Here's something that might surprise you. Some of the most common themes in my Holy Desires coaching calls, both group and one-on-one, have very little to do with sex itself. Three out of the four biggest brakes on a couple's sex life actually live outside the bedroom. Sometimes a struggling sex life is the canary in the coal mine, an early signal that something else in your marriage needs your attention.

In this discussion, I'll build on last week's four-categories conversation and zoom in on what this looks like in everyday married life. I'll talk about why chronic stress is one of the biggest brakes on sexual desire for both men and women (and how it can sneak up on a household), and I'll share two practical moves any husband can start this week to claw back some margin and put real joy back into your home.

Grab a cup of coffee and let's talk about it.

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This class is explicitly to help Catholic husbands improve their sex lives in their marriages.

Right?

Their physical intimacy and union with their wives.

You know what might be surprising to a lot of people who are listening?

Or maybe it's not surprising.

Maybe I'm just gonna name something that, that you already intuitively know.

Some of the most prevalent themes that we discuss in this class, in both the group coaching calls and in private one on one coaching, are not directly about sex.

The discussions are all about things that affect our physical intimacy.

So in last week's episode, I shared four big categories of issues that can get in the way of our mutually fulfilling, intimate expression in marriage.

The intimate relationship, our sex life.

And these are the fours.

Quick recap.

Listen to last week's discussion if you want a deeper discussion of each one of these.

But those four categories are the quality of our relationship, wounds from the past, physical and mental stress, and satisfaction with sex.

Again, I talk about each of these in more detail in last week's discussion.

But pretty much every issue that couples, that husbands face, that is impacting their sex life in a negative way falls into one of these buckets.

This is true of my work with husbands, and it's true of Sarah's work with wives as well.

So here's the thing that I want to point.

Out of these four categories, only one of them involves sex itself.

The other three are all about your relationship, your lifestyle, and your past, including your past beliefs and formation about sex.

Just let that sink in for a minute.

That's like 75%.

Three out of four of these buckets of, of items, of issues, of challenges that can get in the way of a mutually fulfilling sex life, most of them aren't about what happens in the bedroom.

The vast majority of issues and challenges that are keeping couples from a beautiful sex life are not what happens inside the bedroom.

It's about what happens outside the bedroom.

And if we reflect on the theology of sex that the church gives us and the truth about sex and marriage, this makes perfect sense, right?

Sex is an expression, a reflection of and a deepening of the love, the connection, the relationship, the spiritual communion of husband and wife, it's a celebration of that communion.

It's a celebration of your commitment, of your vows, of your love that you share for one another, a special, unique, exclusive, enduring love in marriage.

Sex is a reflection of that.

It's a celebration of that.

So if your relationship, if the love that you share is withering, if the Love that you share is put on the back burner.

Right.

And you're not cultivating that relationship with your wife.

Maybe you haven't for a while.

Is it a surprise that your sexual relationship, your sex life, which is a mirror of your broader loving relationship, is it any surprise that your sex life would suffer as well?

No, it is not.

In fact, it's predictable.

It's kind of working the way God intended it to be.

So in some ways you can actually flip this and say, you know what?

My sex life is suffering.

Maybe this is a signal to me.

Maybe it's like the canary in the coal mine type of a thing, right?

Maybe this is one of the things that I noticed and become aware of, and it's a signal to me, a red flag, an early warning sign that there is something in my relationship with my wife, in my marriage that I need to attend to here, something to think about.

So let me talk about one of the biggest breaks for sexual desire, right?

One of the things that just is very difficult to overcome and to allow sexual desire to flourish and to be felt.

If this is present and what the this is, one of those breaks is stress.

This is true for men and women, broadly speaking.

I have worked with so many men who want a more meaningful, more fulfilling sex life with their wives.

Of course, who doesn't?

And their family life, though, is just stressed to the max.

You know, maybe they're working really long hours.

Maybe it's odd shifts.

Maybe they've their kids activities are completely overwhelming.

They're just spending all of their time and effort managing logistics, getting people from point A to point B at the right time.

Yeah, there's a lot of different ways that our lives can get overwhelming, especially in our modern culture.

Maybe some couples are overwhelmed with the amount of volunteering and service that they do for lots of different reasons.

They these couples, many couples do not have time for each other.

They don't make or keep time for dates.

They have very little connection.

The time that they do have together is spent entirely talking about logistics and managing the household and planning.

Often for couples and families that are in this situation, there's not a lot of sleep happening either.

And by the way, that's another big stressor is younger kids.

Better bedtime and sleep hygiene can cause a huge amount of stress on mom and dad.

You know, if.

If it takes an hour and a half, two hours, even more for a child to fall asleep before mom and dad can have any time together in the evening, that takes a toll for sure.

