How to take your ex out of sex.

This post is the sequel to my first blog about sex: “How to have your best sex, ever.” Enjoy!

June 25, 2011. It was five days before our six year anniversary. My  boyfriend and I sat on my bed in the apartment we shared and called our relationship quits.

I cried, he didn’t. He left, I stayed.

It was the first night in years that I slept alone. When he walked out of my room and shut the door, he took a part of me with him. My whole world went into a downward spiral. My body craved the sex that I had allowed it to have. Food tasted like dirt in my mouth.  I lost weight and cried, everyday. I knew I had made a mistake.

The mistake wasn’t him walking out of my bedroom door. That was the ending to a chapter of my life that should have ended much earlier. The mistake happened in April of 2010 when I gave him the most precious gift two people can give to each other: their bodies.

Most often, sin doesn’t present itself as a monster barging through your front door demanding attention. Sin comes wrapped in a small present with a bow and pretty wrapping. For me, it started with holding hands and making out … going on vacations together and spending the night at his house … doodling his last name after my first. It took five years for us to give in to the “monster” wrapped in a present and it happened in an instant.

I had no regrets. Why would I? I just had sex with the man I planned on marrying. But, what I didn’t realize was one thing that would change everything. The man I was supposed to marry was halfway across the world. Not the man laying naked beside me to whom I had just given my body.

I had “awakened love before its time” (Song of Songs 2:7) and I had to deal with the consequences of my actions. I had to give back my “life pen” to God and allow Him to re-write the story that I had royally screwed up.  I came to him with ashes and tears and he turned them into a love story that I never could have imagined.

But, before that story could be written, I had to allow God to heal me from the choices I had made which he promises to do so in His word. Ephesians 1:7 says, “Because of the blood of Christ, we are bought and made free from the punishment of sin. Because of His blood, our sins are forgiven. His loving-favor to us is so rich.”

This passage doesn’t mean that because I am a Christian, I get a “free pass” to do whatever I want. It means that, when I do sin, Jesus’ blood will wash me white as snow when I repent. Sin will have no hold on me. God will throw my sin into the depths of the sea (Micah 7:19)! Because of Jesus’ perfect sacrifice, my decision to have sex before marriage would be redeemed through Him. There is nothing I could do to “make right” my sin. It is only through Jesus, that my blemished self is washed white as snow (Isaiah 1:18).

God redeemed and restored my spirit the moment I cried out to him to wash me clean. However, the washing of my mind, body, and emotions took years.

Picture a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Before it was a sandwich, it was two very distinct, separate things. There was peanut butter on one piece of bread and jelly on the other. It’s not until you put them together that it becomes a PB&J. Lets pretend you taste the PB&J and you don’t like it. You want to have only a peanut butter sandwich. If you pull a part the sandwich, there will be jelly stuck to the peanut butter side and vice versa. It can never be two distinct items, again.

The same concept can be said about sex with another person … however, on a magnified scale. When two people have sex, every part of them collides with full force: their mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual beings. They become intertwined with each other in a beautiful, magnificent way that only God could have created. Pulling that twine a part will undoubtedly be messy and it’s going to be painful.

I didn’t understand this twine until I tried to separate myself from my partner.

As He always does, God healed me and renewed my spirit through time. During that time, I waited. I waited for my future husband that God had hand-chosen for me to marry. We waited to have sex until we were wed. Every time my husband and I have sex, the remembrances of my ex become a distant memory because I am having sex during the time God intended and with the man he chose for me.

“But, Laura. Would you buy a car without test-driving it? What if the sex sucks and we’re already married?” I hear this a lot. If you are currently thinking this, I want you to walk to your bathroom, stick your head in the toilet and push down the flusher. Afterwards, drive as fast as you can to your girlfriend or boyfriend’s house and break up with him or her. Because you are NOT the best person for them and you do NOT need to continue with this relationship.

If I sound harsh, good. That’s my intention.  If sex sucks or is awkward and uncomfortable with that person, guess what? You learn and grow together as a married couple. Marriage was intended by God to be a beautiful safety net where you can be vulnerable with your spouse and grow together spiritually, mentally, physically, and emotionally in the bedroom. Sex is not supposed to be something shameful but something to celebrate with your spouse. 

“To have sex” is the first commandment given by God! Genesis 1:28a says “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.” So, why would God tell us to have sex (enough sex to fill the earth!) then slap rules around it and limit our enjoyment? Those “rules” (have sex within marriage) and “limitations” (have sex only with your spouse) is to enhance our sexual pleasure. WHAT.

God knew that if we shared our bodies with multiple people, our very beings would be calloused to the sanctity of the act. Sex would become commonplace instead of a holy union between two people. But, when we exercise sex the way God intended, our marriages are strengthened and we are a spiritual force against Satan.

