Kiss Me Like You Mean It (2 page)

When you eat at a restaurant, he rips off the end of the paper covering his straw and blows the paper tube into the air. The fancier the restaurant, the better he likes it. You never know where the straw paper will go (into someone’s drink, someone’s hair, down someone’s shirt), and that’s part of the fun. He likes to read in the bathroom. He calls it “the reading room” or “the library” and can spend up to twenty minutes in there. It’s the only time he can multitask. Of course, a welltimed belch or passing of gas is always good for a laugh.

Husband, your wife is increasingly disgusted with your behavior. You believe you’re perfectly normal and that her standards are too high. You didn’t realize you married royalty. She prides herself on being a refined and elegant person with excellent tastes, who values socially appropriate behavior. She used to find your antics funny and endearing. Now, she looks down her nose at you. It’s no fun being married to Miss Manners.

Before you married her, and for the first few years of your marriage, the two of you seemed to enjoy the same television shows and movies. You’d watch together, and it was a lot of fun. Now, she will watch only serious dramas and romantic comedies. She loves a lot of talking, a lot of crying, a main character taking forever to die, and long, drawn-out romances.

You watched
A Walk to Remember
with her. It’s the tragic story of a teenage girl who is slowly dying of leukemia. She and her boyfriend get closer and closer as she fades away. Talk about depressing. But the longest death scene ever filmed is the horribly burned man in
The English Patient
. This extremely disfigured guy talks about his ill-fated romance with some chick for three solid hours! Every man who is forced to watch this nightmare of a movie thinks the same thing: “I can’t take this much longer. I’m going to die before he does. Would someone please suffocate him with a pillow and put him—and me—out of our misery?”

But the ultimate chick movie is
Pride and Prejudice
, Jane Austen’s classic story of the Victorian romance of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, one of five sisters seeking suitable husbands. I’m not talking about the two-hour version. Oh, no. I refer to the gold standard of the
Pride and Prejudice
films: the six-hour marathon miniseries produced by the BBC and the A&E Network.

This six-hour drama documents—in excruciating detail— the longest romance in the history of the world. For the unfortunate man viewing this sort of, kind of, maybe-but-notquite, it’ll-take-a-little-longer romance, the experience rivals childbirth in terms of pain and suffering. Finally, at the end of six of the longest hours of your life, Mr. Darcy and Miss Bennet get together. There’s a lot of sitting around and talking, a tremendous amount of whimpering and sobbing, and not one person dies!

Why couldn’t Mr. Darcy, in the first half hour of the movie, simply walk up to Elizabeth and say, “Hey, I like you. Do you want to go out on a date? And, by the way, I’m filthy rich.” I’ll tell you why. Because that would defeat the purpose of a chick flick, which is to entertain women and torture men.

At the end of every chick flick you endure, your wife will be crying. You’ll be crying too, but for different reasons. You’re upset because you’ve wasted precious hours of your life watching this piece of sappy drivel, and now you’ll have to listen to her drone on and on about the movie and what it means about her, about every woman she’s ever known, and about your relationship.

You really thought your man liked your type of entertainment. Why, he watched dramas and romantic comedies with you and seemed to enjoy them! You were sure he was different from all the other guys. But that was before marriage. Before the alien showed up. Later in the marriage, it dawned on you that he had been humoring you so you’d marry him.

You can handle the sports he watches. That’s not too bad. But how is it possible that one of his favorite actors is Jim Carrey? He’ll watch both
Ace Ventura
movies and
The Mask
over and over! His all-time favorite comedy is
Dumb and
Dumber
. He laughs until he’s sick at the same old nasty, offensive parts. You’re forced to face the fact that you’re married to a man with an emotional age of twelve.

If it isn’t gross-out, insipid comedies, it’s brutally violent action movies. When the body count doesn’t top fifty, he’s seriously disappointed. Death and gore and destruction and absolutely no plot are what he looks for in an action-adventure movie. And Mr. Cro-Magnon Man wants you to watch this kind of movie with him! You’re beginning to think that you should have had him take an I.Q. test before marrying him.

You were both absolutely certain that sex would not be a problem in your marriage. You were very attracted to each other and your physical relationship during courtship was exciting, beautiful, and natural. But as with every other area of your relationship, after the wedding tremendous differences surfaced in your lovemaking.

The woman remembers
everything
. . . except the last time she had sex with her husband. The man remembers
nothing
. . . except the last time he had sex with his wife. One spouse— usually the husband, but not always—desires sex a lot more than the other spouse.

The woman needs to be prepared for sex with communication, teamwork with the chores and kids, and romance. The man needs only an erection to be prepared for sex. The problem is, he thinks his erection is all the woman needs to be ready too.

The woman likes to be approached for sex in a subtle, gentle, and loving way. The man’s idea of a subtle, gentle, and loving way is to pinch her bottom and say, “Let’s do it.”

The woman prefers—needs—a slow, careful, and gradual progression in foreplay and intercourse. The man prefers speed. He’s proud that he can complete foreplay and intercourse in five minutes or fewer. He may get his name in the Guinness Book of World Records, but it will become extremely unsatisfying and frustrating for his wife.

Goodbye, Passion

The bad news is, I’ve only touched on a few of the differences that disrupt your relationship after marriage. I could easily fill a six-volume set with the avalanche of differences that rush into your once passionate marriage. Your spouse doesn’t get replaced by an alien, but it surely seems that way.

All these differences crush your passion. You don’t know how to make the adjustments and so you do your best to find ways to survive and cope. Add children, the stress of finances and careers, and the speed and chaos of everyday life, and you have zero chance to keep the flame of passion burning.

