Masturbation in marriage
To beat or not to beat, that is the question I cannot believe I'm asking, and answering, out loud; see what wisdom nearly 40 years of marriage brings to this hard topic
“Do you think you could still have sex every day for a month? Or even a week?”
This was a foolish question to ask my husband, on several levels. We were cleaning out our closet together, me clinging to things I should have thrown away long ago, him offering to throw those things away for me without looking closely at the things in his own drawers. I should have known that it’s unwise to ask even an aging man whether he still has what it takes to satisfy a woman, which I see now I was asking him. But it was his answer that really put me in my place.
“I guess we’ll never know, will we?”
Touché.
For the record we have never actually had sex every day for a month in the nearly four decades we have been married. I did try to offer that once, as a birthday present for him, at a time when we had three children and between my responsibilities at home and his rising success at work we were not connecting as frequently as either of us wanted. And I’d like to say we managed it maybe 25 days out of the 30, but he probably remembers that number differently.
We had plenty of weeks early in our marriage where we had sex every day for a week. And a couple of romantic getaways where we had sex four or five times in the first day we arrived in Scottsdale or wherever our infrequent trips took us while still in our 30s.
But we haven’t had sex every day for a week in years. It’s not a mystery why: I don’t want to. Not in a pouty, petulant way, but in a very real physical way. Like my man, I’m nearing 60 and my body just doesn’t respond like it used to. Where I used to claim in my 30s that I could count the times I hadn’t had an orgasm during sex on one hand, by the time we got to our late 40s I was taking off my shoes to count and into my 50s I no longer keep a lifetime count, but a times-so-far-this-year-I-can’t-get there count.
It’s an important topic in our marriage and it’s one we’ve dedicated considerable huddle time to manage. It’s also why my husband’s answer was a deft reply. If I was accidentally wondering aloud whether he was man enough to go the distance, he was reminding me that the reason he doesn’t know and won’t know, is that I’m not woman enough to invite him to do so.
An imbalance in sex drive is extremely common in marriage. There’s much more to write on this topic than I’ll address today—this is one of the main reasons I started the Goodwifery, is to eventually spill some beans on this topic, anonymously—but for now, I divulge to you, a handful of readers kind of enough to give my writings a try, that an imbalance in sex drive is a constant weight that hangs over even a successful, faithful marriage of nearly 40 years like ours. There is no solution, there is no “one weird trick” to fix it. It is a nearly permanent condition in marriage, usually featuring the weighty desire of the husband compared to that of the wife, though the condition can be reversed, at least in some stages of life.
How you handle it will shape everything about your marriage. And how you deal with the most obvious issue arising (pun reluctantly intended) from it will also shape your marriage. That issue is simply: How will you manage the masturbation question?
I’m raising this question because of a recent Evie magazine advice column written about a woman who caught her husband using porn and is devastated by it. The over emphasis on the role of porn is masking, in my opinion, the more important question of managing sexual imbalance in marriage, because as I said in my too-long thread on Twitter/X, focusing too much on the porn question allows a woman to demonize her husband while sidestepping the real issue of how to deal with the fact that he wants more sex than she does.
So-called “sex-positive” individuals will claim that this is not even a question. Of course people masturbate to porn to address their sexual needs, no fuss, no muss, just do it! But I came here to write to women more like myself, women in happy, faithful marriages who are not natively comfortable thinking their husbands can just go masturbate in peace and that it won’t affect the marriage. Women who find porn ungodly (though I won’t focus on the porn part of the conversation here, saving that for later). Though they feel this instinctive recoil at the thought of their husband’s persistent, improperly expressed desire, they are still willing to recognize that no matter how much they try, they’ll never want to offer the daily sexual release that an otherwise healthy man desires when he’s young and could continue to want closing in on 60 if he had an eager partner.
