by PAUL BYERLY | Apr 4, 2025 | Holistic
I think failure to deal with sex holistically is hurting many couples. Sex is affected by all the rest of your marriage and life, and a good sex life requires you to understand and manage that.
We sometimes deal with folks who think their marriage is fine other than for sex. This is mostly men who want more, but it can also be women, or it can be about what happens rather than how often it happens. There have been a few exceptions, but usually when someone has felt this way, they were wrong.
To be fair, if you’re having far less sex than you’d like, you feel that strongly both emotionally and physically. Some men and women find it difficult to believe their spouse loves them when sex is infrequent. These strong feelings can easily blind us to other issues that need to be addressed.
Most women, and some men, need a good emotional relationship before they can want or enjoy sex. If the couple spends little time together, or has very little non-sexual touch, that will cripple their sex life. If the couple is fighting, or ignoring each other, that will also hurt their sex life. None of these can be solved by working on the couple’s sex life because the problem is not about sex.
A lack of time is another big destroyer of sex lives. Most men under forty can manage sex regardless of how little sleep they’ve had. And most men under thirty will be able to manage sex even if they put in a long, physically demanding day. But most women can’t do this, and if they push to have sex anyway, they won’t enjoy it. What’s more, pushing like this too often will put them off sex all together.
If you want a good sex life, you must give it plenty of time and emotional space.
~ This is Paul, reminding you that Doing Sex Well looks different for every couple.
We have a LOT of deer.
I passed this herd of more than 100 in a ten acre field a mile from our house the other evening.
Image Credit: © Paul H Byerly created with ideogram.ai & Paul Byerly
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by PAUL BYERLY | Apr 3, 2025 | Holistic
A holistic view of life helps us understand that we have only so much time. Doing more of one thing means you must do less of something else. Making enough time for a solid marriage often requires cutting back on other things. Or maybe even cutting something out!
Some folks seem to think busyness is next to godliness, and many judge us on how much we do. Of course, this is not God’s way. God “suggested” His people take off a full day once a week! Yes, the Bible talks about hard work, but that’s not the same as never ending tasks. The Bible promise us rest, and calls rest a blessing.
Beyond rest, we need time to invest in those God has put in our life, and especially the spouse He has given us. If we don’t guard that time, it will be stolen from us, and our marriage will suffer.
One time suck for many couples is children who are involved in multiple extracurricular events. This is not just a marriage issue; I’m seeing more and more warnings from experts about kids being too busy, and Hurried Child Syndrome is getting a lot of press. A lack of free time for unstructured play and exploration can result in stress, anxiety, burnout, and worse.
The bottom line: Do you have enough free time for a good marriage? If not, what are you going to do about that.
~ This is Paul, warning you that busyness kills marriages.
So it’s mud and flood season here. This is where the pond out flows.
There is a channel for the water, but it can’t keep up in the spring. The box and upright pipe upper left are a solar-powered well that pumps water up the green pipe into the pond during the summer.
Image Credit: © Paul H Byerly created with ideogram.ai & Paul Byerly
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by PAUL BYERLY | Apr 2, 2025 | Holistic
A holistic approach to marriage means more than just considering all the aspects of the marriage relationship. Virtually ever part of your life impacts your marriage, for good or bad.
Family is a big one. The kids take a lot of your time and energy, especially when they’re young. Parents can be the same, especially as they age. Making commitments to family without considering how it will affect your marriage is a bad plan. If you and your wife are rarely together in the evening because you’re driving the kids to endless events, that hurts your marriage. Likewise, if you never have weekends together because one of you leaves from work on Friday to go be with their parents, getting home late Sunday. Then there is the emotional drain of what you give your family.
The same is true for other areas of our lives; our friends, our work, and what we do at church. Each of these has an impact on our marriage. Sometimes that effect is good. Sometimes it costs our marriage a bit, and may or may not be worth the cost. And sometimes, it’s harmful or destructive to our marriage.
