What about Wives Withholding Sex When They're Upset? 🤔

Is it sinful for a wife to withhold sex when she's upset at her husband? Is it unfair if they've planned to make love, but then he does something to upset her, so she doesn't want to anymore?

The truth is, emotional connection is the foundation for good lovemaking in marriage. If a wife is upset, she is not in a good place to make love. She shouldn't try to force her body to communicate a closeness, connection, and intimacy that her heart doesn't feel. 

If a wife is not experiencing physical and emotional equilibrium, the husband must respect that and surround her with care and affection, as Humanae vitae says when it warns that practices such as birth control which lead to an entitled attitude towards sex are dangerous because a husband "may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection." (Humanae vita, 17).

To talk about "withholding" sex implies an entitled attitude. Sex is not something husbands and wives are entitled to in marriage--even if there is a common expectation that sex is part of marriage. 

The Catholic Church does not teach that it is a sin for a wife to decline lovemaking in any circumstances. She is always free to do so. Husbands are also always free to decline. 

It is possible that a wife may use lovemaking in a manipulative manner to try to control her husband's behavior, but this is objectifying herself, and she shouldn't do that. 

Instead, a wife should use words to explain why she is upset, and the couple should repair the relationship. Then, they can celebrate that repair with lovemaking... when it's the right time.

A couple may need to increase their marriage skills in order to be able to have good, honest dialogue and get equipped to navigate good repair conversations. If they can tend their emotional connection, they'll be in a good place to celebrate that with their physical intimacy. 

🌸 free online Catholic marriage workshop: the Little Way of Marriage 

Learn how to do little marriage-building skills with great love, inspired by St. Thérèse, the Little Flower, and her holy parents, Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin!

