Masturbation is one of the most controversial topics in marriage—especially in conservative or religious circles. In this episode, we’re not going to tell you what to believe, but we will offer a new perspective and framework for thinking about it.
Here’s what you’ll discover:
- The surprising cultural history that shaped Christian attitudes toward masturbation
- Why shame and secrecy often do more harm than the act itself
- How sexuality and spirituality can be integrated instead of at odds
- A simple framework for evaluating any sexual behavior
- Real stories from couples who moved past guilt and found deeper intimacy
Whether you ultimately say yes or no to masturbation in your marriage, this episode will help you replace shame with honest conversation and build safety for true intimacy.
👉 Want to go further? Download the Intimately Us app to reset your intimacy in September with our “Sextember” challenge, and join our upcoming events and coaching programs to take your intimacy to the next level:
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- Get Your Marriage On Program
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors or inaccuracies. For the most accurate and complete experience, we recommend listening to the full podcast episode.
Hey friends, today I’m gonna talk about one of the most controversial topics in marriage, masturbation. And if you’re from a conservative religious background like I am, you might already be feeling uncomfortable or super curious. I get it. I’ve been there. And in this episode, I’m not going to tell you what to do or what to believe.
[00:01:00] Instead, I’m gonna share, a new perspective that you may have not have considered, and I want to encourage you to thoroughly investigate this and come to your own opinions. I’m gonna share with you a framework that I think will help you make wise decisions when it comes to anything regarding your sexuality in your marriage.
If you’re new to this podcast, a very warm welcome. My name is Dan Purcell, and I am a marriage and intimacy coach who’s helped thousands of couples navigate exactly these kinds of sensitive topics in their marriage so they can have a stronger, more intimate relationship. I come from a conservative background myself.
I am an active Christian in my faith, and I host the Get Your Marriage On Podcast, where we tackle the topics that are on your mind. That most people are afraid to ask or discuss out loud, so you’ll find everything that I’m about to tell you. All these resources that will help you in the description below in the show notes.
Let me start by saying this. I understand that this [00:02:00] topic could make you uncomfortable, and if you come from a religious or conservative background, you’ve probably been taught that masturbation is wrong, shameful, or something sinful, or to be avoided entirely, and I absolutely respect those beliefs. I grew up with many of them myself, and I understand where it comes from.
But here’s what I’ve learned in my work with thousands of couples. The silence and shame around topics like masturbation or sexual topics altogether is actually causing more harm than the topic itself. I’ve seen couples where one partner is struggling with guilt and secrecy while the other partner feels completely in the dark about their spouse’s sexuality.
I’ve seen marriages where people are so disconnected from their own sexuality that they can’t communicate to their spouse what feels good, or guide their partner towards what would make for greater intimacy in their relationship. So today I want to offer you a different lens, not to replace your [00:03:00] beliefs, but to help you think more clearly about what might actually serve and build your marriage to make it more intimate and fulfilling.
first, let’s talk about the history of masturbation. The first principle is that there’s a difference between Christian theology and Christian culture. Culture by the way, is very valuable because it’s. How we work together as a group, as a society. It dictates the rules that makes, you know, working with groups of people successful.
But it’s important to note of when we accept the culture, what others do in place of theology. And if you recall in the New Testament, some of Jesus’s harshest criticisms. We’re leveled against the Pharisees of his day. Those that have built a religious and pious culture while departing from the more weightier matters like the, the soul of the gospel, right, love, mercy, and justice.
Attitudes of masturbation in America have shifted a lot over the last 250 years, and I get a lot of my material from a scholarly [00:04:00] article that I found in the journal called Sexuality and Culture. It’s written in 2005 by Mark Kim Milan, of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, and he discusses how cultural attitudes have shifted a lot about masturbation.
This is what I learned from the article. It’s so interesting. So the author, first of all, points out that nowhere in the Bible is a clear unchallenged reference to masturbation itself. However, he does note that a lot of Jewish traditions have always seriously been concerned about the loss of seamen.
In the early 17 hundreds in London, an anonymous book was published about a condition called Onnia, which the author claims is self pollution and causes all sorts of mental and physical illness. As you might recall, the term onnia comes from. The story in Genesis 38, Onan. And he’s Judah’s son who is supposed to marry his deceased brother’s [00:05:00] wife.
