A reader wrote in with a blunt question: when a husband says he is the one who wants sex less, can you legitimately suspect he is covering for a porn habit? Check out the blog post here for the charts, the sources and the full argument.

I have been answering a version of this for years, and I have generally said that a quarter to a third of marriages have the wife as the higher-drive spouse. This time I went and checked it against our own survey archive rather than repeating it. The number holds up, and what I can now tell you is exactly which marriages it describes. Across all marriages it is about one in five. Among couples who are genuinely mismatched it is closer to one in four. An independent analysis of a representative Australian study lands at 26% to 31% of couples with a large gap, which is the one-third figure. So depending on the question you are asking, it is somewhere between a fifth and a third.

The stranger finding is how invisible these men are. Two in five wives say they are the higher-drive spouse. One husband in twenty-five says the same about his marriage. Same marriages, described from opposite sides. In the one survey built to study this directly, eleven hundred husbands rated both drives, forty said their wife was higher, and fourteen of those wrote anything at all in the comment boxes. That is the entire archive of these men speaking for themselves.

And when you stop asking for an adjective and start asking about frequency, the label falls apart. The median lower-drive husband wants sex about once a week, and among the men answering for themselves it is twice a week. That is more than the median lower-drive wife wants. He is not low drive. He is out-driven. On the porn question, the base rate settles it: porn history is close to universal among husbands in our data, so finding it in a lower-drive husband tells you nearly nothing about why his desire is low. A test that comes back positive for almost everyone is not a test.

Then the second half, which is the part I care most about: if he does have the lower drive, should he still be leading in the bedroom? Yes to initiating, no to leading it. The one with the desire should carry that part of the marriage, whether that is the husband or the wife, and the other should actually follow. I talk through what that means if you hold a complementarian view, why handing the department over is not the same as handing over responsibility, and the thing underneath all of it that no amount of logistics will solve.

In this episode:

• (0:27) The question
• (1:34) How common is it, actually
• (3:03) One in five, one in four, one in three
• (4:48) Why lower drive men seem like a myth
• (6:56) Lower desire is a comparison, not a diagnosis
• (9:09) Is he hiding a porn habit?
• (10:55) What actually causes it instead
• (12:50) Should he be initiating anyway?
• (16:46) Who should lead, and headship
• (19:55) The part that doesn't resolve
• (20:22) What the romance novel is really selling
• (23:36) Christ didn't want to either
• (26:22) So, to answer the question

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Why lower-drive spouses should initiate sex
• Sex drive differences aren't the problem
• What does biblical leadership look like in a marriage?
• Why does my wife refuse intimacy beyond the basics?
• Desire vs. willingness
• Being more skilled at rejection
• Take part in the Marriage Study
• Join our supporter forum
• Send me your question
• Book a discovery call

A deep dive into one of the most consistent findings from our survey of over 1,000 married Christians: couples who can talk openly about sex report dramatically higher satisfaction than those who can't. Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why so many couples stay silent about what they actually want in bed
• The communication gap: satisfaction scores by comfort level across manual sex, oral sex, and mutual masturbation
• Who is actually talking — and how many couples are stuck wanting to but don't know how
• What openly discussing preferences actually does to sexual satisfaction
• Why the gender picture is more surprising than you'd expect
• Why the silence persists — and how it calcifies over time
• A note on couples who don't discuss it and are doing fine anyway
• How to start the conversation if you've been sitting on something unsaid

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If you'd like to discuss topics like this with other married Christians, consider joining our private forum.

Thank you to all our faithful champions!

If you'd like to support our ministry and see it grow, check out our support page for more info. Even $5/month makes a difference!

Lastly, if you like our podcast, click here to give us a rating and leave us a review. They help others know this is a good resource for their marriage. You managed to find us; help someone else do the same.

SWM 154 - Sex before marriage - when you remove covenant from intimacy. Check out the blog post here for more details and links.

