#106 - How to Stay Out of Sexual Debt
The early stages of marriage are one of the most difficult phases because it is the period of adjustment for both of you. You must learn to understand your partner's physical, emotional and sexual rhythms, attitudes, and decisions because marriage is all about compromise. Communicating about sex is also a crucial part because if you become self-centered and allow your emotions to handle certain situations, you may find yourself in sexual debt.
Sexual debt creates an impact on your marriage and every aspect of your life. Sexually indebted individuals believe that there’s nothing wrong within themselves and that their spouse is compelled to gratify their selfish sexual desires. Instead of being sexually indebted, invest your sexuality in a selfless way that yields a feeling of gratitude and wholeness as a “return on your investment”.
There is nothing wrong with being indebted as long as you're indebted in a healthy way where you genuinely appreciate your marriage and the love you have together, which gives you the motivation to be the best person you can be for your spouse.
In Episode 106, Andrew and Benjy discuss all of this, as well as the impact of porn addiction on someone’s life.
Listen to learn more!
What is selfish sex?
How can couples overcome the most difficult conflict in marriage
The significance of communication in a relationship
The difference between being sexually indebted and being indebted in a healthy way
What is sexual debt?
How porn addiction can affect your life
Episode Transcript:
Andrew Love
Welcome back to Love, Life and Legacy, a podcast dedicated to helping you navigate these hypersexualized times of ours. And in today's episode, Benjy and I get into the topic of sexual debt. This is an extremely important topic, whether you're single and planning to one day get married, whether you've just newly been married, or whether you've been at it for a while, this is so important because in our work we've noticed a pattern. And that is when a relationship gets started off on the wrong foot, and you create a shaky foundation, it makes for trouble down the line. So to invest well, in the beginning, is so important for the later stages of the marriage. But if you find yourself in a situation where you are at odds with your spouse, there is a way to reverse engineer and to recreate a relationship that makes sense, which is fulfilling. So just know this, please, let's get into it. It's a great and short podcast. Welcome to the future, everybody. God bless your souls.
Andrew Love
Welcome back, everybody. Andrew here along with...
Benjy Uyama
Hi, Benjy here. Good to have you guys.
Andrew Love
Today, we're going to talk about something interesting. It's a conversation about being in debt. There are many forms of debt that we can find ourselves in. But one that I've never heard talked about is to be in sexual debt. And I believe there's probably a bunch of different angles that we can take. But why I think this is important is because you and I, Benjy, end up in a lot of conversations with people who are in struggling marriages. And I've met people that haven't had sex in their marriage in 10 years or 20 years. One couple that we met has been married for 40 years. They got blessed for 40 years and they never consummated their marriage. It's a big disaster. But in having enough of these conversations, one thing that was really haunting was this idea that I saw this pattern in many marriages, the husband was very selfish with his sexuality early on in the marriage. He didn't really ask his wife. He just like guilt-tripping, hey, we're married now so I need sex. And they did this enough times to where it scarred the woman. And the woman started to associate sex with their husbands with something miserable or annoying, or like not good emotions. And they started putting it off, putting it off, putting it off until they just stopped wanting to be touched by their spouse because it didn't make them feel good. When we met these guys, a lot of the guys blame the wives, and like, my wife never wants to have sex with me. But they didn't understand that they were really indebted. They created this massive amount of debt that they had to work through. It wasn't insurmountable, but it was a predicament. Have you heard similar stories?
Benjy Uyama
Yes. Story of my life, bro. I'm serious.
Andrew Love
Really?
Benjy Uyama
Yes.
Andrew Love
Perfect. Not perfect in great, perfect as in relevant.
Benjy Uyama
You explain my life in my life into a teen just now.
Andrew Love
So then, let's talk about this. Because we want everybody who's listening to avoid that. I just got off the call. I just gave a talk at a workshop in Georgia. And I brought this topic up as a cautionary tale be like, you guys don't understand that you need to get in tune with somebody's mind and their heart in the spirit before your bodies connect. Otherwise, your sex, heartless sex, creates a divide. Rather than sex being something that brings a couple together. It actually separates them more and more. So how does that look? Like in your marriage, I guess we have some live-callers all the way from Benjy's head. How does that play out? What does it look like? At the beginning, when you're having selfish sex, why did you...
