Summary: A funny (occasionally crass), but real self-help book for married men.
Last week Orgasms are for Women and Marriage is for Men was offered free for kindle. Because I try to post virtually all of the free Christian kindle book on Bookwi.se, I ran across it. I do not always look into a book, but those that seem a bit sketchy or maybe categorized wrong I try to look at.
I read the intro before posting it and then read the rest of the book over the weekend. It is a quick book (around 50 pages) and most people will read it in about an hour.
I think that it is a mostly helpful book. It is written under a pseudonym, but the author claims to be a former pastor and marriage counselor. He said that in his experience, 99% of the motivation for marriage and premarital counseling was to get the counselor to change their spouse’s behavior (this seems about right to me). This book is oriented around the idea that you cannot control the other person, you can only control yourself. So get your stuff together and forget about theirs.
Here are the main points. Most men strive after sex and most women strive after relationship health. The author suggests that men actually need the relationship (even though they think they want the sex) and women need the sex (even though they think they are more interested in the relationship).
The book starts by telling men to make sure that the focus of their sexual activity is their wife’s orgasm, not their own orgasm. There is some truth to this, but the focus should be on the wife and her pleasure, not the orgasm. Focus on the orgasm can replace the person with a goal, and that is particularly a problem that men seem to have.
Once men realize that they really get more out of life when they seek after the relationship and not the orgasm (and that sexually they are happier when their wife is sexually happier), then men need to strive after becoming experts in relationships (read the books, watch the shows, listen to the podcasts, go to the seminars.) I think this is a very good point and many men’s competitive nature would actually be well served by making them competitive about being a relationship expert.
The next point is to strengthen their marriages by focusing on being in agreement with your spouse. His point about this is that after marriage interests diverge and couple start spending more time apart. So don’t watch different tv shows. Go and watch her show, and don’t complain about it. Agreement is more than about watching the same show, but generally his point is that we should be together.
Then he says men need to take the lead in the marriage. Taking the lead in this context means doing all the hard stuff that is important but no one wants to do. It does not mean delegating. If you are delegating in marriage, you are doing it wrong and you are not leading.
This book is a bit crude at times. But it is written to men (not sure many women would get much out of it and may be offended occasionally.) There are a few parts of this book that I wish were written differently. It has a faintly sexist tone. I think that is because it is trying to go after men and be funny. But there are places where I think it is over the top. There are also some serious places that I am uncomfortable with. He suggests that women are ‘filled’ with their husbands during sex in a very similar way that men are ‘filled’ relationally by God. I think I get his point. But I wish he made it differently.
My pastor preached a sermon last week primarily oriented toward men that had some overlapping themes that were not nearly as sex focused, but also not as concerning. You might want to check that out instead. (Click here, choose message 2.)
Orgasms Are for Women Purchase Links: Kindle Edition The book has been withdrawn from the Kindle Store