Sex-y Marriage
Transcript:
Pastor Priji: Welcome to marriage talk podcast. It’s such a joy to have each and every one of you join one more time on this morning’s conversation. I’m so excited to have Corey Allan on the podcast. If you’ve not heard of him, he’s the founder of Sexy Marriage Radio and is also the author of “The Naked Marriage” Dr. Corey, thank you for joining us. Would you like to take a moment to greet our listeners?
Dr. Corey Allan: It’s a real privilege to be here Priji, and have conversations that help married people. Marriage is not a topic that we talk about near enough, because it’s not a bed of roses and it’s not always easy, but that also doesn’t mean that there’s something necessarily going wrong. It’s fun to get exposed to different cultures and different people and different audiences all over this world.
Pastor Priji: Absolutely! We would love to get to know you a little better. Could you please tell us a little bit more about yourself and your family and the work that you do at Sexy Marriage Radio?
Dr. Corey Allan: Well sure, so by training, I am a marriage and family therapist. So I see clients and do coaching with people in the States and all over the world.. have been that from 2002, so coming up on twenty years. I have a PhD in family therapy and it will be ten years on Sexy Marriage Radio this year in October in 2021 and that’s just a weekly podcast that we do, trying to talk about what goes on in marriage sex, that people aren’t talking about what goes on in a good value based, God-honoring, marriage-honoring way but we don’t take a real religious slant. We take a more health slant to it, because we want people to apply it to their data. So there’s been three iterations of this show, with three co-hosts in the beginning. In the last year, my wife has been the co-host and that at first created a bit of an angst for us, because its different being on the sir with her, having been married to her for twenty eight years and having grown a bunch because of her, it’s a fantastic blessing to share life, share help and resources with people, to be exposed to new audiences like yourself and yours. We’ve two teenagers.
Pastor Priji: Absolutely! I totally enjoy listening to the Sexy Marriage Podcast. I’ve been listening for the last couple of years and I’ve possibly learnt and been helped in my own marriage and I also recommend the same podcast to a lot of our counselees, who come to us for help. Every podcast begins with the statement that the best sex happens in the marriage bed. Why do you believe that and what is the reason that you would say something like that?
Dr. Corey Allan: First and foremost, it’s because I believe there’s a sacredness to sex and I believe there’s a biblical foundation to that, so I believe sex is best in a committed, monogamous marriage, that’s my values, that’s probably going to be a lot if your values, it’s your audience’s values too and it’s a lot of the world’s values and I also realize its not all of the world’s values. We try to take the stance of I want to encourage marriages to last. I want to encourage marriage to have hot sex within it, because research also pears that out that longer term relationships move beyond technique and frequency and start to taste a different level of quality because of the people involved and it may not be more frequent but what you’re doing is because you’re both better as people. So I love the idea of being a proponent for long term relationships, because here in the West—I don’t know what it’s like on the other side of the world completely, but here in the West, marriage has taken a hit completely. It’s cast aside pretty quickly at times and not that at times it’s not warranted. I don’t want to get into that kind of an argument, but I think there’s something incredibly profound about the marriage relationship, and sex within it, that there’s a language going on. There’s a depth and a challenge and a mechanism going on in there that’s more than just a good time, and more than just an orgasm. It’s about growing up, it’s about being better, it’s about connecting and being intimate, there’s a whole lot more and that’s what we try to connect and deal with in a straightforward and a honest way.
Pastor Priji: Right. You know sometimes we think that the initial years in marriage are the times when we are trying to explore each other as married couples, and then as time goes by, we tend to take a more stagnant route. Like we tend to become a little familiar with each other and not really grow more passionate in our desire to grow more intimate with our spouse, that stagnancy and that lack of intimacy can actually become a problem later on. So, what would be your advice to somebody who has been married for a couple of decades and have grown very stagnant or they feel very stuck up. How can they re-ignite that passion that they had earlier on in marriage and how can they jump start their sex life?
