Both husbands and wives will find their relationship is accompanied by less resentment and more freedom when they understand that there are two roles and men don’t have to fulfill both.

Couples argue about many things, but most can be boiled down to one thing: Why can’t you be more like me? This is especially true when you are married to a perfectionist. Mark explains the best way to approach a spouse who is forever telling you how to do things “the right way”. Also, get fascinating insight regarding independent vs. clingy women, which type is better, and why it’s important to not compare yourself with other people.

For the past several decades we have been instructed to let our feelings have a bigger role in dictating our actions and decisions. Men have been encouraged to get in touch with their “feminine side” and to “follow their feelings”. This may be great for women, who primarily feel altruistic and beneficial things, but it doesn’t serve men well to act on their feelings. Find out why all the emphasis on feminizing men isn’t a very good thing after all.

Dating has become an over-romanticized and over-spiritualized endeavor in our culture. It really should be a time of discovering what a person is really like so there will be no huge surprises a few months into marriage. Successful marriages happen when both people do the right things and that includes dating the right way.

Important things to consider while dating include: making sure Christians only marry someone who is also a believer, watching how people react and not just how they act, looking at the person’s past history, and the need to involve family in your decision making process. If you date badly, you will marry badly. By using practical wisdom during dating, rather than trying to find a soul mate and a great physical or emotional connection, people can avoid having their marriages become train wrecks.

I contend that men are the way they are ’cause God made them that way on purpose.  We are not sick, twisted, broken perverts.  We’re just men.  All right?!  In no other area is this great divide in existence than when it comes to this whole area about sex.

Now for men, we’re talking stereotypical situation here, it’s the man who’s more interested in sex, ’cause usually that’s the way it is.  It’s not always that way though.  There are lots of relationships where it’s reversed, where it’s the woman who’s more interested in sex than her husband.  For example, if you’re here today, and you happen to be in a relationship where your wife is more interested in sex than you are, I think I speak for all the men here when I say that we hate you.  But generally, it’s not that way.  Usually it’s the guy, and we want to talk about it.

Now sex is a big deal, particularly for men.  Our sexual peak happens about age 18, and then it goes down from there.  So if you were to graph it out, it would look something like this (see video).  We’re going along, all of a sudden we hit age 18, and we peak there, and then it goes down… and then, we’re dead.  All right?

Now all of this is driven by a chemical called testosterone.  It’s not because we’re sick perverts, it’s the way God wired men.  He did this for a reason, and I want to show you on today’s show what that reason is.  In order to explain it, we have to do an anatomy lesson.  It’s going to be all right, we’ll keep this clean, it’s a family show.  Now we will call this the girl’s heart, okay?  In the interest of keeping everything at least PG, we will refer to this as the place of happniess.  I had a lady who came to one of my seminars once.  She told me later, “Man, I can’t even go to Wal-Mart anymore, smiling faces everywhere.  You just ruined it for me, you just ruined it.”  Ladies, at some fundamental level, you have to understand something.  This is every man’s basica interest in a woman, all right?  Now a lot of women say, “well, that’s terrible, that’s horrible!  Shouldn’t be that way, shouldn’t be about that.  Should be about love, and fellowship, and sharing.”  Sweetheart, if your husband was interested in fellowship and sharing, he’d have gotten a golden retriever.  Okay?  He’s interested in this, and he’s supposed to be.

Now what a lot of guys don’t understand is that the key to the happy place, is the heart.  If a man successfully touches her heart, then she gives him the green light and now he can go to the happy place.  Are you following me?  Some guys out there, Jimmie, I don’t think they get it.  “I don’t understand, what kind of drawing is this anyway?”  All right now, we need to understand something.

With the sex drive that men have, and most men, you know, all we need for a sex drive is oxygen, [breath] “where is she?!”  Now when that hits you, it’s not for you to just go attacking your wife.  It is merely God’s way of constantly reminding a man, “be nice to the girl.  Be nice to the girl.  You better be nice to the girl, or you ain’t getting jack.”  Now for women, it’s very different.  A woman’s main interest in a man is the heart, but what so many millions of women seem to be completely clueless about is that the key to his heart is the happy place.  You touch that, and he gives you the green light, now you can touch his heart.

Pepole say, “what was God thinking?”  This is exactly what he was thinking.  I mean, it drives people crazy!  The bottom line is this: the key to getting what you want is to give your spouse what they want.  We’re selfish, and we don’t want to give our spouse what they want, we just want what we want and it gets us in all kinds of trouble.  Women say, “don’t be such a pervert.  Open your heart to me.”  He says, “I told you I loved you once, if anything changes… I’ll let you know!  So let’s just do this, come on.”  So here we have the modern Christian couple that are constantly at war and fighting with each other, and this becomes a major problem.  Another major problem is that a lot of people think that this whole area of intimacy and sex is a side issue in marriage.  It’s not a side issue, it’s a major, central issue.

Honestly, I started thinking, “what in the world is going on?” One of these sessions that I walked out, my wife was there. I walked up to her, kind of confused a little bit. I said, “what is it about this situation? Why don’t I act like those guys that are doing these outrageous things?” And she said, “because you’re a good man,” and I said, “no. No.” She said, “well, why don’t you?” I said, “because you’d kill me.” She thought for a minute, and she says, “yes, I would.” We started thinking about it, and really, we went down the list of every couple that we knew that had a good marriage, and not in a million years would any of those women ever tolerate this kind of behavior from their husbands. Not a one. And you know, they wouldn’t be going around saying, “what should I do? what should I do?” They just wouldn’t put up with it.

I had one lady come up to me, she set up a counseling appointment and comes in, and I said, “what’s the problem?” She says, “well pastor, I found on the Internet where my husband had taken pictures of his genitalia and emailed them to another woman. What should I do?” I thought to myself, you know, my wife would never ask that question, “what should I do?” She’d say, “you’d better hang on to that picture, ’cause that’s the last time you’re gonna see your genitalia.”

The reality is this – and we’re going to discuss it on today’s show, and again, this will mess with a lot of your heads, but just stay focused and follow as best you can. One of the main reasons men act this way is because they can.

When it comes to the idea of marriage, people do the meanest, dirtiest, rotten, hurtful, stinking things to each other. All with the thinking of, “Well, I just have to be honest with my feelings.” This is, without a doubt, poisonous, destructive, stinking thinking.