In my last episode, I talked about how sex is an act of worship because having sex, the way God intended, gives worth to Him. It honours what He created by using it as He intended.

However, our society is doing its best to invert that by taking away elements of God’s plan so as to distort sex. To make it not something that’s worship and creative, but rather destructive to ourselves, to each other, and to society as a whole.

So, today we’re going to explore sex outside of marriage, or what happens when you remove the covenant from sexual intimacy.

And to be clear, the legal status of the relationship is not the big problem here. It’s the intentional lifelong monogamous commitment to each other. Arguably, many marriages in the Bible are considered marriages simply because they had sex. However, sex is meant to seal a covenant, not substitute for one.

Links in this podcast episode:

• Marriage Coaching
• Speak at an event or church
• Article as a PDF (without mention of UncoveringIntimacy.com
• Podcast mp3

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If you'd like to discuss the questions as they come in, consider joining our private forum.

Thank you to all our faithful supporters!

If you like that there are no ads in our podcast and want to keep it that way, check out our support page for more info. Even $5/month makes a difference.

Lastly, if you like our podcast, please rate it as it helps others know this is a good resource to help with their marriage. You managed to find us, help someone else do the same and receive the same benefits to their relationship.

SWM 153 - Sex as an act of worship. Check out the blog post here for more details and links.

The other night, after my wife and I had sex, we were lying there in that sweaty, happy pile you end up in when the oxytocin kicks in. As I often do, I asked her what she was thinking about. She’ll tell you I probably ask that too often, because I’m endlessly curious about what’s going on in her head.

Her answer surprised me. She said, “Sex is an act of worship.”

I asked her to explain, and she said, “Well, everything we do should be for God. And since you’re the head of the household, just as Christ is the head of the church, then giving myself to you, serving you in this way, is like serving Christ.”

That surprised me. I mean, I’ve taught before that sex is about more than physical release - that it’s for procreation, for bonding, for comfort, for recreation, even for warding off temptation. But I don’t think I’ve ever described it quite this way: as an act of worship.

So let’s unpack that. What does it mean that sex - sweaty, messy, joyful sex - could actually be worship of the God who created it?

Links in this podcast episode:

• Marriage Coaching

Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

If you'd like to discuss the questions as they come in, consider joining our private forum.

Thank you to all our faithful supporters!

If you like that there are no ads in our podcast and want to keep it that way, check out our support page for more info. Even $5/month makes a difference.

Lastly, if you like our podcast, please rate it as it helps others know this is a good resource to help with their marriage. You managed to find us, help someone else do the same and receive the same benefits to their relationship.

June - August 2025 Questions from our anonymous Have A Question page. Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

In this episode, we are tackling the subjects:

• My wife’s nightclothes are killing my attraction
• Is using a vibrator wrong?
• How do I get my husband to initiate sex?
• Need something to spice up our sex life
• How does scent factor into spouse selection
• Recovery after pregnancy
• Is using classical conditioning on your spouse wrong?
• How do I keep myself from becoming distant from my husband?
• How can I talk to my husband about oral sex?

Here are the links I mentioned during the podcast:

• Have a Question (form)
• Join the supporter's forum (donate)
• Manual Sex & Masturbation Survey
• Becoming More Sexually Engaged (webinar)
• Why masturbation is a problem whether you're married or single (blog)
• Sexploration List
• Marriage Coaching

Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

If you'd like to discuss the questions as they come in, consider joining our private forum.

Thank you to all our faithful champions!

If you'd like to support our ministry and see it grow, check out our support page for more info. Even $5/month makes a difference!

Lastly, if you like our podcast, click here to give us a rating, and leave us a review. They help others know this is a good resource to help with their marriage. You managed to find us, help someone else do the same and receive the same benefits to their relationship.

AQ - Oral Sex Norms, Fantasy Guilt & Rekindling Passion. Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

We haven’t done a round up of our anonymous questions for a while. These are actually questions going all the way back to January of this year. For those who are new, these questions come in from our anonymous Have A Question page. They have no contact information, and so we only get whatever they put in the text box as we can’t reach out to get more context. I posted the questions in our supporter’s forum where they were discussed and eventually became a blog post and a podcast episode.

