Half listening to the TV (that obnoxious backdrop of modern dining) while at a local restaurant, I caught the comment that 59% of married men felt entitled to sex. This startled me a bit. “Really? What were the other 41% thinking?”
A friend of mine, sitting in the next booth commented, “I can’t believe that that many men feel entitled. “I do,” I responded. “I feel entitled.” My friend is not married and he has a girlfriend, so I took his comment with a grain of salt. (I’m not sure what seasoning he added to mine.) Then he added, “Well, if your wife won’t have sex with you, you just divorce her.” Okay. So his thinking is that sex is not a marriage entitlement but when one spouse denies it, there is grounds for divorce. It felt like a distinction without a difference to me but, on reflection, I thought, “Maybe he’s on to something.” In our day, there is no commitment to sex because there is no commitment to marriage.
In a recent article, Koren Zailckas commented on the same data I overheard on the TV. “According to a recent survey conducted by Glamour and GQ, 59% of men feel they are entitled to have sex with their wives and 49% of men feel they are entitled to have sex with their girlfriends. The key word here—entitled—has its roots in property law, where it first meant to give someone title to an estate. And what do you do when you own something? Whatever you damn want.”
I wonder if Ms. Zailckas occasionally drives her car into telephone poles, or throws her wardrobe into the alleyway, but I get the anger. Generally speaking, when I witness “entitled” behavior, my first impulse is to bark abuses while slapping the offender about the head with a cat litter scoop. Where does this sense of privilege and disrespect of others come from?
This is one meaning of “entitled”, but you must be a kind of language Nazi to insist on singular meanings for words that have multiple meanings. The dynamic nature of language virtually guarantees multiple word meanings. To entitle also means, “to furnish with a right”. Historically, marriage has not only granted the married couple the right to enjoy sex together, it has been a publicly celebrated expectation. Today that magical initiation has largely been stolen from marriage (to the harm of marriage, and more so to millions of aborted children). But, even so, people still marry with the expectation that sex is integral to the arrangement. I doubt any marriage would survive a month if one of the couple declared for celibacy subsequent to the wedding ceremony.
A good authority (something other than property law) has asserted that sex in marriage is an obligation. “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again…” 1 Corinthians 7.3-5.
There are, of course, other good reasons why married partners might choose not to have sex. Sex every day would become drudgery. Sometimes people get sick or injured. Sometimes exhaustion, or lack of sleep, or extreme anxiety makes it very difficult to enjoy sex. Sometimes there is rift in the relationship that needs mending before sex can be a joyful experience.
Here we have a key word: joy. Marital sex should be joyful. If one spouse is not inclined to having sex, for whatever reason, going through the motions of sex will be dreary business, if not intolerable. Browbeating, nagging, or physically forcing a spouse to have sex are all good ways to steer a marriage off the rails. But this is not a mystery to most people. In fact, I would say that sex on demand is a bit of a fairytale (or an ideological construct). Yes, spousal abuse does exist, and some spouses can be enablers, enduring terrible mistreatment for long periods of time. But this is not how married people typically relate to one another. Spouses know how to fight abuse with misery; abuse is met with abuse. Pleasant negotiation over dinner is a far better approach to resolving differences but, frankly, there have always been carrots and sticks. Spouses learn that life together is much more pleasant when there is peace. Consequently, sex rightfully takes place when both parties are interested or, at least, willing.
The whole mindset of “sexual entitlement” is a commodification of sex. Such thinking sees sex as something for sale or trade. We should admit that there is a certain amount of bargaining going on in every quest for marriage. People want love but people also want a partner who brings benefits to the relationship. People want their spouse to be a good deal. This is not wrong. Marriage certainly is about practical matters. But marriage is not the purchase of an accessory. Marriage is commitment to a person. The core of marriage is a relationship. Those who marry but do not make the personal relationship central to the marriage are actually practicing spousal abuse.
Likewise, while sex is very much about pleasure, it is fundamentally about relationship.
Sex is sacramental. By this I mean that it is a physical ritual that bears spiritual significance, both pointing to that significance and actualizing that significance.
Through sex we touch one another. We say, “I was touched,” to indicate a positive spiritual experience. Few of us are touched enough. Sex is an embrace; we all long to be held. It is intimacy in which a man and a woman are literally joined to each other. The physical uniting represents a spiritual uniting and functions to encourage and bring the two people closer to one another. The unity of body both calls to mind and encourages their united life-purpose. Sex is to be mutual pleasure that exemplifies a relationship characterized by reciprocal joy and happiness. Sex represents vulnerability and trust, for a variety of obvious reasons. Sex represents commitment because of the possibility pregnancy. Marital sex is a mutual promise to care for the potential offspring of the love act. This fruitfulness also underscores how man and woman together image God in a special way. God is the Creator, but he has granted the power to men and women to be re-creators of other living beings.
Sometimes sex in marriage doesn’t seem very appealing. Every marriage is between two normal, which is to say, damaged, human beings. Sexual activity is not something that should take place “on demand”. But it is something we should treasure. And nurture. It is a privilege. It is a joy. It is a benefit. And it is a responsibility. We should pursue sex with our spouses because we know it is good for us individually, and it is good for our marriage relationships.
Yes, forcing sex on a spouse is sexual abuse, but physical or spiritual apathy towards our spouses is also spousal abuse. I don’t doubt that many marriages are not experiencing much sexual joy. But sexual activity, at least between healthy partners, is a strong barometer of relational health. In marriage, joy should be pursued. This means that whatever is driving the marriage partners apart needs to be mended. You don’t get to say, “This marriage is beyond mending,” and then go on living the marriage as if it were a business partnership. That’s a great way to have your soul sucked out. In a marriage we have to say, “Let’s fix this problem. Let’s bring the joy back. And let’s get back to having fun sex again.”
When people first fall in love and decide to marry, there is real magic. Part of the magic is the simple joy of being with someone who wants to be with you. Part of the magic is finding someone who wants to face life’s challenges with you and to dream shared dreams. Perhaps the intoxication of first love is just that—too drunk to see all the intolerable characteristics of that placeholder of a spouse. Or, perhaps, there was something more true about the euphoric beginning than the mind-numbing routine the relationship has become.
Why don’t we stop fooling ourselves?
The game is over,
Over,
Over.
No good times, no bad times,
There’s no times at all,
Just The New York Times,
Sitting on the windowsill
Near the flowers.
We might as well be apart.
It hardly matters,
We sleep separately.
And drop a smile passing in the hall
But there’s no laughs left
‘Cause we laughed them all.
And we laughed them all
In a very short time.
– Paul Simon
Perhaps we have stopped dreaming—because we have failed to recognize the importance of grace…and that grace calls for relational pursuit.
No one should be demanding sex of another. And, yet, in a marriage, we should be demanding it of ourselves. The pursuit of your spouse, both physically and spiritually, is to keep the marital promise, and it is to live with marital integrity. There should be joy in our marriages. This doesn’t happen when we are squabbling about our rights and boundaries. It happens when we remain true to the choice we have already made, i.e., to be married. I’ve never enjoyed being the object of demands…but it has always made me happy to be pursued.
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