SWM 125 – Rethinking “Duty Sex”

Sex Within Marriage Podcast : Exploring Married Sexuality from a Christian Perspective

I've had a lot of conversations with couples as well as husbands and wives individually lately about what often gets called "duty sex" or "pity sex." For those who don't know, duty/pity sex is when one spouse gives in to sex, not because they desire it themselves, but because their spouse does. They might have sex for many reasons, including feeling obligated, pressured, guilty, to keep the peace or to "get them off their back."The problem is that these negative reasons are often the only ones considered, and so any situation in which one spouse wants sex and the other agrees to it without having an internal desire of their own is seen as unfavourable.But there are some excellent reasons to have what's commonly considered "duty sex" or "pity sex," and often, the conflicts I see in marriages are not that it's because of those reasons I mentioned above but instead about something positive and loving.So, in this podcast episode, we're going to talk about reframing duty sex in those situations.