#80 - Marriage: The Benefits of Married Sex | Che Wetzstein
In wedding ceremonies, we often hear the words "become one flesh" which means union between two individuals. Imagine how wonderful it is to have reached that deep connection and bond filled with love and happiness. This sacred unity is also evident in a sexual relationship in marriage. While it may seem uncomfortable to talk about, you will see how beautiful it is if we will only look at it from God's perspective.
In marriages, sex helps a couple to strengthen the connection not only physically and mentally but also spiritually. Having a common understanding of the value of sex and knowing its importance and its purpose in a relationship can create a special bond between a husband and wife more than we realize. Also, intimacy and closeness can help establish a long-lasting relationship especially if it is rooted in love, respect, trust, and commitment despite many differences in so many aspects.
To lead us into an insightful discussion on sexuality, intimacy, and marriage, we are joined by Cheryl Wetzstein, an award-winning journalist for over 40 years. She is happily married and is successful in her current field. In this episode, she will be sharing with us more about her journey in life- how she was able to manage to pursue her passion being a mom and a wife, and how she was able to keep a healthy relationship with her husband.
Cheryl’s writings talk about love, sex, pregnancy, marriage, parenting, marriage renewal, abortion, divorce, gay marriage, pornography, and all about the inconvenient truths of our society.
Learn more about the benefits of sex and marriage, what is sexuality, what is healthy and unhealthy sexuality, and how that pertains to sustainable sexuality and marriage and relationships. Join us and don’t forget to visit us here for us to guide you in your journey to build the life of heavenly sexuality that you deserve.
Understanding what real and healthy sexuality is
How the internet changed everything
Why there’s a lot of single people in journalism
Learning how to handle fights in marriage
Benefits of sex and marriage
How a relationship can grow
Rebirth of love and passion in a marriage
Pillars of love
Studying each other’s personality types
The cuddle hormone
The problem with hypersexuality
Truly understanding love and sexuality
Episode Transcript:
Andrew Love
Welcome back to Love Life and Legacy, a podcast dedicated to helping you navigate these hyper-sexualized times of ours. And in today's episode, we have Cheryl Wetzstein. Now, why is that important? Who is she?
Andrew Love
She was a reporter for over 40 years. And in that time, she covered sexuality, the good stuff, the bad stuff, the ugly stuff, and the inconvenient truths of our society. She went deep, and she was really passionate about helping to bring to life, bring to light, bring to lineage what is heavenly sexuality before that was even a term. And she also wanted to make it be known what the pitfalls of sexuality can be. And so we get into all of this. And more than that, more than just reporting, she was living it, she was building it in her life, and blessing her marriage is the most important aspect of her life. And she just wants that for everybody else that is why she was part of a national newspaper to let it be known how to navigate these difficult times back in the 70s, and 80s, and 90s. She is the reason why something like High Noon can exist because she was continuing a conversation that didn't want to happen because society wasn't ready for it, but it is now. And so, we want to welcome Cheryl and all of her glory as she discusses her forte, which is sexuality, intimacy, marriage, all the good stuff that you guys should know about. She's a gangster in knowledge and a gangster in practice in love and intimacy. Let's welcome Cheryl Wetzstein.
Andrew Love
Welcome back, everybody. We are here today with somebody that I've been passively, politely stocking for about a year to get on this podcast. Because when I got into this game, when I was transitioning from a spiritual caregiver to focusing more on sexuality, I knew who to go to and it was this woman right here, she has been a journalist for a while. But more importantly, she's been passionate about the topic of understanding what real sexuality is, healthy sexuality is, and I really felt like I could plug into her wealth of knowledge. There's a lot of stuff that is hard to understand without breadth, without depth, and without some historical understanding of how we got to this point in society. And I feel that Cheryl here, who I'm about to introduce, has that. And so it's always a pleasure to speak with you, but I'm just glad that we can record this, and let other people share this because I know a lot of our conversations, I wish I had recorded with your permission. This is, of course, to let other people here plug into because you've just been on the front line of the conversation of what is sexuality, what is healthy sexuality, what is unhealthy sexuality, and how that pertains to sustainable sexuality and marriage and relationships because there's a lot of confusion. There's a lot of bad advice out there. It's hard to find clear, good advice. So I'm happy to have Cheryl, what's on the podcast? So welcome, Cheryl.
Cheryl Wetzstein
I'm glad to be here.
Andrew Love
And so you were a reporter. I've seen pictures of you in the past. And you were the kind of person that had a pad of paper and a pencil and you are a journalist, you're a straight-up journal, like in the detective movies kind of thing. That means that in order to get a story to surface in a newspaper, you really have to fight for that.
Cheryl Wetzstein
Well, the industry has changed a lot. So I went out, and I had a roll of dimes in my purse because I made a 10¢ call back to my editor. And I learned how to always have a pencil with me because pens do not write in the rain. But if you've got a pencil, baby, you can keep taking notes on all kinds of stuff. I was in New York City, and it was wild, wonderful, and very exciting. And then later in D.C. for 33 years.
Andrew Love
And so, you did this in total for 40 years as a newspaper reporter?
Cheryl Wetzstein
Exactly.
Andrew Love
Incredible. And that was probably the golden years of reporting. I'm guessing. That's all the movies in the 80s were about being in New York being a news report. And that's your life.