If you want to make improvements, the first step is to clearly see how various things affect your marriage. It’s not as easy as not doing things that cost our marriage; things such as earning money and taking care of our children’s physical and emotional needs are necessary. But we still have choices even in those areas.
Building a solid marriage means doing more of what is good for your marriage, and doing what you can to limit the things that pull your marriage down.
~ This is Paul, reminding you that you must make your marriage a priority.
We no longer raise rabbits, but our daughter-in-law down the hill does. She lost a buck over the winter, and was needing new DNA, so she and Lori hit the animal swap. Yes, that’s a thing.
Vex is about 5 months old. He was raised in a colony, and handled by children. He’s friendly and eager to get to work!
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by PAUL BYERLY | Apr 1, 2025 | Holistic
If you ask a husband and wife to both list the ten most important aspects of their marriage, you will likely see many of the same things on the two lists. But they will probably have different orders of importance.
If your top two or three things are not being well met, you don’t feel positive about your marriage. This is true even if everything else on the list is being done very well. If your top few are the bottom of your spouse’s list, and/or vice versa, you are probably having difficulty. And you may both be frustrated because you’re working hard; on what matters to you. Or maybe you’re working hard on the number nine thing on your spouse’s list, and you wonder why they show no appreciation for your efforts.
If you don’t know what matters most to your spouse, you’re flying blind. If you knew a few years ago but haven’t checked in, odds are that outdated data means you’re not able to put your efforts where they’re most needed.
The solution to all of this? Make lists of what matters most to you in your marriage, from one to ten. Have your spouse do the same. Then swap lists. Don’t attack their list. Ask for clarification if necessary. Then figure out how to address the item on the top of your spouse’s list.
And yes, sex is likely to be top or very high for one of you, and lower for the other. We will get to this on Friday.
~ This is Paul, reminding you that Doing Marriage Well looks different for every couple.
This is queen Tilly on her throne. It sits where both Lori and I can pet her from our desks.
Tilly wants you to know she had just come in from a long day outside, and had not yet cleaned up
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by PAUL BYERLY | Mar 31, 2025 | Holistic
When Lori warned you that I was taking over the posting here, she said Doing Marriage Well is a very holistic way of addressing marriage. Holistic has gotten a bad rap because some who use the word go to weird places. But the concept is good. Put simply, holistic means the parts of something are connected, and must be considered together. I think marriage is very much that way.
I have learned, from both doctors and a good friend who does massage therapy, that sometimes where we feel pain is not where the problem is. This can be because of shared nerve pathways, such as with sciatica. It can also happen because a muscle that’s sore is compensating for weakness or injury in another part of the body, such as back pain because of a foot injury. Dealing with the part of the body that hurts can bring pain relief, but it won’t solve the problem, so the pain will continue.
The same thing happens in marriages. We feel “pain” somewhere other than the issue that is causing the pain. Perhaps the real issue is similar. Or maybe we hurt because we’re compensating for some other part of the marriage that needs work. Addressing the place we feel the pain is natural, but it won’t fix the problem, and the pain will continue.
Just as with physical pain, it may be good and right to do something about the pain, but we must also find and deal with the real source. Sometimes we have no idea what the real source is. A trained third party can be a big help in such a situation.
If your spouse suggests the real problem is something other than where you’re feeling pain, don’t dismiss them. They might be onto something.
~ This is Paul, reminding you that Doing Marriage Well looks different for every couple.
Survey Results: Thanks to the 233 of you who took the time to fill out our first survey.
Half of you are 55 and better. Average happiness with your marriage was 7.6 on a 0 to 10 scale, and happiness with sex life was a 5.8.
If you could help us reach younger couples, that would be awesome!
Something very exciting happened last Wednesday:
That’s the first time in five months our pond has been ice free. And it’s a couple of weeks early.
Image Credit: © Paul H Byerly created with ideogram.ai & Paul Byerly
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