25 Questions You Are Afraid to Ask About Love, Sex and Intimacy (Part 1) - Juli Slattery

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25 Questions You Are Afraid to Ask About Love, Sex and Intimacy (Part 1) - Juli Slattery
25 Questions You Are Afraid to Ask About Love, Sex and Intimacy (Part 2) - Juli Slattery
25 Questions You Are Afraid to Ask About Love, Sex and Intimacy (Part 3) - Juli Slattery

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript

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What Does God Approve of?

Guest: Juli Slattery

From the series: 25 Questions You Are Afraid to Ask (Day 1 of 3)

Bob: More marriages than ever are struggling with issues related to marital intimacy and sexuality. Dr. Juli Slattery says, “There is a good reason why.”

Juli: You can now assume that the average couple is dealing with issues of pornography / there is a good chance there has been sexual trauma in the past—that people are bringing in a lot of baggage, and shame, and guilt about the things that have happened before marriage. We’re dealing with the assumption, now, that there are an awful lot of men and women who are single, into their 30s and 40s, before their first marriage. The game has really changed. God’s truth hasn’t changed, but how we address it and the assumptions we make are very different.

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Monday, October 24th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I’m Bob Lepine. We’re going to dive right into today and talk about issues that a lot of you are facing in your marriage. Stay with us.

And welcome to FamilyLife Today.

1:00

Thanks for joining us. We just ought to say, here at the beginning—we’re about to have a candid conversation on a sensitive subject. It’s one that you sometimes wonder, “Should we even be talking about this?” But honestly, every time we talk to couples about issues in their marriage, this subject comes up.

Dennis: It does. We’ve got a person who knows how to handle delicate subjects like this very, very well. Dr. Juli Slattery joins us on FamilyLife Today. Juli—welcome to FamilyLife Today.

Juli: Thanks for having me.

Dennis: You know, I’m really impressed, Bob, that Juli chose to be on FamilyLife Today. Most of our guests we trick, but Juli actually chose to be on FamilyLife Today and talk about this subject we’re going to talk about. [Laughter]

Bob: She knew what she was getting herself into; right?

Dennis: In case our listeners don’t know who that name is—Juli is married to Mike and has been since 1994. She has three sons—lives in Colorado. She is a clinical psychologist—

2:00

—author of seven books, speaker, and host of Java with Juli, which takes place in a coffee shop.

Juli: It does; yes. See, I love coffee so much I had to find a way to work it into my normal routine.

Dennis: Yes. Have you done some Java with Juli on this book we’re about to talk about?

Juli: Well, you know, I think that this book came out of a lot of those conversations. So, it’s kind of sprinkled around, I’d say.

Dennis: Well, our audience is wondering what you’ve written about. Here’s the name of the book—you’re going to get the point—25 Questions You’re Afraid to Ask About Love, Sex, and Intimacy. Why this book? Why now?

Juli: Well, I run a ministry called Authentic Intimacy. A lot of what I do every day is teach, and write, and answer people’s questions on sexuality. Wherever I go—for example, speaking—we will have at least a half an hour, if not an hour, of live Q&A where women can text in their questions anonymously.

3:00

From that and, also, meeting with women and the emails we get—there are some consistent questions that women will ask. We just thought: “Hey, why not compile this into one resource? These are the questions that either we get asked all the time or, sometimes, they’re the questions underneath the question.

Dennis: Is there a number one question women are asking today that seems to be a unique question because of the day we live in?

Juli: The questions that are most common, probably, would be the most common ten years ago, I’m going to think—about like: “What does God approve of in the marriage bed?” for example—or as a single woman—“Does God say this act is wrong?” That’s the number one question.

I think, in terms of the changing culture, what I’ve seen—and probably what you’ve seen in your ministry to marriage and family—is that things that were an assumption 15 or

20 years ago are no longer an assumption—like: “Where does the Bible actually say it’s wrong to have sex out of marriage? I’ve never heard that before,”—

4:00

—whereas, again, 15 or 20 years ago, those were assumptions that we could begin with.

Bob: When we host our Weekend to Remember® marriage getaways for couples, we always have time where we are with the engaged couples. Twenty years ago, when you got the engaged couples together in the room, you had an assumption, as a speaker, that some percentage of your audience was probably sexually active during their engagement period. Today, when you get together with that group, the assumption is virtually everybody—in fact, I think the statistic I saw most recently was that five percent of women who get married today are virgins when they get married.

Juli: Yes.

Bob: We’re in a very different place than we were two decades ago, as it relates to a lot of the subjects that you are writing about.

Juli: And it’s not just being sexually active; but you can now assume that the average couple is dealing with issues of pornography; that there is a good chance there has been sexual trauma in the past—that people are bringing in a lot of baggage, and shame, and guilt about the things that have happened before marriage.

5:00

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