Unmet Needs

“Family Life’s Weekend to Remember is a three-day marriage conference getaway. An opportunity to help you strengthen, reconnect, and reset your relationship. I can’t think of a better gift you could give one another.”

Pastor Mike flipped to the next slide. The one showing a young, fit couple, hand in hand, smiling as they sauntered along a moonlit beach. Melodic, romantic music played in the background, and my heart swelled with the crescendo. This was it. What I’d been praying for. A weekend alone with my husband to set right the issues we’d been facing.

By my late thirties, we’d already been married nearly twenty years. And though we hosted Bible study at our house every week, attended church regularly and even sent our oldest to a Christian school, we were not okay on the inside.

I knew it was my fault, too. Try as I might, and I did try, I couldn’t seem to get myself right.

Over the years, our one pressing struggle was intimacy. More pointedly, sex. Chet wanted sex regularly. And by regularly, I mean daily. In our first years of marriage, I mostly gave in, but as time went on, I pushed him away. I came up with reasons why I needed to put him off. I had cramps, my period started, I was too tired—nearly always too tired. Many times, these were valid reasons. Many times, I simply couldn’t bear the thought of performing yet another task in an already overwhelmingly busy day.

Since high school Sunday school class with Mr. Whiley, I’d been trained up to believe that a woman submits to her husband. And though he didn’t spend time elaborating, it was clear that once we were married, we could have as much sex as we wanted. This, of course, appealed to the boys, as evidenced by their not-so-discreet elbows to one another’s ribs.

“Sex before marriage is forbidden for good reason.” Mr. Whiley would hold his Bible aloft as he spoke. “Sex was made for the marital bed specifically to glorify God.”

I cringed at the thought that God would be watching me have sex.

“Once you give yourself away, you cannot enter marriage in the state of purity God intended.”

Was I imagining Mr. Whiley’s eyes seeking out those of the girls in the room? I couldn’t help begrudging Eve for her terrible fall from grace. Had she not eaten the forbidden fruit, would women still be responsible for keeping men away before marriage and then satisfying them during? It was unfair for sure, but it was not for me to question God or even Eve. What I felt was a tightening somewhere deep inside my body, like a suturing of my inmost private spaces.

Pastor Mike flipped off the overhead projector. “Let’s pray.”

I bowed my head with the others. As he prayed for the needs of the congregation, I wondered if Chet and I could swing the cost of the marriage retreat. With two kids and a mortgage, finances were tight. But if this retreat could solve the biggest problem in our marriage, wasn’t it worth it?

In the church foyer, tables were stacked with signup sheets and handouts about the Weekend to Remember. Pastors lingered about, answering questions and encouraging participation. Chet took my hand and led me to a table. I noticed him glancing up at Pastor Mike as he reached for a pamphlet.

“You two would love this,” he assured us.

Chet nodded. “We are planning on attending.”

I smiled. If Chet had decided, then we would go. He would find a way.

Babysitting in place, bags packed, Chet and I headed to our destination. The conference was being held just outside the city in a picturesque hotel on the beach, just like in the slide show. I was excited as I anticipated what would come out of this weekend. I was positive that I’d learn whatever I lacked in my current state to feel a desire to give to my husband in the ways he needed me to.

The hotel was packed with hundreds of couples. Many we knew, some we did not. But the goal was not to interact with others, but rather to focus our attention inward, on our own relationship.

There were teachings in the large conference room. Lights dimmed, overhead projector on, man of God instructing from the front. Then there were breakout sessions where couples were instructed to go off and read the material they’d been given. And though they didn’t say go have sex, it was implied that should this happen, then we were on the right track.

The setting for the conference was breathtaking. Chet and I strolled the beach, talked and laughed, then eventually settled onto a bench to look over our work pages. I leaned my back against his chest. He wrapped his arms around me, picked up the packet of papers and held them out for us to read.

It took less than one paragraph for me to realize that I was in for the same story as always.

Wives, when you resist intimacy or show passive interest, you inflict a deep sense of rejection and failure on your husband.

My job was to fake it until I made it, even if I was never able to stop faking it.

I sighed, and instantly Chet’s body went rigid behind mine. An audible exhale and he was already on the defensive. I leaned my head back and looked into his eyes.

“I love you and I will do better.”

I felt a tear slide down my cheek and Chet’s body relax.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Chet put the packet down and enveloped me in a hug. I felt a renewed sense of longing to be the wife he deserved. I knew I could be. I would be.

A Weekend to Remember culminated with us signing covenants declaring our recommitment to one another emotionally, spiritually and, of course, physically. The importance of this document, we were told, ranked right up there with our marriage certificate. I felt cautious but ever so hopeful that this paper scratched with my signature and his would magically correct my deficiency from that moment forward.

If only the magical setting of life on a beach, having meals catered and no demands to parent or work were something we could bottle and take home for eternity, maybe things could have been different.

But probably not.

The thing was, no one ever asked me what I wanted.

I couldn’t even ask myself.

In a few short days I was back teetering so close to the edge of the bed one sneeze could have knocked me onto the floor.

Please think I’m sleeping.

I held my breath, stilled my body, longing to be left alone. Because the truth was that I didn’t want to have sex with him. I felt no sense of control over where I was touched, how I responded, or whether I even wanted to respond at all. The worst part was that I knew if only I wasn’t broken in this way, then I could be the wife Chet and God wanted me to be.

Our Weekend to Remember covenant hung alongside our marriage certificate, and I stared at it, praying with all my might that I’d feel something other than disdain. I prayed for forgiveness. And when Chet rolled off me frustrated and angry, I begged him for forgiveness.

“I don’t know what to do!” he yelled.

I didn’t either.

I knew how to keep myself pure before marriage and how to submit after. I knew how to say no when saying yes was a sin, and how to say yes when saying no meant failing my husband. What I did not know was how to ask myself the simplest question of all:

What do I want?

I wouldn’t have known how to answer.

I knew nothing of mutual desire, of expressing my wants or needs. I had no concept of bodily autonomy or that I even had a right to it. I had no language for the void inside of me that ached for a touch I did not feel with him. I did not yet know there were other ways to love, other ways to desire, other ways to inhabit my own body beyond the religious confines in which I had been raised.

All I knew was what I had been taught to believe:

I was not right.

So I kept trying to fix myself.

For years, the problem in our marriage had been defined by unmet needs. Chet needed intimacy. Chet needed to feel desired. Chet needed a wife who would not reject him. The books said it. The pastors said it. The marriage conference said it.

No one had asked about mine.

My body had been trying to tell me something for years—in the excuses, in the exhaustion, in the tightening, in the inches I put between myself and the edge of the mattress. But I had been taught to interpret every no inside me as evidence of something broken.

I couldn’t yet imagine that my body might not be betraying me.

It might be telling me the truth.

The covenant still hung beside our marriage certificate, proof of another promise I believed I was failing to keep. I looked at it and prayed to become different. More willing. More giving. More like the wife I believed God wanted me to be.

I did not yet understand that the need left unmet all those years was my own—the need to know what I wanted, whom I wanted, and that my body belonged to me.

So I prayed harder.

And tried harder.

And moved a little closer to the edge of the bed.