Marital Intimacy

After reading a few of my posts you may mistakenly conclude that I have something against marital intimacy, specifically sexual intercourse with climax and ejaculation. You would be wrong to reach such a conclusion.

This act is specifically required to conceive a child. Procreation is a God given duty of married men and women who have the capacity for bearing and raising children.

So just procreation, one may ask? No the marriage bed is honorable in all and so are all the acts of the marriage bed that are mutually agreeable to husband and wife. They are good. They are agreeable to God and he can bless them. But there may be even better virtues to cultivate in a marriage. It may be worthy and desirable for a couple to learn how to exercise restraint in their relationship. This can take many righteous forms over the course of a marriage. After the early days of a marriage have waned and some of the excitement of the marital act has been dulled by experience, a couple may want to consider adopting a frequency (but not a schedule) that is controlled by the wife (or the partner with less urgent needs). At an agreeable frequency she initiates the marital act. But this is not on a schedule. Husband cannot expect that he will have sex on Tuesday and Saturday. He thus learns that he cannot call forth pleasure on a demand. He can no longer impose his will on his wife inconveniently.

Later in a marriage perhaps a couple can learn how to experience non-orgasmic intercourse. This is a discipline of desire that place the urges of the body in subjection to the mind.

None of these disciplines are possible for men and women who use porn or practice masturbation. These have no place at all in a marriage (or in anyone else's life).

Why would anyone do these things? To yield their members as instruments of righteousness, to learn how to bridle our passions, and, to learn how to not offend.

We ask the unmarried of the church to master their bodies perfectly. Perhaps it is an even greater virtue to deny ourselves the licit pleasure of sex for the opportunity to perfect our example even though the example is not spoken.