So it's no wonder in situations like this that sex life suffers between husband and wife.

Now, I'm not casting any blame, you know, if, if anyone listening to this or joining this conversation says, oh my gosh, that is so me right now.

I know from talking to couples and to husbands, to men many, many times over who are in this situation, I have yet to talk to anyone who does not have excellent intentions.

The everyone is doing their best.

And I'm sure that you're doing your best as well.

You are serving your family, bending over backwards, sacrificing, providing.

I know it, I've been there myself, and I feel it.

And I know that's what you're doing and I just want to validate that.

I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong.

What I am going to give you are a few tips for how you can keep some of the priorities straight in your mind and help reflect those priorities back into the lived experience of your daily and weekly routines.

So here's one of them.

If you are stressed out this much, if you're stressed this thin, or if it doesn't have to be even super extreme, if you're listening to this and you think, yeah, I could totally, you know, relate to this, maybe it's not extreme, but I'm definitely on that scale at some point.

So somewhere on that scale, here's number one.

Claw out some margin in your week.

There's a few things that you can do.

And I hear it, and I've heard it so many times from other men that I've talked to, like, there is just no way.

I, I don't have any space.

Here's how you get some space.

The power of no.

What can you say no to?

I guarantee there is something somewhere.

So something small, start small that you can say no to, or that you can rearrange.

You've got to keep some priorities in your mind, right?

The priority, I'm going to give it to you, here's the priority.

The priority for your life from an eternal perspective.

I'm not talking about the daily, weekly, yearly perspectives.

I'm not talking about what the ten year plan is.

I'm talking about what the eternal plan is.

Because if you're not planning for eternity, if you've got a retirement plan, but you don't have an eternal plan, you've got your plans mixed up.

So the eternal plan, the eternal priority here is heaven.

That's what we're aiming for, right?

You can retire with a healthy retirement account, but if your soul isn't destined for heaven, who cares?

You've got a plan for eternity.

And so that's.

That's number one.

And it's not just your own eternity.

It's your wife's eternity and your children's eternity.

That's explicitly one of the two ends of marriage, right?

The sanctification of spouses and procreation of children.

Sanctification, what does that mean?

It means making holy.

Why?

So we can get to heaven.

That's what it means.

That's the goal.

Get yourself and your wife to heaven, and marriage is how you do it.

So we've got to prioritize this.

This is our eternal plan.

This is our eternal priority.

This is the job that God gave us.

Men, married men in life.

When we die, God's going to ask us, how well did you do the job that I gave you?

And if you don't know the answer to that, if you're thinking the job you gave me, what's that?

That's a problem.

The job that God gave you is the vocation to which you are called.

The vocation to which you are called is marriage.

And it's not an abstract thing.

It is a very specific call.

It is a call for you to serve your specific wife, to love her and sanctify her and help her get to heaven along with your children.

So with that priority in mind, what can I say no to?

Does that help put things in perspective so that maybe there are some things that I can say no to?

To carve out Half an hour.

Half an hour a week, right?

30 Minutes.

That's all I'm asking.

Start there.

You have seven days out of the week.

Find 30 minutes of it to carve out and protect that margin.

Once you create the margin and you have some space and you've got a quote unquote, a hole in your schedule.

It's not a hole.

It's actually filled with the most important priority that we just talked about.

That is not a place that.

Then you have the ability to schedule something else into.

Right?

Oh, I've got this time on Sunday afternoon.

Sure.

I can help with, you know, Knights of Columbus or men's club or, you know, get coffee with my buddy or whatever.

Right?

No, that is scheduled for your most important priority, your marriage.

So the power of no.

Find something to say no to, remember your priorities, and then once you have that in your calendar someplace, protect it.

Don't schedule anything over it.

Is it easy?

It's easy to think about.

Is it easy to do?

No.

But is it necessary?

Absolutely.

This is absolutely necessary.

Okay.

So that will give you some time with your wife, some time to dedicate, to reconnect.

Your marriage cannot thrive if it doesn't get cultivated with time together.

It just can't.

So that's what that time is for.

Cana Feast, the, the ministry that I run with my wife, we have lots and lots and lots of resources for what to do with that time.

We have online date nights, open ended question banks, like all sorts of things.

So if you want some ideas, just shoot me an email, reach out to me or check out our [email protected] for lots of ideas for what to do do with that time and make it productive and actually cultivate your marriage in that time.

Okay, that's number one, you need the time.

Number two, this one doesn't necessarily take any additional time.

Number two is put some fun back in your life.

This might sound unusual, but if you're stressed out, if you're, if you're stressed stretched thin, chances are that fun and enjoyment, laughter, smiles, those are rare.

So you have to be able to enjoy things with your wife.

If you want to enjoy sex with your wife, you have to be able to enjoy life in general with your wife.

