Episode 295: Does More Sex Make Marriage Happier?

We're constantly told that more sex will fix our marriages, but the research tells a completely different story. When couples are simply told to increase frequency without addressing quality, satisfaction, and women's actual experiences, it often backfires and decreases desire altogether. The real predictor of marital happiness isn't how often you're having sex—it's whether that sex is mutually satisfying, intimate, and pleasurable for both people. Unfortunately, evangelical sex advice keeps pushing obligation sex messages that treat women's exhaustion and needs as obstacles to overcome rather than valid concerns. It's time we start asking better questions about what makes sex actually good instead of just demanding more of it.

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LINKS MENTIONED:

• The Orgasm Course 
• Psychology Today article on sexual frequency and happiness
• Focus on the Family State of Marriage in America survey
• The Whole Story puberty course for kids (coupon code: PODCAST)
• Our reel about the 24 hour rule

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction: Does More Sex Make Marriage Happier?
• 2:17 How is sex talked about in the evangelical church?
• 15:55 The Three Categories of Sexual Desire Explained
• 24:33 Analyzing Ed Young Jr.'s "48-Hour Rule"
• 31:32 What Research Actually Shows: Quality Over Quantity
• 41:17 Problems with Focus on the Family's Marriage Survey
• 51:04 Conclusion

Transcript

Sheila
Does more sex make your marriage happier? That's what we're going to be talking about today. I am Sheila Wray-Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence based biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage. And I am joined today by my daughter, Rebecca Lindenbach. 

Rebecca
Hello. 

Sheila 
Which is super weird.

Rebecca
Yes, we realize it's weird. We've heard it before. We get it.

Sheila
Yes. But, you know, we've researched this and we've talked about this so much that, Yeah, it doesn't quite seem as weird anymore.

Rebecca
No. Not quite. You can. You can get used to pretty much anything. No, but we've done a ton of research into this topic. We've talked a lot about sexual health. We've looked into the determinants of, healthy sexual life in a marriage, all these things. But we're actually looking at different people's research today.

Sheila
Yeah. So we've done a lot of research, but there's a bunch of studies that I want to talk about, that kind of combine to try to answer this question. Does more sex make your marriage happier? Because it is kind of convoluted and I love getting into the nitty gritty of things, of questions like that because it is super, it is super interesting where it's not a straightforward answer. And so we have to dig further to figure out what's really going on. And that really is our call, especially in the evangelical churches, to stop giving this pat one size fits all answers about sex, because it isn't, it isn't that easy. There's more going on. So before we jump into that, I just want to say thank you to the people who support our podcast and listen to our podcast.
So if you are a long time listener, please right now, if you haven't already, rate our podcast, five stars. Wherever you listen to it. It just helps other people hear about it and consider becoming a patron.

Rebecca
Yes, our patrons get, get access to us behind the scenes through our Facebook group, and they get little bonus episodes from the podcast, like when we're going to record today, where wwe're going to talk for a little bit longer, and.

Sheila
A little more unfiltered, a little.

Rebecca
Bit more unfiltered. And that's only available for our patrons.

Sheila
Yes. So you can join us a little as $5 a month or $8 a month to get the unfiltered. And that's super fun. Okay. I want to get to that research. But first I want to give an example, or a couple of examples that we'll talk about of the kind of ways that sex is often talked about in the evangelical church.
And one of them, and this makes me uncomfortable, honestly, to give this, but I just think it's, it's such, it's such an obvious one, and it's got more than a million views right now on social media. So we need to need to talk about it. It's making the rounds. This is Jana Howerton, the wife of Josh Howerton.
And you'll see Josh in this, too, talking about sex with her husband.

Josh Howerton
Candidly to the wives and husbands of, like, point. What, Jana, do you think are things that wives need to hear about sex and marriage?

Jana Howerton
I have a lot.

Josh Howerton 
Buckle up.

Jana Howerton
Okay. If you want to see some ripple effects in your marriage, I first, I would say make him feel wanted. Start desiring him. Pursuing him. Initiate sex with your husband. Just like the lady inside. It's almost like she gives us an example. Women need to remember that, emotional intimacy for them is going to lead to physical intimacy.
But for him, physical intimacy leads him to emotional intimacy. We both need to be playing our parts in doing what we need to be doing for the other. And then you're going to improve you're intimacy with women. Women are really, really good at giving attention to the needs of everyone around them: kids, friends, extended extended family, people at work.
But what about your husband? You're completely exhausted and you have no time for physical intimacy or a desire for him. But you know what? If your friend calls, you say, hey, can you go out tonight. All of a sudden you're excited and ready to leave and energized. What kind of message does that send to him? Like? And you are thinking he doesn't notice.
He doesn't care before he does.

Josh Howerton
Let me just say he cares.

Josh Howerton
Okay. Marriage is the only way that he can get this. He needs it. Sex is important, and you need to make sure you're having more of it.

Sheila
Okay, here's why this makes me uncomfortable.

Rebecca
Mhm.

Sheila
And this is.

Rebecca
Really this is my pet peeve. This is my big point which is if you hire someone to be a pastor of your church and you do not hire their spouse, and their spouse does not apply for the position and their spouse is not hired as the teacher, I just think it's incredibly inappropriate how often pastors wives are asked to bare their souls and their personal lives and talk about incredibly personal, intimate things simply because their husbands have a certain job.
I don't think it's appropriate to be asking, pastors wives in particular, because it's mostly women who are asked to do this. Because what happens is their husband is supposed to talk on sex, and he's like, well, someone talk to the women, and it would be inappropriate for me to talk with another woman. So then you're just gonna have to do it, honey.
And I don't know if that's happening with Jana and Josh. Obviously, we don't know, but it's a dynamic that I've seen happen so often that immediately when I see a pastor and his wife, who is not also a pastor, speaking on this, I'm always like, oh, so is she able to say no? Or has she been forced to talk about her sex life in front of millions of people now?
Because I've put it on the internet to have like a million views. Yeah, right. Like that just feels incredibly inappropriate to me. It feels coercive, and it feels like one of the many ways that the way that we do church leadership is actually not healthy for the pastor's family either.

