Aug 21, 2026 · 32 min · 11 segments
Most of the fights in your marriage aren't problems to solve. They're paradoxes, and we get stuck the moment we try to pick a side instead of accepting both. In this episode, I dig into why our faith…
Marin tells me that for sex to feel appealing, she has to feel emotionally safe and connected first.
She wants to know that Wade cares about her, that he's paying attention to what's going on in her inner world and her outer world.
She wants to know the marriage is steady, that Wade isn't frustrated with her, that the day hasn't been full of low-level tension.
He says he can't fully relax into the marriage until he knows Marin still wants him.
He doesn't wanna just feel like a paycheck or someone who's around to help with the kids and fix things.
He wants to know that she still sees him as her husband, not just a useful partner running a household.
So when weeks go by without her reaching for him, he starts to feel like a roommate, and that feeling makes him pull back, get a little quieter, and a little more careful.
And the distance that he creates is the exact thing that makes Marin feel less emotionally safe.
Each one is standing still, waiting for the other to move first, and the marriage has been frozen in that spot for three years.
So I told them on our Zoom call, "Neither of you is wrong." Marin is right that emotional safety feeds desire.
You have spent three years trying to figure out which one of you is correct, and the answer is both of you.
You're stuck because you've been treating a paradox like it's a problem to solve.
So today, I wanna talk about paradox, what it is, why our faith is absolutely full of it, why your marriage runs on it, and why your sex life in particular lives inside a few tensions that will never resolve the way that you keep hoping that they will.
Marin tells me that for sex to feel appealing, she has to feel emotionally safe and connected first.
She wants to know that Wade cares about her, that he's paying attention to what's going on in her inner world and her outer world.
She wants to know the marriage is steady, that Wade isn't frustrated with her, that the day hasn't been full of low-level tension.
He says he can't fully relax into the marriage until he knows Marin still wants him.
He doesn't wanna just feel like a paycheck or someone who's around to help with the kids and fix things.
He wants to know that she still sees him as her husband, not just a useful partner running a household.
So when weeks go by without her reaching for him, he starts to feel like a roommate, and that feeling makes him pull back, get a little quieter, and a little more careful.
And the distance that he creates is the exact thing that makes Marin feel less emotionally safe.
Each one is standing still, waiting for the other to move first, and the marriage has been frozen in that spot for three years.
So I told them on our Zoom call, "Neither of you is wrong." Marin is right that emotional safety feeds desire.
You have spent three years trying to figure out which one of you is correct, and the answer is both of you.
You're stuck because you've been treating a paradox like it's a problem to solve.
So today, I wanna talk about paradox, what it is, why our faith is absolutely full of it, why your marriage runs on it, and why your sex life in particular lives inside a few tensions that will never resolve the way that you keep hoping that they will.
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