Few people would be surprised to find that anger breaks the
pattern to the best possible sex, but for some of us it may not feel “normal”
unless anger is involved. Perhaps you take your anger out through sex with your
spouse. If this doesn’t turn your spouse
on, the formula for the best possible sex is broken.
Anger creeps into our lives very easily for most of us. We
don’t want to be taken advantage of, or we may have struggled through a day
filled with an abusive boss.
Our parents may have been angry people, and that is our
default emotional setting to any given situation.
Some of us may have obsessive compulsive tendencies, and
when things aren’t done just so it irritates every nerve in our body.
Perhaps we’ve been abused before, and fear having someone
take advantage of us again.
Anger can be a sign of a lack of trust, but chances are, no
one is more on your side than the Lord and your spouse. If we’re deliberately
getting angry with our spouse because it gives us habitual pleasure or
emotional payoff, then repentance and counseling should be sought for this type
of marital sadism.
If you want the best possible sex, that needs to stop today.
Intellectually, we in the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-Day Saints well understand the spiritual consequences of anger. Anger
even causes the loss of our rights to the priesthood. Gone. Kaput![i] Which,
consequently, also results in a loss of the best possible sex. If you lose your
priesthood, you lose your right for the Holy Spirit of Promise to seal to your
spouse, which could mean the loss of the best possible sex for all eternity.[ii]
It’s just not worth indulging our anger. The eternal consequences
of indulgence are sobering.
What I want to focus on here is, if we struggle with anger, how
to come back from that.
Rethinking Anger
Anger is too deep a construct to go into the depth I’d like
to here. Some of the causes of anger can be the result of depression, bottled up
feelings that explode, or fear of showing emotion or sharing feelings, or even
hunger and fatigue.
Be mindful here that just because there’s conflict doesn’t
mean there has to be contention and anger. If there’s no conflict in a
long-term relationship, there’s no intimacy either, and the couple is
interacting only on a very shallow level. Deep intimacy and the best possible
sex comes when a couple work toward and overcome a conflict together.
So how do we keep anger and contention out of our conversation
when we have a conflict?
For that, I recommend two books for further study – The Seven
Principles for Making Marriage Work, by John M. Gottman, and The Sex-Starved
Marriage, by Michele Weiner-Davis.
The principles and tools there are too big for me to do them
justice here, but they both are a very easy read, and very useful.
Join us next time as we address unkind words or actions.
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