Delighting in Marriage

Leslie Basham: Are you making an effort to look attractive for your husband? Here’s Shaunti Feldhahn.

Shaunti Feldhahn: We say it’s what is on the inside that matters. We’ve come to this idea that what’s on the outside doesn’t matter, and instead, we just need to deal with reality on this and recognize that to our husband it does. Thankfully, it’s about them seeing us willing to make the effort.

Leslie: You're listening to Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss for Thursday, February 3.

Today's program will give wives a lot to ponder, but the program is not appropriate for young children. I hope you'll get your little ears involved somewhere else and then come back.

I will also say that when we talk about issues like intimacy in marriage, we can’t possibly address every specific issue. Each woman is unique and each marriage is unique. Some women will be listening today while carrying a lot of hurts. Let me just ask you to consider what you’re hearing. Ask God whether it applies to your situation. Get help from older women at your church who can address your specific concerns. And if needed, get the leadership at your church involved. Here's Nancy to get us started.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: We’ve been having a great discussion over the past several days with two women who have a heart for the Lord, a heart for their husbands, and a heart to help other women have the kind of marriage and relationship with men that God intended them to have.

Barbara Rainey has been a longtime friend; she’s the wife of Dennis Rainey. Together they founded FamilyLife Ministries—heard on many of the same stations that air Revive Our Hearts. They’re a partner ministry of ours.

Barbara, you’re a sweet friend, and you’re an author, a mother, a grandmother—a lot of roles that you have at this season of your life. Thank you for taking time out to come and talk with us about some of these really important subjects.

Barbara Rainey: You are welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Nancy: Shaunti Feldhahn is a new friend. She’s written a book called, For Women Only: What You Need to Know About the Inner Lives of Men. We stated earlier in the series, but I want to say it again, that none of us are experts on men—certainly not I—and we’re not claiming to be.

There is a lot more that we don’t know than we do, and we want to say that from the outset. But Shaunti did some research and asked in different ways, in verbal and written interviews, over a thousand men to help women understand what they want us to get about them that sometimes we don’t get.

Shaunti, thank you for writing this book; thank you for joining us here on Revive Our Hearts.

Shaunti: It’s a pleasure.

Nancy: Before we jump into this, I want to just lay a biblical foundation. I was reading in my quiet time this morning from the book of the Song of Solomon, which is the biblical handbook on physical intimacy in marriage. It reminds us that the marriage relationship, and even the physical part of that, is intended to be a picture of the redemptive relationship that Christ has with His church. We don’t want to lose sight of the mystery of all this.

It’s not just about sex. It’s not just about your marriage. It’s not just about your issues. It’s about something God wants to communicate to the world about His relationship with His people.

As I was reading in Song of Solomon, I see this very open, free expression of love between this husband and this wife. I see a woman who is delighting in her husband and a husband who senses and is grateful for the delight that she feels. Just the very opening of that book she says, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine;” she says to her husband (Song of Solomon 1:2). Then she says, “Draw me after you; let us run. The king has brought me into his chambers” (Song of Solomon 1:4).

Right from the get-go, she’s saying, "I cherish our physical relationship. I cherish your body. I cherish you as my husband, and I delight to give myself to you."

That is a really different sense about physical intimacy than you get when you talk to a lot of wives today.

Barbara: That is really true, because the attitude today is not that gracious; it’s not that giving; it’s not that kind. So often it is begrudging and negative, and I think in the last generation, women have changed their perspective. They’re looking at marriage as, “What’s in it for me?” not “How can I serve my husband and love him?”

We need to do some mental shifting in the way that we think about our husbands. The Song of Solomon would be a good place to start as we think about the whole area of physical intimacy in marriage.

Shaunti: I think also that for us to recognize that delight in this relationship is exactly what our husbands need to feel from us—that sense that we want to be with them in that way, we delight in it, we desire them. It was such a surprise when I found out that this was not just a physical need, as we talked about yesterday, but that our delight built our husbands up in a sense of well-being in other areas of their life.

One man said,

I can be having a terrible time at work; I can be having a terrible time in my industry; the house can be a wreck, and the kids can be disobedient. But if I know that my wife desires me and she affirms me in bed, I have a sense that I can conquer the rest of my life with no problem. But if I get that same sense from her that "You don’t measure up, don’t touch me,” that will devastate me worse than anything else in my life.

Barbara: It really does create rejection in the heart of a man that goes perhaps deeper than any other kind of rejection he can experience.

Shaunti: The other thing that I discovered, that really was a surprise to me, was that so many men go through their day feeling isolated. One guy said, “I feel like I go out in the ring every day, and I fight the good fight, and it’s really lonely.”

Nancy: That can be true of even men who are very outgoing and who have a lot of friends.

Barbara: Oh, yes.

