Dear girls, I have received a lot of letters these past few weeks that we’ve been talking about sex and romance and loving our husbands.  Women cautiously opening their fears and shame to me.  Stories of abandonment and abuse, disappointment and defeat.  Of boredom and disinterest.

I sense the honor of being one you feel safe with, and I am humbled by your courage.

Women who hurt deep most often hide it carefully.

We pretend. Oh sure, we women complain about the petty stuff like that extra 20 pounds and all the inconveniences of our less-than-ideal lives. But those hurts that define us? Those get locked away where no one dare judge or in any way add to our grief.

And in your honesty, I hear the same thing over and over again. The man who was supposed to protect you and love you and cherish you and provide all you need— didn’t.

Your father failed you. Your boyfriend took too much. Your husband cannot seem to give enough.

And your glorious, alluring sensuality has become your downfall.

Many of you have simply packed it away, like a dress that doesn’t fit anymore. You know its there, you remember, with a certain sense of remorse, a time when you felt beautiful and desirable.

But now you don’t want what you once craved. It’s brought you pain or disappointment. You gave yourself to someone who didn’t treasure you, didn’t keep his promises, didn’t love you in the way you thought he surely would.

What you thought it was… it wasn’t and what you wish it was… it never has been.

Or for some of you, it’s not that at all. No pain, but not any real pleasure either. You’re too tired. Too busy. Your to-do list is too long. Too many little ones touching you and taking from you all day and into the night.

Your body is tired, your soul depleted, your relationship with your husband more of a chore-riddled, conflict-avoiding, child-raising, career-building cooperative… no longer the romance you once imagined.

And then there’s reality:  Your body isn’t beautiful like the airbrushed, half starved, breast enhanced women in the movies. You’re so intent on hiding the parts you don’t want him to see that you fail to recognize your own inherent sensuality. You punish yourself by denying your feminine flourishes. Instead you’ve become practical and low maintenance.

You don’t want him to see you unclothed because you’ve lost the freedom your beauty brings. The naked and unashamed of the Garden is long gone.

You’re hurt, you’re tired, and your beauty is lost.

And for all three causes, the result is the same— you no longer want sex.

And for each of these three common causes, there are simple solutions. Not easy, mind you, but straightforward and doable.

Let’s start with cause #1.

You thought sex with your husband would mean blockbuster romance every time. You want to see tenderness in his eyes, yearning, adoration. You want him smitten, his passion for you propelling him to a place of sacrificial giving into your life.

And guess what? That is what God wants too. He calls it being “exhilarated by her love”, He goes so far as to sternly command a husband to choose to be satisfied and at rest with his wife’s sensuality. (Pv 5:18,19) God wants your husband to demonstrate His own tenderness by “nourishing and cherishing” you. (Eph. 5:25-33)

But here’s the truth: The reason God so adamantly commands your husband to love you the way you wish you could be loved… is because no man naturally does that!

And here’s the rest of the truth: The only One who will always love you the way you long to be loved is God. His is the love that pursues you relentlessly. His is the passion that uncovers your beauty. He is the one who yearns for intimate connection with you every moment of every day.

A woman who finds her own longings fulfilled by the One, is able to so love her husband that sex becomes about satisfying his longings— exhilarating and thrilling him with her spilled over love. And in doing so, she finds immeasurable freedom. Her body, her soul, and her spirit mesh in a moment of unabashed passion and pleasure.

Try it. Get up tomorrow morning and spend an hour with your Bible open to the book of Psalms. Listen. Let God love you with His words. Respond by loving Him back. Go on a walk somewhere beautiful and drink in His gifts to you. Treasure His love. Relish the beauty He made to nourish you. Pick a handful of flowers that He grew for you.

Then plan and prepare a sensual rendezvous with your husband. Be creative. Do what delights him. Do it for him. Look forward to loving him all day long, to lavishing love on him the way the Father lavishes love on you- even when you’re less-than ideal.