And , when he went into her, he spilled his semen on the ground instead of going through with his obligation of raising up children with his deceased brother’s wife. So the author Connected Anand’s Behavior with masturbation, and this book was published by the way, on Grub Street in London, which I learned is where lots of other less than reputable books and pamphlets were printed.
Back in this day, the author was really good at Fear-Mongering. He went on to list all sorts of horrible things that happened to a person spiritually. Physically and mentally if he practices masturbation. And at the very end of the book, he tries to get you to buy his supplements, his food, which he claimed cures the disease.
So of course it feels a lot like snake oil, right? But here’s the interesting thing In our history, this book became an international bestseller and others started to, for the first time, think seriously about masturbation and its [00:06:00] impacts. Okay.
One popular influence shaping attitudes of masturbation in the mid 17 hundreds. Was a Swiss physician named SAD Tesat, I find the first three initials of his name. A little ironic, right. Anyway, he was successful at convincing the medical community that masturbation was not just a sin, but a major factor in disease and death.
So his ideas took off and a lot of people glbb onto that idea and these anti masturbatory ideas spread throughout the whole western world.
You may have heard of Kellogg’s Cornflakes, right? The creator was JH Kellogg in 1882. He produced literature that devoted pages to identifying any illness imaginable that a teenager could have as a link to masturbation. This includes being disobedient. Having acne, being too bold or impulsive, or sleeping in too much.
All of these were because he masturbated. [00:07:00] So he was really good at raising fear among his readers. He was also the person, by the way, along with his brother that created the Kellogg cornflakes. others tried to create solutions to keep teens and others from masturbating, thinking it was a horrible disease and not just a sin, but all these other elements causes insanity.
You lose your hair. Other things like that.
Another popular figure in the 18 hundreds was a person named Sylvester Graham. Graham was an American Presbyterian minister and he also advocated for reformed diet. See, by the way, he’s the inventor of the graham cracker and it was part of his bland diet and he designed it specifically to curb one’s desire to masturbate.
Now we might look back on these cultural changes today and probably might make a smile like, come on, we’re coming up with foods to make you not wanna masturbate anymore. But remember, rigorous scientific testing of medical theories wasn’t mainstream back [00:08:00] then. That wasn’t a thing until the 19 hundreds.
So, you know, the, emotion of fear and anxiety is extremely contagious and it spreads so fast in society. So the ideas of the ills of masturbation really took hold and became commonplace. Now, religious cultures are not immune to influences of the greater culture in which the practitioners belong.
So it’s natural then for religious leaders to weigh in on their ideas of the practice. so this scholarly article. Concludes that a lot of religious attitudes kind of stem from this era when a lot of people, even notable scientists at the time were saying masturbation is not only sinful, but it causes physical and mental illness also
and I believe a lot of our attitudes that we’ve inherited even today stem from, uh, this tradition that’s been handed down from, generation to generation.
But this still leaves this question unanswered. [00:09:00] Is masturbation still considered a sin from a strictly religious standpoint? Anyway, keep listening and I’ll explain a few other principles, and I promise we’ll circle back to this question.
I wanna switch gears for a moment and talk about sexuality and spirituality. Now, I used to think that sexuality and spirituality were at odds. In other words, if I wanted to be more spiritual, I had to repress my sexual appetites because you know, after all, sexual desires are carnal of the natural man, and definitely less than spiritual desires, right?
In other words, if sexual feelings weren’t good or appropriate, then the way to combat that is with more spirituality. In other words, when I’d have a sexual urge or thought, I tried to repress it by thinking about spiritual things. As you can guess, this strategy didn’t work very well. Experiencing sexual urges, by the way, are a wonderful and natural part of being a human, and often directly out of one’s control.
[00:10:00] But I still felt guilty, so I’d suppress my sexual desires even more. I’d stuff it down, and as I say that, which you resist persists. And I felt the split in me. The more I increased spiritually to try to repress sexually, the more I felt disconnected from myself and from my wife. On the other hand, after a rather satisfying and gratifying sexual experience with my wife, I’d question if it was wrong for me to have enjoyed it so much that it was it okay that I let go.
and had as much fun as I actually did Anyway,
all of this changed eight years ago. And it’s part of the origin story of Get Your Marriage on, and why I am so passionate about helping couples take their intimacy to their next level. Here’s the short version of what happened eight years ago. Earlier that day, I had a conversation with a friend where he opened up to me and shared some of the details about his sex life.
