31 Days to Great Sex by Sheila Gregoire

NOTE: The blog tour for my new book LET. IT. GO. continues over at my two of my friend’s places: Shannon Milholland and Rachel Wojnarowski. And click here for the dozens of others on the tour.

I’m addicted to Diet Pepsi. I don’t drink a lot of it: usually only a
can a day, and I make myself wait until 11:30 before popping it open.
But that urge hits me by 10:45.

I turn to Diet Pepsi because I’m not a coffee person. Nevertheless,
I’m a big fan of caffeine. And so I drink Diet Pepsi, knowing that
caffeine and aspartame are bad for me, because I figure the pick me up
outweighs the potential dangers.

I know what I need to do: I need to sleep more so I don’t need the
caffeine. That, however, requires effort. And so I turn to the quick
fix.

How often do we do that in our marriage?

When we need to lose weight we watch what we eat. We stop eating out
so much and start cooking healthy foods. We exercise. And we know it
will take time.

If we want a new job, we go back to school. We take extra training. We
work hard at our courses. We know that will take time, too.

But when our marriage is blah, what do we do? Often we take the Diet
Pepsi approach—we have this need for intimacy and connection and fun
that we should meet through our marriage. When that doesn’t happen, we
throw ourselves into something else, like hobbies, or homemaking, or
church activities, or our kids. We take the easy way out.
Rather than putting the huge amount of work in to fixing our
marriage, we turn to something else instead.

Perhaps it’s because it’s not always obvious what work we should do.
How do you get yourself to magically connect? How do you heal weeks
and months and years of holding things back, of feeling disconnected,
of feeling hurt?

It isn’t easy. But I know that God wants more for my body than Diet
Pepsi, and that means that I have to do the hard thing of actually
quitting. And I believe that God wants more for our marriages
than to be merely existing, merely roommates, merely people who walk
through life together, but who don’t necessarily feel that rapturous
intimacy He promised.

Think about this: if marriage is supposed to reflect the deep intimacy
that God feels with us, then shouldn’t marriage be a beautiful thing?
And that intimacy that God designed us for within marriage has, at its
core, sex, even if we don’t always talk about it very much. Sex itself
is also supposed to reflect that urge to know and be known. Yet too
often sex becomes an obligation, something that we do because we know
we have to, but not something that we do because it helps us feel
invigorated, alive, or even loved.

I think God wants more for us than that. He doesn’t want sex to be an
obligation; He wants it to be a celebration! And while sex won’t solve
all the problems in our marriages, it does lay a foundation of
connecting physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It’s how we
become one flesh.

And sex wasn’t just designed to make you feel physically rapturous; it
also makes us feel intimate with our husbands. It makes us feel close.
It makes us laugh. It even helps us to sleep better!

Perhaps it’s time, then, for us to do the hard work—that work that
really does pay off. And I have a really fun way for you to do it in
my new ebook The 31 Days to Great Sex. You work through it with
your husband, but don’t worry; it’s not like everyday is about a new
trick to do in bed. Not at all! Instead, it’s a journey of
communication you take together to help you, step by step, feel more
intimate both inside the bedroom and outside of it.

So if you’re just too exhausted for sex; if you’re sick of him
pestering you; if you can’t figure out what all the fuss is about;
take a deep breath and tell yourself: I may not understand how great
sex is right now, but I know that God meant for it to be great. And
I’m not going to stop until I figure out how that’s actually possible!
Because it is, ladies. Don’t lose out on it.

Billions of people have had sex. I’m not sure how many have actually
made love. I hope through this 31 Days to show people how amazing–physically,
emotionally, and spiritually–making love can be.

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To be entered to win a copy of Sheila’s book, leave a simple comment here telling us one thing you love about your husband. I love my husband’s selfless attitude and gorgeous green eyes!

Sheila
Wray Gregoire is a national speaker, parenting columnist, and the
author of seven books, including The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex. Her passion is
to see marriages thrive, so that our churches and communities can
become stronger Christian witnesses. You can find Sheila, and her new
ebook The 31 Days to Great Sex, at her To Love, Honor
and Vacuum blog.