Sheila
Yeah, we did a whole podcast on this, where, Josh and Jana actually did like an hour and a half long Instagram Live about sex. And we, and we talked about what was good about it because it was some good stuff about it and what was bad about it. And, and I'll put a link to that in the podcast notes below.
Actually, that Instagram Live was better than this. 

Rebecca 
Yes. Yeah. 

Sheila
Because, you know, the big message here is he needs sex.

Rebecca
Yes.

Sheila
And you need to give it to him no matter how you’re feeling.

Rebecca
Which means you have to desire him. You have to initiate if you want to be emotionally connected, you're going to have to give him sex first, which is, as many people have often pointed out, the exact opposite of the advice and the warnings that we give pre-marriage. Right? What's one of the reasons that, you know, Christians typically tell kids like, hey, you shouldn't have sex until you're married.
Why? Because sex can cause a false sense of intimacy. 

Sheila
Yes. 

Rebecca
And so you don't want to be building intimacy based on sex because it's not true. You need to be. You need to know each other first. You need to be committed to each other first. You need to be married first. And then you can allow sex to build on what's already there.
Then the minute you get married. Oh, are you not intimately close or are you not emotionally close? Do you not really know each other well? Make sure you jump into bed. Yeah, it's it's not like our brain chemistry works differently after we're married. Like people work the way that they work. And so if you're saying that sex can make you feel close when you're really not when you're dating, well guess what?
Sex can make you feel close when you're really not when you're married to.

Sheila
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you know that that line that she had, you know, women desire emotional intimacy before sex, and men get emotional intimacy from sex.

Sheila
I taught that.
 
Rebecca
Oh, everyone taught that.

Sheila
Yeah, like it was. It was a big takeaway from the original version of The Good Girls Guide.

Rebecca
But it also is true according to the literature. And here's the thing. It's it goes back to that ravioli. That that ravioli, research article where they found that, women and men, mean different things when they use the word sex because for men, it's almost always paired as an orgasm, whereas for many women it's almost never paired to an orgasm.
And so it's not actually sex that you're measuring. It's pleasurable sex. Yeah. Because when women have orgasms at the same rate as men, they report the same things as men. And so anyway, so that's a whole that's a whole different podcast that we talked about, but in a similar.

Sheila
Sex like Chef Boyardee and yeah, hilarious.

Rebecca
It was a great.

Sheila
It was all about when you say ravioli, are you talking about Nana's ravioli or are you talking about Chef Boyaredee.

Rebecca
Exactly.

Sheila
Women get Chef Boyardee and.

Rebecca
Men get known as handcrafted. Yeah, but but.

Sheila - AD
You know what? One of the hardest parts of my job is just to impact on your faith. When we started looking into all the toxic teachings in evangelicalism and sex and marriage, I was left thinking, how could people who read the Bible do such harm and not seem to care? Like, how could God let his Word be misused like that and it really did cause me a lot of consternation for a couple of years.
Well, when I read Zack Lambert's book Better Ways to Read the Bible, it was just so comforting because it showed me that the problem was not the Bible. The problem was the assumptions and the lenses that we have often read the Bible through. And, you know, Zach shows the four harmful lenses, but also the four healthy lenses. And I especially love the Jesus lens.
So if you haven't read Better Ways to Read the Bible yet, please get it. It's just out with Baker Books and the link for it is in the podcast notes.

Rebecca
But but we're having the same situation here. Well, what do we mean by emotional closeness and what do we mean by that? Because it's not that women don't want sex, it's that women experience sex often in a different way, simply because of socialization, of how our brains work, how our bodies work, of how much more vulnerable sex is in many ways because of the risks.
So it's not that women don't want sex. It's not that like women will give sex because they feel emotionally close, is that women really want sex, and emotional closeness is one of the ingredients to sex, even more so for women on average. Right? That doesn't mean that men need to be given sex in order to feel emotionally close.
It's just the question is like, there's been a lot of studies on how like that I've seen over the years where it's like, it's just that there's less risk for men in sex. And so emotional closeness is less of a requirement because men are not the ones who get pregnant. Men are not the ones who have.

Sheila
Look and have pain during sex. Yeah, like who can be degraded in the same way during sex.

Rebecca
Like so on average who are on average because men can't experience all these things as well, obviously. But in the average like man, woman, sexual encounter, one is at risk and the other one is not in a in in a very profound way on the average encounter. And so that's why we see these results. So it's not that women don't want sex.
And it's not that men don't need emotional connection. It's just that when you specifically look at what does it take for you to have sex, there's more cost requirements for women because of the increased risk.
It's not, like let me make this very, very clear. It's not that men do not crave emotional closeness. And it's not that women do not crave sex. Women crave sex just like how men crave sex. It's just that women have more burden with sex.

Sheila
Right? And and sex. The word sex means different things to to a lot of women because their experience of sex is so across the board, whereas men's experience of sex tends to be pretty much the same. Right? 95% of men are going to orgasm in a given sexual encounter, compared to 48% of women. And there's much more coercion male to female than the opposite.
Not that there can't be coercion, of course, but.

Rebecca
But but when we're talking about statistics, we're talking about averages. And so you're not part of the average that it doesn't apply to you. That's fine. But we are talking about averages. When are talking about statistics.

Sheila
But what gets me about this conversation this is this is really why I wanted to use this video as an example is her takeaway is no matter how you feel, what is going on with you, he needs it. Yeah, the marriage is the only place he can get it. So you have an obligation to give it. There is really nothing about the benefit of sex to you.

Rebecca
There's also nothing about how, hey, this is the only place you're supposed to get it to. There's no assumption that she also wants sex.

Sheila
And then. And then she tells a story about how there's these times where you are just exhausted, you know, you're running around with the kids, you've got to cook meals. You're just absolutely run down to the end of the day. And yet if your girlfriend calls and says, hey, do you want to go out? You'll go, but you won't have sex with your husband.
And it's like, well, maybe the girlfriend hasn't let you down. Like, why are you exhausted?

Rebecca
But also maybe for this woman, maybe going out and having a time to chat with, with her girlfriend and connect and go look at cute things in the thrift store or whatever is a recharging activity. And for some reason, sex is not for her. And maybe she also just has had a touched out day and she's like, yeah, if she wanted to take me out to go get coffee and go thrifting she would also do that with him. Maybe she just doesn’t want to have sex.