Cheryl Wetzstein
Yes, it was. We ate, slept, and drank. The news was always wired to look at, and the internet really changed everything. We thought the internet was going to give us a way to be very specific. I don't have to guess what decade something happened. I can tell you it is 1953. But the internet completely blew up our industry utterly and the business model is gone. And frankly, it tied me to my desk because the news started coming to me.
Andrew Love
But specifically about your interest, so you got into sex., and you also got into relationships. Did you knees down? Did you kind of start just digging in your heels, so to speak, and say this is what I'm interested in? Or is that something that came to you?
Andrew Love
Well, whenever I could write about family issues, I did my entire career, but I was switched over to the national desk to cover welfare reform in 1994. And that puppy that bill had everything in it. It had men, women, poverty, families, and abstinence education. I mean, it opened the door to 1000 directions of things involving family, teen pregnancy, and abstinence education. And it got me into all kinds of sexual issues. So frankly, I ended up writing a lot about love, sex, pregnancy, marriage, parenting, marriage renewal, and also, abortion, divorce, gay marriage, and pornography. I used to write a weekly column, and every six weeks I wrote about pornograph in that because there were so many studies and so many things to talk about. I became essentially, people joked with me, they said, Cheryl, well, you're kind of like the pelvic reporter. You're like the sex reporter in the newsroom. Well, let me tell you, everybody reads my stories.
Andrew Love
I mean, I want to get into all that. This is all really important information because, again, what we're looking at is the result of a culture going in a very particular direction. A lot of times unconsciously, we wouldn't choose to be here because I don't think many people are very comfortable in the society that we're in. It doesn't make a lot of sense to most people. It's not an accident, but it also wasn't done intentionally by most of us. I know that we've been guided by certain things. So I do want to get into that. I also wanted to, you are you, have invested a lot into your own relationship. So this is not something that's like a scientist who's detached from their work like you are in the lab every day working on your relationship with your husband. So how long have you been together? What has that journey been like?
Andrew Love
We've been blessed in marriage for 38 years, and I'll say professionally, journalism is death to marriage. There are almost no married women reporters, and definitely very, very few women have children as I did. And that's because the industry just wants your attention 24/7. There are just a lot of single people in journalism and then a lot of divorce people and then a lot of childless people even if they got married, they didn't have kids. So, we handled all these stresses. My husband was a photojournalist, and part of our journey was that he was Jimmy Olsen and I was Lois Lane. And I told Superman to go fly a kite because Jimmy Olsen would come home every night. We understood journalism. My husband still understands he helped me set up for the zoom today. He's just got that vision. But because we walked the walk, that gave me more confidence to talk. We have three adult children, and we're grandparents now. And we have a pretty dramatic love story which is why we're writing a memoir, but let me just go cut to the chase. About the 17th year of our marriage, we had a breakdown in our marriage. Some people say the 17th year of marriage is the nadir of the lowest point of marriage. That's because you have teenagers in the house. The adults are having their midlife crisis. There are just too many disappointments that have piled up, and doggone it that backdoor still squeaks. It's just like a whole litany of bummer things going on. And we, my husband and I stood, and we realized we're standing at the edge of the abyss. We're thinking about divorcing? How can that be? So we had a spiritual awakening? We basically took each other's hands, and said, no, no, no. We love each other, and we are going to fix this marriage. We kind of kicked our marriage to the curb, in one sense, the way we were operating our marriage. We changed ourselves, and we changed our marriage because we wanted to make it the most incredible marriage. We wanted to have a marriage we both want to be in. And at that time, guess what, all this marriage education stuff was coming out. The George W. Bush administration was promoting marriage. So I'm going to all these conferences, and I'm meeting all these fabulous people talking about marriage enrichment and saving your marriage and divorce busting and all this stuff. So we've applied those things in our marriage. We didn't keep it to ourselves. We even started a marriage monthly couple meeting with other couples, and then we became marriage mentors to young people. We help with all kinds of things. In other words, we wanted to sharpen the saw. It's not just for us, and I would say that our marriage is like firing on all cylinders, and 38 years later, I mean, we hardly stay away from each other.
Andrew Love
That's impressive, walking the talk. Yeah, I never knew about the 17-year syndrome, I guess we all have it in a marriage, you are still able in that time to then manage and somehow survive being a reporter, a mom, and a wife. How did you do that? Because a lot of busy people out there, now as you said, as a reporter, all the stories come to you now but same with us like everybody's not working from home during the pandemic information follows you to the park into the playground when you're with your kids because it's on your phone and it's hard to kind of detach so for them. How did you survive being a full-time reporter, a mom, and a wife at the same time?
Andrew Love
It takes time management, it takes them setting boundaries. One of the marriage enrichment tricks is you put a hedge around your marriage, and you don't let anything in that isn't your spouse, and you carve out that private time. And of course, one of the big topics since turning your marriage around is the topic of sex. Basically, when you're not feeling good about your spouse, the sex kind of goes out the window. He can't let that happen. The Bible says, "Don't let the sunset on your anger." So, part of our technique was to learn how to table this fight we're having, and chill on it and put it off until tomorrow at four o'clock then we'll talk about the yada-yada, so we could rebuild our intimacy back into our life. I had one guy that I quoted a lot, and he said, "Sex is not the biggest part of marriage, but it's the first 10%." Basically, whatever that means, his point was that you don't want to have a sexless marriage as much as possible. Build that romance, and intimacy, and keep that part very much alive because all the rest of it because there's always laundry and there's always car repairs and all that stuff. We can deal with that but to carve out and make sex a priority in a marriage is one way to just keep everything the greases the wheels, baby.
