We hear from a lot of women who just say, I have never enjoyed sex. I just kind of put up with it because I’m supposed to in marriage.
And they wonder if they should even fake enjoyment or pleasure. So the first thing I would say is, please don’t fake enjoyment or pleasure. You know, God created sex to be a journey of authenticity and intimacy, and any form of faking is taking away from that intimacy. Uh, what you really need to do is be honest about the fact that sex isn’t pleasurable for you. And then say, well, what’s getting in the way? What’s the barrier? And there are barriers that get in the way of sexual pleasure, and it can be physical barriers, um, like pain, physical pain that needs to be addressed. It can be emotional barriers like trauma from the past, or it can be intellectual and thinking barriers, like just growing up believing that you’re not supposed to enjoy sex or that it shouldn’t be pleasurable or it’s somehow dirty. It can be spiritual barriers like shame around sexuality.
And so my encouragement to you would be that God has created sex to be pleasurable for both the husband and the wife. And when it’s not pleasurable for one of you, that’s not the fullness of what God designed sex to be. Uh, authentic intimacy has a ton of resources available to help you on that journey of identifying what’s getting in the way of sexual fun and pleasure, and also give you the skills towards building towards that. So don’t pretend and don’t just avoid sex, but work towards addressing the barriers so that you can really enter into the pleasure that God has created sex for you to have with your spouse.