Sheila
Or if he had given the kids the bath, if he had been the one to make dinner, like they don't talk about any of that, but they just it's just you need to bear everything, women. You need to bear the entire burden of the house. The entire burden of the kids. And you need to have sex even when you're exhausted.
And it's like, that's a terrible message about sex.

Rebecca
It's also what I hear when I hear Janna talking about this is also a fundamentally different view of what a spouse is than what I mean, what my experiences, but also what I think a lot of, healthier marriages have, experienced, which is your spouse should be someone who is on your team and is looking for the best for both of you, not someone who's just trying to make sure they're getting what they're owed.
And I'll actually give an example from today. So I was diagnosed with I don't have technically don't have anemia, but my my fair ferritin level,  ferritin levels are like literally like one point above what you literally what you get a diagnosis. And my iron levels are practically nonexistent. They were like single digits. Yeah. And so we're treating I have I have I'm about to have anemia.
If I don't if I don't currently. Right. So it's pretty bad. And this morning, can I have a deal? I get up with the kids and I make them breakfast, and then Connor does bedtime, because near the end of the day, I just want to sit down and read a book. And I would much rather get up early and be tired than have to keep going for longer in the day.
But this morning I rolled over and it was like, you know, 7:30 in the morning. And I was just like, I, I will do bed time. Can you do breakfast? And he went up. He got them breakfast. He got them all settled. He came back, he saw that I was just completely dead to the world. And he let me sleep for another two hours.

Sheila 
Wow. 

Rebecca
Right. And he got the kids all sorted. He didn't say a single thing. And it's not like now he's owed a sleep in day, because that's just what you're supposed to do. Like when you see that your spouse is tired, you let them rest.

Sheila
Yeah.

Rebecca
Like that's just it's that simple. Yeah. If your spouse is tired and you can, you let them rest. It's it is that simple, right? And like, we're dealing with profound levels of tiredness right now in my house. Right. And it's so it feels stupid to have to say that. But it's like if if your spouse is tired, they should rest.

Sheila
Yeah.

Rebecca
And I, I just see this thing with Jen and Josh and I'm like, okay. But like, why is he seeing her as the enemy? Why is why is her needs? Why are they the hurdle? Why are what she needs to feel good the hurdle? Like why is that the case? That means you're not a team. That means you're not on the same page.
That means that you're just trying to get stuff from each other. And that just shouldn't be how it is.

Sheila
Yeah. No. Exactly. It's that it really is. I also think, and I really want people to understand this. Okay, I want to I want to divide libido or our approach to sex into three different categories. Yes. Okay. So when it comes to sex, we can have three different attitudes at the end of the day or the middle of the day, whenever.

Rebecca
You're going to whatever.

Sheila
Okay. Whatever. It doesn't matter. You can want to have sex. I'm like, I'm in the mood. I want to jump you. That's great. Okay, so you can want to have sex. You can like, not want to have sex but not be opposed to it. You can be like, you know, I'm not particularly in the mood, but hey, if we have sex, I'm probably going to enjoy it.
I'm probably going to sleep better. I usually have a good time. I like our marriage.

Rebecca
Yeah. Whereas one of the things we're saying, like, I don't feel the need for right now, but I know that I will become aroused and want sex when we start going. That was a big category of women on our survey, we asked people about their arousal levels before they started having sex and, there and then we measured their feelings of satisfaction.
And there's a lot of women who start sex because they were like, I wanted sex and I was like, honey, I want sex. Great. And then there's another group of women where they had sex because they were not aroused yet, but they were confident that they would become aroused when they had sex. And those women also had super high rates at the same level of satisfaction. No difference, no afterwards. Does that actually matter if you have a responsive that's like as in you respond to the initiation or a spontaneous, which is you're kind of already there even without the initiation libido, there's not there's not a difference in terms of your satisfaction, as long as you're confident that it's going to be good once you have the sex.

Sheila
Right. So again, there's I want to have sex. There's oh, I'm not really feeling it, but I probably could feel it. And then there's I actively want to not have sex.

Rebecca
Yes.

Sheila  
Okay. So you can so you can be like no I want to not have sex. It's like when my husband was a teenager, the radio station in town had this thing where you could call in and ask them to play a song, all right.
And he and a group of friends every night would call in and say, I am asking you not to play pass the dutchie on the left hand side. Yes. Okay. And they and then the guy would say, okay, so I'm going to play pass that actually no no no no no, I am saying I don't want you to play it.
So if someone else requests it, we are canceling out the request because we are saying we actively do not want you to play this. And that's kind of what's going on here. So there can be people who are like, yeah, I don't want sex, but if I have it, I'm probably going to.

Rebecca
Yeah, it's more like if I had chosen what we were doing tonight, it probably wouldn't have been that. But because you want it, I'm like, okay, actually, why not? It's because for, I am feeling antsy and want to go for a run because I need to burn off steam versus, well, I said that I wanted to run more.
I always feel better after I run. I'm going to feel proud of myself, and I'm going to regret if I don't do this because I'm going to waste the the afternoon on the couch instead. So let's go for a run. Yeah. And then you feel great afterwards. Versus I broke my ankle yesterday. Yeah. And if you make me go for a run, yeah, it's going to be worse.
Or even just like I am nauseous and I don't want to mess around. I am exhausted, like, then there's times where you're like, if I go for a run, it's going to actively damage the next day for me. Exactly right. So those are the three.
Sheila
Not so this is the three categories. The problem is that we conflate the second two. Yes, we conflate I you know I'm not wanting to have sex, but it'll be okay. And I actively want to not have sex. Because we say to people, look, you know, you may not want sex, but you need to realize that he needs it and that message falls very differently to people who are, hey, you know, I don't feel it, but I could.
And to people who like, no, I actively don't want it right now. And the problem is this conversation that Jana is having is not the conversation you should start with. This is not the lead into the sex conversation. This is the conversation that you have about sex. After you have talked about how sex is supposed to be mutually intimate, pleasurable for both.
After you've talked about the orgasm gap, after you've talked about what consent looks like and how it isn't okay to use sex toys on your wife without her permission, or when she tells you not to. You know, after you have said that, her arousal matters and having sex when she doesn't feel good is not okay. Like you need to have all of those conversations first so that when you are talking about having sex, you mean the same thing about sex.
You mean an encounter where she is likely to have an orgasm, where they are both going to feel close to each other. Where this is going to make their marriage more intimate. If that's if that's what you're dealing with, then sure, tell people, hey, you know, this is something important. We need to prioritize it.

