I have created a new .pdf for my readers, which can be found on my Free Downloadables page. In this new .pdf, I have gathered several of my posts dealing with warning signs for those who are worried about lack of intimacy in their marriage. A smaller .pdf, but I hope it will be helpful. The link to my Free Downloads page is above in the header, and to the right in the side bar.
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The Curmudgeonly Librarian · Pithy Insights from a Experienced Old Coot
The Curmudgeonly Librarian 
Hi,
This comment probably belongs in another, older thread, but since this post is your latest…
Thanks for your blog. I really appreciate your thoughts and the general discussion, some of it very personal but also insightful, on marriage matters. So much better reading than Focus on the Family, etc.
I was particularly moved by your post on divorce/amputation, i.e., when to cut your losses. You framed this issue in terms of Jesus’ comments on what constitutes justifiable divorce, in the overall context of sexual refusal. So my question is…what happens if the context isn’t sexual refusal but the pain caused by different sexualities? For example, what if your spouse is gay or asexual and isn’t refusing to “do the deed” per se, but, due to your differences, you never really connect sexually, no matter how hard you both try, after years of seeking professional help, prayer, etc.?
In other words, one or both partners live – as one man mentioned in a comment here on sexual refusal – in a state of perpetual dissonance: being in a marriage on the one hand and yet feeling so alone, sexually, on the other. It’s a miserable situation and understandably so, even if your spouse is technically doing his/her duty, even if he/she didn’t understand his/her sexuality going into the marriage and didn’t intend to hurt you.
As you’ve mentioned before, I don’t think God intended marriage to be constant misery. When we take a legalistic view (i.e. advocating adultery as the only exception to divorce), perhaps we’re also acting just like the Pharisees that Jesus was condemning. At the same time, in a situation like this one, how do you balance the competing priorities of God’s intentions for marriage, the importance of marriage, and his compassion for people?
In some ways the issue of whether sexual refusal in marriage can justify divorce is pretty straightforward, at least in my mind. But many marriages are in gray areas that aren’t necessarily addressed directly by ketubahs, tradition, etc.
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Hi, Karen,
Thank you for your kind words about my blog. As to FoF, I wouldn’t know, as I haven’t seen their materials in a very long time.
You pose an interesting question, about how to approach a situation where one partner has gay or asexual tendencies. The way you structured the example, the spouse with the problem isn’t refusing, but doesn’t have their head in the game, to use an idiom. I have heard of situations in which a gay spouse does completely shut down sexual activity, and if s/he is engaging in same-sex activity, that is probably just as well. And in that case, my advice would definitely be to send the spouse packing.
But if, as you posit, the spouse with the problem hasn’t shut down the marriage bed, I wouldn’t counsel walking, as an immediate knee-jerk reaction. Let me give what I think might be a way forward and a way to clarify the direction to take.
First of all, I would want to know a couple of things. Is the spouse actively engaging in sex, or is it by sufferance? Is s/he good-willed and caring, really concerned for the emotional needs of the one who is hurting? All too often, sex or counseling is done as attempts to placate and really engaged in for the purpose of getting help, getting better.
In my mind, I keep coming back to the idea of covenant. Yes, I know that in the first few posts on my blog I disparaged Christian attempts to distinguish between contract and covenant, but marriage is still a covenant, just as any contract is. And in making a marriage vow, covenantal terms are promised. But the fact is that no covenant is unbreakable, and covenant breakers will break covenants. What the concerned spouse needs to think about is whether his/her spouse has broken the covenant that exists between the two of them.
Is the spouse with the problem attempting to live up to the covenant of marriage (see my posts on vows, etc.) or just hoping to get by? I see this as like the situation of someone who is married to a sexual abuse survivor–are they getting counseling, are they seriously working toward getting well, and are they making progress or merely coasting by on their excuse? Having a problem does not mean setting up housekeeping in the problem. You actually have to work on steps for dealing with the issue. If they aren’t, then they are not keeping covenant. This is not something that I can determine, but only the spouse who is having to cope with the situation can make that determination. If they feel that their husband/wife is not attempting to live up to their covenant, they have a decision to make.
