A Lifetime of Love

I finally finished "Sheet Music", a book about how to have a healthy, intimate relationship with my wife. To put it more bluntly, it's about how to have better sex with one's spouse or significant other (I would guess the author is aiming more for the former than the latter). You're probably dying to hear all the details of the "good parts" of the book but I will let you find those in the book itself. Rather, I'll offer you a brief application of what I take away from the book. This book reinforces for me that a marital relationship is ultimately analogous of Christ's relationship with his followers. That relationship is not an easy-come-easy-go relationship. It also involves the ups and downs of the joys and sorrows of two people having an intimate relationship where they have made a covenant with one another, vowing not to be unfaithful to that relationship. More to the point, this book makes the point over-and-over again that sex is not just the cherry-on-top of a committed relationship but that it is at the center of the relationship and that everything the couple does centers around that. That may be baffling but rather than try to make sense of that paradox here I'll let you read the book. Suffice it to say that if a couple is not mutually loving one another that they will not have a healthy sexual relationship. Need a more basic example? How about a mistake I made with my wife tonight? Well, the jury is still out on whether it was really a mistake (That's the jury on my side, if you will). I thought we were just going for a brief visit to McDonald's to enjoy a few moments of air-conditioning, ice cream and iced coffee and my wife thought we were going to enjoy a few areas of air-conditioning, regardless of how much conversation we had. Well, when she saw how displeased we were at not doing anything that seemed productive, I found myself in the doghouse. Now surely you can see how this mistake on my part (or for the sake of my ego, both of our parts) might affect "tonight".