Rebecca
Yeah. You don't. And now, to be very clear, the way that that Jana and Josh are talking about it is never appropriate. But like the, the concept of talking about telling people to prioritize sex and have and try to make sure that they're not just going days and days without having sex has just impact..

Sheila
Makes whatever.

Rebecca
We do, it's whatever, whatever you want to do. And I say days and days, I mean like weeks and weeks, but, you know, like, this is this is the thing. Like it's one thing to have that conversation. It's never okay to say it doesn't matter how you feel, he needs it. It's never okay to phrase it as a he needs us to do it for him.
Versus a this is good for your marriage. You want to have a good sex life, so stop getting in your own way. That's a very different conversation. Then, your spouse needs this. And so it doesn't matter how you feel. Yeah.

Sheila
And that's basically what they're saying. And again, they have not in this in this video that they put out on the internet, they have not talked about the 47 point orgasm gap. They have not talked about how 16% of women say that their primary motion after sex with their husband in evangelical marriages is feeling used. Right. And so, you know, they have not talked about the fact that 23% of evangelical women have experienced pain, during sex, like vaginismus and another 30% have experienced pain after childbirth, like they have not talked about those things.
And so you can't just have this conversation without explaining and without making it a foundation that sex needs to be good for her too.
Where she feels wanted, she feels safe, she feels intimate with him. She doesn't feel used you know, and where it's pleasurable and she can expect an orgasm.

Rebecca
Yeah. Exactly.

Sheila
Like you just don't talk about this stuff first. And so if that is you like like if you were in that middle group where you're like, I, you know, I feel I don't really feel like sex, but but maybe we have two courses that can help you. So first of all, if you have never reached orgasm, if you, if you just maybe you can get aroused, but you can't get to orgasm, or maybe you're not even sure if you're getting aroused at all.
Our orgasm course is really foundational, and it's fun. It's based on research. It's not based on how we reach orgasm. We don't get gross. Like this is all based on research. A little research you had to do was pretty disturbing.

Rebecca
Well, there was a lot of those probes are very common in this realm of research. I will just say probe, I if I never have to. You hear the word inserted like device or whatever I am, I'll be thrilled.

Sheila
Yes. Anyway, so so the orgasm, of course, can help. And we also have a boost. Your libido, of course, because maybe you're someone you can reach. Orgasm. Sex is good for you, but you just never want it. You're in that middle group.

Rebecca
Yeah. And you're. And you're frustrated because like I said earlier, like that I did like I want a great sex life. I feel like I'm in my own way. Like, that's a lot of I think that's a lot of women's experience where it's like, I just feel like there's something that's blocking me from having what I want, and I can't figure out what it is.
We work through a lot of those in the Boost Your Libido course.

Sheila
Yeah. And so we will put links to both the orgasm, of course, and the mystery libido, of course, in there. But again, I just want people to hear this, that this is what we get in the evangelical church all the time is we get these messages that ignore that third group that actively don't want sex, that don't examine why is it that someone may actively not want sex?

Rebecca
I think I actually think I don't think they're ignoring that third group at all. Yeah, I don't think they care. Yeah, I don't think they care. Yeah, I think that's because we've told them multiple times that the third group exists versus the second group, and they don't change what they're saying. I think they only care about making sure that men are getting enough sex.
Yeah. And the ironic thing is, if you only care about making sure that men are getting enough sex, eventually the sex just stops altogether.

Sheila
Yeah it does. So okay, let's listen to another clip. Okay. Another take. All right. This one is from Ed Young Jr who is a senior pastor at oh I forget what church this I will put it in the podcast notes. And his wife Lisa and they're talking to a couple. I don't know who the couple is, but here we go.

Ed Young Jr.
It's the story of our marriage. Oh my God. Hey, that's why we wrote the boo Sexperiment. It was Lisa's idea. I’ve been fighting her off 40 years. I mean, you understand the struggle and just.

Lisa
Being about the woman feeling more sexual. As I get older, I've been the one that's desiring sex more.
So we have come up with a rule, and I just want to help y'all out. 48 hours. If you decline, you got 48 hours to initiate. Because I got tired of being declined.

Ed Young Jr
You know, I've I've written about the 24 hour rule. Now, wait a minute. We need to vote on that. But did you read, what, like 24 hours?

Sheila
Okay, so first of all, woman with a higher sex drive. Yes.

Rebecca
They're normalizing that women have high sex drives, too. That's great.

Sheila
I think that's awesome. Yeah. And as we were talking about this advice in that situation, it's not terrinble.

Rebecca
Terrible. No. Exactly. I think that, the word rule can be triggering for a lot of people, but I feel like I don't I'm going to be very honest, statistically speaking. But we have found and what other studies have also seemed to have found. But what we have found is that when the woman has the higher sex drive or they have around the same sex drive, it tends to be because sex is frankly going pretty well. Yes, like women have high libidos when sex tends to be orgasmic. I obviously there are cases where there are bad marriages where she has a high sex drive. Not saying those don't exist. Again, we're looking at statistics. We're looking at the aggregate. We're looking at the group scores and where they tend to shift so people can. Marriages where she has a high sex drive tend to mean this is a woman who enjoys sex, right?
So in those cases, the word quote unquote rule is, probably not an actual rule. Yeah. And I know that that so there's a lot of marriages where the rule was enforced, you know, when often it's because she was coerced, have sex she didn't want to have because of the 72 hour rule, which you talked about in The Great Sex Rescue. If you haven't read the Great Sex Rescue yet, you have to read it.
The 72 Hour Rule has a very funny story about couples trying to figure out the right frequency in their. And anyway, if you haven't read it, you should. But this idea of there being like, quote unquote rules for 48 hours or 24 hours to me, I'm going to be a very generous here, feels more like this is the general guideline that we've worked out right where it's like if you and if you initiate, you don't have to worry about getting rejected because you know what's going to happen soon.
Yeah, right. That's that's more how I'm seeing it. However. Yes, that advice to couples where overall they have mutually pleasurable sex is not the same. If you give that advice to someone where she has never had an orgasm. 