Andrew Love
Let's get into that. I mean, what exactly are the benefits of sex in marriage? This is dicey because, to be honest, you have cultures that have different historical relationships with sexuality. You have people, especially intercultural marriages that they're coming to a marriage that is completely different opinions about sex but to have a common understanding of the value of sex would be wonderful.
Andrew Love
You bet. Well, what I'm going to talk about with you today, this is not in my head, I interviewed hundreds of people, really wise people. I read their books, I read their papers, I kept up with my studies. Please don't think that I'm the genius here, or I'm the wise person, it's quoting the wise people. Basically, we can start with biology and love because one of the things I always wanted to know is if Hollywood goes away, how do we become in love with each other? And I found one book that really kind of spelled it out and the beginning is with your eyes. You notice someone, and if you're lucky, they'll notice you. And all of a sudden, you're communicating with your eyes because if you think you like this person, you go and stand next to them. There's a whole march of how the relationship can grow. When we hear each other's voice that tells us a lot, we can smell each other, you know, our pheromones matter? Do we like the smell of each other? I can sense you, your spirit is like, who is this person? And then, of course, you have hands touching each other and putting your arm around the waist, and there's kissing, and there's a whole line up that leads all the way to intercourse which should take an ample amount of time. And the intercourse really should happen on your wedding night in some fashion. The reason I like this, how do you become in love is that when people find that they're struggling, and I don't think I like you anymore, etc. Go back to the beginning because there's a study, for example, that found that if strangers would sit and look in each other's eyes, and say intimate things about themselves, and do that for a period of time, for whatever reason, that connectivity starts stimulating feelings of affection for the person. So if a couple is struggling, they need to literally go sit and look at each other. They need to realize the power of a touch, lay on the beach, or lay on the grass on a blanket or whatever and just let your pinkies touch. What's going on? Because of the energy in your hands, all of a sudden, it's like you're vibrating because touch is so powerful, smelling good, and uses all of our senses. This is how we can reinvigorate a relationship that has been strained because that's how we grew in love in the very beginning. So we re-energize and recycle all those feelings.
Andrew Love
So that is part of the reason why, in some marriages, people start taking care of themselves in a way that's a manifest destiny to a bad end. For instance, you stop showering, stop shaving, you become less attractive to that person. It's just kind of a negative loop that starts for me.
Andrew Love
To me, that's a little passive-aggressive because we all want to be loved. We really, really do. And part of what my husband and I discovered and other couples have discovered is part of the rebirth of love and passion in a marriage is that I try not to be annoying. I try not to be unlovable. I try not to be, I don't want to be too difficult to love. I want to be as beautiful and as luscious and as smelly and everything as I possibly can for you. It makes it easier for you. So for me, in my marriage, I had to zip it. Then we learned the speaker-listener technique so that my husband would say, I'd say something blah, blah, blah. And the speaker-listener technique says, okay, now Doug is going to repeat back to me what I said. And then, when he did, I'd go, wait a minute, I didn't say that. This is what I said, baba, baba. And we got good at this because he did the same thing to me. He'll say something to me, and I'd say, well, honey, this is what I heard you say? And he'll say, no, I didn't say that. So we learned how to actually hear what the other person is saying. But do it in a way that's when in some way we're leaning into each other. Well, I want to understand you, I want to get what it is that you're telling me. You're going to give me the good news, and you're going to give me the bad news however I can take it. It's a journey. And it's a lot of fun. My husband and I hardly fight at all, just don't ride with us in the car around that roundabout anymore because I can never go that way. And we're driving.
Andrew Love
Okay, yeah, so it is like an eternal thing since the advent of cars. Many, many marriages have struggled I think. This brings up a few questions. This is one thing that I'd really like to discuss because it happens within a marriage, but it's also happening at a younger age for pre-teens and teens that they're skipping this process. They're skipping the getting to know you, and there's a huge momentum in sexting and stuff like that where you just go straight to the graphic stuff without any of them getting to know your stuff. But I also know within the context of marriage that a lot of times, usually the husband honestly will want to kind of skip the maintenance of marriage, and just go straight to the sex, and how harmful that is to a relationship. Because you're talking about a very specific formula to how to produce a specific feeling of familiarity, and ultimately, intimacy with another person safety and closeness, but people are skipping the emotional, mental, spiritual, closest, and going straight to the physical geographical closeness of sex. Do you have anything to say?
Andrew Love
I do. The pillars of love, or those stools of love or the thing you stand on with love, it has three legs to it. One is respect. I respect you, and you respect me. We trust each other which is huge. And the third is, we're kind to each other. If I asked you for help, you're not going to snap at me, you're not going to ignore me, you're not going to make me feel bad for asking for help. You're going to be kind to me, and I can respect what you do. I'm watching you, I see what you're doing. I trust you because you are acting trustworthy, you are reporting what you're doing. That's one of the things that I learned a long time ago in my path of faith is that if you report willingly on what's going on, There's a lot of freedom involved with that, because I've already reported what I'm going to do, what I'm thinking, etc. So, trust, respect, and kindness are the building blocks. And then on top of that, there are so many dimensions that a couple will work on, in order to have a love-relationship and have a really robust sexual relationship. And that's one of my lists. You want to hear my list.
