Daniel, a friend whose name I’ve changed for privacy, had done the hard work. He had walked away from pornography, and for the first time in years he felt like a free man. So he threw himself into ministry, joining a group that leaned heavily into the deliverance model of healing. Prayer, breaking strongholds, casting off demons. He wanted to be all in.
Only, the relapses kept coming.
He would go a stretch, then fall. Go another stretch, then fall again. Eventually his wife, worn down and scared, brought it to some of the others in the ministry. They cared about the couple, even prayed over them. They tried what they knew to try. And when they got to the end of their ideas, they landed on one final suggestion.
"Well, just encourage more sex."
I understand why they said it. When prayer doesn't seem to be working and a man keeps falling, you reach for the next lever. And there's a whole line of teaching out there that treats more sex as the answer. If the marriage is dry, or if a guy is struggling, the fix is to get more of it flowing.
I want to say this as plainly as I can: That is an extremely dangerous move.
Don't Have Time to Read? Here's the Gist:
Pressuring a wife into sex, whether to "cure" a husband's porn struggle or to satisfy his desire, misunderstands what's actually driving sexual sin and quietly centers self instead of love. Sex is meant to flow out of a shared commitment to intimacy, and intimacy is far bigger than sex. It's meant to resemble the way God relates to us, and God never forces. He woos. If you're the husband asking when your wife is finally going to respond, the better question is whether you're becoming a healthy man she can trust again.
It Misunderstands What's Really Going On
The first problem is that this approach completely misreads the heart of sexual sin, and pornography in particular.
It assumes a man is simply wired for endless sexual expression, and that if you give him more of it in the right place, the pull toward the wrong place will fade. As if the problem behind looking at porn is that he isn't getting enough. But that's not the problem. Some men who struggle actually have plenty of sexual expression in their marriage. More consumption was never the missing piece.
Maybe you're reading this in a marriage where you haven't been intimate in a long time, and you feel like throwing your phone across the room. Hear me out. I've been where you are. I know what it's like to be walking in freedom, not in pornography, and still feel the pull, still ache for sexual intimacy. Your desire is not what's wrong. The desire for sexual intimacy is a good thing, indeed!
The way in which you pursue sexual fulfillment is what’s wrong. If you find yourself tempted with porn because you haven’t had sex in awhile, it reveals a deeper heart issue that sex has never resolved because it’s not designed to resolve it. More sex with a broken soul is simply more broken sex. Any alleviation of temptation that more sex provides is simply a facade, not actual healing. Even extremely perverted men don’t necessarily desire sex as strongly right after ejaculation. That’s biology–not deliverance.
The reason a man can't harness his sexual energy is that something is pulling for it. Something in the emotional environment he lives in every day is grabbing for the hit. It's a lot like a drug addict trying to break free. You can walk in freedom for a time, and then something shifts in your world that resembles the old days, and suddenly the pull is back. Sometimes part of what shifts is the marriage itself. You've grown distant. You're not as close as you were. The old emotional environment returns.
And this is where the rubber meets the road. Was there ever true freedom? Or is there deeper work still waiting to be done?
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Pressured Sex Ruins the Very Thing It's After
The second problem is what pressure does to a woman, and to sex itself.
Think about something you genuinely love to do. Now picture the day you're exhausted, overworked, stretched thin, and someone insists you do it right now. Even the thing you love turns sour when it's demanded of you in a moment you have nothing left to give. You'll go through the motions out of obligation, but the joy is gone.
That's what pressure does to sex. It takes something that's supposed to be mutual and turns it into a performance. It's no longer centered on love. It's centered on self. And love, by definition, is centered on the other person. Paul told us as much. Love is patient, love is kind, and it does not insist on its own way. How can I bring them pleasure? How can I make their life better? Pressure asks the opposite question. It asks how she can meet my need.
When a wife withdraws, there's usually a reason. Sometimes it's personal to her. Maybe she's wrestling with how she sees her own body. As husbands, we get to walk gently and graciously with her there. Pursuing her is part of that, yes. But it's not going to be fixed overnight. She has her own story work to do, and we can be patient with her in it.
Sometimes it's other things she's carrying, physical or emotional or spiritual weight from a season that's taking its toll. She needs us to meet her there, not to keep standing in the one room where we're demanding to be met.
And sometimes, honestly, it's us. Maybe a husband isn't looking at porn, but he has holes in his own emotional life he hasn't tended to. He isn't well inside. This is the deepest reason pressure is so dangerous.