Sheila
And and who is the audience. Yes. That is listening to this. So here's two couples, both of them where she has the higher sex drive. And we know that in 19% of marriages, women do have the higher sex drive. Like there's nothing that's great. And often those marriages tend to do better. So that's that's not a bad thing okay.

Rebecca
That's and again, because women's sex drives tend to be a direct result of how they are treated sexually. Yeah. Not all the time again. But generally.

Sheila
Yeah. Generally. But what everyone else in that stadium is hearing is, oh, if he initiate sex, she only has 24 hours and then she has to give it. Yeah. Which means he could be insisting on sex every 48 hours.

Rebecca
Yeah. Like, and that.

Sheila
Could be the rule. And she can't say no.

Rebecca
Yeah.

Sheila
And that is a really destructive thing to say. Yes. It's obligation sex we that which is the most destructive thing. The belief that we measured in the great sex rescue, it it lowers women's orgasm rates. It's one of the biggest drivers of the increased burden of vaginismus that evangelical women suffer from. It it lowers your marital satisfaction rates.
It's highly correlated with abuse and marital rape. Like, it's not a good thing. And so and this is and this is it again, having that conversation without having all that preamble is not okay.

Rebecca
No. And I think this is also a really great example. And I know we talk about this a lot, but every time we see it we talk about it again. This is why you can't talk about sex from personal experience. And why you shouldn't be teaching from personal experience, because I actually think from the very limited information that we have in this video, I think statistically speaking, it's very likely that these people have pretty happy sex lives.

Sheila
Yeah.

Rebecca
Statistically speaking. So good for them. Yeah. But but that doesn't mean that you're qualified to give advice because you might not realize what's making your sex life happy, because they seem to think that it's the frequency that's making it happy. Yeah, but really, it's very likely that it's that it's it's mutually pleasurable if that's the case.
Like, it's that both of them, are maybe they both feel like they're, able to trust the other person sexually. And that's also why her libido has blossomed in the marriage. Maybe this is a thing where, he and she have both worked to build up the other's self-esteem and to really be your biggest cheerleader. Like, we don't know what it is.
From from just this information about what makes the sex life good. And it's very likely that they don't even realize what's going on either. That's not a dis. Very few of us do. That's why research is so important.

Sheila
Yeah. Like when we when we did our survey for the Great Sex Rescue for the first time, I figured out the root of my vaganismus, because I never realized how the obligation sex message that I was given by reading the book, The Act of Marriage before we got married really impacted me. Yeah, because my my view of sex and the way that I was looking forward to it completely shifted after reading that book.

Rebecca
Exactly. And that's that's so I'm not saying that that's not a diss. That's not a oh, silly them, they don't know. None of us know. Okay. And that's why you cannot speak from personal experience has I think for them this probably has been great advice for them personally in their marriage because again of a different foundation than the average couple.
But they're not speaking to just them. They're speaking to a lot of average couples and a lot of worse than average couples. Yeah. And this advice of if you initiate, you get a rain check, but you're cashing in on that rain check is not cute and flirty and fun. If it's a non orgasmic marriage with their sexual coercion and the lack of emotional closeness or safety around sex, that becomes a threat.
Yeah, it's no longer a like fun cutesy deal you guys have. That's mutual. It has now become a threat that can be leveraged against someone that will pastor says, yeah.

Sheila
And to put this up as a real on Instagram, where this is the only thing you're saying, yeah, is really is really problematic. Okay. So let's turn to the research.

Rebecca
Yes.

Sheila
Okay. Because yeah, we're not supposed to talk to from from personal experience. We're supposed to focus on research and there's a really, really good article from Psychology Today. Psychology Today have some great articles and they have some really.

Rebecca
Well, you just you just have to read the actual study, because I have read a lot of Psychology Today articles where they really took one small sub point and boy, did they draw conclusions. Yeah. But but this is just a good summary of the.

Sheila
And they're bringing in a whole bunch of different articles, some of which we actually quoted in The Great Sex Rescue. It's kind of cool. And actually we've used a lot of them before, so I will put links to the Psychology Today article and, and there's a lot of the articles that they quote here. But it was just, it was actually a really good write up.
Yeah. Which again, you don't always find in Psychology Toda.

Rebecca
Today we're not I cannot emphasize enough how much you should not blindly believe every Psychology Today article that you read.

Sheila
So I'm going to read the first paragraph. So so they start out what they're basically saying is does more sex make you happier. Yeah. And they share the they start out by sharing the studies that show. Yes, it does. And then they end with showing the studies that show. Well, not exactly. Okay. So let me just read the first bit in support of this, a study by mice to make an impact from 2016, which is the one that we use, that we cited in both Great Sex Rescue and, and the marriage you want examined data from over 25,000 participants across multiple data sets.
So that's called a meta analysis, which we talked about before. They found a relationship between sexual frequency, happiness and well-being. Increasing sex to once a week produced positive results. Yeah. And then what they found is like beyond once a week, those positive results kind of dropped off. It wasn't that it wasn't better. It's just it it wasn't substantially better.
Yes. It's like it's substantially better when to get to once a week and then everything else is just kind of marginal. It's not it's not huge.

Rebecca
It's probably more individual versus like yeah.

Sheila
And that's what we found for great sex rescue too in our study. So so that's kind of cool. Like we could if we if.

Rebecca
It's always great it's always great when you get to, solidify you get to repeat results from other studies.

Sheila
And can I also say I am like a huge fangirl of Amy Myers, who who co-wrote, who authored and is the coauthor here because she's also done the studies. She's she's from Toronto.

Rebecca
She's. Oh, yeah.

Sheila
Also done this study that showed that the five love languages wa sbunk  science. And she's done some great studies on desire. And so.

Rebecca
Some reason Amy ever listen to this podcast hit us up.