Andrew Love
Yeah, lift it up. Yes, please.
Andrew Love
This comes from a sex education curriculum that I really liked. I interviewed the author many times. It's called, Love U2: Becoming Sex Smart. It's produced by the Dibble fund for marriage education who is really righteous people. They really appreciate sex within marriage. Anyway, they said the dimensions that you need to have in order to really have a secure, loving, intimate, and robust sexual relationship is of course keeping your physical body, keeping your health, staying clean, being attractive working on that, especially as we get older, it's a lot more challenging. You can't just roll out of bed, you got to do things while maintaining really good physical health. Another thing is intellectual stimulation. This is, the brain is a huge sex organ. So we want to keep each other in touch with all of my incredible ideas, interests, my plans, my hopes, my dreams, I share that with you. That's part of our pillow talk or part of our sitting on the couch while I'm holding you or caressing your face and honey, I've always wanted to do this. This is when you begin keeping that intellectual stimulation going. A third is emotional. It is really keeping strong, warm, close feelings with my spouse. This involves whatever their love language is which we can talk about, but really going up to my husband at any opportunity and just loving him and telling him I really love what you're doing. I just really think you're awesome. The other three areas are social, spiritual, and area of commitment. Social means that in our relationship we do a lot of things with other people. We have friends we entertain, we go out to recreational activities, we do things together that are novel and provide stimulation, we run out with kids, anything. Going to Lowe's is fun, going to the hardware store, going to a park, the spiritual dimension. For many of us, that means doing things like praying together every day, reading scriptures, keeping God close within our relationship because believe me, that's where a lot of problems can get knocked out immediately. Because when you pray, you kind of gets a different zone mentally. And even though I'm really mad about something, if I start praying about it, it kind of doesn't get all ugly, I can kind of deal with it. The last thing is the realm of commitment with that respect, and trust, and kindness part. Commitment is really a big deal in the trust part because it means I trust that you're going to stay in my life, you're going to put me as a priority, you're going to be there for me no matter what. So I can feel free to invest in this marriage and invest in you and invest in everything. You're not, it's not going to backfire on me, you're going to be there. And if we have a problem, we're going to work it out because you're not going to leave, and I'm not going to leave and that problem is going to leave, that's what's gonna leave.
Andrew Love
So, does it mean, committing vocally or just in your heart or both?
Andrew Love
Bringing it out into the physical world, and saying it, that matters. But it's got to be backed up by all the little things that I do all day long to tell my husband that I am in this for the long haul. And when we repaired our marriage, we did a lot of affirmations along that line that, okay, we got wobbly there, but we're not wobbly anymore. We're gonna just see that mountain over there. We're climbing it. Help me and I'll help you.
Andrew Love
And so when you refound yourself or restabilized your marriage, and you started recommitting, was it to an ultimate end or just some prescribed habits, or how did you commit to each other?
Andrew Love
Well, as I mentioned earlier, we studied our personality types. That was one of the things we did, so my husband realized I wasn't insane. I was an ENTJ, and he's an ENTP. This is a big deal on how you operate in life. And I stopped trying to make schedules for him because that's what I do. I make lists, I make schedules, I have a calendar, I have six calendars, and I have a calendar for my calendar. He's not built that way. He's very spontaneous and doesn't want to commit to anything. So I unlearned how to schedule his life, and I ended up scheduling things that I wanted to do and then ask him if he wanted to join.
Andrew Love
Basically, the same result, different process because he had the free will to choose.
Andrew Love
Yes. And you know what, he felt totally liberated and thrilled that I had plans, and he could join if he felt like it, which he ended up doing about 95% of the time. I'm happy, and he's happy. That's just one of the things that when you understand who the other person is, there are just tools out there for so many fun things to learn about my spouse so that I can be in harmony with my spouse on levels that I didn't even dream of. Really, it takes a lifetime to understand one woman. It takes a lifetime to understand one man with that difference.
Andrew Love
I mean, I remember somebody telling me that you don't even know your spouse until you've been married for at least 20 years. And that was so difficult for me to fathom because I've been married and blessed for nine years, and I feel like I know her. But every year, I'm dumbfounded by how little I understand about her. It is a kind of general assumption that I guess that has to be true, but it is so deeply, painfully true.
Andrew Love
The wisdom that I've saved for some of the education that I do in marriage education, and that is, we have three people or three ways that we exist in our marriage is a person that I think you are when I marry you, okay, I think I got your number. And then, after you're married, the person that you really are holy, moly, I didn't know that. But here's the best part. There's the person that you are going to become based on being married to me, and that is amazing. So there's a person I thought you were, and there's a person that you are, but then there's the person that you are going to be as a result of being married to me. My husband and I talk about this all the time, just all the time. What our lives would have been without each other. And both of us just that's where we get on our knees, and just say, thank God, thank God, thank God, I can't imagine being without you. You have been this in my life, you have been that in my life, we really have just really dramatically helped each other grow up and meet people we like.
Andrew Love
Yeah, because it's not always just like going to the gym is sometimes painful and annoying, but the result is always wonderful with another person. Yeah, I mean, yours was clear, the mark was 17 years, but I'm sure there's a lot of sketchy periods before and after. But in that result, you get to be the person you were meant to be because of that person who helps and enables you to become that person. The only gateway to yourself is through your spouse, in a sense, to your true self, you can only get to your true self through another person through the person you've committed to.