Shaunti: Yes, absolutely.

Nancy: It’s an inner loneliness that you’re talking about.

Barbara: That’s right.

Shaunti: Absolutely. It’s an inner loneliness that they have. One man said, well, let me actually just read this quote. He said,

A man really does feel isolated, even with his wife, but in making love, there is one other person in this world that you can be completely vulnerable with and be totally accepted and non-judged. It is a solace that goes very deep into the heart of a man.

Barbara: That is so good.

Shaunti: Isn’t that beautiful?

Barbara: It really is.

Shaunti: What a joy to be able to recognize that. And instead of feeling, “Well, it’s my duty,” or “It’s my burden,”—no! You have an opportunity to salve this deep sense of loneliness that your husband feels.

Nancy: I want to encourage our married listeners in particular to go and read the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament. It’s a book you don’t hear preached on very often in church. It’s a book not many Christians take time to dig into, but just read the exchange—the verbal exchange, the physical exchange between this husband and his wife.

Read the things that she says. It’s intriguing to me how often she initiates the physical relationship with her husband. She says, “Tell me, you whom my soul loves, where you pasture your flock, where you make it lie down at noon” (1:7).

Shaunti: “Where can I find you?”

Nancy: She’s saying, “Where can I find you?” Then she says, “Behold, the voice of my beloved! Behold, he comes, leaping over the mountains, bounding over the hills” (2:8). A lot of women are thinking, “Yes, I know what he wants!” But she is welcoming him. She knows what he wants, but she invites him; she welcomes him, receives him into her life, and that’s really what a man wants from his wife.

Shaunti: Let me tell you—I’ll be very transparent here. When I started learning this: how much, just initiating, made such an enormous difference to this feeling in my husband’s life that, she does desire me; she does delight. I started getting kind of bad. I would send my husband a little text message on his phone when he was in the middle of a meeting that just said something about, can’t wait for you to get home. He would just be like, oh man, that fills me up. I can just . . .

Nancy: He forgot all about the meeting!

Shaunti: Yes, probably. But what a joy for us to be able to have that secret delight in each other. For the women out there who feel, “Well, I just don’t—I’m tired. I don’t know if I’m ready for that, if I don’t feel that.” If you will take that first step, I bet you will find that your feelings follow your actions.

Nancy: We are going to put together here, in this last session, a couple of insights that you gave. It has to do with the concept that men are visual, and again, that probably doesn’t come as any great surprise. But let’s talk about some of the implications of that that were a surprise to you as you did this survey.

Shaunti: Yes. Absolutely. One of the things that I realized is that I heard in premarital counseling and many other places that my husband was visual. Then I realized I didn’t even know what that meant—really.

Nancy: What does it mean?

Shaunti: Here is really what it means, and, okay, ladies, hold on to your seats here for a minute and have an open mind as we talk about this because some of this can be a little hard to hear frankly.

Nancy: Or hard to believe.

Shaunti: Or hard to believe, right, exactly. What “men are visual,” means is two separate things that are related. It means that a man is wired in such a way that he can’t not notice a woman with an attractive figure. He just can’t not notice her.

Nancy: Now, you’re talking about godly men—spiritually mature men?

Shaunti: Godly men, wonderful Christian husbands. Yes. All men. It doesn’t have anything to do with sin. This is an initial temptation. The Bible says that Jesus was tempted in every way and yet without sin. This initial attraction to not be able to notnotice this woman is an involuntary reflex. And by the way, the Scripture can bear this out very easily if you look at Job. God said Job was the finest man in all the earth, okay?

Nancy: The most righteous.

Shaunti: The most righteous man in all the earth, and this man even had to say, “I had to make a covenant with my eyes to not look with lust upon a young woman” (Job 31:1). Okay? So if Job had this struggle, every man has this struggle. That’s the first thing that “men as visual,” means.

Nancy: Which is very hard for us as women to understand because most of us are not wired that way.

Shaunti: That’s right. That was the first thing, here’s the second thing that it means:that image of that woman that he just couldn’t not notice is burned into his brainand becomes part of what my husband calls a “mental rolodex" of images that stretch back to his teen years that can arise any time in his mind without warning. This picture just sort of pops into his mind without warning, and it could assault him, basically, at any time of the day.

I didn’t really understand what this meant. I’ll explain this in the same way that I found out about it, which was: We were driving in the car one day, and Jeff said,

Jeff: I bet you do understand what this means, and maybe we’re just using different words to describe it. So let me give you this illustration. Remember this movie we went to last week with Tom Cruise?

Shaunti: Yes.

Jeff: Okay, you think he’s an attractive man, right?

Shaunti: Yes.

Jeff: Okay, so how many times the next day does this image of Tom Cruise with his shirt off just sort of rise up in your head?

