What Does A Biblically Healthy Libido Look Like for a Single?
The definition of libido is sexual desire. As a Christian single who is obeying God and waiting for marriage to have sex, what does a biblically healthy sexual desire look like?
As a single person its easy to think that while battling porn that sex is bad, or that you are not supposed to have sexual thoughts or desires, but this isn’t true, and this isn’t how you were created. God designed humans to have sexual desires when they reach a certain age, both male and female, whether they are married or not.
It has been almost two years since I last looked at porn or masturbated, and I realized today that a lot of my success has been changing my sexual desires, my libido, from what the world told me about it, to what God said in his Word about it.
The world builds their sexual desire, their libido, around the idea that sex is a purely physical/biological act that brings pleasure and offspring. And this is true for dogs, cats, horses, monkeys and other animals. But humans are so much more than animals. As long as we views sex as a biological release that is only intended for pleasure or reproduction we are going to have a very difficult time overcoming this addiction.
Ironically, even though I have probably watched thousands of hours of porn and looked at tens of thousands of pictures of porn, getting porn out of my life has significantly broadened my horizon on what sex is. Even though I understand that sex is a physical act, after studying what the Bible says about sex I am unwilling to settle for sex as only a physical act, because God intended it to be so much more.
Yes sex is a physical act, but for humans God specially created sex to be part of intimacy. Intimacy has 4 parts. It has intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and physical parts. God designed sex to bring all these things together. It’s a sad statement but our culture has tried very hard to take intimacy out of sex, and our culture is succeeding.
In Genesis 4:1 (and many other places in the Bible) God describes sex as knowing one another. God designed sex so two people could know one another better and be closer to one another than anyone else in the world.
As an unmarried person it is appropriate to have a sexual desire that says that when you get married and have sex that you will be closer to that person than anyone else in the world. That sex will not just be a biological release but also an intellectual, and emotional, and spiritual act. That sex will allow you to know that person better than you can know anyone else in the world.
For me as an unmarried person this thought has encouraged me to not allow relationships to stay shallow. I will take a relationship as deep as I can intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, because the way I figure it, if sex is to take intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and physical intimacy to the next level then I need to know how far I can take intimacy without sex.
Let me tell you something, although I have had to be very vulnerable to get to where I am at, I am blown away by how much better I am when I am intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually intimate with the people around me.
My desire now is that if God blesses me with a girlfriend and the relationship ends in marriage, to spend the entire relationship building intellectual, emotional, and spiritual intimacy, and then on my wedding night and honey moon finding out how sex deepens intellectual, emotional, and spiritual intimacy.
At this point my libido cannot imagine sex without first developing intellectual, emotional, and spiritual intimacy. And that is healthy.
God designed sex to be a physical act, and an act of intimacy, but God also designed sex to be done in a committed relationship. Marriage. God designed sex with the purpose that sex was only to be done once you were in a lifelong relationship.
If you wait until you get married to have sex then you have no idea what you are getting into. And it pleased God to design sex with that mystery behind it. The world pushes sex as only a physical act, so the world cannot handle this mystery. The world has to know what they are getting into before they make a commitment. But God made sex to be a mystery only to be discovered after marriage because it delighted God to make you focus on intimacy.
Furthermore if you wait until you get married, what does it say about your commitment? What does it say about your trust?
God designed marriage so that two people will go through the good times together and the bad times together, and in good times and bad learn about one another more and more. When there is job loss, and promotions, child birth, and miscarriage, family member dying, and family member recovering whatever the circumstances your marriage says you have a lifelong commitment to each other. And sex plays a part of that.
In Genesis 4 Cain kills Able. In verse 25 it says that Adam knew his wife again. I believe there is an implication that after the death of their child that Adam and Eve where in a very different place emotionally than they had ever been and sex was a different experience because there is an emotional intimacy in sex. In the hurt of life Adam and Eve had a very different sexual experience. But that only came because of their commitment to one another.
I have a sexual desire to only have sex after I am married, and that marriage will be a lifelong commitment. Good times or bad times. Whether there are struggles in the area of sex or other areas. I views sex as something that should only happen after marriage. And honestly it is healthy for your libido to desire sex only after marriage.
Yes sex is a physical act, but God also designed sex to be an act of intimacy, an act done in commitment, and finally God designed sex to be an exclusive act.
Perhaps you think we covered that in commitment but there was this guy named Solomon who made a lifelong commitment to a 1000 women. He was committed to those women but he was not exclusive to any of them. The Bible is clear that Solomon eventually realized his mistake, but by then it was too late to have an exclusive relationship because he had already committed.
I believe that the book Song of Solomon was written after Solomon prayed to God asking God to show Solomon how to teach his kids not to make the same mistake he did. I believe Song of Solomon 1:1-4 is talking about Solomon and his children. And the rest of the book is Solomon singing a song God gave him about how wonderful an exclusive relationship is.
Although my desire is to only ever have sex with one person, for me this goes beyond that. My desire when I get married is to only know what my wife thinks about sex. I have no desire to know anybody elses thoughts on the matter because to me her thoughts on sex will be the only thoughts that matter in the world.
Some of this desire is bleeding into my life now. Where someone will talk about sex or say something about sex and my thought is that their sex life is none of my business, that I should not be looking at their exclusivity and intimacy, or lack thereof.
Right now my sexual desire is for an exclusive sexual relationship with one woman for my entire life, and this exclusivity extends to the only person in the world that I care to talk with about sex is her. If you read Song of Solomon then you will find out that this is a healthy sexual desire.
I guess to sum everything up my sexual desire is to have physical sex with a woman that I am more intellectually, emotionally, spiritually intimate with than anyone else in the world, to wait until marriage to have sex, and that once married sex is exclusive to the point that I only talk with her about the mysteries of sex.
Honestly this desire has been the most helpful thing to me in resisting porn in the last few months. When I am tempted by porn, I think of my sexual desire for intimacy, commitment, and exclusivity and realize porn has nothing to offer me. Porn offers no intimacy, commitment and by its very nature it cannot be exclusive.
A healthy biblical sexual desire will not be interested in porn, even if you are a single.