Transcript

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What about wives withholding sex when they're upset? Is this bad? Is this a sin? What is going on with this? Do I have thoughts? Yes, I definitely have thoughts on this. Have you heard about this? Have you heard people saying, wives, you shouldn't withhold sex when you're upset. Some people might even say That is a sin and I think we need to talk about this. Because there is a lot going on, even just in how that is framed, how the language is worded there. That I think is important to unpack so we can understand the truth of how God created husband and wife to celebrate their union, their emotional connection, their communion of life with love making, as, whole persons. So first of all. Women, need to feel safe, seen, heard, and respected and loved in order to open ourselves up to this very vulnerable activity of love making. To literally let another person inside you women are more likely to experience pain than men in love making. We're much more likely to get pregnant. There's more at stake for women. It's more risky for women than men to make love, and so therefore, very appropriately. There's a lot of caution here in which situations do we feel comfortable and safe in being that close, being that intimate, opening up. That's just a, a human response in the females of our species that, we with good reason. Need to feel really, really safe in order to make love and for that love making, to be good, to be pain-free, to feel good at a whole person level, to feel good at a heart level. All those things, really need to be respected and if you've listened to my podcast. You may hear me repeatedly bring up this important quote from Hue Vita, in which St. Pope Paul the Six recognizes the importance of the husband showing. Care and reverence and attention to the wife, in paragraph 17 of Human Vita, when St. Paul Paul six is writing about possible dangers that could come from birth control being widely accepted, which it is now today, he says Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman. And disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection. End quote. So from this we can tell that the way the church thinks that husbands should regard and approach their wives sexually is with. Regard for her physical and emotional equilibrium that he should not see her as just an instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, and he should see her as his partner, who he should surround with care and affection. So when we have a situation in which a wife is upset and she doesn't feel like having sex with her husband because she's upset, she's her, she's mad. It would be bullish, it would be rude, and it would be disregarding of her for the husband to insist on love making. In those circumstances, and it would be disregarding her own emotional and physical equilibrium for wife to think or to be shamed into thinking that she should push through her feelings of being upset and disregard her heart and what's going on at her heart level,, in her relationship with her husband in order to be available sexually, to be available physically, what we need to keep in mind here is that emotional connection is the foundation of, and the condition of good love making in marriage, the body, the physical connection you have in having sex. That should just be the icing on the cake. It should be the celebration of and the making concrete of a heart to heart emotional connection. That you've already established and that you are both feeling there. So to make love, to have sex without feeling emotional connection or worse to feel a disconnect in the relationship through being upset, but then be like, well, I just have to have sex anyway. Then that is bringing your whole person into a disunity that's working against the integration of the whole person. It's making your body say something that the heart is not feeling. So I'm going to share a question that came in to me and then how I responded to it. So a wife wrote me and she said. I've heard friends talk about sex and withholding sex from their husbands because of X, Y, Z. In my own experience, there are times with lots of little things when maybe we were planning on having sex that night, but then he did or said something, nothing big, but that rubbed me the wrong way. So I said no to sex. And then he felt that was unfair. The word manipulative is what I would call the way my friend talked about it. I should say that their marriage is rough, but it still made me think she's using sex to manipulate her husband. Do you have any thoughts on that or how would you advise someone who seems to be doing this? So I wrote back to this wife both about her situation that she described and then about her friend's situation. I think for sure there could be situations in which a wife is using sex to manipulate her husband, and that is sad. That sad if she's treating her body as an object to use to be like a carrot or stick. For her husband, to use sex as a reward for desired behavior and then withholding sex, if we're gonna use that word, withholding to as a way of punishment for bad behavior. First of all, let me start with like how I think it should go. And this is what I told, the wife who asked me the questions. So they were planning, say it's a Wednesday and they were planning on making love Wednesday night, but then it's Wednesday afternoon and Wednesday evening roll around, and maybe the husband did some things that really irritated the wife. What did she say? He did some things that rubbed her the wrong way and then she didn't feel like having sex. Okay. What I think should happen here is that they should talk about it before the time when they would've been making love. She should say with words, you know, I'm feeling actually really upset because of this and this that happened. Like when you yelled at the kids or I don't know what, she didn't give the concrete example of what it was she was upset about, but I'm sure we can fill in the blank ladies, right? And think of all sorts of things we could get. Anywhere from irritated to very mad and upset at our husband's about, and the way to signal to him that you're upset. It shouldn't be that when it's time when you made a we're about to make love, surprise, I'm not going to. And then, maybe no even further words beyond that, just a retreat or, just, a cold shoulder. What really should happen is you should be having a discussion and good communication with words about how you're feeling and why, and what you would like, and then some repair. So here's what I wrote, this woman, I said, here's how I see it. You need a foundation of emotional intimacy for sexual intimacy to thrive. Women need to feel safe, heard, seen, and respected in order to open up and give themselves sexually to their husbands. If there is discord in the relationship, it doesn't make sense to force the body to express a unity that is not there emotionally. This is not withholding out of spite or punishment. This is being true to the unity of the whole person. So of course, like it is possible that a woman. Could use sex as a means of manipulation. If her husband is not meeting her whims, she could use it in a controlling way. But when a woman is sincerely feeling frustrated, upset, unheard, annoyed, et cetera, that's a call and an invitation to repair the relationship first, and then celebrate that you repair the unity with sexual union when the time is right for some women. Once that repair happens, maybe it's that exact same night, you say, you know what, I'm actually really upset about how, you yelled at the kids tonight and I just really hurt me the way that you handled that. I am feeling upset. I don't feel like making love. I am. You know, I, I wanna work out a better way for us to handle the kids and, you know, just have a conversation about that and say let's figure this out. Like, how can we approach this better so that we're both feeling good about it, and then have a repair, whatever it takes, some forgiveness, some humility, some repentance, some problem solving together, and it is