Christian counselor Richard Winter once shared an article with pastors to help them understand how sexual sin can destroy intimacy in marriage. It was an honest autobiography of a minister's struggle with sexual lust and the consequences of it on his marriage:
I have not mentioned the effect of lust on my marriage. It did not destroy my marriage, did not push me out to find more sexual excitation in an adulterous affair, or with prostitutes, did not even impel me to put unrealistic demands on my wife's sexual performance. The effect was far more subtle....
Because I have...gone over every inch of Miss October as well as the throng of beauties that Madison Avenue and Hollywood recruit to tantalize the masses, I start to view my wife in that light....I begin to focus on my wife's minor flaws. I lose sight of the fact that she is a charming, warm, attractive woman and that I am fortunate to have found her....
Lust affected my marriage in...[a] subtle and pernicous way. Sex....We performed okay....But passion, ah, that was something different. Passion I never felt in my marriage....
We never talked about this, yet I am sure that she sensed it. I think she began to view herself as a sex object--not in the feminist sense of being the object of a husband's selfish greed, but in the deprived sense of being only the object of my physical necessity and not of romance and passion ("The War Within," Anonymous, Leadership Magazine, Fall, 1992.
No comments:
Post a Comment