This is very complicated territory for us as a couple because we were raised as small-town Christians. Though, unlike the common narrative you’ve heard or read in movies, TV shows, or a thousand opinion pieces in The New York Times, being raised Christian, with inhibitory sexual beliefs and practices, is not bad for you. In fact, the people who have the happiest and sexiest marriages (measured in amount of sex they have and how satisfied they are with it) are practicing Christians. If you don’t believe that, I urge you to be open to how much you have been lied to about sexual practices in general and inhibitory sexual practices specifically. People who constrain their urges – have fewer sexual partners, commit to a single partner and don’t cheat – have happier lives in general, including happier marriages and, as I already said, more sexually satisfying lives. If you insist this isn’t true, it’s proof that you are unaware how much you have been manipulated and lied to and I hope that you will be willing to read the literature here, starting with a book called Get Married, a new book by Brad Wilcox, a family sociologist who compiles decades of research showing who is getting the most from sex, from marriage, and from life. It’s not who you think.
Even as I express gratitude for the way I was raised, that I’m one of the 20 percent of currently married people who did not have sex with my spouse until the day of our wedding, I am aware that it doesn’t automatically prepare you to have satisfying sexual technique. That’s one reason I’m writing what I do, to encourage women to seek techniques for increasing the satisfaction that is theirs by design. But being raised with conservative sexual beliefs also leaves you with a few thoughts about the relationship between sex and sin that you may have to wrestle with as an individual and as a couple.
Note that I said wrestle, not discard. Unlike the popular message given to people today, that if Christians would just be open to multiple sex partners and open marriages, and the utility of pornography and masturbation, we would finally be free of our supposed neuroses, the better message to my fellow Christians is that we were smart to see giving in to our sexual urges as bordering on sin or leading to potential sin. But that somehow, we need to see that experiencing sexual pleasure in our marriages – and acknowledging the sometimes greater pleasure it provides for our husbands – is not a sin against God nor should it be against womanhood.
Yes, most American Christians grow up believing masturbation is bad and that God commands them not to do it. And many Christians struggle with that commandment because most young boys and, indeed, most adult men feel a need to masturbate to compensate for not having regular sexual access to an actual woman. Far fewer women masturbate, though there are those that do, of course.
An easy proxy for masturbation is the weekly use of pornography. Depending on which study you read, as many as 60 percent of healthy adult males use pornography in a typical week. The number for women is 20 percent. Men are three times as likely to view pornography in a typical week than women. For men, it’s the case that there are a few men who didn’t do it this week but will next week, but that 60 percent number remains a pretty solid base of men who will continue to view pornography and masturbate to it. For women, it’s quite different. It’s not that there is a stable 20 percent of women masturbating to porn every week, it’s that in any given week, the women who masturbate might rotate in and out of that condition. So the number of women who do masturbate is bigger than 20 percent but the frequency with which they do so is much lower than it is for men who do. I have access to data through an academic friend that I won’t use here so I can preserve my anonymity and also so I don’t bore you, but basically, more men masturbate at all, and those who do do so more frequently. A majority of women don’t masturbate at all. Haven’t for years, including women who have never done so, like, I’ll confess, me. Those that do masturbate do so less frequently and as you probably guessed don’t all rely on video porn to do so. Many of them read erotica instead.
The feminist movement of the 60s and 70s first introduced the idea that we would solve all of women’s hangups if we just taught them to masturbate. My first brush with this movement was in the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, based on the book by Fannie Flagg. It shocked me just as it did Kathy Bates’s character. The belief was that once these innocent women were given the key to unlock their passion, everything would magically open up, they would find the ability to orgasm, and they could then confidently have sex with strangers as every good woman should. This message is still proudly taught today as if it had any wisdom to offer at all. It does not.
Think about it. Why do we have to teach women to masturbate? If it’s so wonderfully natural, why does there need to be a movement to evangelize it to women? Conversely, men discover masturbation early on because their penises get hard all the time starting from a young age. While they sleep, when they enter puberty and think about the girls in math class, pretty much all the time. Getting hard feels good. Touching it when it's hard feels even better. Thinking about having the girls in math class touch it feels even better which makes you touch it even more until, whoops, one day you’ve touched it so intensely that it explodes. Just as it was designed to do.
Because I promised my husband that I will keep us anonymous, he is willing to let me report this fact about him: He first masturbated to completion at age 11.