Sheila
Yeah. We would love to work with you. Yeah. Exactly. Because you're just down the 401. But anyway. Okay, so, I'll keep reading. However, additional increases did not lead to a greater effect. This suggests that moderate increases in sexual frequency may enhance perceived happiness, particularly for couples in committed relationships. Finally, Meltzereat all from 2017 found that couples who engaged in more frequent sex reported higher marital satisfaction with correlated with greater overall happiness in life.
They noted that sexual activity fosters emotional closeness, which, with increased frequency, may amplify positive effects and contribute to a sense of life fulfillment. Yeah, which makes sense. It does make sense. And we found a lot of this to write. It kind of all goes together, like when you're happier, you have more sex, when you have more sex, you feel better about life and everything, and it makes sense.
Okay, here's the counterpoint, which is really interesting. Yeah, okay. Lowenstein et al. From 2015 moved beyond research, examining positive correlations between sexual frequency and perceived happiness and actually did experiments. Well, that's okay, because they wanted to examine whether there actually was a causal increase in happiness. So they asked couples to change the sexual patterns in their relationship.
So they said, you guys are gonna do this, you guys are gonna do this randomly, half the couples were asked to double their sexual frequency.

Rebecca
Yeah. Which is, quite frankly, almost exactly the same advice that most evangelical sex books give. Yeah. And what Janna was giving and everything where it's like, just you have to have more of it.

Sheila
The authors findings concluded that increased sexual frequency did not lead to an increase in happiness. One explanation they formed was that increased sexual frequency may have produced a decrease in the wanting and enjoyment of sex.

Rebecca
Like, well, I mean, think about it this way. Like if you have an appetite for a certain amount of food and you're used to having three meals a day, and then someone starts making you eat five meals a day. Food might start feeling bad. I know Joanna talked about that. Our coauthor, when she, she was on the, gestational diabetes diet.
Right. And to make yourself eat a bowl of brown rice and chicken when you're not feeling hungry yet in order to maintain stable levels feels bad.

Sheila
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. But this is the one that I really thought was interesting. Schoenfeld at all in 2017 found that it was sexual satisfaction rather than sexual frequency alone. That was a stronger predictor of happiness.

Rebecca
Which makes total sense.

Sheila
Yeah. So participants with more fulfilling. But fewer sexual encounters tended to report higher levels of happiness and well-being than those participants who experienced more frequent but more unfulfilling sexual encounters.

Rebecca
Yes, that makes total sense.

Sheila
Which is which is also what we found in our work.

Rebecca
Yep. And it also is. Remember that if you're having fulfilling, satisfying sexual encounters, you are more likely to want them with frequency, right? This is this is normal. If all that you were ever given, for food was like oatmeal with no sugar and no milk, just bland oatmeal, you're not going to feel as motivated to pull out lunch versus if you were going to get like, amazing grilled, like Cajun chicken burger with like, mushrooms.

Sheila
I haven’t had lunch yet and now I’m feeling hungry.

Rebecca
Me either I'm really hungry. No, but this is the thing. You know, if you if you know that what you're going to have is good, you're going to want it more often. So this is also why a lot of these studies find that frequency is related to happiness is probably because frequency is related to having good sex, which is related to having good relationship closeness, which is.

Sheila
That's that's the problem that Joanna has, right? Whenever she's analyzing our data is that everything is related to everything else. So when you're trying to tease out what is the main thing, it is difficult. Yes, it is, because yeah, when you have better sex, you want it more. When you have more sex, you're happier in your marriage. When you're happy in your marriage, you want sex more and at all.
Yeah. Like which is the chicken? The egg. It is difficult. Yeah. But what this study has found is that it isn't just frequency. It's really the quality of the sex that matters most. And that's what wasn't being said in these videos.

Rebecca
Yeah. Well, it's two things. Yeah. It's the it's the quality, not the frequency. And also increasing frequency can actually decrease your desire and enjoyment. Yeah. So not only does this advice ignore the idea of quality, it actually makes it more likely that the sex will be bad.

Sheila
Yes.

Rebecca
Like just have more of it makes because it makes sense, right? Sex is good when there's yearning and desire, and if you're doing it before the yearning and desire has built up.

Sheila
Like now I mean we do need to put a caveat here, which is that the other side even more is mice. And also found that like if you do, if you do increase frequency to at least once a week, that does have huge. Yeah. Totally. So in this, in this other study where they were doing the experiment, they were increasing it like yeah.

Rebecca
But that's but that's what we hear, right? We hear from every man's battle that you should have sex every day. Oh, several.

Sheila
Times. And it.

Rebecca
Yeah and like.

Sheila
Come ten bowls of sexual gratification a week.

Rebecca
Yeah. Which is such.

Sheila
A gross thing.

Rebecca
It. But here's the thing. They're not talking about going from once a month to once a week. They're talking about people who have regular like regular sex. On average. What I hear from a lot of these books is husbands saying like, it's only once a week, or it's only like, I don't know, like maybe every four days. And I got married, I thought we'd be having it every day. So the wives are saying, so the wives are encouraged in quotation marks to fulfill their husbands fantasy and like, well, don't you want a good sex life defined as whatever he wants? Yeah. Versus defined by the quality. Yeah. And it's that's what we often hear is women who have sex like four times a week and they're like, I'm just tired.
Yeah. They're like, and you don't give me a chance to want it. And then they're shamed for not wanting it four times a week. And it's like actually, statistically speaking, about one to like a week maybe like is is pretty normal for like your desire to kind of recharge.

Sheila
Yeah. Which doesn't mean that like, I can't I mean, I think we found that the I like that the happiest couples were twice a week. Yeah.

Rebecca
But I also think that like and this is, this is Joanna, I've talked about this a lot and we kind of want to do a study on it, but I have absolutely no idea how we ever could because of, oh my gosh, that's so much personal information. I want to track women's desire and frequency over the cycle.
Yes. Because like, okay, once a week is great if you have a hormone levels that just change daily, but women don't. Women have monthly hormone cycles. What if the happiest couples are having sex seven times during ovulation and like once during the luteal phase and yeah, three times in the follicular phase and none during menstruation or like like, I don't know, like this is this I want like yes.
You know what I mean? Like maybe it averages out to like once to twice a week, but it's real heavy on 144 you're like, I don't know. But these are all the things that that go through my mind.
With all the research. Right?