So, if you have a question of your own you can’t find an answer to, or are afraid to ask anywhere else, you can ask it there, or join our supporter’s forum where you can ask anything you want anonymously as well.

But for now, we’re going to get on with these questions.

Do most guys enjoy cunnilingus after ejaculation? I don’t have any stats on how many, I’m afraid. I could not find a survey on it anywhere, nor have we asked that question in any of our surveys. I do know that some men definitely do enjoy it, and often quite passionately. Some have been very not-shy about sharing just how much they like it, and also how much their partners (not always married) also enjoy receiving it.

There’s another group of men who want to, but don’t, either because they’re afraid of judgement from the partner or because they errantly believe that ingesting their own semen while performing oral sex on their wife is somehow a homosexual act.

There’s yet another group of men who want to, but as soon as they ejaculate, suddenly they lose interest - likely because of the phenomenon where what you think is distasteful changes before and after orgasm.

SWM 150 - Control, sex and marriage. Check out the blog post here for more details and links.

Last month, I watched a great video by Gary Thomas and his wife Lisa on how a controlling spirit can harm a marriage. It got me thinking: In Christian circles, we often struggle to define the difference between healthy leadership and damaging control—both in marriage and in our relationship with God.

Why is it that surrendering to God is seen as good, but demanding control from a spouse is harmful? The key, I believe, is consent and love. When surrender is freely given and motivated by love, it can bring freedom and joy. But when control is forced, it leads to resentment and broken trust.

In this post, I’m sharing some personal stories and lessons we’ve learned about navigating these tricky dynamics in marriage.

Links in this podcast episode:

• Gary Thomas - Substack - A controlling spirit can devestate a marriage
• SWM 108 - What does the Bible say about hell?
• Sexual Frequency - Why I don't worry anymore
• Becoming More Sexually Engaged Course - For Christian Wives
• Sexy Photos Course - For Christian Wives
• Becoming More Sexually Engaged Course - For Christian Wives

Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

If you'd like to discuss the questions as they come in, consider joining our private forum.

Thank you to all our faithful supporters!

If you like that there are no ads in our podcast and want to keep it that way, check out our support page for more info. Even $5/month makes a difference.

Lastly, if you like our podcast, please rate it as it helps others know this is a good resource to help with their marriage. You managed to find us, help someone else do the same and receive the same benefits to their relationship.

My daughter's speech - Transgenderism is a lie. Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

Today we're going to do something a little bit different. For those who have been listening for more than a year, you know that my kids are in 4H and every year they have to deliver a speech. For the last few years, my eldest daughter has been delivering speeches about transgenderism based on her research and her own personal experiences. Now, these are difficult topics, and in a lot of cases, she gets, angry judges who mark her poorly simply because of the topic and her stance on it. And it's easy to think that, oh, that's just her father thinking that she should have scored better, but when a large number of people every year come to her afterwards telling her how impactful her speech was, how they don't understand how she couldn't have placed higher or sometimes at all, when the scoring comes back with no notes, only a bad score, and every year people tell her that she should be talking to churches about this, it's hard to think otherwise.

This year we had an elected government official say she should be speaking to the government about this and sharing her perspectives. This year she actually won at the local level and the district level before getting shot down at the regional level, and the same thing happened. We even had people tell us they went to the judges afterwards to ask them if they made a mistake because so much of the audience thought she was the clear winner, and then she didn't even place in the top three, which would have let her go on to the provincial level. During her speech, I saw multiple people in tears in the audience, and I didn't see that for any of the other speakers.

So, as has been our tradition for the last three years, we wanted to share this one with you as well in the hopes that it might impact you. So this is my daughter's speech titled Transgenderism is a Lie.

Transgenderism is a lie, a sham, and it promises false hope