Dr. Corey Allan: So, two things with this. One is that it’s normal. There is a popular phase that’s thrown about where marriages where sex goes to die. There’s an element of truth in that because sex as we knew it, from the very beginning with us, when we are filled with endorphins and hormones chemicals, and we’re charged as newly weds or even if you get married later, there’s just a charge to the relationship that you can’t replicate. It’s just not possible with the chemical concoction that’s going on in your brain. So a lot is recognized, it’s going to happen. Passion is going to wane, stagnation and monotony is going to come in, so how do you re-ignite it? How do you re-ignite the framework of we don’t capture what we have, we have to create something new. And I think too often, we as humans get caught in “oh, well, I have tasted this before. How do I put all the right things in place to make it happen again, when I can’t because I’m a different person, I eluded to at the beginning of the podcast, I have been married to my wife twenty-eight years. We can actually say ”This is our fourth relationship with each other.“
We can actually look at markers of life together. We were here and then we were here. We’ve fundamentally changed, circumstances and situations have fundamentally changed and so, I can’t recreate what it was in season one because I was naive and I had no clue what I was doing as a husband or a lover, neither did she. So i think the way that you re-ignite that is that you are living passionately in all areas of life that you can. Whatever you do, you do it with all your passion. You bring your passion to how you do housework, you bring your passion to how you play with kids or neighbors or do church or worship, I think you bring your passion to life because your relationship is not going to be the source of that, so sometimes we have to bring it in my life and other areas too. Then the other is “how do I pursue that aspect of my life? how do I pursue that aspect of my marriage? How do I honor that aspect of my marriage because I don’t know what your experience has been man, because we get caught up in a lot of other roles. We just expect our intimate life to just happen magically.
Dr. Corey Allan: I make the joke of “we don’t have sex by accident. You don’t just trip and fall while you’re having sex, right? It just doesn’t happen that way. It takes some intentionality. It takes some claiming that time, in that time and it also takes that happening before we actually have it. It’s how am I working towards that aspect? I’m pursuing my spouse, connecting in deeper ways. We’re doing some things together that aren’t just managing a household or family, or business or roles you play, but you are actually cultivating that aspect of your relationship.
Pastor Priji: True, you brought up an interesting point where we need to expect to grow in passion in every area and that will consecutively overflow into this, and sometimes a lack of physical intimacy is because of a lack of emotional intimacy in marriage, and when a pursuit of your spouse has gone down during the ages and you don’t want to spend personal time or getting to know your spouse better in this season that will automatically drive you to a place of not wanting each other physically as well. So, I would like to know from your perspective, what role does emotional intimacy play in leading to physical intimacy? Because sometimes we just see lack of physical intimacy as a problem but not lack of physical intimacy. So how is it connected and so how could it lead to one being physical?
Dr. Corey Allan: So this is a tough one, because this isn’t an easy answer, because if you and I can crack that code, we would be the fastest trilionaires in the planet. It’s recognizing that this is kind of the chicken or the egg, right? Is it emotional intimacy that enhances and fuels sexual intimacy, whereas the other side could say the same thing. Sexual intimacy is what fuels emotional intimacy, so I think it’s probably just recognizing that this is what I’ve lately in the training that I’ve been doing, because it’s recognizing one of the pitfalls in marriage is “I have tremendous detail on my spouse. All the good and all the bad, all the times when I’ve been a pleasure to her and all the times I’ve been a disappointment to her. So, I’m having to confront the math of my wife in my own head as well as the current iteration of my wife, and so sometimes those two aren’t the same. When I set up the scenario of ”hey, I want to take you to to dinner.“ I said this to her ”Hey, what have you got Wednesday night? Let’s go to dinner, right because it looks like both kids are going to be taking care of other things. It looks like we can steal a moment, let’s go have some dinner. She can read that as “all you want is sex” because that could be the whole iteration of while there’s truth in that statement, well, that could be a move towards a sexual encounter and also towards an emotional encounter, and I can’t control how she interprets that and so, we get caught up in these scenarios of “well I did this or said this and we did this at one point, and it went horribly wrong” and we can’t bring that up, and all of that is emotional intimacy, because intimacy isn’t just required on “how does my partner respond to it.” Intimacy also means, I expose me a little differently, a want, a desire, an interest, a tweak, whatever it might be that’s intimacy. It might go horribly wrong, but it still is intimate and we don’t really think of it that way.
Pastor Priji: Right, when we fail, we may feel that that was not worth it, but even that failure was an attempt towards emotional intimacy.
Dr. Corey Allan: It could be and then it comes down it depends on how each of the couples recover from that. How do I navigate that something just happened and it didn’t go well in the way that I had an outcome that I was attached to, but how do I recover to still continue to grow forward? Because that’s the growth process of marriage and that’s the growth process of how we grow together with each other in a lot of ways.