And just so you know, this wasn’t bro talk. He wasn’t bragging, [00:11:00] but he was really trying to help me see something I was completely missing, and he was sincere, and I realized he had something that I didn’t have. He had a vibrant, creative, and adventurous sex life, and still seemed to be a solid spiritual person.
that night. Emily and I talked for about five hours about our sex life, our most vulnerable and open conversation about that topic to that point in our 13 years of marriage. And we committed that night to each other that we were going to do whatever it took to build a replenishing and fulfilling sex life together.
For me, though, I had a major obstacle to overcome. I had to figure out how to integrate sexuality with spirituality in our marriage, which seemed to have always been at odds with each other for so long because. It, you know, cognitively, I knew sex was a good thing. It came from God, but the, my experience was different.
If my s*xuality was actually a good thing, how do I reconcile it with feelings? That s*xuality then was incompatible with being a spiritual [00:12:00] person, and how do I do that together in line with my values that I thought was godly. Part of the answer came from the Disney movie, Mulan, and there’s a part in the movie you might recall, where the military recruits are given the task to climb a long pole while carrying two heavy metal discs strapped to their wrists.
The commander explained that the discs represent contrary principles and everyone tries and fails. Then Mulan figures out that when the discs are integrated together. Rather than just adding resistance and drag pulling you down, they actually can lift you higher. She became the first to climb the pole and to show the rest of the recruits how to succeed.
In other words, I had to learn how to stop treating s*xuality and spirituality as contrary. Principles drag me down and had to learn how to integrate. them I’ve learned that far too many couples struggle with integrating their sexuality with their spirituality. They [00:13:00] feel the split as I once did. They live like one or the other is a burden dragging them down.
So they resist their sexual nature thinking that’s a virtuous thing to do, but they end up feeling burdened, split, and disconnected from their selves and their spouse. You might be married to someone that has attitudes that sex is a little less than and not good, and you might feel that disconnect in your own marriage.
Today, I believe with all my heart that God wants us to have joy in this life. And in the world to come. Men and women are created in God’s image so that we can experience joy. Even the Greek origin of the word gospel means good news or joyful sound. God has designed us to be embodied people. There’s a spirituality about having a body, a physical body is so important that Jesus was resurrected three days after he died, and even shared meals among his apostles as he ministered to them 40 days afterwards.
Our [00:14:00] bodies and spirits work together. Our sensual nature is God-given. Even our sexual nature is God designed. If you want further evidence on this topic, just consider this. The clitoris, the center of female sexual pleasure is the only organ in the body that scientists conclude that has only one function for pleasure.
That’s it, and a lot of pleasure too at that. So it’s by integration that is taking an honest approach at our sexual and spiritual natures that help us grow and develop who we are. This integrity of these two things, integrating our sexuality and our spirituality is crucial for us to learn how to love a spouse deeply.
How to build an intimate connection with a strong unbreakable bond. So what does all this have to do with masturbation? I’m getting to it, but keep listening. Part of learning and development in life centers around directing, disciplining, and bridling our appetites. Now [00:15:00] using food as analogy, if I were to just to eat brownies all day, just because they taste good, and that’s all I ate, it would be very bad for my health.
On the other hand, if I felt immense shame for enjoying a brownie once in a while thinking I was a bad person for even wanting a brownie. Then I’d be missing out on one of the best desserts and joys of life. Any indulgent behavior, including sexually indulgent masturbation won’t lead to a life of joy.
But on the other hand, suppressing and resisting sexual expression and exploration and sexual pleasure won’t lead to a life of joy either.
So figuring out this balance helps us build the character traits that God wants us to have. So is masturbation sinful or not? Here’s a framework I use when evaluating any sexual behavior in my marriage. And I believe the same can apply to thoughts about masturbation. I ask myself this question, does this behavior bring you and your spouse closer together, or does [00:16:00] it drive you apart?
In other words, does it lead to connection or division? That’s it. That’s a test. It is an application of Jesus’s teaching On the Sermon on the Mount. You’ll know the tree by the fruits. A good tree won’t bring forth bad fruit and a bad tree can’t bring forth good fruit. Another way to look at it is, masturbation is like money. Is money good or evil? Well, it depends on how you spend it.
So I think this framework can be applied to all other questions you might have. Not just masturbation sex toys, role play, dirty talk, different sex positions, incorporating BDSM or whatever things that, you have questions about. So let’s get a little more specific and apply this framework as it pertains to masturbation.