I said . . .

Nancy: Let me guess—never?

Barbara: Zero.

Shaunti: Never.

Jeff: No, no. I must not be explaining myself correctly. You’re just sitting at your computer. You’re working on a column or something. You’re not doing anything sensual, and a picture of Tom Cruise with his shirt off just sort of flashes across the screen of your mind. How many times does that happen the next day?

Shaunti: Never! It just doesn’t happen. I realized this is what goes on in the minds of our men, all day.

Barbara: All the time.

Shaunti: Every day they have these images that rise up and can really assault them without warning, and for any man who wants to keep his thought life pure, that’s when he has the choice. That’s when the temptation rises up, and he has the choice of what he’s going to do about it.

They have to take that thought captive and say, I don’t want that in there, and tear it down. Do you know what? If they’re having a hard day, it could pop up again five seconds later. “Uh, I don’t want that there. Take it captive; tear it down.” And this culture, because it’s a mine field of those images, many men have described this as exhausting.

Nancy: A wife needs to appreciate and honor the fact that her husband is making the effort and is making the commitment to make those right choices when he does.

Barbara: She needs to thank him for being pure and for wanting to be faithful and for talking about this with her.

It is one of the things that I value most in my relationship with my husband—that he feels like he can confide in me when he is faced with temptation, or when he’s struggling in some area. He’ll talk to me about it, and I feel so honored that he feels safe with me, and we can talk about it. I can say, “Thank you for wanting to do what’s right. Thank you for doing what’s right. Thank you for not dwelling on those things or not lingering on a channel on the TV when you’re changing channels.”

All of those kind of things—I’m so grateful. I make sure he knows that I’m grateful for the commitment that he has.

Nancy: But your husband is not going to feel free or safe to let you know he struggles if he knows that when he shares his struggle, you’re going to freak out.

Barbara: That’s right, he won’t. If when he shares that, not only will you freak out, but if he shares a need to be with you intimately, physically, sexually, and you’re not interested, or you don’t respond and you don’t welcome him, he’s thinking, “Why should I talk to her about it? She doesn’t get it.” The truth is that many women don’t get it.

Nancy: The fact that men are wired this way, that they are so visual says something, also, about the importance to those men of their own wife’s physical appearance.

Shaunti: This was actually a very important light bulb to me that went on, especially because I had just had two kids. I was 20 pounds overweight, and I just didn’t think it affected anybody but me. Honestly, that’s the way I felt about it. Instead, a man shared, “This is such a blind spot for so many women. They don’t realize the importance of this.”

The good thing that I learned that was such an encouragement (because it’s very hard to hear this) is that for men, it’s not about being a size three. And, of course, for me I say, "good thing," because it’s not going to happen! But it’s not about being tiny.

It’s about our men simply seeing us being willing to make the effort to take care of ourselves for them and to take the time to put ourselves together well. What a blessing it is to know that that’s important, because frankly, we say, "It’s what’s on the inside that matters."

We’ve come to this idea that what’s on the outside doesn’t matter, and instead, we just need to deal with reality on this and recognize that to our husband it does. Thankfully, again, recognizing that it’s about them seeing us willing to make the effort.

Nancy: Let me illustrate that with an email we received. Most of the emails we receive are from women, but this one came from a man who said exactly this. He said,

When my wife and I dated, it was so wonderful. We loved spending time with each other. She took care of herself. She took care of our home. She took care of me after we got married.

Then he described some work-related issues that came up, some financial issues, she had a baby, and in the process of marriage, years in the marriage, some things changed in her heart, and he said she became a very unhappy camper.

In all this time, she also has the extra weight from the baby; she’s growing heavier. She once was a very neat person. She no longer keeps the house clean and tidy. She’s let herself go physically; she’s at least 60 pounds overweight. I know it shouldn’t, but this has become a huge issue to me personally.

Quite honestly, this is hard for me to understand. I come home each day from an intense work situation, and she’s not dressed attractively. I know that it's not possible every day, but nine days out of ten the house is a wreck. She and our daughter are fighting with each other. "Welcome home, Honey!" I just want to go back to work.

Then he says what you just said, Shaunti.

If I could even see some small effort to please me as a husband, such as trying to control her weight and look more attractive—I’m often embarrassed in public. I’m not saying this is the right attitude; I’m just being honest. If I could just see some effort, I would at least see some light at the end of the tunnel.

He is really saying that when a wife doesn’t take care of herself, that the man feels unvalued and rejected.

Shaunti: The other thing that I hear from him is the same thing that I’ve heard from so many men. The sentiment that, “She doesn’t understand how hard it is for me in this culture to go through my day, all day, every day, making an effort to keep my eyes off of other women. She expects me, and I want to make that effort to try and keep my thought life pure for her, and to recognize that it’s that same kind of willingness to make an effort on her part—to do something that will help me in that process.”

