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John and I stopped at a fast-food restaurant for a quick meal on the way to his farm. My friend had one of the "cleanest" sexual pasts of any man I've ever met; on the day he married, the only woman other than his bride he'd ever kissed was his mom.

The young man taking our order noticed that both of us had on wedding rings.

"You both have wives?" he asked.

"Yes," we replied.

"Tell me, is it true what they say—that your sex life gets better after you're married?"

John choked a bit on this one. "Mine sure did!" he said, without explaining that he'd never even had a sex life apart from marriage.

"It's tough being single," the young man shot back. "I'll tell you this much: I know I'm not getting any tonight."

I know I'm not getting any tonight.

This may be the quintessential statement of our culture on sexuality: Am I "getting any," or not?

Imagine how offensive this must be to our Creator God, who established sexuality as a gift. When a couple conducts their lives according to God's good plan, sex becomes an exclusive gift that the couple will share with no other. God has given married men the opportunity and the ability to make their wives feel things no other man can ever make them feel; wives can touch their husbands in places and in ways that no other person will ever touch.

As a Christian spouse, you are the only person, biblically speaking, your spouse can go to in order to share this pleasurable yet also very holy experience. In other words, you hold a gift that your spouse can't receive from anyone else.

Spiritual sickness seeps into our marriages when we stop viewing sex as a gift we can give to our spouse, and start seeing it as a demand that must be met. By God's design, sex gives us a capacity to give to someone in a startlingly unique and human way. And yet sex remade in our own image is often used to take, to demand, to coerce, to shame, or to harm.

Most sexual problems in marriage aren't due to a lack of knowledge or mechanical skill; on the contrary, I think most of the problems between the covers are due to sinful selfishness. In this sense, virtue is the guardian of fulfilling sexual intimacy.

Since, biblically speaking, the only sex life my wife can enjoy is the sex life I choose to give her, anything I deny her, by definition, becomes an absolute denial, because she has no other outlet.

You know what this reality produces?

Power.

The stereotype is that husbands usually want sex more often than do their wives. There are valid physiological reasons for this. But I've talked to plenty of couples where it's actually the other way around, and the wife feels cheated by her husband's diminished desire. Whether it's the wife or husband who feels denied, one thing is almost always true: Whoever wants sex the least tends to have the most power in bed, because he or she possesses the absolute power of denial. And the old adage, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" is particularly true in the bedroom.

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