Here are some ideas that I have where I can see where masturbation can drive a couple apart when it’s used to avoid intimacy with your spouse,
or keeping it completely secret and building [00:17:00] walls of shame. Around your own sexuality and how you feel about yourself or turning to masturbation instead of working through sexual issues in your marriage. In other words, using it to avoid things that actually need to be dealt with right now in your relationship or using it with pornography or fantasies that take your focus away from your spouse and building your marriage.
Such as thinking of the neighbor or imagining in detail a sexual encounter with someone other than your spouse. I think those will drive you apart as a couple. And here’s some ideas I have where masturbation can actually bring you closer together as a couple. For example, learning about your own body so that you can communicate better about pleasure with your spouse, exploring together as a couple what feels good.
Enjoying sexual pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Using it as a tool for self-discovery so that you know how to, you know, tell your spouse what you like and don’t like, or helping yourself become [00:18:00] more comfortable and at peace with your own sexuality. Do you see the difference between those two? It’s not the act itself, it’s the intention.
It’s the energy, it’s the why, it’s the outcome of the act.
I want you to consider this scenario of a committed married couple. They’re in bed, they’re enjoying each other. Does it really matter whose hands is on? Whose genitals? Or imagine this scenario, a couple, they’re apart for an extended period of time. Maybe it’s work or military service and so on. So they can use maybe phone sex or FaceTime sex, or maybe they just wanna experience some sexual pleasure for pleasure’s sake on their own without their spouse, to keep the feeling of connection in their marriage alive.
Or consider the story of a wife that in the morning, she woke up her husband and she said, Hey, by the way, we had wonderful sex last night while you were asleep. And it’s pretty hot, right? It’s used to [00:19:00] build connection. She used masturbation while her husband was asleep too. Bring her closer to him so you can see how there’s different uses for, it’s how you use it, I think, determines if it’s helpful or harmful for your relationship.
Now let’s take a research perspective. I wanna share something fascinating. I discovered
This was a study published in the peer reviewed journal, the Journal of Sex Education and Therapy. In 1991, the researchers recruited 82 married women in their study, and the women were assessed using standard assessments relating to marital and sexual satisfaction across seven different criteria. Then they divided the groups into two camps.
The woman who reported repeatedly experiencing an orgasm through masturbation. And the second group, those that have not, these are women who have not experienced an orgasm through masturbation. And here’s the fascinating thing that they found. The woman who masturbated scored significantly higher in [00:20:00] six of the seven areas of marital happiness compared to women who don’t masturbate.
Now, I don’t know if this is correlation or causation, and it could just be that woman who tend to be more comfortable with their sexuality are more likely to masturbate and therefore have a happier marriage, or maybe it’s other way around. They use masturbation to help them become more comfortable with their sexuality, which led to a happier marriage.
And in other words, there could be a chicken and egg scenario here, and I’m not making any conclusions about that, but here’s the connection that I do make. There is something powerful about being comfortable and at peace with your own body and sexuality and that comfort and self knowledge that comes from knowing how your body functions.
How pleasure works in your body can definitely not only benefit your marriage, but lead to greater marital satisfaction. Think about it this way. How in the world do you think a new bride can guide her new husband? They’re both [00:21:00] inexperienced sexually. How is she to communicate how she wants to be touched in ways that feel amazing?
If she doesn’t even know how her own body operates yet, it doesn’t make sense. How would you guide your spouse to touch you in ways that feel amazing if you don’t know what feels amazing in the first place? Many people, especially women, need time and space to explore their own bodies to understand what brings them pleasure.
And this isn’t about being selfish. I mean, it could be indulgent, but that’s not the intent here. It’s about learning how to become a better partner in bed. When you understand your own arousal patterns, your sensitive spots, what kind of touch and pressure works for you, you become capable of much clearer communication with your spouse.
You can guide him, show him, and teach him what you’ve learned about yourself, and that’s not taking things away from your marriage, that’s investing in your marriage. And this isn’t just applies to women. It applies to men too. In fact, I have a course on my site teaching men how they [00:22:00] can learn how to develop the capacity to have multiple male orgasms.
This course walks you through six weeks of mindfulness practices to build the skill and awareness to know how to direct your sexual energy. But this process involves a lot of self-knowledge, some self-stimulation, some masturbation involved in the process. The self-discovery and sexual skills you gain through this process can then not only bless her life, but bless her marriage too.
But here’s what’s happening in a lot of marriages. Instead of this kind of healthy to self discovery, there’s a lot of secrecy and shame and suppression and repression of their, of their own sexual being. One partner feels guilty about their body’s natural responses, their body’s natural sexual urges, so they.
