Podcast: Download

In the summer of 1997, Lori and I started posting on AOL’s Christianity Online Message Boards. We primarily posted in the married sex and romance forums. Because of our journey and a lot of reading, we knew a good deal about these things and knew where to find answers to things we didn’t know. Someone suggested we should start a website and a couple of folks seconded it. After a bit of discussion and prayer, we went for it.

In the fall of 1997 the predecessor of The Marriage Bed, called Godly Intimacy In Marriage, went live. So our twenty-five anniversary is about now. Originally we had intended to discuss all aspects of marriage, but Christians willing and able to discuss sex was a novelty back then, and we ended up doing mostly sexual content. In the summer of ’99, we started The Marriage Bed message boards when the Christianity Online Message Boards were overrun by a group of self-proclaimed pagans. Two years later the blogs were started, to allow us to cover issues beyond sexuality.

Every year we ask ourselves if God wants us to keep going. Not because we want to stop, but because we don’t want to put time and energy into something that is no longer God’s will. Beyond asking if we should keep going, we seek Him about what we should be doing. This has led to us moving into social media and more recently audio recording. At the start of 2022, Lori felt unsure of God’s direction for her. I had similar thoughts. We offer a lot of content here, but we sometimes wonder how much of it is actually put into practice. Sure, we get comments and emails that say something we’ve written has made a big difference in someone’s marriage, but our feeling was we weren’t meeting the challenge.

Lori took a sabbatical, a decision we made just before the start of her five months of medical issues. In the midst of that, she told me she had a sense she needed to do something new that involved more practical suggestions developed over a week’s time. More doing. I won’t steal her thunder, so I’ll leave it at that.

When Lori shared this with me, it brought my thinking into focus. I share the same concern she has, but specifically about sex. What we’ve done on The Marriage Bed and the blogs has helped a lot of folks overcome sexual problems. But have we helped folks with okay sex lives move to good? Have we helped couples with good sex lives find their way to great sex? I want to do something for couples without sex problems who want way better sex lives. Following a similar plan as Lori, I will provide one idea every two weeks. It might be a sex act of position, or it might be looking at your thoughts and feelings. I want to gently push at your limits and suggest ways to move beyond what has been your norm. I’ve done bits of this on the blogs. It’s been well received, and modesty aside, I think I’m rather good at it.

Neither Lori nor I want to tell you how to do your marriage or sex life. This is not about doing it right, it’s about finding what works well for you and your spouse. We want to offer ideas along with various ways to implement those ideas. Some will work for you, some won’t. But if you give each a fair chance, you will gradually improve your marriage or sex life.

As my plate is already full, doing the new site well will require me to cut back somewhere. I’m going to continue doing The XY Code three times a week and will cut The Generous Husband to five times a week. It’s still a modest increase in my workload, but I think it’s doable.

We have no solid timeline at this point. Lori has been actively working on building her new site and we’ve both been making notes on content and have started to put a few ideas down on cyberpaper. I expect Lori will go live before I do. My tentative start date is mid-February, but that’s just a guess.

We would really appreciate your prayers as we move in these new directions. And as always, we depend on your financial support to keep us going. I’m doing a soft launch on our year-end giving today, with more information on that to follow after Thanksgiving.

~ Paul – I’m XY, and I’d love to do this for another twenty-five years

Image by Dorothe from Pixabay
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