Do this often— as often as he wants and needs you and then a little more. Then look at the way he looks at you. Do you see that spark? That meaningful glance? That passion you’d missed?

Add in a whole bunch of just plain, ordinary niceness… that phileo (friendly) love written about in Titus 2:4, and you have set the atmosphere for the kind of love you long for to grow between the two of you.

Simple? Yes. Easy? No.

This goes against everything you’ve seen in the moves, most marriage books and seminars, and would never, ever be the basis for a best-selling romance novel. But this is God’s way.

And since I’ve gone too long (again) I’m going to have to hold the other two reasons women don’t like sex and the solutions for next week. But here’s a recap, just a little clearer.

Problem: You’ve stopped craving sex because he isn’t romancing you and loving you the way you thought he would.

Solution:

1. Cultivate and receive a love relationship with God that fills you full to the brim.
2. Seductively pour love on your husband out of the overflow of your feeling loved by God.
3. Do this a lot. Do this often. Do this for him.
4. Be friendly towards him, remembering how kind God is towards you even when you’re less than you ought to be.

The result:  You will love sex!  Your husband will be thrilled! He’ll be exhilarated with your love, he’ll find rest and comfort in you.  He may just fall over in shock!

Now, do this all summer, into the fall.  Then keep his bed hot during all the winter months. Surprise him in the spring. Do this for years and years and decades until you’re both old.

Those crinkles along his eyes will be all about you. You’ll be so inundated with all the healthy hormones that great sex releases (more about this later), that your own skin will glow without the costs of Botox and beauty supplies. Really.

And if you’re not married, this is what you have to look forward to, girls. A lifetime of getting from God and giving to your husband and receiving back more than you can imagine.

From my heart,

Diane

P.S. I still can’t believe I’m talking so openly about this, girls. Thank you for cheering me on, for leaving comments that give me courage to open my heart wide, and for so fearlessly keeping this conversation going.

Your honesty and humility astound me.

P.S.S. I know there are men out there who have allowed themselves to be so perverted by pornography and sexual sin that no amount of pure loving will create this kind of passionate response. I am so sorry. Yet I also know that there are solutions. If that is your story, please get serious help. Stop hiding his sin and seek wise counsel. If you don’t, it will only get worse. If you do, God is more than willing and able to redeem the darkness.

For weeks and months now I’ve been writing Letters To My Son, a series of answers to his question, posed a year or so ago,  “Mom, what should I look for in a wife?”

Such a simple question.  Such a long and involved way of answering.

I think he assumed I’d answer by talking, the way mothers do, about beauty being more than skin deep and all the fine qualities a good woman should have.

And I suspect he thought all this talking would take an hour or so.  At the most.

And now I’m finally just about talked out.  Thirty-five letters and ten months later.

I’ve loved your responses, mulled over your questions, treasured your insights. What has emerged from my mail is a generation of men and women who want to do relationships right. Who’ve seen what happens when a man and a woman mess up.

And you want more for yourself.

You have astounded me by your willingness to read and learn and ask questions and gather wisdom and wait for the right time.  You have no idea how honored I’ve been to be a part of the conversation.

But now I think its time to talk about some other things.

Because, you see, I’m hoping all this talk about dating and marriage and falling in love and honoring God and each other will actually lead to some of you falling in love and getting married!

And so, at the urging of some of my advisors...

(part of our blog team: Elizabeth, Kristi, Abi and Fallon)

and my niece, Brittany...

I am embarking on a new series.

A series I’m calling He’s Not Your Prince Charming.

While the Letters were written for men about women,

this new series will be written for women about men.

I'll be attempting to explain what I’ve seen and to make sense of what the Bible says about how men work and what they’re called to and why its sometimes so hard to fit our lives with theirs.

Now I am certainly no expert on men or marriage or much of anything else. I’m just me- a woman,  a wife, a mom. You know my story, how God allowed my me to go deaf and in turn taught me what it means to listen.

