Nobody wants to talk about it, and yet almost everyone eventually has to. Sean Perron and Spencer Harmon, pastors at First Baptist Jacksonville and co-authors of the Letters to a Romantic series, opened our Members Only Q&A by naming that tension directly: sexual struggle is one of the most common issues that brings couples into marriage counseling, and it’s also one of the hardest for people to talk about. Over the course of an hour, our members brought them real, difficult cases. And Sean and Spencer answered with a mix of pastoral candor and theological depth that reframed the whole conversation.
When Husbands Weaponize “Submission”
The first question set the tone for everything that followed. A member described counseling several women in oppressive marriages, where angry, demanding husbands were using 1 Corinthians 7 to insist their wives owed them sex. Sean didn’t hesitate. He described telling one such husband directly: “What you’re doing is you are being a hypocrite. You are taking a verse and you are exalting that verse above everything and you’re using it for your selfish desires.” A man who wants to lead his marriage, Sean explained, has to actually lead. And demanding sex while ignoring every other biblical instruction to love, serve, and sacrifice isn’t leadership. It’s dictatorship dressed up in Scripture.
But Sean and Spencer were equally careful not to rush the wife toward compliance either. Sean was blunt: “I don’t believe in that kind of scenario” — quoting 1 Corinthians 7 at a fearful woman as a first move. Instead, his first questions are always about safety: Do you feel threatened? What’s the environment of your home like? Only once safety is established does the deeper work begin, uncovering what’s actually driving the tension in the marriage. Because, as Spencer put it, quoting Paul Tripp, sex functions like a barometer. It doesn’t create the weather in a marriage; it just reveals it. “The problem is not sex,” Sean said. “The problem is all these other issues that are taking place.”
A Story about a Woman Who Freezes During Sex
One story stuck with the room. A counselor described a woman who reports literally shaking — her body “freaking out” — when her husband tries to initiate intimacy, even though there is no history of sexual abuse or mistreatment in this woman’s life or in the marriage. Spencer’s answer went straight to the heart, not the symptom. He’s said that women in this situation are often carrying an unspoken, worldly belief: that they exist as a “release valve” for their husband’s needs, that sex is something owed rather than something shared, and that fear — of being a bad wife, of being abandoned — has quietly become the engine driving the whole marriage bed. That fear, he said, is often what triggers this sort of shutdown.
His counsel wasn’t to pressure women to push through it. It was to go upstream, to address the way the woman thinks about intimacy long before intimacy happens. “If we just start thinking about this when your husband says, ‘Hey honey, what if tonight?’ then we’re way too late,” Spencer said. He encourages women to let Scripture, not fear, become the soundtrack of their thoughts, praying through moments of intimacy in advance: thanking God for the gift of their husband’s body, asking that the act itself be worship, and resting in the truth that “the Lord is with you… he delights in this good gift that he’s given to you.”
A Whole Book of the Bible on Romance
Spencer made a point that reframed the entire conversation: God didn’t just permit sex; He wrote an entire book about it. The Song of Songs, Spencer noted, features a wife earnestly, joyfully pursuing intimacy with her husband: planning it, anticipating it, offering herself to him without shame. Sean built on that by walking through 1 Corinthians 6, showing how Paul directly ties the “one flesh” union of marriage to the believer’s union with Christ, meaning the marriage bed isn’t incidental to the gospel; it’s a living picture of it. “The most intimate pleasure that a husband and wife can experience… is to point us as a picture of the joy of the Lord,” Sean explained, “and what it means to be intimate with Him.”
This theology, both men argued, is exactly what’s missing from how most couples approach sex, including couples who never cross a physical line before marriage but still walk into it thinking mechanically, treating intimacy as a problem to be optimized rather than an act of worship and mutual self-giving. Spencer’s line landed hard: “The best sex happens when you are seeking to serve… you’re losing your life, but you’re actually finding it.” Even the marriage bed, he said, isn’t exempt from Jesus’s call to lose your life in order to find it.
Reframing Purity for Those Pursing Marriage
A counselor working with college women asked a sharper question: how do you help young women hold onto sexual purity without making sex sound shameful? Spencer’s answer was an image he uses often in premarital counseling: purity isn’t deprivation, it’s storage.
Like Adam and Eve surrounded by trees they could eat from and fixating on the one they couldn’t, engaged couples often obsess over what they can’t yet do instead of everything they can explore. “Explore all these other trees,” Spencer tells them, “because as you do, it will make this tree sweeter when you’re able to partake of it.”
He was candid about how far this is from the purity-culture horror stories many in the room grew up with — vague threats about being “damaged goods” that Scripture itself never actually makes. The Bible’s vision, he insisted, is far more positive than most churches have made it sound: “God’s forbidding sex outside of marriage because it’s so good in marriage. That’s his idea.”
Still Laughing After Fifty Years
The most touching moment of the whole hour came near the end, from a member rather than the hosts. When a member asked how to counsel an aging couple — still deeply in love, but facing real physical limitations — Sean pointed to the classic resource Intended for Pleasure and its chapter on intimacy after 60, 70, and 80.
But it was 87-year-old Howard Eyrich, a beloved and well-known biblical counseling leader who was participating on the call, who spoke from first-hand experience. He said he and his wife laugh more now than they did twenty years ago. They tease each other. They pray together at every meal. She reads to him from her devotions; he shares his. “We just continue to cooperate and have a lot of fun together,” he said simply. And then, with a smile in his voice, confirmed that yes, the sexual side of a marriage really can keep working the way Scripture describes, even decades in. “It doesn’t work the way it does when you’re younger,” he admitted, “but it does work to some extent.” It was wonderful to hear what fifty years of covenant faithfulness sounds like.
The Closing Charge: Talk About It Before It’s a Crisis
Asked what they’d want counselors to walk away with, Spencer and Sean both landed on the same conviction from different angles.
Spencer’s concern was pastoral courage: churches need to actually talk about sex — from the pulpit, in premarital counseling, in ordinary conversation — because silence doesn’t stop people from having questions; it just means they’ll find answers somewhere else. “Everybody loves sex,” he said. “The question is whether they think their church and the Scriptures have things to say.”
Sean’s concern was preventive: too many pastors treat premarital counseling as a box to check rather than genuine preparation for a marriage, leaving young couples to figure out intimacy through trial and painful error. “More is more,” he said. “Don’t be shy.”
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