That’s six grade, folks. He has never talked about this with anyone and the fact that he has given me permission to talk about it here, anonymously, is still a big deal. Because, appropriately in my opinion, he thinks his constant masturbation from 6th grade to our marriage is sinful. Luckily, he believes God forgives sin, so he’s okay thinking masturbation is sin, but he still thinks what he did was sinful.
I do, too. And if I knew when we first started dating, that after we’d make out in his truck at the end of a date, he would go inside, jump in bed, and masturbate thinking of my body, I would have been totally grossed out. “Oh, you prude!,” I can hear some saying. “It’s just a natural body thing, we should just all be nudists, masturbating all the time, sleeping with whomever comes along, you know, if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with” (I hate that song, no surprise).
Understand that for my man, masturbation was a necessary way to deal with his feelings of desire and pleasure. And feeling that it was wrong helped him keep it within controllable bounds, learn to master (okay, another pun reluctantly intended) himself, become an honorable man who can be trusted with the young women he dated, even as he thought about their bodies constantly. Believing that he was wrong to do what he did shaped him to be a good man who is respectful to women, chaste, and faithful to his beautiful, sexy wife.
But you masturbate from age 11 to adulthood, sometimes every night, not uncommon frequency for a healthy young man at key ages like 15, and it becomes a deeply ingrained habit. One that leaves tracks in your mind the way riding your bike over the same path to school every day leaves a path. An inviting, familiar path, that is easy to return to. He has masturbated during our marriage, a fact that neither of us wanted to talk about for a lot of years and only later did we discuss openly. Not to induce shame, not because I need him to speak to our Pastor about it. But because he just feels less manly when he masturbates and he knows that it makes me feel less attracted to his male parts.
How we manage that in our marriage is a topic for another post, maybe one where I decide to be even much more explicit that I’m already blushing for being here. But the end result is this message that I communicate to him with my words and my deeds: “I recognize that your body put demands on you that I don’t understand, and I forgive you and accept you.”
Yes, forgive. He believes it’s sin and so do I. But we believe it’s sin in the way that gossip is sin. You shouldn’t do it. Some people can avoid it completely. Other people seem drawn to do it all the time. It won’t consign you to hell, as long as you repent and try to improve, avoid hurting other people with your sin, and trust in God.
I am not a gossip. But I occasionally give into the temptation to share a juicy tidbit in the faculty break room and then later feel bad about it. When I do I feel bad and I try to fix any damage I’ve caused and I sometimes have to talk about it with my husband so he can help me identify the things that led me into that compromising spot and avoid that behavior in the future.
His masturbation is basically the same thing. He would rather be inside of me. But he doesn’t have daily access to my body. He works hard to control that desire, he is scrupulously careful to avoid thinking about other women which is very important to me because I’m the jealous type, and when he lets me know how much his thoughts about me are consuming him we find time to take care of him and I know how to make sure I enjoy it as well. Other times, he masturbates, in the shower, in bed next to me after I’ve fallen asleep and he’s lying there with a really hard erection that won’t let him rest. I don’t know how many times a year he does this. I like to imagine it’s once a month or so. That sounds about right. But I won’t ask him because I don’t want to feel mixed about it.
Mixed in what way? I love and want to be intimate with my husband. But I don’t want to feel burdened by my husband’s sexual desires. I don’t want to be that woman who constantly groans about how much her husband wants her. And so sometimes I need to not consciously process how much he would like to be with me. Mixed because I really don’t want to ask him if seeing other beautiful women—in a movie, at the grocery store, or at work—makes him want to have sex all the more because I know it does but I hate to hear it. Nothing soothing about my husband admitting, “yes, that attractive woman at work makes me think about sex but it only makes me want to have sex even more with you!” So, yeah, mixed. Lots of mixing.
If you think that the goal in life, in a relationship, especially a long-term intimate relationship is that you should never feel mixed like that? You don’t understand what life is. Including the best parts of it.
There will be days of passion, there will be days of sorrow; there will be days of every kind if you live a good life long enough. And if you want those days to be filled with love, you will learn how to share your bodies, hearts, and minds as often as you can. And apologize when you can’t.