And since that near failure of my faith and the subsequent failure of my hearing, I have focused on listening to God in the everyday messiness of life and relationships.

And in all that listening, I’ve gathered some things to pass on to you. About what love really looks like, about conflict and communication, about honesty and humility and intimacy. I want to tell you how I found  joy in the midst of tension and rest in spite of my perfectionism. I want you to know that marriage can be both a crucible for building character and a refuge from all that performance-based scrutiny that is real life.

But first, I want to tell you more of my story.

Because this will be a series of letters to my girls about things like finding satisfaction and dealing with disappointments and learning how to love the men in our lives with skill and wisdom.

A mixed bag of lessons learned along the way of listening with both my Bible and my heart wide open.

So for the next couple of weeks I’ll be inviting you into the intimacies of how I met and fell in love with Phil all those years ago. I’ll tell you what I saw in him, why I fell in love, and what I thought my life would be.

And I’ll let you know mistakes I made and lies I believed. I’ll tell you what I was thinking then and what I think now. How I’ve changed and what I wish I’d known.

Most of all I will remind you over and over again that fairy tales are not real life. That our stories include great beauty and dark disappointments.

That falling in love is not the end of the happily ever after, but the beginning of learning to love our neighbors as ourselves.

From my heart,

Diane

P.S. I’d love to hear your questions. Though I’ll not be able to answer every one (partly because I don’t know!), I will attempt to include answers in every post.

I promise to pray and ponder and listen in the hopes that we can mine for God’s wisdom together.

Make Her Feel Safe

Dear Matthew,

I woke up this morning feeling safe.

Pushing back the thick down comforter, I slipped out of bed while your dad slept soundly. Jackson led me excitedly to the laundry room as he does every morning, where I filled his bowl with 2 scoops of dog food, which he wolfed down as if he was afraid he might starve. I get the impression that he’s just not sure if I’ll remember to feed him one of these days and so he starts off every morning on a mission to remind me. Just in case.

And I think I used to be just like our dog.

Unsure that anyone would love me enough to take care of me every day.

Always. No matter what.

Would this be the day when Phil would stop loving me?

Would he be too busy to care today?

Too distracted to remember my presence?

Too enamored with all that the world outside our little home offers to notice me?

And so I’d wake up every morning asking those same questions, just a little fearful, hesitant. Watching to see if what I feared would come true. Feeling that maybe I needed to remind him that I’m hungry for his love, for assurance, for that pat on the back.

And every day for 35 years your dad has just loved me. Again. Until I finally feel safe and secure and sure that yes, today he’ll still love me. No matter what.

Matthew, I want you to understand that every woman, in her own way, enters every relationship feeling just a little unsafe… and that she’s looking to you with just a hint of fear behind her eyes… and that you can either fuel those fears or choose to go on a mission to make her know she's safe with you. No matter what.

And so, my dear son, in case you’ve missed the clues while growing up in this home where love has made your mama feel safe, I’d like to make another list.

This is how your dad did it:

1. He tells me he loves me. Over and over and over again. Using words. Lots of words.
2. He is affectionate with me. Ruffles my hair, holds my hand, sits close.
3. He looks at me when I talk. Not over my shoulder or out the window- at me.
4. He stays aware of me, choosing to see my beauty and look away from other women.
5. He lets me be who I am, never hinting that if only I’d do more or be different he’d love me better.
6. He never yells at me— ever.
7. He prays with me whenever he senses that fear again.
8. He seeks out my advice.
9. He guards me from bad guys- locking the door, looking around, letting me know that he’s on it.
10. He pays the bills. On time. Every time.
11. He goes to work. Every day.
12. Sometimes he empties the dishwasher…

I could write a whole letter on each of these dozen ways your dad has chased my fears away. There are stories and reasons and Scripture and so much more to say about making a woman feel safe.

This is how a man loves a woman, Matthew. Every day. For a lifetime. Starting now.

I love you!

Mom