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Zondervan Books by Tim LaHaye Anger Is a Choice How to Win Over Depression Revelation Unveiled Zondervan Books by Tim and Beverly LaHaye The Act of Marriage The Act of Marriage After 40 THEAct OF Marriage The Beauty of SEXUAL LOVE Tim and Beverly LaHaye Z ONDERVAN The Act of Marriage Copyright © 1976 by Zondervan All rights reserved under International and Pan- American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan. EPub Edition © June 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-82834-1 Grand Rapids, Michigan Revised Edition Copyright © 1998 by Zondervan Requests for information should be addressed to: Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data LaHaye, Tim F. The act of marriage. Bibliography: p. ISBN 0-310-21177-8 1. Sex (Theology). 2. Marriage. I. LaHaye, Beverly, joint author. II. Title. BT708.L42 301.41′8 75–37742 All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. Published in association with Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920. 05 06 / DC/ 20 19 To all those who believe married lovecan be beautiful, exciting, and fulfillingand to those who wishthey could believe Contents Cover Copyright Introduction Chapter One: The Sanctity of Sex Chapter Two: What Lovemaking Means to a Man Chapter Three: What Lovemaking Means to a Woman Chapter Four: Why God Created Sex Chapter Five: Sex Education Chapter Six: The Art of Lovemaking Chapter Seven: For Men Only Chapter Eight: For Women Only Chapter Nine: The Unfulfilled Woman Chapter Ten: The Key to Feminine Response Chapter Eleven: The Impotent Man Chapter Twelve: Sane Family Planning Chapter Thirteen: Sex Survey Report Chapter Fourteen: The Missing Dimension Chapter Fifteen: Practical Answers to Common Questions Bibliography Acknowledgments About the Publisher Share Your Thoughts Introduction This book is unlike any other I have ever written. It should be read only by married couples, those immediately contemplating marriage, and those who counsel married couples. It is deliberately frank. I have long felt a need for a clear and detailed presentation of the intimate relationship that exists between a husband and wife. Most Christian books on this subject skirt the real issues and leave too much to the imagination; such evasiveness is not adequately instructive. Secular books, on the other hand, often go overboard telling it like it is in crude language repulsive to those who need help. In addition, such books usually advocate practices considered improper by biblical standards. To keep the facts that every couple needs to know from being offensive, I am writing this book with the help of Beverly, my wife of fifty years. In addition to the delicate sense of balance she brings to this work, I have drawn on her extensive counseling experiences as a minister’s wife, conference speaker, and registrar of Christian Heritage College. Both of us have counseled enough married couples to convince us that an enormous number of them are not enjoying all the blessings of which they are capable or for which God has designed them. We have discovered that many others find the intimacies of married love distasteful and unpleasant. Through the years, we have developed several teaching principles that have helped such people in a relatively short period of time. The requests of counselors, pastors, and others persuaded us that these same principles could help thousands of people if presented in book form. Before we had had time to begin the project, Dr. Robert K. DeVries, then executive vice president of Zondervan Publishing House, invited us to lunch to present us with the first printed copy of my previous book, How to Win Over Depression. “A book that is sorely needed today, written by a Christian couple, would concern sexual adjustment in marriage,” he remarked, “and we would like to ask you two to write it.” We thanked him and promised to pray about it. At first Bev was reluctant to get heavily involved with the endeavor until the Lord gave her a specific sign. Within the next two months she counseled at least ten wives who were averse to sexual intercourse. The success those women soon achieved in their love lives convinced her that God required her active participation in the project. As we began to read current literature on the subject, convinced that God meant lovemaking to be enjoyed by both partners, we prayed that He would lead us to make this work fully biblical and highly practical. He provided many counseling illustrations and pertinent suggestions from pastors, doctors, and friends, among them Dr. Ed Wheat, a family physician who has prepared a superb series of lectures on the subject. When we met him at our Family Life Seminar in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he presented us with a complete set of his cassettes and graciously offered us the freedom to use anything in them. We recommend these cassettes to every married couple and those planning to be married in the near future; they are unquestionably the finest we have ever reviewed. In fact, Dr. Wheat includes information in them that we have not found in the fifty or more books we have scrutinized on this subject. Inasmuch as most of the people we counsel are Christians, we concluded through our reading that Christians generally experience a higher degree of sexual enjoyment than non-Christians. However, there was no way to prove our assumption. We then prepared an intimate survey for married couples and offered it to those who have attended our Family Life Seminars. By comparing the responses with those of secular sex surveys, our conclusions were confirmed and other interesting and valuable facts were discovered. The results of our survey appear in chapter 13, and parts of it are scattered through the book. While we were writing the last chapter of this book, Redbook magazine published a Sexual Pleasure Survey showing the preferences of 100,000 women. The survey was taken by the magazine and written by Robert J. Levin (coauthor with Masters and Johnson of The Pleasure Bond). The most significant finding of Redbook’s survey and the one listed first was that “sexual satisfaction is related significantly to religious belief. With notable consistency, the greater the intensity of a woman’s religious convictions, the likelier she is to be highly satisfied with the sexual pleasures of marriage.”1 Naturally we were delighted to find that Redbook’s survey revealed results quite similar to those of our survey. On the strength of his research Mr. Levin emphatically confirmed that “strongly religious women (over 25) seem to be more responsive… [and] she is more likely than the nonreligious woman to be orgasmic almost every time she