Pastor Priji: That’s beautiful, you’ve built an entire community on SMR nation, where people can connect and grow together as a family, the conferences, the retreats that you guys do, how important is it for us to grow in marriage? You did mention how building a community around you, where you can learn from each other and be vulnerable, be open is vital to your growth in marriage. I’d like to know why do you believe that and how can we overcome our own fears of insecurity or all the things that we do to keep ourselves in our own little cocoon, to just come out of that and say “this is who I am, we need help and we would like to learn from other people.”
Dr. Corey Allan: Well, I think one, is just the idea of marriage and the importance that it is for that kind of a relationship it is for our own being because we are relational beings by design, yet we still fight against “I don’t want to subject myself to someone else’s tyranny” because every culture across the world and across time, will rise up against a tyrant eventually, whether that tyrant is a spouse or a leader or a dictator or even a foreign army, eventually we rise up against it. Yet, when left to our own devices, we seek out a connection with people, because this is the two life forces we live in. So, I think there is a tremendous value in doing this on a couple and family level, because one, I start to realize I am not abnormal or alone because when you face difficulties in you’re marriage, it is so easy to think “Something’s wrong and I’m all alone. No one else experiences this, no one else has the heartache going on” and in today’s society and cultures, where there’s an interconnection with social media, it allows us to keep connections on surface level things, but it also allows us to protray what we want to portray and so there’s that element of “I feel wrong. I feel isolated, and so if I could live with other people on various depths of levels, because I don’t think we need to be wide open completely behind the curtain with everyone but I do think that some that allow us to have safe places to land, to just say ”you know what? My marriage is messed up“and there are times in my life where I have done that with other people, without fail, they’ve either responded with ”we’ve just got out of a messed up phase or I just got out of a totally messed up phase in my life“ or ”I’m in in too“ there’s just this bond that comes with like ”okay, I’m not alone in this, there’s no quick fixes in this“ because marriage isn’t a problem to be solved, it’s something to be lived through and experienced the same as life. Some of life’s problems aren’t meant to be solved. They’re just part of a human condition in a fallen world, and I have to live through it—so it’s recognizing that if I could see that I’m not alone in that and this is where the SMR nations come in so well for a lot of people, is our willingness to talk about stuff behind closed doors, because Pam and I pretty much lived our lives on the air in a lot of ways and it resonates with people because they realize ”oh, he’s got the same stuff—they’ve got the same stuff. Okay, there’s nothing wrong with us, it happens, now what to we do about it?“ that gives hope and that gives us help.
Pastor Priji: Beautiful. I love the way that you make many of these complicated topics easy and relatable for people. Dr. Corey, you’re a therapist yourself, and you help families, and you do sessions and you counsel people. Here in India, people are very hesitant to reaching out to a therapist or a counselor, especially when it is something very personal like intimacy or marriage issues that you don’t really want to talk to anybody else. Could you give us a few reasons why it is helpful to find a counselor, to find a therapist, even if there’s no big problem in life, but to just help you to coach through some seasons of your life. How important is it for you sometimes to just receive help, from someone outside your marriage.
Dr. Corey Allan: Some of this is just a continuation of the conversation that we just had, that we don’t need to go through life alone. There are resources and help available. The benefit of working alongside somebody that’s professional or “non-biased” I am using that term relatively, because I have agendas too. I have biases too. I can do everything I can to keep them out but they’re still there, but the difference with having a relationship in that—through that way in versus family and just friends, is how often do we run into or I go to a family member and share what’s going on and they immediately project their issues on it, and tell them what they would do, rather than be somebody who’s an advocate for you, or for what you should do. Because I truly believe a good coach or therapist, they won’t tell you what to do. I don’t tell people what to do, unless there’s true physical danger involved, I don’t tell people this is what you should do. I try to help get them a better picture of what’s going on so they can make better choices about what they do and that way, I can maybe be an ally that’s in their corner and helping in best I can without “here’s what you should do, here’s what I would do or you should just leave that person. I cannot put up –that’s my own projections.
