Can I tell you a secret? Having a great sex partner is not the key to sexual gratification. Finding the most beautiful wife in the world won’t keep you from lusting after other women. The desire for erotic pleasure comes as the result of a lack of meaning and purpose and nothing in life is truly meaningful without its relational value.
Sixty-four percent of Christian men view pornography at least monthly. Thirty-seven percent look at porn several times a week. I know what it’s like to be addicted to pornography. I thought the struggle came from my strong sexual drive. But as I came to experience freedom from lust and the addiction to erotic pleasure, I learned part of what held me captive for so long had little to do with sex and more to do with intimacy.
What I Learned about Intimacy While Watching a Romance Movie
Every once in a while, my wife and I curl up to watch a movie. Often, it has something to do with romance.
My wife enjoys romance movies. All ladies do. To be honest, I don’t get it. What’s so fascinating about watching a story of a man and woman meeting, offending one another, then slowly relinquishing their animosity as they come to discover each other’s virtues? Watch it, every romance movie follows this formula and ends the same way—passionate lovers embracing and gallivanting off to spend a blissful life together.
My wife ends in tears, snuggled up close (such is the perk of such movies). I tell her, though, that we make a better love story and don’t need to watch other people’s. However, because of my endearing affection for her, I breakdown and watch one every first and third Wednesday’s of even numbered months.
I’m kidding.
One movie my wife enjoys is Pride and Prejudice. While I connect more deeply with a movie like Amazing Grace, recounting William Wilberforce’s life-long campaign to abolish slavery in Great Britain, my wife connects with Lizzie Bennet and the unfolding mystery of meaningful relationship.
Meaningful relationship. It sounds meaningful, right? But to be honest, it feels a little vague. Not to mention risky.
Relationships require vulnerability, connecting with someone else, someone wired differently than ourselves. As a man, I find it easier to dive into my work, something I can control, than to explore the mystery of “meaningful relationship.”
But the more I watch romance movies with my wife, the more I see an underlying truth coming through in every one of them. We can bemoan romance novels for their many fallacies, but there is a deep truth hidden underneath every romantic tale. If there is nothing else these stories tell us it is that even successful, wealthy, men of renown long for intimate relationship with someone.
Even men are made for relationships.
Naked
Back at the beginning, when God first created the world, He said all but one thing was good: man was alone. And that was not good. God went about dealing with this flaw by arousing in Adam the awareness he is missing something. So, God gave him the job of naming the animals.
If we’re not careful, we can read over this passage as if it is a list of facts we need to memorize for an upcoming history exam. But when we do that, we completely miss the greater story of what God is creating. I think the part that makes me realize something deeper is going on is when Moses says both Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed (see Genesis 2:25).
The picture of two people being naked is a little startling. What is the point? What is God trying to communicate to us through this story?
Could it be that all humans are made for intimacy? To be fully-known and entirely accepted?
Furthermore, could it be that our strong desire for sex is at its core a desire for this kind of intimacy? And could it be when you and I long for sexual release, to look at porn or masturbate, we are longing for a need God intends to meet through other people?
Learning to Clothe Myself
When I was young, we lived next door to a family who had children the same age as my younger siblings. I remember one time running outside to join them in their playhouse, only to discover they didn’t want me playing with them. I had been a little bossy the previous day, I guess. Since it was their playhouse they could say who could or couldn’t play. I couldn’t.
I felt a pain inside of me that day. Not because I didn’t have purpose in life, and certainly not because I couldn’t have sex. I felt pain because I was not accepted. I wasn’t wanted. And while I wasn’t very conscious of it at the time, looking back now I realize I learned something that day. I learned how to play by myself instead.
We lived on the edge of town. Bordering our back yard was a wood larger than Winnie-the-Pooh’s, and I absolutely loved wandering around in it. I would cut sticks to the shape of rifles and hand-guns and pretend I was a pioneer explorer in the days of westward expansion. I built forts, chased deer, and discovered hide-outs in the tributaries coming off the river. And I did a lot of this by myself.
My neighbors were great kids. We eventually started playing together and I know they were not intentionally trying to hurt me. But even so, I discovered that when you have your own world to play in, you don’t risk being told to go away. Every child wants a place to fit into. Everyone deserves friends to make memories with. But somewhere along the line we clue into the fact some people don’t like us and we escape to the isolation of our imaginary worlds.
Worlds that one day become the playhouse for erotic pleasures.
It was during the years of playing by myself when I began creating sexual fantasies in my mind.
Our sexuality is not just for sex and procreation. At the bottom of all humanity is a design for relationships: relationship with God and with each other. When we don’t have those relationships, we look to fill them ourselves through imaginary worlds we can control. My fantasies not only provided a sense of sexual pleasure, they also provided relationships where I was perfectly accepted.
