Imagine taking your wife out to a beautiful dinner. You finish your appetizer, your entrée, and dessert while she has barely touched her first course. Then you sit back, satisfied, while she stays at the table hungry and unfulfilled.

St. Francis de Sales once used an extended dining metaphor to talk about married love, and I think it can teach us husbands something we really need to hear.

In this conversation, I'll share what the Catechism teaches about the purpose of sex in marriage, why a slower and more attentive approach leads to deeper pleasure and connection for both of you, and how a simple dinner date can reshape the way you love your wife.

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

Resources mentioned in this episode: 📖 Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales.

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I studied philosophy in grad school.

Shout out to the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. excellent program.

When discussing ethics or morality, many philosophers, I've noticed, use examples of eating or sex when discussing human desire and appetite.

These basically stand in as relatable examples for any other desire or passion that might arise.

And then philosophers pontificate about what to do with these things in an ethical or moral context.

And there's a lot of similarity between these things.

Eating and sex.

They're both pretty well recognized as universal experiences.

Any human person can pretty well appreciate and understand these desires.

One is related to the survival of the individual.

Eating.

The other is related to the survival of the species.

Sex for procreation.

They're both obviously important, but both require ethical limits and boundaries, unless you're a complete hedonist.

But we're not.

So, yes, they.

They require ethical limits and boundaries.

Theologians have recognized these similarities as well and have drawn the comparison much, much further.

For example, in his introduction to the devout life, St. Francis de Sales, who is amazing, by the way.

I love St. Francis de Sales.

If you haven't read him, do so.

He's incredibly accessible and so down to earth and practical.

So this is kind of one of his classics, Introduction to the Devout Life.

He gives a bunch of practical advice to laypeople about living everyday life.

You know, so many of the spiritual classics are directed towards nuns or monks, right?

Imitation of Christ or The Rule of St. Francis or the Interior Castle.

Right.

All these things are ostensibly directed to people who have joined the monastery or given themselves to religious life in one way or another.

But St. Francis, St. Francis de Sales, he is writing specifically to lay people and how to live a holy life for the layperson, which is so fantastic.

Anyway, he's wonderful.

He has this book, Introduction to the Devout Life, and he lays out, you know, all this advice for how to live a holy life in the world, but not be of it, right?

As Jesus commands us.

He wants to discuss sex because it's a.

It's an important topic for the layperson living in the world.

It's really important.

And you know how to live this part of our lives in a holy way.

Well, that's what this entire podcast is all about.

Um, and St. Francis wants to discuss it, and thank goodness he does, because, you know, this isn't a topic that's needed to be discussed by The Rule of St. Benedict, right, in the monastery or other spiritual classics.

So he wants to discuss this, but at the time that he's writing, it would be extremely unseemly for him to be very direct.

So he uses a metaphor of dining.

It's a whole chapter long, or maybe slightly more than a chapter.

I'm not sure.

It's an extended metaphor where he talks about how to moderate your sexual.

Not only sexual desire, but also, you know, actual sexual intercourse within marriage in a holy way.

And it's really great.

I think that this metaphor is very, very, very powerful.

And it can help us men understand some things about making love at a deeper level than we often do, and in a different way.

It's really helpful to us to think about it in this way.

So I'm going to draw this out a little bit here.

Imagine a dinner date.

The dinner date is our metaphor for sex.

All right?

So imagine taking your wife out to dinner.

First of all, there's a lot of similarity.

Let me draw this out a little bit.

There's mutuality, there's connection.

It's not just about the food.

It's about experiencing something with your wife.

If you wanted to just eat, you wouldn't need a partner or a date to do that, right?

The whole fact that it's a date means that there's something beyond just the food.

In fact, the food is there to facilitate the connection, not the other way around.

The food on a dinner date is there to provide you with a common experience.

Joy, pleasure, all of that is there.

Like, we can enjoy the food.

We experience pleasure from the taste of the food, from the service, from the atmosphere, from, you know, all of these things.

But the whole experience is there to serve the connection, the love between you and your date, between you and your wife.

That's what the dinner date is for.

So it's not really about the food.

It's about the experience and the connection and the love that is really important because it is the exact same in making love.

The sex is not actually there as the pure focus.

Right?

Pleasure is not an end of sex, properly speaking.

Philosophically speaking.

I started talking about philosophy.

May as well keep it going.

The end of sex, according to the catechism of the Catholic Church, is twofold.

One is the procreation of children, of course.

The second is the bond between you and your wife, between a married couple, the bond that they share, the sex.

The second end of sex is to facilitate, to grow, to nurture, to cultivate, to strengthen the bond of love and connection between the two of you.

Pleasure comes out of that, and it is no bad thing.

And the catechism explicitly says that spouses who seek that pleasure to do no wrong in Doing so.

So the pleasure is fine.

It's good.

There's nothing wrong with pleasure in sex, just like there's nothing wrong in enjoying a great meal with your wife.

That's not wrong, but it's not the primary focus.

The primary focus is the connection, the love, the bond that you share in marriage with your beloved.

Okay?

Now this is actually really important.

This is what differentiates us from the animals.

Remember, I started philosophers.

Love, sex and food because they're universal and they're very visceral, right?

They're biological.

They're related to survival.

You have to eat to survive.

You have to procreate the species in order for the species to survive, right?

These are irrefutable facts, but that is very reductionist.