Andrew Love
Who else knows you so intimately, and so personally. Our parents knew us when we were kids, our siblings knew us, but then they moved away. The one that really knows you for your entire long life is that person marching alongside you in the desert and through the jungle, through the forest, up the mountain, and down on the ocean and having a journey of great variety with someone by your side? And you get to sleep with him at night? I mean, it's just awesome. Yeah, there's mud, briar patch, rocks, hot sun, and stuff like that. So you got to just make it through the seasons and miles of the journey.
Andrew Love
And where does sex play into this formula? Because there's all this stuff is kind of on the road sexuality, but obviously sex. One analogy is, it's like a thermometer for a relationship, in a sense, where you get to see where you're at through touch. You can see how comfortable you are, but it's got to be more than that. We know at high noon that it is connected to every part of us. But that's an abstract notion. How specifically does sexuality help in maintaining the relationship and also scaling love and producing more and more intimacy?
Andrew Love
To answer this question, I've thought about basically just running through just a little bit about the infatuation stage and why that cannot last. Okay, you got to move into the mature love stage. And have you talked about this before?
Andrew Love
No, but I'm really it just came up last week. And I would love to know because I don't know if that's something that's meant to be reproduced, or whether that's just an immature form of love. So I'd love to get into that.
Cheryl Wetzstein
Well, actually, I've read that you actually can't get to the mature, incredible mature love without going through all the infatuation jazz. In other words, magically we are built in a way where God intended us to get addicted to love one person. And so, when you are madly, passionately in the infatuated stage, there are all kinds of chemical brain chemical things going on. For example, dopamine, okay, dopamine, adrenaline, nowhere epinephrine, I used to be able to say epinephrine and then phenethylamine which is in chocolate and serotonin and estrogen and testosterone. These are all naturally occurring hormones, and they become like a cocktail in your head so that if they do brain imagery of your brain when you're infatuated, it looks like you are on drugs, honey, so it's the same pleasure centers exploding, etc. And when you're infatuated, and this could be a newlywed stage and like you're married, you're happy you're thrilled you know you're obsessed with each other. You're besotted with each other, you're also distracted from everything else in the universe. Wash the car, forget about it, write that paper, forget about it. All I want to do is just be with you and you and you. So we really can't actually do well in function when our head is high when we're addicted to love. So God made it in my view that these things tend to peter out infatuation like poof. You wake up one day, and I still love you, but where did that rush go? And that's because it has gone. We are not intended to live in that highly addicted state where we can't do anything else. But what happens is, once the infatuation period has left now, we move into where sex, and cuddling, and talking, and having physical touch, you're starting to release something called oxytocin. Both men and women have this. It is called the cuddle hormone. And with women, women get all lovey-dovey, especially because it's released during orgasm and sexual intercourse. So oxytocin is just the lovey-dovey feeling. And men have something called vasopressin which also women have. But as in men, it makes them want to, they have the surge of, I want to protect you, my wife, I want to be with you, I want to do everything for you. So together, these two hormones just make you just want to melt into each other. And the good thing is, is that the more you have sex, the more oxytocin you release, you get stronger orgasms and the more bonding that you feel, and so all of a sudden, a natural feedback loop that times you have sex, the more you want to have sex and the more bonded you feel. So that is why even though you know, obviously we have life in between having sex, ideally, but the monogamous relationship, the body gets used to each other, the body can experience deeper levels, there are just so many good benefits to having a lot of sex in the married relationship.
Andrew Love
Can we talk about that real quick? Because this is obviously countercultural, I mean, common wisdom and legend wisdom or whatever I want to do, and it's fine. There's the term polyamory which is really sneaky. I encountered that. I don't know. I had a friend that was polyamorous maybe 20 years ago, something like that. And it's this illusion that you can be in love or be in a loving relationship with many, many people. And there's a temptation to want that because we all want to have freedom without responsibility. But what is the reality of what is occurring? In that scenario, if somebody has multiple partners? Are they able to release as much oxytocin? Or does your body have defense mechanisms? Because it can open up because psychologically, you don't trust that person enough? Or how does that work?
Andrew Love
Well, the list of six things that I went through before the commitment, the emotional attachment, the intellectual stimulation, all those things that take a lot of time and focus. And women have the most orgasmic experiences when they feel safe, secure, loved, adored, wanted, and wanted, not just for tonight, thank you very much and not wanted until someone else comes along, wanted for the rest of my life. So those kinds of feelings aren't just highly available with a flip of a switch. It takes investment by the man and the same with the woman towards the man because she's investing in him. So to experience all these really deep, amazing things in married sex, it takes the exclusion, and as I said earlier about building a hedge around your marriage, that means there's nobody in there but you and me. And if you're a faithful person, God, and that's it, there's nothing else in there, there's nobody else in there. The kids aren't in their jobs, not in there, the phone's not in there. It's just you and me. And we're just gonna focus on each other, till the end of whatever time we can spare. And it's just really exciting. And that investment is what opens the door to things that people who are still smorgasbording it. They don't ever experience this stuff.
Andrew Love
Can you put that into, what would somebody be missing out in that lifestyle? Just the sense of belonging, the sense of comfort of knowing that somebody is truly there for you in every sense of the word?