Using Work to Avoid People
When my wife and I moved to Thailand to begin a teaching stint at a small international school, I could tell you within a week whether I found purpose in what I was doing.
If work doesn’t seem to have meaning, we guys feel it quickly.
However, my wife was not as worried about whether she found meaning in what she did. Instead, about as soon as we landed in Chiang Mai, she was talking about the relationships and whether she would be able to connect with the other women around her. I didn’t even really begin thinking of how meaningful my relationships were until a year later. They were not as necessary to me as they were to her. But relationships are nonetheless vital and if they are not meaningful, I eventually begin feeling it.
I can often trace the times I struggle the most with working too much back to feeling a lack of meaning in my relationships. Work is necessary. Having a cause to live for is crucial to sensing deep meaning in life, and meaning in work is part of finding freedom from lust.
But work can also become a guise we hide behind when relationships are fragile.
Sometimes I get so obsessed with my work that I begin feeling empty. Even when I am doing good work, like teaching students and writing books on moral victory. I will pour myself into them to the point I begin wondering if what I am doing is meaningful anymore. It’s as if I am Adam naming the animals and can’t find a partner suitable for me. But instead of giving up and asking God where my partner is, I keep recounting and renaming them to see if something will turn up.
In other words, I get so involved in the job given to me because I am unconsciously looking for relationship. I am hoping that through my work I will begin experiencing what it’s like to know someone and be fully known by them.
And as I ponder that, I realize the reason I don’t just stop and pursue people is because I am afraid I won’t be accepted by them. I fear if they really got to know me, they wouldn’t like me and tell me I couldn’t play.
Why Relationships Are More Important Than Sex
I don’t feel very good at relationships yet, but I am learning a few things about them. My wife helps me. She’s miles ahead of me in the relational category. Some of my biggest fears in life have had to do with getting close to people. While I think she would say the same thing (I think we all would), she’s the one slowly teaching me that life is meant to be shared and enjoyed.
I am deeply in love with my wife. We share an incredibly powerful connection not just sexually, but emotionally and spiritually as well.
I cannot imagine looking at porn again or fantasizing about another woman. Not because my wife is the sexiest, most beautiful woman in the world, but because it would ruin the relationship we have. That’s what matters to me. I could find sex somewhere else. But I could not find the same relationship I have with my wife anywhere else, and I don’t want to give it up.
She knows me better than any other person on this earth. She accepts me more perfectly than anybody else ever has. Sure, we have a lot to learn yet about each other and about marriage. But I am not interested in destroying what we share and trying to rebuild a connection that won’t be nearly as powerful or pure only for the hopes of having better sex.
But you want to know something else? We aren’t just looking for romantic relationships.
A man can have a close relationship with his wife and still be a workaholic, drowning himself in it, hoping to find the meaning only relationships give. Nothing has meaning apart from its relational value. Unless we have meaningful relationships, we will feel a constant pull toward erotic pleasures and obsessions with things that numb our pain.
I never had many friends. I wasn’t necessarily popular. Not that I didn’t like people, I was just shy and never had funny things to say at the right times. In many ways, I am still like this, but over the last several years I have developed some really good friendships.
The best, of course, is with my wife. I also consider my brothers to be some of my best friends. But there are a few other guys who have journeyed with me (although sometimes at a distance because of where we lived in relation to each other) that have become very dear friends of mine. A couple of them I try to connect with at least several times a year. These are the friendships I think of when I think of meaning in my life.
As I have gotten older, and have done more public writing, I have gotten to know a lot of people. I have developed a lot of fans. While I appreciate each one of them and wish I could know them better, they don’t mean the same to me as my close friends do. My wife, my brothers, my fellow comrades—they know my imperfections and negative tendencies. None of my readers do. They only know the glossed-over image of words that I have labored over for days (sometimes months) on end. But that is not the real me. It’s not what I look like on Saturday mornings after a long week, or Tuesday afternoons after a big day at school.
The raving of fans can work like a drug to numb the pain I feel when I’m not experiencing the meaning of friendships with people who don’t rave over me. Friends who don’t rave are the ones that give meaning.
I talk little about my writing with my close friends. Not that I don’t want to let them in on that part of my life—I’d love to, and if they bring it up we talk about it.
It’s just that with them I can be me. I don’t feel the need to maintain an image of perfection. And no, I try not to leave an image like that even with my readers, but I think you know what I mean. I like a place where I can let my guard down, where I can share my un-edited words and feelings and still be accepted and loved. I like a place where we can reminisce about things other than previous writings—about experiences we have shared together, problems we have wrestled through, accomplishments we have achieved with each other. These friendships are as much a reason why I don’t compromise morally as my relationship with my wife is.
A man can live without sex, but he cannot live without intimacy.
[To continue reading about what meaningful relationships look like, check out this post.]
Question: Do you find it difficult to get close to others? Why do you think that is? Share in the comments.