We humans go a lot deeper.

There's a lot more going on to us than simple survival, and this illustrates it.

This is one of the.

One of the things that's going on.

We aren't there just to survive.

We don't need a fancy dinner date to survive, to get enough nourishment to keep our bodies going.

That's not what's happening.

Yes, that does nourish us, but it's at a very lower level, right?

Animals need to eat to survive, and they simply eat and then they move on.

Humans have elevated that physical need of food, of nourishment, and have elevated it to a whole different plane where the deepest meaning is no longer about simple survival.

The deepest meaning is about shared connection and an experience of love.

There is no accident that Jesus Christ himself instituted the Eucharist as a meal.

Why a meal?

Right?

It is nourishing us.

There is a physical nourishment.

The bread nourishes us.

But the actual meaning of it, of course, is far beyond the physical world.

It goes.

Taps directly into the divinity of Christ himself.

When we receive the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus in the Eucharist, right?

So it becomes the spiritual nourishment, and it becomes an expression of love and unity with Christ and with the rest of the Church.

That's the ultimate, ultimate elevation of eating and of meals beyond the simple physical reality of it.

But even in.

Even in date, right, that we're talking about, we elevate the simple act of eating and nourishment far beyond the physical level of survival to a much deeper and richer experience of love and connection and community and communion.

That's what the eating is all about.

That's what a dinner date is really all about, right?

Well, that's what making love is about, too.

We are far beyond simple procreation of other animals.

They procreate to perpetuate the species.

We do that too.

We also need to perpetuate the species that's there.

But it's like eating.

We are so far beyond just that physical survival that making love is.

Yes, it's about procreation of children, the church says so explicitly, but it's also about the love and the connection.

And that's why procreation is reserved for marriage, so that children can be raised, born into and raised within a communion of love and commitment.

That is, again, one of the things that elevates us beyond merely animal.

That's what makes us human.

That's.

That's our immortal soul that we are endowed with by God, making a real practical difference in how we approach our lives and how we live our lives and how we experience our lives.

All right, I'm getting really philosophical here.

Let me get back to the dinner date.

Let's get practical.

Let's get way more practical.

You're on a date.

You're on a date with your wife.

Imagine that.

You know, it's a nice restaurant.

The waiter comes out.

You decide what you want to eat from the menu.

The waiter brings out your appetizers.

Let's say that you eat your appetizers and you're, like, really enjoying them.

And you finish them really quickly, and your wife has barely taken a bite.

Waiter comes by and is like, oh, great, you're done.

All right, I'll bring.

I'll bring out your main course.

Your main course comes.

Maybe it's a steak.

Maybe it's salmon.

I live in the Pacific Northwest, so let's go with salmon.

It's tasty.

Whatever.

You get a nice meal, and it's amazing, and you love it, and you just eat it right away.

Meanwhile, your wife has eaten, like, half of her appetizer, and the waiter comes out and he's like, oh, great, you finished it.

Okay, I'll bring out your dessert.

So then you get this, you know, amazing wet chocolate cake maybe, and you eat that up, and it's.

It's so good.

And then you push back from the table, and you're like, ah, that was an amazing meal.

I hope you enjoyed your meal, sweetie.

And your wife is staring at you because she has eaten half of her appetizers, has barely even started.

And then you go home, and she's literally unfulfilled.

Do you see where I'm going here, guys?

The metaphor is clear.

Let me spell it out.

For most women.

Most women experience a Much, much slower arousal curve than most men.

Most men can achieve sexual climax really quickly without much effort.

Most women require a lot more time and they.

Their arousal curve just is slower.

That is not because they're broken.

It's not a deficiency.

In fact, I would say that if we go back to the dining metaphor, we know, I know from my own experience, enjoying a meal slowly actually is more enjoyable, isn't it?

Like when you really linger over an excellent meal, it's a deeper experience, a more enjoyable experience.

You get more pleasure and more fulfillment out of a long, slow meal than you do out of wolfing down a burger.

And know 5 seconds you can barely taste it.

How was it?

I don't know.

I barely tasted it.

That holds in sex too.

The.

The slower arousal curve actually facilitates a deeper and more pleasurable and more connected experience within lovemaking than rushing it.

So when we are aware of the connection between the two of us, remember, we're not making love for the sake of the sex itself.

Sex, like the food in a dinner date, is there to facilitate the connection between the two of us.

That's what the church says.

The love and the bond is the end of sex in marriage.

One of two.

Not the pleasure, not a personal release.

It's the connection and the bond with our wives.

So when we're focused on that and we're aware of her experience also, it can help us understand that we can slow down, we can try to do things to facilitate her experience.

But yeah, one of the biggest things in my course, holy Desires, where I coach a whole group of men about holy and pleasurable, mutually satisfying sexuality within marriage.

This is one of the big, big eye openers.

For most or for many men?

For many men, this whole idea of responsive desire and slower arousal curves, it's just a giant aha moment.

And talking about it in terms of this dining metaphor, I think makes it more relatable and more understandable for many of us.

So I'm going to leave it there.

I want you to think about that.

And when you connect with your wife, when you make love with your wife, next time, maybe try to focus.

If this has been not so much of a focus for you, try to focus on your connection and your love with your wife more than on the physical activity of making love.

Focus on the connection, and the pleasure from sexual intercourse will arise naturally out of that.

God bless you all.

Take care of.