Marriage — In the Bedroom

The Sexually Confident Wife: Connecting with Your Husband Mind, Body, Heart, Spirit by Shannon Ethridge

Shannon Ethridge is known for her books written to exhort and encourage Christian women in many issues. The Sexually Confident Wife is not published by a Christian publisher (probably because they shied away from the frank nature of her discussions), and while she does use Biblical teaching to uphold such principles as good sex = married monogamous sex and a few other things, in general this book will be helpful to any woman who acknowledges that sex as a necessary and healthy part of marriage.

Ethridge not only wants women to understand and embrace those principles, but wants them to enjoy it.

She addresses issues that can interfere with this very important part of the marriage relationship, such as past sexual abuse, body image and more.

I recommend this book to women who are open to frank opinions and advice, or who perhaps need a little nudge in making this area of marriage a priority.

Find out more at the book’s website.

Just Do It: How One Couple Turned Off the TV and Turned On Their Sex Lives for 101 Days by Douglas Brown

Doug Brown shared some information with his wife Annie about a sad club that a man from Denmark told him about in which married men who had been abstinent (not necessarily by choice) would commiserate in their sadness. This made Annie wonder what would happen if they did the opposite. So, after a fair bit of planning, they undertook the quest of having sex 101 nights of sex in a row.

I thought Just Do It might be a bit racy for me if it contained too much information about an area of marriage that — while important — is still private. There is some frank talk about some of their attempts to spice things up that some might find offensive, but the play-by-play is spared, and in that respect this is much tamer than a Danielle Steele novel.

I loved the examination of the effect this effort had on his marriage, and the tender descriptions that he shares about his love for his wife, as well as the honest (yet not too personal) look at the obstacles to intimacy, including young children, stress, jobs, sickness and the like.

It’s a bit unconventional, but I liked it. This is another example of a fun “project memoir” that I mentioned previously.

Jennifer Donovan is married but would want to write neither a guide nor a memoir about it, though she likes reading about others’ honest experiences. She also blogs at Snapshot.