possible, maybe the repair can happen right then with words that evening. And then you're like, ah, thank you so much for hearing what I have to say. I really appreciate that. Thank you for your apology. I apologize for my part. I think we could, you know, we can move forward Great. For some women, their nervous system's all keyed up. Maybe the repair conversation was still pretty intense and you're feeling kind of raw and you need a little more time to let that settle in, and that is totally okay. And maybe you need, some more assurance of affection and goodwill on the part of your husband. This is not being manipulative. This is regarding your physical and emotional equilibrium, and maybe it's gonna be another night or two before you're feeling reassured and good and safe and up for making love. Totally fine. That is totally fine. That is not a sin. And I just wanna say for the record. It's never a sin to say no to sex. There's no commandment. There's nothing in the catechism that says, wives, that you need to make love with your husbands whenever they initiate. There is a scripture verse in the New Testament that says. Do not do not deprive yourselves of each other. There is a whole context for that verse, and that was written in the first century Mediterranean world 2000 years ago. There has been literally two millennia of development of the theology of marriage and the theology of the meaning of sexuality, and we really need to interpret that. Verse in context and not use it as a proof text. Not proof text it to try to make it mean something that actually our Catholic moral tradition doesn't teach. Our Catholic moral tradition does not teach that women wives in marriage always have to have sex with their husbands when their husbands initiate it. Just for the record there, right. So that the verse there, and I talk about this more in my podcast episode, marital debt is not church teaching, that was to establish reciprocal mutual,, belonging sexually for of husband and wife to each other. That that's not this just unilateral, a husband has access to the wife's body. I just, I take issue with this term withholding because withholding implies entitlement. You know, when we talk about withholding food from someone or withholding affection from them, like access to food, the expectation of affection in close, intimate relationships, those are things you are. Entitled to for your human flourishing and wellbeing. You should have a right to expect your parents to give you food. And it is cruel for parents to withhold food from their children in cases of neglect and such, right? That doesn't mean parents have to give their children every craving and whim, they don't have to always give their kids Cheetos or always give them all the snacks they want, or give them the amount of food or like dessert or whatnot. Like there, right, you can use good judgment here anyway, I just, I think that term withholding implies this cruelty. That there would be a cruelty in a wife not having sex with her husband. And I think we can say the same thing the other way as well, when there's really, there's no entitlement here in love making in marriage. I think we just need to really shine a light on and examine and then discard this idea that there is entitlement. And when we do that, then we realize withholding's not the right word and sin is not the right the right thing to be thinking about when we're thinking about a wife not making love with her husband because her heart is hurt, because she's upset that's a sincere thing that we need to respect and care for. Okay. So to continue with what I replied to this wife who emailed me,, I told her neither husbands nor wives are entitled to sex in marriage. Like the church doesn't say you have to have sex in marriage. It says if you don't ever have sex in marriage, one of you could ask for an annulment. Right. The truth is there's examples of Catholic couples who achieve sanctity. Who opted not to have sex with each other. That doesn't mean. Having sex is less holy. I just, you gotta look at this with so much care, right? Because I know some people sometimes think that like, oh no, then like to be holier, I should actually never have sex with my husband or with my wife, that's, that's not what I'm trying to say here. I am just trying to make the point that the Catholic church does not teach. There is like a requirement of having sex in your marriage. I think that we commonly expect. That is gonna be part of marriage, and that's reasonable to expect that, but there's still no entitlement here. So what could happen though, which would be bad, is if instead of actually communicating with words about what you're upset about, or what you want, or what you're hoping for, what you're hurt about. You communicate it through whether you have sex or not, like a faucet that you turn on or off, right? Isn't that like a, um, a form of behavior control? Is that behavioralism where you, you try to control and manipulate people's behavior with motivation, with reward and punishment? That is not what sex is meant to be in marriage. And that would be. Immature, I would say, and it would be avoiding true, honest, good communication, and it would be treating yourself as an object wife's and in your body as an object to be used for reward and punishment. If that was the only way you signaled to your husband, whether you were happy with him or upset at him, don't do that. And I'm not gonna say that is a sin. I'm gonna say learn how to use your words. Learn how to say, I really wish you wouldn't do that. That really hurts me, or makes me upset, or, I'm really hoping for this. Could we work together to see how we could achieve that or make that happen? And you know, really it's like, do you see me? Do you see my heart? Do you care about me? I care about you. When you are able to meet at that level, at that heart to heart level, then you can celebrate your unity with a bodily communion. And it's not about getting what you want, it's about really connecting. So I hope that that is helpful to think through, that it's completely legitimate to want and require repair before love making, and then you can celebrate the repair with the love making. And I think a lot of times what is needed here is. Development of marriage skills in the communication department in being able to state clearly what you want and what you don't like, and to be able to manage conflict and navigate conflict and repair from conflict with each other. Honesty and dialogue. These are all really important marriage skills and maybe it's time to realize, you know what? We need to grow in these marriage skills, and if you want to take a baby step in that. The little way of marriage workshop that my husband Nathan and I offer can help get you going with some small, actionable little steps that you can take to grow in your connection, in your day-to-day life, and just start building up a richer fabric of connection so that it's there to support you as you dive into working on repairing hurts and work on,, resolving tensions.'cause you have to have some good stuff in there. First in your marriage, before you have these hard conversations. If you want them to be successful and you really want to solve problems together, you have to start with this base level of affection and connection in order to do that together. Well otherwise. It just feels like lots of blame, lots of shame, lots of inadequacy, lots of hard, and you can kind of just loop around and cycle around in that and not really come out of it into the happy place where you wanna be, where you feel like you're on the same team, where you feel connected and where you feel warm and affectionate to each other. In a word where you feel like you could make love because you're so happy with each other. So I hope that's helpful. I will leave a link to the little way of marriage workshop here, invite you in. It's free. There's little skills there. Inspired by the saint of the little things Saint Theres of li you and her parents. Saints, Louis and Zalie Marta. Okay. God bless you. See you in the next episode.