Oh, you’re still married and that’s good. You still love each other and that’s good. But you’re not having much fun, are you? You’re not madly in love, are you? There’s a world of difference between being in love and being
passionately in
love
.

Well, join the “No More Passion Club.” It’s a big one. A very big one. Believe me, you’re not alone. The loss of passion in marriage is universal. Sooner or later, it happens to every married couple. It might be two years, seven years, ten years, or fourteen years after the wedding. But the loss of passion will get you.

It got my wife Sandy and me. We had been married for about ten years. In those ten years we had three baby girls. Our little darlings were taking a major bite out of our passion. Emily, Leeann, and Nancy were consuming our lives. They spent all their time—and all our time—screaming, crying, whining, belching, spitting up, pooping, making massive messes in every room in the house, demanding attention, creating huge loads of laundry, and eating all the food in sight.

Life was unbelievably busy. Life was stressful. Life was numbingly monotonous. Life was all about the kids, my career, friends, making enough money to pay the bills and put food on the table, and church. Life was all about everything and everybody but Sandy and me.

Sound familiar? I’ll bet it does. The loss of passion happens so gradually you’re not even aware of it. Until one day you suddenly see with sickening clarity that it’s gone. Typically, one spouse realizes the passion is gone before the other.

It dawned on me one day that something important, something precious, was missing from our love relationship. That something was passion. I went to Sandy and told her. She agreed.

Over the next few months, as Sandy and I discussed the state of our marriage, we decided passion was something we couldn’t live without. We didn’t want to be just parents. Roommates. Good friends. That’s not why we got married! We got married because we were passionately in love with each other. Period. And we were determined to get that passionate feeling back and keep it.

How about Your Passion?

Be honest. Your infatuation has fizzled out. Your many differences are painfully apparent. Annoying habits have set in. One child (or more) is in your home. And that child is not leaving home for a long time. Or, maybe it’s just the two of you in your home, and you’ve realized there is no spark left in your marriage. The routines of life have taken over. Your passion is dead. Or, at least, it’s in bad shape. Your relationship is blah. Ho-hum. Boring.

You wonder: “Can we ever get our passion back? Can we ever again be crazy in love?” God has an answer for you. It is a big yes! You can’t help losing your passion. That happens to every married couple. What you can do is what Sandy and I did. You can get it back.

There is a book, from God himself, the most beautiful and powerful love story ever told. It was given to you to show you how to get the passion back into your relationship and how to keep it there until life ends.

The book is the Song of Solomon. It is a magnificent, sublime poem describing the godly, passionate love between Solomon and his wife. I have chosen to use the name “Shulamith” for Solomon’s wife. For reasons known only to Solomon (and God, of course), he does not give her a specific, formal name. But I believe, as do several other commentators on the Song, that Solomon likely used “Shulamith” as a personal pet name for his beloved. She was a real person of great physical and emotional beauty, and I think she deserves a beautiful and personal name: Shulamith.

Of the over one thousand such songs Solomon wrote, God has saved this special book for us. God wants every couple to be as crazy in love as Solomon and Shulamith. And, God wants you to stay that way throughout your marriage. Loving with passion is God’s design for marriage. To live without passion is not healthy—in fact, it’s downright destructive.

In the Song of Solomon, God provides a “Crazy in Love How-To Manual.” The Song is a detailed explanation of how a husband and a wife can experience unending passion, and have a blast doing it! This amazing book of the Bible teaches you how to break through your many differences and relationship obstacles to a powerful, permanent passion.

In chapter two, I cover the myths about passion and about the Song of Solomon. A lot of experts are dead wrong about marital passion. A lot of other experts are wrong about the teaching of the Song. Someone has to set the record straight, and I’m that guy.

In chapters three through twenty, I teach the
passion principles
contained in the Song of Solomon. There are two chapters for each principle: one chapter describes the mistakes couples make, followed by a second chapter that explains— with teaching from the Song—how couples can master that passion principle. I devote three chapters to resolving conflict and preparing for physical intimacy. Finally, in chapter twenty-one, I examine Song of Solomon 8:6–7, the beautiful definition of Solomon and Shulamith’s love.

Ready to get your passion back? Let’s go.

2

Can Passion Really Last, and What Does Solomon Know about It Anyway?

From the time Solomon wrote his beautiful song of love some 3,000 years ago, there have been myths about the book itself and about passion in marriage. These myths—both secular and Judeo-Christian—have confused lovers for centuries and done great damage to many couples. It’s time to explode these myths and replace them with God’s truth about marital passion.

Myth #1: Passion Can’t Last in a Marriage, So Find a
New Spouse (Secular, Popular Culture)

Look, passion never lasts in a marriage. Never. It’s just the nature of the beast. Your male-female differences catch up to you. Life becomes routine. You begin to bore each other. The only excitement comes from your ever-increasing conflicts. If you have kids, they drive the last few nails into the coffin of your passion. Some couples keep their passion longer than others, but no couple ever keeps it forever. If you get seven, ten, fifteen, or even twenty years of passion with your spouse, consider yourself very lucky. When passion leaves, it’s gone. It isn’t ever coming back with your current spouse.

When you realize your passion is gone, face that sad truth head-on, and don’t make any attempts to get it back. Cut your losses and move on. Get divorced quickly, and find a new spouse. Multiple partners are just a reality of the twentyfirst century. You’re going to live only about eighty years, so don’t waste time in a dead marriage. Living without passion is awful, and you deserve better. That fresh burst of passion with your new sweetheart is going to feel marvelous. So, go for it!