Andrew Love
Well, that's right. I mean, I have a list of things of what really, really, really good sex, what the characteristics are. And these things come from a true investment again, in the person say, I know you. The ability to see each other, I see you, I feel you in the case of my husband and I. We are so attuned to each other that if he is in say, Madison Square Garden which holds 30,000 people. I can find him because I know him so well that I know how he moves. I know what he looks like, I know the turn of his head, I can spot my husband in a crowd of people. And that doesn't happen with semi strangers.
Andrew Love
That's a deep point, I think. Yeah, the reason I'm delving into this is that it's not understood. It's easy to sacrifice important things for immediate gains but in short-term gains? because that's how we're trained in this society. But it's hard to really understand what you're missing out on because that's the stuff of bold, romantic stories that we don't even hear anymore. It's all about hookup culture and stuff like that. And they just cut it short of happily ever after because they don't even know what it is after. They just say I don't know, I just assumed that things are good after this. But in reality like that, the nuance of being so in tune with somebody that you can even have a sense of them when they're outside of your immediate vicinity that you can even maybe intuitively call them when they need you to call in. This kind of stuff is only possible when you're really singing the same tune when you're in harmony with the same frequency of the thing that the sound that you're creating as a couple. That's something worth fighting for. People really need ammunition these days to stay focused because you're talking about focus, there's an ample distraction, especially in the arena of sexuality. There are so many distractions. It's hard to give your sexual energy to one person and your attention and your love and your hopes and your dreams because we're being pulled in many directions. I love that. I really do love that.
Andrew Love
The most beautiful people in the world are actually the old wrinkly white-haired people walking on a beach. They've got their hands clasped, he touches her waist and grabs her butt. She is kissing him on his arm. I mean, they are so in love that you cannot even imagine. And yes, there's sex in old age. Okay, you may need help, but there is sex in old age. This is not something you stop when you're done having children. But the thing is, if they have journeyed through so much they know each other so well, though the flick of one eye tells the other one a whole paragraph. I mean, you cannot build that kind of instant intimacy without putting in the time and the effort. And it's so exciting. I mean, to have your husband wink at you across the room. And it's like he just zings zing you to have you have your look back at him. And he gets zinged. I mean, you can't do that unless you have put in the time. You've got to walk the walk to do that zinging thing later in life.
Andrew Love
Yeah. Well, this is something that we have evolved into in High Noon because, in the beginning, it was just, hey, there's an emergency, let's repair as much of this sinking ship as possible. But since then, we've built the foundation. Now we're really understanding that what's really missing here in society is just the healthy vision for what heavenly sexuality looks like or having intimacy. And that intimacy is that feeling your heart flutters when your spouse of decades winks at you or touches you, and how there's only one person in the world that can offer that to you in a deep way. It's not the rash of somebody flirting with you because then, you in a childish way, feel valued, like some office worker, that's what some people get deeply obsessed with. Rather, it's something much deeper than fulfills you and almost is the purpose of our life itself.
Andrew Love
I recalled and thought about our call today, our podcast. I recalled this really funny dream that I had years ago which I very proudly told my husband about, but in this dream, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Andrew Love
He's always in everybody's dreams. I hate that guy.
Andrew Love
He's interested in marrying me. He was seeing me. He was begging me to marry him, and he's hyper-masculine. He's so gorgeous. He's got that dessert with a funny accent and everything like that, and he's chasing me. He's trying to wine and dine me. Take me places, "Marry me, marry me." He's telling me in his dream, and all I could say I'm laughing at him. I said I'm sorry. I marry Doug. I'm married to Doug. I can't marry you, Arnold. It might have been nice, but I am married to Doug. And the whole dream. All I can say is laughing. I'm with Doug. So when I woke up that morning, I was so happy to tell Doug, hey, you'll never guess what happened to me last night. You over missed the most hyper-masculine guy in the universe. Mr. Universe, in fact, you, Doug, you are my man.
Andrew Love
I bet after you ended that conversation, you went to the bathroom instead of flexing his muscles in federal and so you've probably felt like the biggest man in the world.
Andrew Love
I hope so. But I mean, it's that sort of when you're in an intimate relationship, I mean, Doug actually interprets dreams. So that one didn't need an interpretation. But we have all this talk that we literally can talk with each other for hours, and just get closer and closer. We know each other's thinking patterns. We know how to amuse each other. We have our inside jokes, our inside names are everything. And that's another thing that an intimate close couple who's in love. You have this whole production of cool things that are just you and me. And we're the only ones that know what that means. It's like our own private language, just knowing each other. And that also takes time and effort to build it, and nobody else can do that. Nobody else.
Andrew Love
That's really wonderful. I think that's a painting with a really positive picture. Because marriage is not something that you are, you're not married, this marriage is something that you build. It's more proactive than okay, we're married. It's more on the marriage is, okay, now we start building and that gives you something to strive for and to know whether you're off track or on track. Are you on deadline or not? Because you're constructing this edifice of love or at least a lot more sense than the common understanding of what marriage is. People see it as a contract. Oh, we don't even need the contract now. It's a non-important negotiable aspect of many current arrangements. It doesn't make a difference. But in essence, there's a lack of that commitment that you're talking about to build something very specific.
