Keys to a Healthy Marriage

Letters To My Daughters

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript

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Keys to a Healthy Marriage

Guest: Barbara Rainey

From the series: Letters to My Daughters (Day 1 of 2)

Bob: Barbara Rainey likens intimacy in marriage to a secret garden—a place that only a husband and wife go together. She says it’s a risky place.

Barbara: It is a place of raw exposure. It is a place of being real with one another. It is the place where we are most transparent in our marriage relationship, so we need the walls of a commitment. Both of us need the security and the comfort of knowing that we’ve got a perimeter around our marriage much like a rock wall around a secret garden. We need that commitment to be in place.

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Monday, February 6th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey. I'm Bob Lepine. We’ll talk today about how a husband and wife can work together to cultivate the secret garden of their marriage. Stay with us.

1:00

And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. It’s been almost a year now since the release of your wife’s book, Letters to My Daughters. We’re finally getting around to Chapter 6—

Dennis: You’ve got—

Barbara: —which rhymes with—[Laughter]

Dennis: —you’ve got a cheesy grin on your face.

Bob: You—you know, Chapter—

Dennis: The listeners can’t see your face! [Laughter]

Bob: —six!—six. If you replace one letter in “six,” you get an idea of what we’re going to be talking about—

Dennis: Well—

Bob: —today.

Dennis: Barbara’s book, Letters to My Daughters: The Art of Being a Wife, has flown off the shelf. It’s really doing well. I understand why, because I think this is Barbara’s best book ever. It is certainly a very honest look at our marriage.

I want to welcome her back to the broadcast. Thanks for coming back in, Sweetheart.

Barbara: I’m happy to be here.

Dennis: I know you are.

Barbara: Yes.

Dennis: I know you are. Since we’re going to talk about s—s—s—

Bob: Sex. Just say it—sex.

Dennis: Chapter 6.

Barbara: It is not that hard for you to say! [Laughter]

2:00

Bob: You’ve heard him say it before?

Barbara: I don’t think it’s that hard for him to say! [Laughter]

Dennis: I just want to pray for our audience; because as I was preparing to come in here, reading Barbara’s book, I thought: “You know? Oh my! How broken are we as human beings—how many different perspectives we come at this subject.” There are some listeners who’ve been hurt deeply by their past choices and some are in present relationships. I just want God to intervene and minister to—whether they’re single, married, divorced, single parents—I just want to ask God to meet every person where they are:

Father, You made us, male and female. There is no surprise in terms of how we function. You made us to merge together and become one.

3:00

Yet, what You designed, man has degenerated and has twisted. You know that as well.

You know where each listener is, who is tuning in to our broadcast today. I just would ask You to be gentle with each of them. Use these broadcasts, I pray, to minister to them just where they are. Produce some hope, some help, and some encouragement to each person listening.

For the guys, who are listening in, Father, I pray that they might listen with some understanding. We tend to be too quick to judgment on this subject. I pray for all of us just to be wise in terms of what we hear and what we apply. In Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

Bob: Amen.

Barbara this is a subject that obviously is personal—it’s intimate—it really does get to the core of who we are as human beings. It can be threatening for a lot of people.

4:00

I was very interested—as you invited your daughters and daughters-in-law to ask questions about marriage, the first question you got related to this—I’m just going to read it from the book——it says: “So yeah. Sex. You gave me “the talk,” and we had our pre-wedding conversation that was pretty short and hurried. No offense; it was busy. I get it. But now I’m married. And it’s um…different. Fine. FINE. But, well, I have to ask this…what’s the big deal?” I thought that was an interesting question from a daughter to say, “I’m in the midst of it, but I’m not sure I understand why it’s as big a deal as people say it is.”

Barbara: It’s a great question. You know, it was one that I just had to think about a lot. Actually, I had to think about all these questions a lot because, as Dennis prayed, this topic—this part of our marriage relationship—is not easy.

5:00

It’s not simple. It’s not cut and dry / it’s not black and white. It’s very complicated; and even though it’s very good, it’s very complicated.

My short answer to “What is the big deal?” is that it takes a long, long time to understand what God has built into us, as men and women. It takes a while to understand the purpose of sex. It takes a while to undo things that we’ve brought into our marriage. It just takes time. I think, in our culture today, more than in any other generation, we expect instant results in every area of our lives.

We’re so used to having instant access to information. We just don’t know how to wait—we don’t know how to persevere. We don’t know how to have patience.

I think, in this area of marriage, our expectation for change to happen quickly and for results to be mastered fast, is a misplaced hope; because I think, in the long run, the goal of marriage is a marathon—

6:00

—it’s a lifetime race. Figuring out why it’s a big deal takes a lot of time. It’s me getting to know my husband, as a man, and him getting to know me, as a woman. That isn’t going to take place quickly.

Dennis: If you go back to Genesis, as it describes two people becoming one—there was a progression that God declared. He ...