Consider this story from Lauren Winner: “I want to tell you a story about my friends Charlie and Suzanne. They should have had a picture-perfect wedding night.… But [instead it] was, in Suzanne’s words, ‘a disaster.’ Though Charlie was eager to make the beast with two backs (that’s Shakespeare’s felicitous phrase, not my own), she simply did not want to have sex.… Nor did she want to have sex much during their first three years of marriage, until they started meeting with a counselor.… ‘I knew there would be a learning curve with sex, but I thought that meant learning about mechanics. What I really had to learn was that sex is OK—that it is OK to desire my husband.’ Rather than spending our unmarried years stewarding and disciplining our desires, we have become ashamed of them. We persuade ourselves that the desires themselves are horrible.… We spend years guarding our virginity, but find, upon getting married, that we cannot just flip a switch. Now that sex is licit, sanctioned—even blessed by our community—we are stuck with years of work (and sometimes therapy) to unlearn … anxiety about sex; to learn, instead, that sex is good” (Lauren Winner, Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity [Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005], p. 95).

Those who consider all sex to be basically evil, however, are as far from the truth as those who consider all sex to be basically good and permissible. God is not against sex. He created and blessed it. When used exclusively within marriage, as the Lord intends, sex is beautiful, satisfying, and stabilizing. “Let your fountain be blessed,” Scripture says, “and rejoice in the wife of your youth.… Be exhilarated always with her love” (Prov. 5:18–19).