Benjy Uyama
It's really hard because you don't know you're doing it. Really. You don't know the damage, you don't know the impact that we're having when we're selfish. It's not apparent unless we're aware unless we have some self-awareness and we've trained ourselves to see that. But especially in the beginning, doing the work that I do, helping couples especially with struggling marriages. We've been doing this for a while. It was especially difficult in the dark for me because I had so much guilt and shame around this area, because I was supposed to be the guy who was helping. And you know, I was doing my best genuinely trying to help people. But I honestly didn't know that we were struggling so much. And I was experiencing this immense self-centeredness in my sexual relationship with my wife for years. And like you explained, I honestly got a thought that she was wrong and I was right, and she was selfish and I was selfless. And I was doing everything right, and I didn't understand how she could do this to me. That was my constant argument point. It's like I need this.
Andrew Love
I just want to unpack that because I'm sure there's a lot of guys that have felt that or women. I guess this could go either way. But I would say it's probably more men than women. When you thought that you were being selfless and she was being selfish, what was the logic in your mind? What story were you saying?
Benjy Uyama
Well, I grew up my whole life basically thinking that when you're married, when you're blessed, when you're in a relationship, everything will just happen naturally. It's what you do when you're married, is you have sex. And I didn't consider that people are different. My wife is a different person. She's not me. She doesn't want to have sex whenever I want to have sex. She doesn't even want to have sex at the same time of day that I want to have sex. And she definitely doesn't have sex, the amount of duration that I can. It's like everything is the polar opposite. So if I operate in the realm of thinking about myself, it's just not going to work out because I'm a night owl and she's a morning person. And I'm an instant pot and she's a slow cooker. It doesn't work like that. You can call it whatever you want. I think it's God's mysterious trick on us or God's perfect design. But yes, my logic was that we're in a committed relationship and everyone around us seems to be having a beautiful relationship. Everyone around us, you know, in the movies and Instagram, on Facebook, all my friends seem to be having incredible sexual relationships. Why is it that you, my wife, are so resistant to this? And she was really appalled by that. And she has really pushed away from that mentality. I didn't even realize it. I didn't realize that I was being selfish until many years later. Basically, the first eight years of our blessing, of our marriage, the first eight years was us struggling at each other's throats because of this point. Almost daily arguments and fighting. And we had kids too, so it was really rough.
And then at one point, something really hit like we had an argument or something, or reached out to someone. That's what I do, I reach out to you, Andrew. I reached out to Uncle Dave. I talked to some people. I got over the shame, the shadow of it, and I just felt like, okay, I don't like living like this anymore. I want to let someone know, someone that might relate. And then for some reason, when I did that, it's like I could see myself from a third party. I could see myself from God's perspective, essentially. Because it was not just inside of my head anymore, but it was more like, holy crap, I can't believe I've been doing this. I've been selfish, self-centered. And then for some reason, I was able to empathize. I had some compassion for my wife. It wasn't just, she was being an old hag and a sexless person, it was she was going through stuff like actual hormonal changes, chemical imbalances. And I was able to have some compassion and make a change. We just decided, like, I got to move. We just decided to move down here to North Carolina, change the environment, give my wife some more space to grieve, and spend more time together. And my parents live down here, so they can help with the kids. And so we could spend a lot more quality time together with my wife. And that was what we needed to do . That started, essentially, for me to decide and realize that I was being selfish. Realizing that this was an unhealthy thing, reaching out for help and having a little bit of compassion as opposed to blaming. Because as soon as we became on the same page about this, specifically, she was having postpartum depression and hormonal imbalances and PMS and all that kind of stuff. Complicated. I don't want to go into it. But as soon as we decide to be a team about it, and this is how people can overcome the most insurmountable and egregious situations, insurmountable situations in life, most difficult conflicts is because they become a team instead of pointing fingers at each other. And they will look at the problem together. This goes for pornography. If you're dealing with porn, this goes for divorce, this goes for affairs. How do people get over that? They become a team. They realize that we can work on this together. So that's what we had to do and work on it together.
