Posts Tagged ‘men’

Maleness is under attack in this country and has been for the past 40 plus years. This is true in the culture at large, as well as in The Church, and it is extremely detrimental to male culture and our society at large. For a few years now people have been addressing this issue in books like The Feminization of American Culture by Ann Douglas, and David Murrow’s Why Men Hate Going to Church. The results of this feminization have been disastrous. Men are not real men anymore. Many males themselves don’t even know what it means to be a man because they have no role models. Part of this is due to the fact, that far too many fathers have literally abandoned their children or they are not engaged playing an active role in being a part of their son’s lives. For decades since the industrial revolution, most boys have been surrounded and raised by women who are the caretakers and role models. The message men are getting in spades—consciously and unconsciously– is that they need to be more like women and less like men.

While, there is much to be said about the causes and cures for this phenomenon, for the sake of this argument, we are going to zero in on one particular area: living by feelings.  More importantly, how it’s a dangerous thing when men live by them. In his book, Man and Woman in Christ, Dr. Steven Clark states that one of the earmarks of a feminized man is that “he will place an unbalanced emphasis on how he feels (and how other people feel), in turn becoming highly visceral in his personal thinking and reactions”.  In other words, because such a high emphasis has been placed on feelings, men have incorrectly learned that they have permission to act on and live by their feelings rather than thinking through logically what is right and wrong.
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Many people have seen the 1999 movie The Matrix, starring Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne. It’s a really cool movie with all this action and cool special effects that most guys really love.  One of the great things about the movie is the theme of the “chosen one” or “messiah” coming to save the race—a theme common to lots of literature and movies because of it’s universal appeal to the human soul.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, or in case you have forgotten, the basic gist of the movie is that these humans think they are alive and carrying on their normal lives, but in reality, they are not actually living. They exist in cocoons where their bodies are used to generate energy to run the giant computer program that simulates their lives—the matrix. All they are doing is living a virtual life in their heads and the movie is about trying to break out of the matrix so they will live a real life, rather than the one generated in their minds by the computer.

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In a previous post I gave one possible explanation for why some married couples don’t have much of a sex life. Sexless marriage is a very common problem in millions of marriages today. As I’ve stated before, a sexless marriage is one where a couple engages in little to no sexual activity–anything less than ten times per year is considered to be sexless. There can be many reasons that contribute to this phenomenon—anything from health issues, kids and busy schedules, to pornography use, masturbation, issues due to past sexual abuse and serious problems or difficulties in the relationship. But there is one very simple misunderstanding in regard to sex I would like to address, and I truly think it can make a big difference for a lot of couples. Many, many people mistakenly think that you can only have sex if it is preceded by great desire and/or a huge emotional connection. But I say that neither is required every time to have a great sex life with your spouse.

Let’s deal with the desire issue first. The typical model says we first feel desire, then arousal, followed by the actual event of sex (intercourse)—but as I say in my Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage book and seminar, this is not true for millions of people! Many people don’t feel that great desire first and often don’t want to do it until they are actually doing it—then they are glad they did! Unfortunately, the misinformation that we have been given by so-called experts and the media in our culture has led most people to believe that both the man and woman always feel all this hot and heavy desire before they can have sex.
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In the last post I wrote about the connection between attention and desire and explained that when a man pays attention to his wife, it builds desire in him. As human beings we want or desire what we give our time and thoughts to. It could be a shiny new car that you keep driving by the lot admiring or the big piece of chocolate cake that you continuously look at sitting on the counter! Then I explained how this applies in marriage—mostly from the man’s point of view—trying to get women to understand this connection between attention and desire in a man’s brain. If you haven’t read it yet, you may want to check out Attention = Desire Disorder (Part 1) first.

Now, I didn’t say that every time the guy gives his wife a little attention she needs to fulfill his immediate desire (as some readers assumed). Rather the intent was to explain why some men stop paying attention to their wives. If time after time a man gives attention, causing his desire for his wife to grow, and then she constantly stiff-arms him and pushes her husband away, the dude is going to stop with the attention. He will do it if for no other reason than to keep his arousal and desire in check and limit his own sexual frustration.
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It’s the New ADD. Attention = Desire Disorder.

It is not a secret that men and women typically want different things from one another in a marriage. Ask 100 women what they want more of from their husband and most of them will say they want him to pay more attention to them. Ask 100 guys what they want more of from their wife and most of them will say they want more sex… no surprise there! These differing wants are the ingredients for a perfect stand off between men and women.

Women will say, “I’d make love to him more if he’d just give me some attention and I felt like he cared about me for more than just sex.” Men will say, “I give her attention and that just makes me want her more, but she still doesn’t want to have sex.” And it’s true that when a man gives his attention to his wife, it increases his sexual desire for her! Desire fills him as a result of paying attention to the woman—his sexual interest increases as he focuses in on his wife. Much of the attention that men give, whether women like it or not, is sexually driven. Sex and attention all go together, you can’t separate the two. Whatever we give our attention to is what we end up desiring.
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