What ex-gay men can teach us about marriage
MARRIAGE | Who better to explain the differences between ‘intergendered’ and ‘monogendered’ unions?
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Sam Andreades ministered at a church in New York’s Greenwich Village for many years and founded G.A.M.E. (Gender Affirming Ministry Endeavor), which serves those with same-sex attraction who want to follow Christ. Andreades has just finished his Doctor of Ministry work at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, and his dissertation, which grew out of his pastoral experience, is titled “Does She Matter? Emotional Intimacy in Marriage in Light of Gender Distinction.”
Andreades interviewed Christian husbands with a gay background who are now happily married to women, asking why they prefer “intergendered” to “monogendered” marriage. He learned that gender distinction contributes depth and intimacy to marriages—and this sheds light on why God gave us the commands He did about heterosexual marriage. Here's an article he wrote for WORLD that brings out some of his key findings. —Marvin Olasky
THE STONES THE THE BUILDERS REJECTED
The wave of same-sex marriage now breaks across the country amidst retreating (and diminishing) cries to defend traditional marriage, but very little is heard in the splashing about what makes one better than the other. It is worth pausing for air to ask: Are there actually any benefits to traditional marriages over same-sex marriages? Is there some reason the Bible prescribes one and not the other? When Jesus defined the institution by joining the two Genesisquotations, “God made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife …” (Mark 10:6-7), was He making a crucial point in making marriage an issue of gender?
There are people who can tell us the answer. There are those who can teach us the difference between “intergendered” unions (between two people of different genders) and “monogendered” unions (between those of the same gender). In fact, there are plenty of them in our churches. Sadly, they get ignored, insulted, or shunned, yet they are the ones before whom we should all be quiet and listen.
Who, you ask? Simply those who feel long-term same-sex attraction (SSA), and who may have even acted on those feelings in gay relationships in the past but who came to decide, in their Christian commitment, to marry the opposite gender instead. Ex-gay Christians who have been happily married for years are the best instructors what the difference is. They have been there and can compare. It was to just these people that I turned to explore these questions of marriage in my doctoral qualitative research project[i] under Covenant Theological Seminary.
I decided to limit the scope of my study to husbands with SSA, talking in depth with them about how their Christian wives, as women, made a difference in their relationships. Based on the national conversation, you might expect that finding such men would be formidable. Actually, they were not hard to find at all. Just how many “mixed-orientation couples”[ii] reside in America is unknown,[iii] but author and ex-wife of a gay man, Amity Pierce Buxton, who founded the Straight Spouse Network serving thousands of spouses in similar situations, estimates the number to be 2 million.[iv] Not all of these are Christian or happy, of course, but there seem to be plenty that are. I know because they have been teaching me. What did I learn?
LOVE LED TO GOOD SEX
As sociologists, psychologists, policy-makers, and marriage counselors have realized the failing health of the institution of marriage in this country, they have focused a great deal of attention on what makes marriages work well. The answer, upon which these folks have converged, can be summed up as emotional intimacy. A variety of disciplines now understand achieving emotional closeness to be the prime determiner of a happy marriage. It is the thing that makes marriages last longer, grow stronger, and endure the more formidable shocks of life. It is the stuff of solid unions.
The first thing I learned in talking to the husbands in my study is that those espousing the power of emotional intimacy are right. As would be expected, SSA did indeed present an obstacle to closeness in these marriages. As one husband put it, “It is difficult because they [women] are different. And, in our case, where we had to work through that, initially without the sexual dynamic, it was really hard. Because there wasn’t even … you couldn’t kind of patch things up with sex.”
What I did not expect was the repeated confession that this seemingly insurmountable obstacle of SSA was overcome through emotional intimacy. Although I did not ask about it, most participants made some kind of statement, in passing, about how sexual intimacy with their wives grew from emotional intimacy with them. One said, “[Titillation from] the female body … always felt like it was kind of a reach to me … times I got … excited … was all emotional and psychological.” Another recalled how “the tenderness, the patience of … my wife toward me [awakened our] exploring one another. …” So the power of emotional intimacy to make marriages successful was confirmed in this unexpected way. This also comports with findings that some in mixed-orientation marriages experience a lessening of SSA over time.[v], [vi]
Source: World Magazine
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