon Love Triangle: God’s Soulmating and Lovemaking Guide for a Lifetime of Passionate Sex. Are you in a sexless marriage? Take Patsy’s free Passionless Marriages Self-Assessment Survey. Six checklists explore surprising core issues to help you start solving the real problems.