Andrew Love
Children have two absolute needs. One is that mom and dad love me. And the other one is, mom and dad love each other. I see them kissing each other holding hands. He touches her on her fanny, he touches her. He holds her, he sees mom kissing him, and the child sees mom and dad love each other. And they both love me. I am good, I am good to go. Because then they can handle everything else.
Andrew Love
So that just helps them to solidify an image of what real love is.
Andrew Love
Exactly. So any of the cultures that you were talking about earlier that don't approve of public displays of affection, we need to have that rule repealed. We need to have public displays of affection because it is the manifestation of what's inside my heart that I'm keeping there privately. But there's a place and a time and a way to do this. But yes, touch each other. We have our hands that were built for the other person. You never see your face, you only see the other person's. Your ears, two of them to hear the one mouth going. But the whole, your whole body is built to hug your spouse.
Andrew Love
Have you read anything about... Because I know there's a lot of single people here, people who are kind of approaching the matching like courtship phase of their lives, but they don't have anybody to reach out at all. Is there a need for the same sex, physical affection of hugging another man like a father figure or a brother figure? Because I feel there's a lot of needy touchy people, that they even need to be told that they're handsome or maybe ideally, they're getting that from their parents, but it most likely not because parents are just distracted or embarrassed to do that kind of stuff. But where do they get that kind of validation and love?
Andrew Love
Well, yes, it's very important to understand that the four realms of heart which are in my path of faith, the conjugal realm is the only one where sex occurs. That's it. The parent realm, the child's realm, the sibling realm have a wonderful agape love, and that allows you to love all kinds of people. There are all kinds of father figures, all kinds of siblings, friends, all children are my children, that sort of thing. And the love and the affection and the hugging, and the touching that we do in that realm is non-sexual. So there's politeness, I think if you hug someone for so many seconds that if you hug them, something happens, it's a quick hug, and then there's the hug, hug. And if you're able to hug someone, there's a way to do it in a way that validates them. They are loved. You don't cross that line and do some weird sex thing you're not hitting on. Again, I think that we are still wrestling as worldwide cultures with how we touch each other and that there is a way to do this. There's a way to do it that still has innocence and sincerity and can adopt a love motif to it so that I'm not confused at all about what you are doing whether you are a father figure or sibling, or child.
Andrew Love
That's a very good point. Yeah. Because I know I mean, definitely in my time in Korea, but also when I was in Mongolia, there were a lot of mothers and daughters and young ladies who would hold hands in a completely innocent way. And that just seemed natural that you'd want to, especially the little kids. They just reach out to hold your hand. But then yeah, there's also this confusion now that everything's being sexualized that nothing is safe- tables, dogs, napkins, everything's being sexualized. So it's hard to understand when somebody is touching what their motivation is. Anyway, to that point, sometimes when people go to workshops or camps or something like that, there's a tendency to at some point, somebody on both sides of the same gender that were group hugging as if there's a secret need that nobody has identified as being fulfilled at that moment.
Andrew Love
One of the five love languages is physical touch. And that means, I only feel if that's my primary one, I feel loved when someone touches me. So when my mom hugs me, I feel loved by her. When she refuses to hug me, I'm not really sure if she likes me. So we need to know each other's love languages. It is part of my husband's and I, and we kind of go along with that. We really want to know what your love languages are and most people will show it. So there's even tests to do and such and that would help us kind of put physical touch in the right zone because there are many ways and again, our hands are built to show kindness and to show sir, and we have so many nerve endings in our hands, and there's a way to touch someone else with respect, and with trust. Again, we go back to trust, respect and kindness.
Andrew Love
Yeah, life skills. This is great.
Cheryl Wetzstein
How about that?
Andrew Love
Because we don't get tired. I mean, there's no formal place to be taught any of this at this point. Obviously, it meant to happen in the family, but a lot of parents and some others do this and so just imagine that if this was in education, how many people, they don't even have a failing grade, they've never even taken the class. So, of course, they're going to show up. And the test is being really equipped in relationships.
Andrew Love
I interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people to try to distill out of them something that I could give a short comment here and there. I mean, it is not taught in school the way it could be. And again, we have many cultural differences, and then the hypersexuality that has crept in and looms large in our cultures. Now, that is not helping.
Andrew Love
Can you get into that real quickly? Because we're trying to untangle this weed or these weeds, or just get ourselves out of the weeds so that we can see clearly. Okay, why is this not helping me, and what then would help me to have the ultimate thing that I need to identify which is the last thing loving marriage?
Andrew Love
There was a professor in a university, I forget her name now. Ana Bridges is her name, but she and two other universities had young people students who actually looked at and rated 50 of the top adult videos back then. They look for acts of love and also chart all the other things they were doing in the video. So this is all very clinical, just research, they found out of 50 videos with 300 events, less than 10% showed any love. There were no kind words, there was no kiss, no hog, nothing more than 90% was hurting people's, doing all kinds of things which I'm not going to go into. But it had nothing to do with love. So that is the problem with hypersexuality. It has nothing to do with love. It has nothing to do with a relationship. So how skewed are we? And that's what I think you're talking about is how do we talk, you know all about all this great sex and marriage and love and intimacy when I've never seen a picture of it.
Andrew Love
That's a great point. It's somehow the most potentially intimate scenario but it's impersonal when it's done that way because it could be interchangeable with any person. Because there's no loving act, it's just animalistic. How you can see a dog humping a pillow, it's the same, same thing, same level.
