Kevin Fredericks - Marriage Be Hard: 12 Conversations to Keep You Laughing, Loving, and Learning with Your Partner

Of course, you could have gone to a Black church your whole life and had an entirely different experience. Thats totally fine. This is our experience and the experience of the vast majority of our family and friends. Okay. Back to what we were saying

Churchy people like to talk about everything: the pastors last service, the praise team, even marriage. But theres a whole world of things you will never hear Christians talking about. Most of all: s-e-x. Thats how it was for me. No one discussed sex unless they were telling you all the bad stuff that would happen if you dared enter a sexual relationship before marriage. So I did what they told me to do: I waited until marriage; I went to counseling; I went to marriage enrichment workshops; I attended all the womens Bible studies. But I still felt terrified and unprepared.

In church, in Christian homes, no one shares what theyre struggling with. It is common to hear Look where the Lord has brought me from. Its not so common to hear Look what the Lord is doing for me right now as I am struggling. Kev and I have struggled. Our marriage has gone through challenging seasons. I have felt devastatingly alone even when Kevin was right in the next roomand now, eighteen years into our marriage, were working harder on our relationship than ever before. We pay close attention, we set aside time to talk, we go to therapy, and we deal with issues in our relationship as they arise.

Thats my primary reason for this book. On the podcast, weve tackled a wide range of topics, lots of which circle around Christianity and sex and how to reconcile a life that includes both. In one episode, we took a cardinal rule of Christianityabstinenceand broke it down. We gave our listeners specific advice about how not to have sex before marriage. People went crazy. It was as if no one had ever gotten this kind of straight-up advice before.

My initial intention was to serve as a teacher, but more often I ended up being a student. For example, I used to think that sex was a binary thing in a relationship: Men always wanted it and women could do without it. But when we interviewed Dr. Laurie Watson, a relationship counselor and podcast host, I learned that there is such a thing as a higher-desire woman and a lower-desire man. While I was sitting in my chair learning all of this, I said Wow out loud into my microphone. I was blown away, and it turned out I wasnt alone. When the episode aired, I received countless emails and DMs from women who thanked me for having a conversation about higher-desire women. They had felt so lonely, thinking there was something wrong with them for wanting more sex than their husbands did. They worried that their husbands werent attracted to them. Getting feedback like this reminded me daily of the good we were doing on our podcast.