Rebecca
Okay.

Sheila
But the the takeaway from the Psychology Today article is that we need to ask the right questions. Yes. Okay. Because often we're not asking the right questions. And that's the problem with so much evangelical sex advice is the only answer they have to everything is have more sex. Not, you know, what's the quality of sex? What's her experience with sex?
Why doesn't she want sex? Because frequency, like low desire, should be a symptom that should that should trigger curiosity, not something that triggers condemnation. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, I want to talk about that idea of asking the right question as we get to the next part, which is focus on the family has come out with their own marriage survey that looks remarkably like ours.
And we did this right after the marriage you want came out. They use the couples satisfaction Index on the same one.

Rebecca
I love that all these people have started using the exact same, questionnaires as we have because they realize this. They know that our research is sound.

Sheila
Yes, yes.

Rebecca
So they're telling on themselves. Yes.

Sheila
So let me just read this. Okay. Is this the survey was was completed by 1835 women and 1973 men. While these is statistically sound representations of both sexes, it's also true that each respondent was answering questions not only for himself or herself, but also on behalf of their spouse. So there they did not do like a matched pair.

Rebecca
They just self-reported. Yeah, they self-reported their spouses experience and their that's fine. You’re allowed to do that.

Sheila
Yeah. And this is significantly fewer people than we had answering ours. Okay. Plus we had like almost that number of matched pairs. So. Yes. Okay. And they're big. It's it's called I'll put a link. You can actually download the report. I will put a link to it. I think it's like the state of the family marriage in America or something like that. I will put a link to it. And their main focus is like, do Christians have better marriages? And they found that Christians on the whole did. Lots of surveys have found this isn't surprising. We found this at all as well. You know, couples who pray together tend to do better. Like that was a big finding we talked about in the marriage.
You want like none of this was that surprising. But there were a few things that I want to highlight that I found interesting based on this thing about. Are you asking the right questions? Yeah. So they also measured like how Christian everybody was. I think they had a five point scale of whether you were born again or whether you were like nothing or I don't, I don't remember what they all were.
But across all, all of the different categories of faith, they found that the biggest drivers of marriage problems were sexual issues was number one.

Rebecca
That make sense.

Sheila
And they described as sexual issues and frequency. Okay. The problem is they never again talked about quality of sex.

Rebecca
Did they not measure orgasm rates?

Sheila
I don't I don't know it doesn't they don't say a thing about it. They just say frequency.

Rebecca
Yeah. They don't they don't measure whether or not the sexual issues are because like I don't know, even if they did measure it, they're not reporting it that it's.

Sheila
Not being.

Rebecca
Reported. Yeah. So they may have measured it, but maybe they're just not willing to talk about it. Right. I don't know.

Sheila
They just they just talk about how important sex is in marriage. But they don't say anything about like the quality of sex, or it's simply the fact that it is women who are being deprived. Yeah, right. Like we think about men as being deprived because we're not having enough frequency. But if you look at orgasm rates, if you look at feelings of closeness after sex, it is women who are being deprived.
Yeah. But there's also some things in there so that I just don't think they ask the right questions.

Rebecca
Yeah, or maybe they have weird definitions.

Sheila
Yeah. Because and we've talked about this before too, where, in our original survey for the Great Sex Rescue, we tried to ask about modesty. Yes, but we were trying so hard to present questions that weren't biased at all. And in fact, we get so much feedback. After people did our survey of people accusing us have been complimentarian.

Rebecca
And also then, commentarians and accusing us of being egalitarian.

Sheila
Which is good.

Rebecca
Yes we did. Everyone thought that we were the other side.

Sheila
Right. Which is and so we were trying so hard to wear our modesty questions in the right way that we ended up measuring nothing. Yeah. Because it just wasn't statistically significant, even though we knew that this is important because there's so many other studies showing how much modesty beliefs impact. So when we did our survey for She Deserves Better, we drilled down.
We had multiple questions about modesty. We did.

Rebecca
We made them brag. Yeah, we made our original questions too big. Our survey was a behemoth. It was already super long and we didn't want to add seven questions on modesty. We tried to put it in one. Yeah, and the modesty question was way too yes, and nothing more.

Sheila
And so we just didn't we. And so we discarded it because we didn't have any findings to, to, to show. But then when we really looked at it and for the next survey.

Rebecca
Yeah, we did it properly, we did it more like how we did obligation sex for the Great Sex Rescue survey, because that's really the topic we were really diving into on the first one where we had like 4 or 5 questions, just on that. We did that with modesty and we found some really cool stuff that's also echoed in the literature.

Sheila
Yeah. Okay. So they did measure shared household chores and they found that it just wasn't that important.

Rebecca
Oh yes, they found it.

Sheila
Okay. Whereas we that was one of the huge things that we tried to measure for the marriage you want.

Rebecca
Like so many studies have come out to found that have found that household chores and sharing household labor and inequality division number was like that.
So I wonder if they mostly surveyed, first of all, the their own listeners who are far more likely to have internalized the idea that the women are supposed to do the housework and the men aren't so, well, why would it be a problem? Because this is my job and I'm just failing at my job, you know? And he just doesn't see it as a problem.
Yes. I wonder if there might be a little bit of that. Yeah. Or if they were did it weirdly, I don't know.

Sheila
Yeah. So I just, I mean, because because we found in the marriage. You want that, household chores, are three times more important than sexual frequency and six times more important than money when it comes to marital satisfaction.

Rebecca
Well, and there's so, again, there are so many studies that found we have thi, we’re not biased. Yeah. Yeah. I found well, because there's one study that in essence found that if you have a problem with the household labor, she wants sex less because she doesn't want to have sex with a dependent. Yeah.

Sheila
She thinks of you as a dependent. That was a Great Sex Rescue. So we've we've cited that one a lot. So it's like it's like so they just they just found this thing that they think doesn't matter. Yeah. And I just so I just find this interesting that they are trying to do a marriage survey was so much like the marriage you want.
But they're not asking the right questions. They're not looking at the literature and saying, what are the big things that are being talked about in the literature about sex? What are the big things that are being talked about in the literature about marriage, and how can we measure them? And instead they're kind of not even talking about the relevant stuff?