Andrew Love
So while you were in debt, it's like the act of sex became stressful. It seems like for both of you, because you are trying to almost seem like guilt for falling into your rhythm. And she felt judged, most likely, because you're trying to squeeze her into being somebody that she's not. And so on the topic of sex, I'm sure a lot of married people listening to this can relate that sex can become a stressful issue just like money. Every time it's brought up, it brings out cortisol rather than oxytocin. Wrong chemical. So when you're in debt like that, are you saying that paying off that debt is communication? Would you equate that, that to get back into a natural rhythm it's only by way of communicating? You communicated with people, people in your circle, to help understand yourself. But you also process that information and had deeper conversations with your wife.
Benjy Uyama
Yes, that's one way to put it is how to change the trajectory of things. One person that I was listening to gave a sermon, and He was talking about repentance. And he said, simply put repentance is your decision to go a different direction. Period. There's no prerequisite of shedding a certain amount of tears or blood to repent. It's just you deciding, I'm going to go a different direction. And for me, I just need to tell somebody. That was it. Honestly, that was it. I need to get over the ego and the shame associated with our issue, and just reach out for help.
Andrew Love
Well, that's really important. Something that I think we've all experienced at one point in our life but always forget is, you can liquidate like a decade of pain in an instant. You can reconcile with yourself or with another person in a moment if you are up for it. And you can move on and start to create healthier motions and healthier associations with that person, but as to be a priority and has to be a decision. And that's like this weird torturing habit that we have that like in your situation, it took you eight years of getting bad results again and again and again. Trying the same thing again and again. Regardless of how much you're both suffering in order to try a different angle which is, again, if you're listening to this, if you're feeling stuck in your relationship, try a different angle. Try a different approach. Forcing your will on somebody never works. Now, for any great length of time, what would be the opposite of debt than to be in a surplus? What does that look like? You are in debt, you're in a better place now. Would you say that you've created a surplus? Or are you just scraping by your month-to-month? Do you use this analogy?
Benjy Uyama
Yes. I am so grateful. Every time I get to be intimate with my wife, I'm just blown away. I cannot believe that I get to do this. That's how I feel all the time. I still feel in debt all the time constantly, not just to my wife but to God, to life, just to be able to have a functioning body. That's it. There's not like some magical formula or X, Y and Z that once we have it, we'll be happy. We're alive, you're breathing. There's so much to be grateful for. That's all I can say. You can ask me, you can message me or email me if you want to know how great our sex life is. I don't like to go into details here.
Andrew Love
But I'm sure you don't mind, but I'm sure she might. Well, no, because that's really interesting. Because the conversation started with, what does it look like to be in that? But to have a surplus is to feel indebted. Whereas when you're truly in debt, you feel that the other person is indebted to you. That arrogance, that ego is when you feel somebody is indebted to you, that means you're on the wrong course. But when you feel indebted in a healthy way, because I'm sure there's a way that you turn that in screw that. But when you're indebted in terms of just feeling genuinely grateful for the fact that you're in a relationship, that you have a wife, that you're both creating this love together. When you're in that state, it's almost like you feel indebted, and that means that you have a surplus. That's weird and backwards, but it makes sense. Because yes, I remember, I've been indebted as well for a period of time. And the feeling is very clear. It's closed hearted, and it's judgmental, and it's accusatory that you are like this, and you should be like something else. And you project this really harsh judgmental energy, and the other person cannot do anything with that positive. It only wreaks havoc. The best case scenario is they conform to your will, but that means that they're turning into somebody that they're not. And they can't live like that. The worst case is they turn right back on you and then you're both judging and accusing each other. So it doesn't work either way. So that debt is really important, people. If you're listening out there, and you feel like you've been investing in the wrong type of sex because this also influences you. If you're a single person, to go to porn for your sexual needs, you're in debt to porn. And the price you pay is that crappy feeling afterwards, is that feeling of powerlessness, is that feeling of being an indentured servant to this thing, to not being able to have the willpower to overcome it, and to find more natural uses of that sexual energy. So you're in debt when you use your sexuality out of your control and out of line with your ideal. But when you are in line with your ideas and you use that sexual energy well and you invest it well, the return on that investment is a feeling of gratitude, is that feeling of wholeness. That's what I'm getting from this conversation. Would you agree?