Andrew Love
Exactly. It's devoid of love and emotion, and frankly, intelligence and other things. So all of this is basically, it has something of a captive audience, I guess, or people, for at least a period of time. But it cannot be jettisoned fast enough for us to actually build a culture where people understand how to love each other in non-sexual ways and then love my spouse, to the moon and back, in a way that we are just happy, happy, happy. Married couples should be truly the happiest people walking the earth because they have many victories under their belt, and they're growing their love for each other every day. In my marriage, 38 years, I need 38 more years, come on, I'm not done yet. I have more to learn about this guy. I went through a lot of my blessing education, marriage education that I did for young people at 20 in 2008. So, I had exercises and programs. My husband and I did it together. It was fun, but there was something that I wrote that I thought I would share here about marriage, which is that marriage is not an award that you receive or a trophy that you win. It's not something that you frame and hang on your wall to look at. But marriage is a living entity. It's created by you and your spouse's love for each other. It grows as you grow. And in time, your marriage will become bigger than either one of you. It becomes your house of love. And it's majestic in its dimension. It protects all that you hold dear. And it's a living tangible, public, and private expression of your deepest love. So that's marriage. And it's great.
Andrew Love
Thank you. So what you're saying in terms of we need to jettison away from pornography as quickly as possible. The thing is that there isn't a counterforce that has equal power. So obviously pornography serves a function people are not doing it without some sort of personal benefit, be it short-lived and with a lot of downsides, but they're doing it because there's no other force pulling them. And we're finding that the force is a strong vision that's connected to sustainable love and all that. But it's not as available. It's not marketed as readily. There are not enough movies about it, not enough music written by a couple that's been married for 40 years, and this kind of stuff to any reasonable person to argue that. It's just that that picture seems so abstract for so many people. so that what you say, or what you just said, is fundamentally true. I think it would be hard for anybody. And as you said, we need to be it, we need to be the face of it, that it's just no contest that people plead no contest because that's the winner. And that's where we've fallen short because I think a lot of people who are unhappy marriages are too happy working, or they're too busy working on their marriage to advertise it. Do you know what I mean? Whereas everybody else who seems to have a skewed version seems to have a lot of time and energy on their hands to spread false narratives.
Cheryl Wetzstein
Well, if you stood up all the happy married couples who do not use pornography, you would have hundreds and hundreds of thousands and millions of people who do that. So it's a lie. It's another media lie. And not only that, it's a nuisance, and it gets in your way. It's boring, and it's easy to block. You don't want to see it. It ain't there.
Andrew Love
Yeah, so that's your call to action. Everybody, if you're listening, and you're married, and you're happy, stand up. People need to know, and we need to be unabashed about how much we love our spouses and not gloat and not falsify any information. But to be honest, and to let people formulate that vision because it is worth every ounce of energy. You're feeding this entity, as you said, this organism.
Cheryl Wetzstein
You're growing your house of love, and it's beautiful. It's big. It's got everything you care about in it. And guess what, you get all the crap out? No crap, no garbage, take the trash out.
Andrew Love
I have to tell you, I have to confide in you that we're going to cut this now because we've gone a little bit over because I can't stop myself. But there's still so many more questions that I do have. And you have this treasure trove of knowledge. And so we have to do part two at some point because there are a lot of facts and data. Also, I remember my initial conversations with you. I was just floored by how much statistics you had, like a repository of them. And I really want to unearth those and understand those more clearly. So this was a fantastic foundation. And I really loved where we went, especially how you ended this in terms of building a house of love. Is there a way for people to contact you if they have any questions?
Cheryl Wetzstein
I can give you my Gmail address.
Andrew Love
Or we can link in the description if you're comfortable with that. But definitely, we have to have part two. It took about a year to get you here. So it might take another year, which seems to be the average so far. Yeah, thank you for making this happen. And everybody, please listen to this a bunch of times. This is one of those episodes where I think this requires a lot of depth understanding this that we often approach love and sexuality from very shallow needy means, but it's something that I think we've discovered in talking through this conversation, that what that depth how that looks and how that feels, and what the benefits of living in that space are and what you can get if you live a certain lifestyle that you can't get any other alternative presented as shiny and fast, but not nearly as deep and wonderful.
Andrew Love
So please listen to him many times. And as I said, we'll link the email and Cheryl's email here. Otherwise, thank you so much for listening. God bless your souls, your faces, your minds, and your family, and your dogs and everything. We'll see you next time.
Andrew Love
I hope you found that episode enjoyable. And before we go, I wanted to challenge you to take your life on to take your life to the next level. And if you're struggling in any way, with pornography, with masturbation with issues of sexuality that just are not helping you at all. If you want to reclaim your life, reclaim your eyes and ears, your time, your energy, then take our free 15 Day challenge. If you go to highnoon.org, you can find our 15-Day challenge right there on the front page. Take it, and it's absolutely free, with no strings attached. We've designed it to help you gain some level of momentum in your journey of sexual integrity so that you can take the next step, whatever that may be. It could be to go deeper into our Ascend program, which is a 90-day program we have. It could be to reach out to that accountability partner, it could be to just take whatever steps you need to take in your journey, to build the life of heavenly sexuality that you deserve. So go to highnoon.org right now if you want to break up with porn, and start to get engaged with the life of your dreams and eventually marry. Doesn't it sound nice? So, go to highnoon.org to find all of those resources and more. It's been a slice.