Rebecca
Well, they do the same thing that the evangelical church has always done about research is they use studies to get the point. They want, and they design studies to prove what they are hoping to find, rather than designing studies to measure what's actually happening. And then drawing conclusions based on that. Yeah, right. There's the same thing we saw in Shanti Feldman's book with the for women only and for men only, where the survey questions are frankly ridiculous and how they're worded, they point you exactly towards the correct quote unquote answer so that she can say 87% of men say, yeah, because it was very clear which one you're quote unquote supposed to choose.
Yeah. Right.

Sheila
And I don't think it's focus did not do that with this survey.

Rebecca
I don't know if they did or not.

Sheila
Well, I don't think they did. They had someone external write it and they were using the CSI.

Rebecca
So did Shanti. Oh this thing you are able to do this in so many different ways. You could just simply fail to ask the questions that would disprove your hypothesis. Yeah, you can simply fail to put in control questions. You can simply, only ask questions in a vague way so that if people have even any doubt, they have to say the thing that you wanted them to say, like, for example, if for housework, you could ask a question like, have you ever considered divorcing your spouse over housework?
And then they could say, well, it must not be a big problem then. Like, I don't know what the question was that they used, but there's all sorts of ways you can do this that prove what you want to see. Yeah. And still say, I did it through research and that's why that's why we've been so upfront about how we've done our studies.
That's why we've always had experts looking at what we're doing. We've submitted for peer review. We've been accepted like we.

Sheila
Put our data sets up so that other people can use our data sets.

Rebecca
Yes. And we've always not just set our findings, but also so what our questions were, we've been very upfront. And, it's because we want to be clear that we were not doing exactly that where we weren't just creating a survey to find what we wanted to find, we wanted to create surveys that actually were accurate, reliable narrators of women's experiences in the church.
And we can draw conclusions based on their experience, not ask questions that tell them to report the experience that we think they already have.

Sheila
Yeah. The other big thing that is found in the marriage literature is that women's marital satisfaction is far lower than men's. Yeah, almost all studies find this. Ours did. Well, we've talked about some of them on this podcast. And their report, they don't even talk about the gender differences. Yes. And that's just a huge glaring thing. And I just wonder if they don't talk about that because it doesn't further their narrative.

Rebecca
Yeah. It's too pricey. Yeah. To acknowledge.

Sheila
So anyway, so when you ask the question, does more sex make you happier? I think we need to take a step back and say, what kind of sex are we talking about? What is her experience of sex?

Rebecca
What does more mean? Yeah, I mean, like, again, are we already doing it three times a week? Like, gosh darn. Give each other a break once, get blisters. Wait.

Sheila
Yes. Exactly. What is their marital satisfaction like? What is just the facts on the ground? Do they have like six month old triplets? Right? Like like, what are the facts on the ground? We need to be asking more questions instead of just jumping right in with sexual frequency is the main problem. And the main, which is what you know, focused tended to do with this.
And the main way that we correct things is just by telling women to have more sex. And it's like, no, it's not that easy. Research shows it's not that easy. Our books show it's not that easy. And if you want a better sex life, we need to ask better questions. Yeah. So that's what we want to encourage you to do.
We've got the links to the to the studies in the podcast notes. We've got the links to, the great Sex Rescue in the podcast notes to the marriage you want to of course, our boost to libido and orgasm courses and hopefully, hey, we can all be having frequent great sex because we genuinely want it. Yeah.
You know, and that would be. That'd be wonderful. So thank you for joining us on the Bare Marriage podcast. Next Monday something exciting is happening. So we are starting our annual huge sale for our puberty course, our sex and puberty course for kids. It's called the whole story. And you created it. You want to tell people?

Rebecca
Yeah. So we wanted to create a product to help parents have these really awkward conversations. So we on the screen are the ones actually explaining the brass tacks. And by.

Sheila
We, I mean you.

Rebecca
Me, my sister also does the girls version with me. And then for the boys version, it's my husband, Connor, and, a long time friend of ours and medical student Daniel Barrows. So there's, four people who are going to be telling your kids the nitty gritty stuff. We talk about very, basic kind of just facts on the ground for the younger version of the course, which is your preteen years.
And then when you talk to the teenagers in the high school years, we get a lot into those tricky social, kind of situations as well. And how did it how to handle this when there's nuance here and there's tricky questions, and some families are going to have different rules than yours. And what do you do about that?
And we talk about we talk about all this stuff and help you have the conversations that are hard to start because really when we made this, we didn't want it to be a replacement. This isn't something where you're going to stick your kid in front of a screen that you never have to talk to them again. Absolutely not.
This is a resource for parents, so you can have those really tough conversations without feeling like a deer frozen in headlights. Me like, I don't know, did I say what a fallopian tube was? Did I explain what an erection is? Like you don't have to worry about any of that stuff because I know it's it can be panic inducing.
It can make you freeze. Especially if you're someone who grew up with weird feelings about sex or who in a family where it wasn't talked about. And so this is a video course you'll go through with your kids. There's activities, there's discussion questions, and there's all sorts of information so that you can know that your kids have a really good big, really good foundation of sex education, that you can then continue the conversations as they grow and as the questions come up, so that you can make sure they know everything.
They know the whole story about sex, puberty and growing up.

Sheila
And that's going to be on sale as of Monday. But because you're listening to this now, we're going to give you a coupon code if you use the word podcast, in the in the coupon box, you're going to get that sale price even right now. So we'll be sending out all the details on Monday. But you can get the complete, girls version or the complete boys version for $10 off.
Or you can get the complete boys and girls version together, for $30 off. So that's starting Monday, but you can use the coupon code podcast. And of course, please check out Zach Lambert's book that I was talking about earlier in the podcast, Better Ways to Read the Bible. It is beautiful. It will it will change your view of Scripture and it will.
It will make you feel like God truly sees you and he loves you, and he's giving you a hug, and he cares about you as opposed to you're always a big fat failure. God is not a magazine cover in the sky. Who's angry at you? So check out Better Ways to Read. The Bible is lovely and we will see you again next week on the Bare Marriage Podcast.

Rebecca
Bye!