The best example for this is somebody, I actually just read about his years ago about a guy that had stage IV cancer, and he had a short term to live. He can continue treatments and it was going to prolong his life by months, maybe but he made the call of “No, I’m going to go out the way I’m going to go out. I’m going to stop treatment and I’m going to start traveling and I’m going to see people with the time I’ve got left” and he told his family and they were appalled by it.“ No, you need to do this, what about this?” Everybody was offering these things, rather than realizing it’s his choice. Right? and yes, it impacts them, because our choices impact people and so some of our reaction come from “your choice, impacts me” but some of it also is “I have a hard time separating myself from someone else’s pain or struggle and not making it about myself” so, hopefully good therapists and good coaches can do that better, and be somebody that truly helps create a space for you to experience what life is and what struggle is and what it can produce, right? That’s biblical—“consider joy when we go through trials” and the reason we consider it joy, is I am learning something if I get the opportunity to take that way.
Pastor Priji: Right, and it is so important to find the right coach or the right counselor. Sometimes you might have to do it a couple of times to get it right, but once you get a good counselor or a therapist, it’s such a big blessing over the years. And Dr. Corey, you’ve mentioned this statement on your website, which I find it very hard to believe, I agree with it, but sometimes going through life, I find it very hard to like really believe it. You mentioned that marriage is about keeping things simple. I’ll just read this statement out, it says “Marriage is more about becoming a better human, than it is about two people being happy, and when you do keep things simple, you can experience more in marriage and in life.” How do you keep marriage simple? Marriage is so complicated in so many different levels? and your advice to keep it simple, sometimes can be very challenging and what would you tell us on that point?
Dr. Corey Allan: Well, I have this as a framework of how oftentimes we complicate things because one, we don’t understand it. We don’t recognize that there’s natural things already happening that are just going to happen, I can’t really change them, so I need to make it a little bit more simple to realize “I cannot change my spouse. I could change spouses, but I cannot change my spouse” So often we come into struggles thinking “if my wife would just do it better or my husband would just get his act together, everything will be better for me” Rather than just realizing “No, it won’t. It would just make it a little bit more comfortable possibly, but it’s not solving the issue” So, keeping it simple means recognizing that there’s some stuff going on that I can’t change and when I come to grips with that, it simplifies things. The other is keeping my life and all the circumstances around me simpler, because then I can actually experience and keep what’s important important, rather than let the immediate take over and I think that a lot of times, the human condition is that when there are things that are going on in my life I don’t like, I just distract myself from it and that’s usually with things or schedule or something. You know, I disappear on the web on on the book or in a movie or I’m just distracting myself. Every distraction means, still I wake up at some point to something that’s going on that I don’t like and so if I can realize pain is real, it happens. Struggle is real, it happens, it’s a pre-fall condition.
Struggle was Adam and Eve’s plight even before the fall, right? They had a struggle to live since they had to tend the garden and cultivate everything, it was an easier struggle from all accounts, it got harder once sin entered the world, but it got harder once work was involved and so, it’s just kind of when I can have that in my mindset, I am much better in how I deal with stuff, so it comes down to how do I frame it? We started as a family years ago, doing month long trips for vacations in the summer, when our kids were littler and it we had a keyword on every single trip, it was always the same word, and anytime we were getting ready to drive off it was just like “okay kids, remember the motto” and it would be yes, be flexible and it would be because we have plans and plans aren’t always going to work, and what’s going on in our world with COVID, over the last year and a half, if you don’t write anything in pencil, it’s not a good plan. Because it’s going to change because there are circumstances and we realize, we don’t rate as well as high as we really thought we did, because there are things that we cannot control and I’m going to adjust to, address and deal with consequences that are really good or bad, that is the human condition. There is nothing that we can do to change that and so in simple it means I keep that in perspective because then i can really experience more of what this life really is, rather than I am always yelling in the wind because it didn’t go the way I wanted it.
Pastor Priji: That’s beautiful, Dr. Corey, we would love to know what are the different resources that are available on SMR radio and everything that you put out there, that our people can subscribe to and even join. It will definitely be a blessing to them on a long run?
Dr. Corey Allan: Well, you’ve already been to before, it’s smrnation.com that’s where every episode of Sexy Marriage Radio is, so we have a membership site on there, where you can get membership content for the shows. There’s an academy, where people can have a deeper access to me and my wife. There’s more support and the book I’ve got is there “Naked Marriage” There’s some courses coming towards the end of 2021.
Pastor Priji: Thank you Dr. Corey for joining us! We were really blessed and we can’t wait to check out all the resources and content that are about to come.