Nancy: Shaunti, at the end of your survey, you asked men, “What is the one thing you most wish that your wife understood—that she knew about you?” You were really surprised at the answer that stood out from all those responses.

Shaunti: I was just blown away. I gave men a blank space to answer that question, “What is the one most important thing you wish your wife knew, but feel you can’t explain to her or tell her?”

I gave them a blank space, and I thought, really, they’d probably use it to vent. I mean, really, that’s what I expected. Instead, the top answer by far that I got was that the one most important thing they wished their wives knew was, “How much I love her.”

That blew me away because I realized that most of the men in our lives are good guys who love us, adore us, cherish us, and feel absolutely handicapped at really getting that across. I did a talk recently where a man came up to me afterwards after I shared this. He said, “It’s not even so much that I feel like I can’t tell her this. It’s that I can’t tell her in a way that she’ll really believe me and get the depth of how I feel about her.”

What an encouragement to us to recognize that we have such an opportunity to build the men in our lives up, and that they want to do the same thing for us.

Nancy: Women, it is as we receive the love, the incredible unconditional love that God has for us, that we grow in our capacity to give and receive love from others. If there’s an issue in your marriage—and there is in every marriage—where the love isn’t what it ought to be, the intimacy isn’t at the level that it ought to be, the starting place is in your relationship with the Lord.

As with every issue in life, it all goes back to your relationship with Jesus Christ. To have been loved by Him, and to receive His love with gratitude and with faith and realizing, His love is grace.

It’s not something we deserve; it’s just that He is a lover. He loves us with a dying and undying love, infinitely, eternally—what can ever separate us from the love of Christ?

As you begin to, by faith, receive that love, I think you’ll find that you have a greater capacity to believe and receive the love that your husband said in this survey, he really does want you to know that he has for you.

Leslie: Nancy Leigh DeMoss has been talking with Barbara Rainey and Shaunti Feldhahn about the way men think and receive affirmation from their wives.

We’ve needed to trim some of that conversation in order to fit it on the radio this week, and when you order it on CD, you’ll hear all of it. Just look up the series, For Women Only, at Revive Our Hearts.com.

Nancy just mentioned practical steps of action. I hope you’ll take some of those practical steps by getting a copy of the booklet, 30 Days of Encouraging Your Husband.

The booklet is based on the 30-Day Husband Encouragement Challenge that Nancy’s given over the years. At Revive Our Hearts, we continually hear from women who have watched God change them and their husbands through this challenge. Like Allison.

Allison: My husband originally went to school at college to be a pastor. Right now he's working in a warehouse. It doesn't have a lot of prestige. It's a warehouse job. He makes money to support the family, and he does a good job, but it's not something you want to brag about or go "Ooh, look what job I have."

It really changed my perspective to be able to encourage him that even God is using even that time now to prepare him for what God has down the road. It made me focus on looking for skills or talents that he was using in his job now that you could see that the Lord was cultivating for the future.

I think that's really changed my heart, and it has encouraged him to fully embrace his job and to see his job as more of that's where the Lord called him and that's his mission field for right now. That's where the Lord has called him to speak to people and share with people and minister to people. He takes every opportunity he has now in his job to be faithful with the little that the Lord's trusted him with. 

Nancy: I’m so thankful that God has used the 30-Day Husband Encouragement Challenge to affect Michael, Allison, and so many marriages like theirs.

I want to say that I hope every married woman who is listening to the sound of my voice today will take this same challenge over the next 30 days.

Starting the 30-day challenge has never been easier, because we've created a booklet called 30 Days of Encouraging Your Husband. It will give you fresh ideas on how to effectively build up your husband each day through the challenge.

When you send in a donation of any amount to Revive Our Hearts, we’ll send you the booklet, 30 Days of Encouraging Your Husband. And we’ll also add the book our guest Shaunti Feldhahn wrote called, For Women Only.

Just make your donation of any size at ReviveOurHearts.com, or call 1-800-569-5959.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that every situation is unique. Today’s discussion on outward beauty and physical needs of husbands is going to resonate differently with different women. Each person is bringing their own experiences, and sometimes hurts, to a topic like this.

I want to encourage you to just ask the Lord what He wants you to take away from today’s program? If you need some further help sorting things out in your life or your marriage, consider approaching an older woman in your church or perhaps your pastor and his wife. Ask them to help you think and pray through how to work these issues out in your specific situation.

Now you may be wondering, if I encourage my husband each day for 30 days, how much of a difference can that really make in our marriage? Tomorrow you'll hear from several women who have taken this challenge and will share the difference it has made in their lives. Be sure and join us tomorrow for Revive Our Hearts.