You ask, “At the same time, in a situation like this one, how do you balance the competing priorities of God’s intentions for marriage, the importance of marriage, and his compassion for people?” I am leery of using the phrase “Importance of marriage” because, all too often, that is an indication of a mindset that idealizes marriage and turns it into a fourth part of the Trinity. Yes, marriage is important, but it isn’t something God created to be the be-all and end-all of Christian living. It has its limitations, one of which is the two people who actually make up the marriage–they are more important than “marriage” as a concept.
That said, how to balance the competing priorities for marriage with compassion for his people? That’s the rub, isn’t it? God does have his priorities for marriage, and he does have compassion for people. As I am sitting here thinking about what you have presented, I call to mind something I read many years ago, written by an emergency aid worker in a third-world country. She wrote of having to deal with starving people, refugees who have nothing to eat. She worked among children dying of starvation, women whose breasts had dried up and could not give their babies milk, etc. She wrote of her feelings of guilt when she and the other aid workers had their meals, racked with feelings about having a full stomach in all the misery and suffering around her. But she remembers being told when she first went there that as much as she might be tempted to, she couldn’t give away her rations. She had to keep up her strength to do the work she was engaged in. If she gave away her food and starved, what good would she be to the people she was sent to help?
In the same way, we are not called to misery for its own sake. We are to do what we can to assist and to heal, but we have to know that we can’t do the fixing for them. And if they ultimately don’t want to do what it takes, as hard as it may be, to be a full partner in the covenant that they entered into, then the covenant is broken.
It may be that the partner who is feeling deprived may be willing to create a second covenant in which brokenness is part of the bargain. As long as s/he realizes that this second covenant is a modification to accept the broken condition of the other, it’s not up to us to judge. But if the deprived spouse decides that the covenant of marriage between the two is broken and not repairable, they that is his/her call, as well. And that is their call.
I hope I don’t come across as harsh and unfeeling, but, as you can tell, I have a problem with the legalistic nature of the Job’s counselors whose only comments amount to “Tough luck, your marriage is your cross to bear.”
CSL
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I do think that a lot of marital problems (inc. sexual ones) can be solved or at least improved with hard work, prayer, a good therapist, etc. Not so in this case, it seems.
Yes, the partner with the “alternate” sexuality, who I’ll just refer to as the alt. sex. spouse, is truly willing to have sex and may even enjoy the physical release of it, but there’s still a permanent sexual gulf between the two partners. The alt. sex. spouse is fine with the status quo, but the other partner is distraught. The alt. sex. spouse cares for the partner’s emotional wellbeing, but what can be done? The other partner longs to be desired/“seen”/appreciated sexually in ways that seem fundamental to marital sexual relations but fundamentally impossible in this marriage, given the issue, regardless of whether sex actually happens, regardless of the work and time (years) both partners have put into prayer and therapy.
I think it’s potentially cruel to consign a person to marriage on these terms, in which one feels that one’s sexual being can’t really be cherished by the alt. sex. spouse, or even truly “gifted” to them, given their proclivities. I can’t imagine that maintaining such a marriage on paper is more pleasing to God than ending a union that will always be broken in an essential way and is causing such misery. To your previous point about gangrene – you cut it off.
It could be argued that the alt. sex. spouse, by being naturally unable to truly cherish the partner sexually, can’t fulfill the marriage vow. Ultimately the aggrieved spouse has to make that determination, as you say, but what a(nother) burden to bear, especially when the alt. sex. spouse is otherwise a faithful parent/contributor/partner. Perhaps Jesus’ allowance for divorce based on pornea, if understood in the broader sense of unfaithfulness, could apply to this scenario; but the unfaithfulness here would be unintentional. (I thought the idea of unintentional marital unfaithfulness was silly at first, but then I realized it’s possible to be unintentionally unfaithful in myriad ways, so why not in marriage as well.)
I’m not sure how others have navigated these issues as couples within more conservative churches – probably not easily? I dread the “process,” whatever that is.
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