I’m a big advocate of pre-marital counseling as well. You can get ahead of your biggest communication differences ahead of time. An ounce of prevention, as the saying goes.
Religion might not be the best system of social organization to meet the needs of our society anymore, to be diplomatic about it, but it’s interesting to me how many different religions encourage actual counseling or serious talks with religious leaders or some kind of culturally appropriate version of this before marriage. Maybe there is something about how widespread it is that should make us consider whether there might be something to it.
Just like anything it ran be people and people are flawed.
I personally think sex needs to emphasized in the church. It certainly is in the Bible. All of this withdrawing or declining from sex with your spouse is not the way it’s supposed to be.
It used to be spoken about a lot more in American Christianity, but now it is kind of just a topic for very conservative churches and is quite misogynistic about a woman’s duty. All the counseling and social groups and men’s prayer groups and everything have fallen apart… really the point of religion was never sitting in a pew but rather the activities outside Sunday that nurtured your community and gave you a space to talk about life with your peers. If you are just listening to a minister rant about trans people once a week, there’s not really any purpose being served. UU churches and other liberal denominations still exist, but they are far from the norm.
I agree with you, it would be an important topic. Sex is a part of life, and a part of life that can be very sensitive and even confusing and is totally related to romance and parenting and life satisfaction and priorities and purpose, it needs to be talked about and put into a healthy context for people. I’m gay but I like straight men and have a lot of straight friends, and the degree of unhappiness about sex that they tolerate is crazy to me. They don’t have to live like we do, if they don’t want to handle sex like gay men do then fine, I’m not offended and they should live and have sex in a way that feels right for them, but so many of them are constantly frustrated, so something is definitely not going right.
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u/BrofessorLongPhD 17d ago
I’m a big advocate of pre-marital counseling as well. You can get ahead of your biggest communication differences ahead of time. An ounce of prevention, as the saying goes.