Intimacy Is Not Merely Sex
Here's the thing. Sex is an outflow of intimacy, and of a shared commitment to intimacy. But intimacy is not merely sex.
When I say sex flows out of a commitment to intimacy, I'm not asking whether the two of you are committed to having sex. I'm asking whether you're committed to intimacy. Intimacy is oneness. In every area of life, in every season of life. Are your hearts turned toward each other? Are you tuned in? Are you walking together through your spiritual journeys, your ordinary days, your work, your kids, all of it?
There will be times you feel disconnected, times you haven't had a good chance to sit and talk, and you start by simply being together physically. So it isn't that sex only flows out of perfect intimacy. It flows out of a commitment to intimacy, where you're pointed toward each other. Emotionally naked with one another. Wanting each other, all of who they are.
Marriage Is Meant to Look Like God
This brings me to the part I keep coming back to. Sexual intimacy in marriage is designed to resemble God's relationship with us.
And God has never once pressured or forced us into experiencing him. He woos us. Listen to how he describes his own pursuit in Hosea: "I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her." That's the posture. He invites. He draws us in and then he stays. He's long-suffering. Patient. Kind. Gentle through the whole process.
God is also so committed to our ultimate good that he never makes the relationship about himself. He isn't doing nice things for us so that we'll finally give him what he wants. He sets us up to experience all of life, and then he offers himself as its deepest fulfillment.
Reflect on that for a bit. It exposes how easily we operate with ulterior motives. We have to keep asking the question. Am I committed to intimacy because I want sex? Or am I committed to intimacy because I want my wife, all of her, in the exact season of life she's in right now?
But What About Paul? And What About the Husband Who's Trying?
Two objections usually come up here, and both deserve a response.
The first is Paul's instruction not to refuse one another (1 Corinthians 7). And Paul is right. Do not withhold that from each other. But he never handed that verse to one spouse as ammunition against the other. He gave it for each of us to take into our own heart, to shape how we love. It's a self-examination, not a weapon.
Notice the context, Paul isn't offering sex as an antidote to lust. He's describing part of the design of marriage. We sometimes take "burn with passion" from that chapter and treat it as the same thing as lust. It isn't. Good, godly, healthy people burn with passion. That's exactly why it's right to marry rather than stay in perpetual longing. It's part of the natural flow of being human, and it belongs in the covenant of marriage, where you don't refuse each other. But it's still not mine to hold over my wife. It's mine to hold up to myself. Paul’s primary objective in this first portion of that chapter is to provide order to sexual chaos: instead of having sex with just anyone, have sexual relations with your spouse.
Why don’t we ever hear about how “the husband does not have right over his own body, but his wife does”? In other words, what if the wife needs her husband to just be present and help around the house and offer comfort and stability without sex right now? As husbands we ought to joyfully give our bodies to our wives in this way.
The second objection comes from the husband who's been trying.
He's been pursuing her, doing the work, and she still isn't responding. At some point, doesn't she need to meet him?
Let me answer with a question. How long did it take you to get serious about your own life? You're treating this like a salt shaker with the timer running out. "I'm here now, I'm ready, and time's wasting." But for a long time she'd grown resigned to you being you. Then something changed, and now you're interested.
If that's you, I'd like to ask what's underneath the impatience. Are you pursuing intimacy because you want the benefits, or because you actually want her? Because here's a truth we forget: you can break trust in a single day that took years to build. And if you've broken it over and over for years, rebuilding may take decades. If you're impatient in that process, it makes me wonder how committed to intimacy you really are. It starts to sound more like selfishness than love.
Quit Worrying About When She'll Respond
If your wife had spent years nagging you to get your act together, to quit the sins and habits dragging you down, you wouldn't have loved that much. So do the simple flip. Do to her as you'd want done to you.
There's no salt shaker. Time is not running out. You are learning to live in a healthy way. You are learning to pursue your wife. And she is on her own journey, with likely a lot to process, maybe a lot of broken trust to work through. She gets to walk that at her own pace.
So quit worrying about when your wife is going to respond, and start becoming a healthy man.
Consider: Where do you find yourself in this? Are you committed to intimacy because you want your spouse, or because you want something from them? And if trust has been broken, are you willing to let it be rebuilt on God's patient timeline instead of your own? If you’d like, you can respond in the comments below.
Grace and peace,
Asher
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