Benjy Uyama
Yes. That's key. That's awesome. I think a lot of people are stuck right now at the place that I was, in terms of their marital conflicts or their relationship with porn or with their kids or something in their life, is that they're at that tipping point where they feel like they just don't know where to go. And I was there. And I think the thing I realized now that I didn't realize at the moment is that what changed me is I understood the impact of my decisions. I understood the negative impacts. And I didn't understand the impact until many years, until it was facing me in the face. And it was basically like, you either change or your marriage is over. That's when you realize the impact. This is often the case with porn. Many times people bring porn way too far into their future, into their career, into their work environment, into their marriage, into their blessing until they're faced with a situation where they're forced to look at the impact of how it's affecting their life. But we don't realize that porn especially is affecting your life right now in more ways than you could possibly imagine. You just are unable to see it. And you're unwilling actually to look at that in the face and deal with it. But once you get that, you will change. I promise, you'll change instantly. If you can write down every way that your actions especially around pornography, especially around being selfish or being indebted in your relationship, you understand the impact, you will change and then you'll get serious. This is the difference between someone who's just goofing around and practicing NoFap, as they say, because they want to get all this superhuman strength and attract all these women, and they keep failing at it. And have this little counter on their computer or phone. There's a difference between that and someone that's truly recovered. The people who have truly recovered are the ones that understand the impacts of porn in their lives, the impact of their decisions, and are really recovering and healing from the ground up.
Andrew Love
Love it. We're going to have a short one today. So that's about it. But if you have more questions about this, as always, please let us know. We're happy to continue these conversations. But the main point is, you never want to be in debt to anybody or anything. But when it's emotional and spiritual, the consequences are pretty widespread. And they impact every area of your life. As you can tell, with the Benjy's story, his relationship with sex and his wife in the early stages of their marriage impacted every other aspect of their marriage, and also how he felt about himself. I'm sure, how he showed up at work and everything. So you can see that you want to take care of this stuff. You want to invest not get in debt, not do a bunch of stupid stuff, be selfish, but instead invest and that the dividends are endless as well. So we hope this was helpful, as always. And please, reach out to us with any questions.
Benjy Uyama
All right, thanks, everyone.
Andrew Love
Hey, Andrew Love here, and I wanted to plant a seed in your mind before you go. You see, a lot of people when they start to consume our content, they listen to our podcast, they watch our videos, they read our blogs, they start to believe in the idea of freedom as a possibility for them and their lives, and it is. You can break free from porn, you can build amazing eternal relationships, but it requires you to make the jump. It requires you to commit to transformation. And that only happens when you invite other people into your journey. You see, a lot of people think that because I got into porn by myself, I can get out of it by myself, and that's the wrong thinking. It's not about simply removing a negative force from your life. It's about creating fulfillment and connection and intimacy with other people. So we really recommend, first and foremost, that you build a team of accountability partners, facilitators, group members, and we can do that. We have all that waiting for you. But you need to first reach out to us. If you already have people in your life that you think can help you, we have online courses that will teach you both how to create a dynamic that works in terms of accountability. But if you don't have an accountability partner, we already have volunteers who are waiting for somebody to help. We have groups that are waiting for somebody like you. But your role and your job are to merely reach out to us, and we can work together with you to create a powerhouse team so that you can build the life of your dreams. We look forward to hearing from you.