This does not have to be big or expensive or take a lot of time or even any time, but find things that you both enjoy and make them happen.

Pray for laughter in your marriage and family.

This is one of my favorite tips, and we, I talk about this quite a bit actually.

So pray for laughter.

Fun and laughter are the opposite of stress.

So if stress is a big marker in your life or in your wife's life, striving for the opposite virtue is sometimes the best way to overcome the challenge.

We can pray for patience, we can pray for endurance.

Get through it, right?

And, and those are good things to pray for.

But also try this.

Try praying for fun, try praying for laughter.

Try praying for, you know, peace and contentment instead of gritting and bearing it.

Give me patience, give me endurance, right?

Those are, those are hard.

Those aren't fun.

Instead, pray for fun and laughter.

The concrete situation of your life won't change necessarily with this prayer, but your subjective experience of it can go from night and day, from night to day.

Here's a, here's a dumb example, but this is, this is real from my own life.

Our family was, was in one of these seasons, right?

And we were all kind of stressed and busy and it was, it was just heavy.

It was heavy in our family.

So I literally bought a cheap book of dumb dad jokes one summer and I Pulled it out, and I regaled the dinner table with them, you know, for like, a week or two straight.

And as soon as I.

The first time I brought this book out, everyone was like, what is that?

Oh, my gosh, you didn't do that, did you?

What.

What is happening right now?

And then, you know, the.

The eye rolls began, the groans.

Like, these are terrible, terrible jokes.

And that's the whole point.

You're not really laughing because the jokes are funny.

You're laughing because they're so bad, which makes them funny.

But it doesn't have, like, it.

It worked.

It worked.

By the end of dinner, we were all kind of laughing at how absurd and ridiculous this whole thing was.

But we had a good time.

And that is what you need to do.

Find some ways to inject laughter, levity, and fun back into your marriage and back into your family.

Learn a dumb trick.

Learn how to juggle.

Like, I know how to juggle rather poorly, but I can manage to keep three objects in the air for a minute, maybe.

And sometimes I'll just grab some fruit and juggle it, and my kids will be like, whoa.

And they'll drop one.

But it's just fun, right?

Like, find these moments to have fun.

Just a word of caution, right?

If there are heavy things that need to be addressed in your marriage and in your family, obviously you can't hide behind levity.

You have to address those things.

But what you can do is it's not an either or.

It's not like you can't enjoy yourself.

You can't ever smile while something big and heavy is weighing on you.

You actually can do both.

So this isn't a running away from the big issues that need to be addressed in your marriage and in your family.

You need to address the big issues.

Absolutely.

Here's another truth.

The big issues are so much easier to address when you are deeply connected and in love with your wife.

When you are deeply connected and loving and your relationship is warm and you've cultivated that marriage relationship and that friendship.

You, yes, you love each other, but you actually like each other, right?

You want to be with each other.

When you're in that state with your wife, the big issues that you face together in marriage become so much easier because the context of your marriage is so much warmer.

And together you can do anything, right?

You can conquer the world together.

So if you focus on your marriage and reconnect with your wife, the challenges, they become easier to face again, subjectively.

So I'm going to leave it there for this week's.

Discussion.

I kind of covered a lot of ground.

But the main thing here is that so many issues that affect our sexual relationship with our wife and the quality of our sex life and the mutuality of our sex life, they're not about what happens in the bedroom.

They're about our relationship.

They're about the quality of our love and our connection with our wives.

Or they're about our past and things from our past are affecting us.

Or things from her past are affecting your relationship.

I talked today a lot about stress.

Stress is a huge break to sexual desire and physical desire.

It's a really big challenge to overcome, to have a beautiful, mutually fulfilling sex life.

When you're marriage and your family life is marked by chronic stress, so what two quick ways to try to alleviate some of that stress.

The power of no.

What can you say no to in your life?

Like, if you're truly in a period of survival mode, you've got to say no to something.

You've got to change the dynamic in some way.

You've got to get some margin back into your weekly schedule.

Once you have that margin, protect it.

It is precious.

It's the most valuable thing in your schedule at that point.

So get some margin and then use that to, you know, reconnect and cultivate your marriage.

The second one, try to find some levity, some fun, some joy back into your life.

This doesn't have to take time or money or anything.

It's just subjectively.

How do you go throughout your day?

You're gonna see your family, you're gonna see your wife throughout the day at various times and do various things with them.

What's your attitude gonna be during those times?

Are you going to allow the stress to just completely mark that interaction with your wife and with your kids?

Or you could choose to be more joyful, more loving, more funny.

You could just be funny.

So those are, those are the two tips that I have for you today.

I am praying for you always.

And catch me here next week.

Until next week.

God bless.

Bye.