Stuff, their sexuality, they hide it even from themselves and their spouse. And then they wonder why they’re not as connected in their marriage. Uh, ’cause they’ve cut off this ability to be great [00:23:00] sexual partners with their spouse. Here’s the truth, shame is the enemy of intimacy when you’re ashamed of your own sexuality.
You can’t be fully present with your spouse. You can’t communicate openly. You can’t explore and play and discover together. What if, instead of shame and secrecy, couples approach this with openness and curiosity, what if you could say to your spouse, Hey, I wanna understand how my body works better so that I can be a better partner for you.
Can we explore this together? What if masturbation became not a shameful solo activity, but a tool for mutual discovery and deeper intimacy in your marriage? Some couples find that exploring their own bodies together side by side, openly without shame actually increases intimacy and creates incredible connection.
Let me share, what one couple wrote to me recently. This is what she said. It. One of the challenges my husband and I faced was the idea around [00:24:00] masturbation. It’s personal and controversial, especially in a religious marriage. So we had a lot of shame, guilt, and silence around this topic as we listened to the Get Your Marriage On Podcast and learned from the Intimately US app.
We began to have conversations around what masturbation meant to us. We decided it was time we both became more explorative in our own bodies so that we could share with each other how we liked to be touched and what felt good to us. Sometimes it was during sexy time together, other times on our own, and we would just share our experiences.
We began feeling more confident in sharing our own sexual discoveries with each other. We realized it didn’t matter really whose hands were where, or whose hands touched what, as long as it was creating an intimate experience together, and it did to help us overcome our fear of masturbation, we decided one night to lay next to each other, but we would use a toy on ourselves until orgasm.
This was so connecting [00:25:00] for us and the freedom of not having shame, judgment or guilt,
but rather this ownership of our own sexuality that we can now share with each other helped us heal and feel more open to exploring our own and each other’s bodies. So here’s the questions I want you to consider. Not for me to answer, but maybe you think about it, maybe pray about it and definitely discuss with your spouse.
Number one, are there aspects of my sexuality where I still experience shame? Two. If so, how does a shame impact our marriage? Three, would my spouse and I benefit from better understanding our own bodies and desires? Four. In what ways do I tend to repress my sexuality? In what ways do I become indulgent in it?
Are there healthier ways for me to bridal direct and be more integrated with sexuality? And number five, could open honest communication about sexuality, including self discovery, bring us closer together. I’m not telling [00:26:00] you what to decide. I’m just inviting you to think more deeply about what would truly honor your marriage and bring you and your spouse closer together.
Now, maybe after considering all this, you decide masturbation isn’t right for your marriage based on your values and beliefs, and that is completely valid, but I hope you’ll consider whether shame and secrecy around sexuality or serving your marriage as well. Maybe the answer isn’t about changing your behavior.
Maybe it’s about changing how you communicate about sexuality, how you approach and regard your own body, and how you create safety for intimate conversations with your spouse. In conclusion, remember, the goal isn’t to be right about masturbation. The goal is to build the most intimate, connected, and joyful marriage possible.
Sometimes that means questioning assumptions that we have never questioned. A lot of these might be traditions that have been passed down generation to generation. Sometimes it might [00:27:00] be having a conversation with your spouse that you’ve always been afraid to bring up. And sometimes it means getting comfortable with aspects of ourselves and our sexuality that we’ve kept hidden in shame for a long time.
Whatever you decide about this topic, I encourage you to decide together with honesty and openness, focused on what will serve your marriage best. Now, if you want more resources for having these kinds of honest conversations about sexuality and marriage. Check out our Intimately US app where we provide tools and frameworks for navigating sensitive topics like this.
Together, you’ll find the link in the description below. Now, if you and a spouse want professional help in creating safety for deeper intimacy and communication, or you wanna go fast instead of, and have someone guide you step by step through the process, our coaching program is designed specifically for couples ready to go deeper, and all those details are at Get Your Marriage on.com.
Thank you for listening. Now next [00:28:00] week you’ll hear an interview I did with a headliner of a guest. This popular public figure has agreed to come on the Get Marriage on podcast she has some great ideas on marriage and intimacy you won’t wanna miss. So be sure to hit the subscribe button in your favorite podcast player so you don’t miss out on it.
Thanks again for listening and remember, go get your marriage on.