Satan hates you. Satan hates your marriage. Satan wants you to look elsewhere for sex. He knows that when we as Christians have sex with our spouse and don’t give in to the temptations of this world, we are exemplifying Christ and the church.

I digress.

The fact that Satan hates your marriage and what to do about that is a topic for another blog. For now, I want to offer you advice that took a broken-hearted girl out of a state of misery and into a state of joy and freedom.

If you want to take your ex out of sex, cry out to the Lord in prayer and meditate on the Book of Life (the Bible). Do not give in to Satan’s condemning lies that you will never be redeemed and pure. Lastly, wait to have sex until you are married. Wait for your future spouse; pray for him or her. If you’ve already had sex before marriage, do not feel unworthy! You have not and will never mess up so much that God cannot redeem you. And, oh, what a beautiful redemption He offers.

-LMN

Markus & Laura Nielsen

two years later

August 28, 2012.

Around 2 am, I found myself staring at the computer screen and my heart was pounding out of my chest. Markus and I had talked for months about seeing each other again. But for so many months, the plane ticket prices were outrageous. The first few weeks of August I watched as the plane ticket from Denmark to Georgia slowly dropped from $1200… $1,050… $880. Knowing what I know now about how expensive a plane ticket is, I can’t believe I didn’t buy the $880 ticket right then and there. I watched the prices fall. I didn’t buy the ticket. At 2 am, after getting off work, I opened up my computer to check for the thousandth time. Staring at me like headlights from a Mack truck was a ticket that would bring Markus to Georgia for $638. I bought it without thinking another thought, without telling Markus.

The next day, I still didn’t tell my sweet Markus. He knew that the prices had gone down, but I lied. I lied to him and told him that the prices had risen again before I had bought the ticket. What he didn’t know was that in the mail was a copy of his ticket with excited hand-written scribbled words on the top: “How about a coffee date in person?” I waited a painstakingly-long ten days for him to get his letter. I didn’t even tell him he had a letter coming in the mail. The day he opened it, he was sitting at his mom’s kitchen’s table talking to her while she made dinner. Markus absentmindedly opened the letter, looked down, and seeing the copy of his flight itinerary yelled, “she bought it! she bought the ticket!!”

Coffee date in person

The 28th of August is special for me. There was something about buying the plane ticket that made our relationship real. The first two months of Skyping with M, I was waiting for it to end. Apart of me wanted it to end. I didn’t know how to do a long-distance relationship. What if we spent months talking on Skype, only to find each other awkward in person? I laugh to myself now how incredibly wrong I was. Markus fought for me more than I realized. He comforted me over Skype, promised me to take this one day at a time. He told me once that at any moment I couldn’t handle long-distance anymore, he would understand. But, the thought that helped me pass the hard time of waiting for a hug from him was this: “what if he is the best person for me and I give him up because long-distance is too hard?” I couldn’t stand the thought. I promised myself that if this relationship was to end, it wouldn’t be because I was weak. It would be because we weren’t right for each other.

I remember waiting thirty minutes in the Hartsfield-Jackson international airport lobby for Markus. Every time a 6’0″ man with light brown hair walked through the sliding glass doors my heart fell to my feet. We had already waited 4.5 months for a hug, what’s another 30 minutes? When I finally saw him walk through the glass doors with his bags in tow, I walked towards him for our first of seven airport reunions. I couldn’t believe how tall he was, how REAL he was! My sweet Markus was standing in front of me instead of standing in front of a computer screen. All of my fears of awkwardness between us faded when he took my hand as we walked to the car, talking and laughing like we had never been apart. Outside of my blue little Spark in the airport parking lot, I made a comment about our future. Markus said (ironically), “I have to do something first before I marry you, Laura.” With that, he kissed me for the first time.

Our first picture together after 4.5 months apart

The past two years have been full of laughs and tears, arguments and long talks, good times and bad. I look back on how scared I was two Augusts ago about giving this relationship a shot. Although we’ve cried many tears with being apart and missed holidays and birthdays together, what I’ve gained from long-distance is irreplaceable. Markus taught me how to be blunt with my feelings, to talk things through. We learned how to be together without being together. He showed me how if someone truly loves you, they won’t care about how much money a plane ticket is or what time it is in their homeland when you call. Ironically, we are learning everyday how to be together on the same continent instead of apart. I wouldn’t trade that for the world.

Today was spent waking up late, drinking coffee together, and having a spur of the moment lunch date at a hibachi restaurant. We played at the pool, tanned, read our books, and enjoyed eachother’s company. Markus made a homemade dinner for us and  the rest of the night will be movie night. Who knows what the next two years will bring? One day we’ll have little Danicans running around (my word for our Danish-American babies). But for now, it’s the two of us. And everyday with the two of us, is better than the last.

Jeg elsker dig, M. Tak for being min mand og bedste ven.

-lmn