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Maren and Wade have been circling the same fight for about three years.

Maren 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. When that’s in place, she can imagine wanting him. When it isn’t, the idea of sex feels like one more thing being asked of her.

Wade tells me something that sounds like the opposite. He says he can’t fully relax into the marriage until he knows Maren still wants him. He doesn’t want to feel like just a paycheck, or someone who’s around to help with the kids and fix things. He wants to know she still sees him as her husband, not just a useful partner in running a household. 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, a little more careful. The distance he creates is the exact thing that makes Maren feel less emotionally safe.

So Maren is waiting for emotional safety to produce desire. Wade is waiting for desire to produce emotional safety. Each one is standing still, waiting for the other to move first. And the marriage has been frozen in that spot for three years.

I told them on our Zoom call, neither of you is wrong. Maren is right that emotional safety feeds desire. Wade is right that feeling wanted helps him relax. 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.

Today I want to 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 you keep hoping they will. Once you stop trying to make the tension go away, something opens up.

What a paradox actually is

A paradox is two things that seem to contradict each other, where both are true at the same time.

That’s different from a contradiction. In a contradiction, one of the two things has to be false. The light is on, the light is off. Only one can be true. A paradox feels like that from the outside, but when you look closely, both halves are holding real weight. You let go of either one and you lose something true.

We live with paradoxes all day. You have to spend money to make money. The more you grip something tightly, the more likely you are to lose it. You become more yourself when you give yourself away to people you love. None of those sentences make logical sense on a first read, and all of them are true.

The trouble starts when we hit a paradox and our brain treats it like a math problem. We assume there’s a clean answer, and if we just think hard enough or try long enough, we’ll resolve it. So we pick a side. We decide safety comes first, or desire comes first. We decide it’s all grace or it’s all effort. And the moment we pick a side, we’ve broken the thing, because the truth was living in the tension between the two.

Maturity, in a lot of areas of life, is learning to hold two true things at once without collapsing one of them. That’s a skill. Most of us were never taught it.

Our faith is built on paradox

If holding two truths at once feels hard, here’s some comfort. You belong to a faith that is stacked floor to ceiling with paradox, and that is not an accident.

Jared Halverson, who teaches Ancient Scripture at BYU and hosts the Unshaken podcast, gave a whole talk on this called “Proving Polarities and Paradox.” His argument is that contraries are woven right into a life of discipleship, and that learning to live inside them is part of spiritual growth.

He uses the image of the cross. One beam runs vertical, our connection to God. The other runs horizontal, our love and care for the people around us. Discipleship, he says, is the center point where both beams meet. You can’t be so focused on your relationship with God that you neglect the people in front of you, and you can’t pour yourself out for people while ignoring God. The shape only works when both directions are held at once.

Once you start looking, the paradoxes are everywhere in the gospel. We’re saved by grace, and we’re told faith without works is dead. We’re given agency, and we’re asked to obey. We’re taught to be bold, and we’re taught to be meek. We’re in the world, not of it. We lose our life to find it.

None of those are errors in the system. They’re the system. A faith with no paradox would be a faith that asks nothing of you, because it would let you settle comfortably into one side and stop growing. The tension is what keeps stretching us.

So if you’ve ever felt like your spiritual life requires you to hold things that don’t quite fit together, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re doing it exactly right. And that same muscle, the one that lets you hold grace and effort together, is the muscle your marriage needs.

The Stockdale Paradox

There’s one paradox I bring up with individuals and couples more than almost any other, because it speaks directly to how people get stuck. It’s called the Stockdale Paradox.

Jim Collins wrote about it in his book Good to Great. He named it after Admiral James Stockdale, the highest ranking American officer held in the prisoner of war camp in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Stockdale was there for around seven years. He was tortured more than twenty times. He had no release date, no guarantee he would ever see his family again, no reason on paper to believe he’d make it out.

He made it out. And when Collins asked him how, Stockdale said something that has stuck with people ever since. He said, “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.”

Then Collins asked him who didn’t make it. And Stockdale said it was the optimists. The ones who said, “We’re going to be out by Christmas.” Christmas came and went. Then, “We’re going to be out by Easter.” Easter came and went. And Stockdale said, “They died of a broken heart.”

Sit with that for a second, because it’s stunning. The pure optimists died. Their hope had no floor under it. It was hope without honesty, and when reality didn’t match the timeline, it shattered.

So the paradox is this. You hold unwavering faith that you will prevail, and at the very same time, you look the brutal facts of your situation straight in the eye. Both. Always both.

I watch couples fail at this constantly, and they fail in two different directions.

Some couples are all faith, no facts. They tell me things will get better eventually, they don’t want to rock the boat, they’re sure it’ll work itself out. And underneath that, a sexless marriage is quietly eroding, resentment is building, and nobody will say out loud how bad it actually is. That’s the optimist in the prison camp. The hope feels nice right up until it cracks.

Other couples are all facts, no faith. They can recite every brutal detail of how disconnected they are, how long it’s been, every way the other person has let them down. They’ve confronted reality so thoroughly that they’ve lost any belief it could be different. They’ve mistaken despair for honesty.

What changes a marriage is the both. We are going to be ruthlessly honest about where our sex life actually is right now, no flinching, no pretending. And we are going to hold complete faith that it can be different, and we’re going to act like people who believe that. Maren and Wade had plenty of faith and almost no honest facts on the table. They’d been protecting each other from how bad the three years had felt. The first real movement happened when they finally said the brutal part out loud and kept the faith anyway.

The paradox of grace, and why getting it wrong is the point

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan writer, has a line in his book Falling Upward that I think about often. He says, “We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.” The failures, the falls, the times we got it wrong, those turn out to be where the real growth lived. The version of us that has it all together, that never stumbled, never actually deepens. We learn on the way down.

That’s the grace paradox. We assume strength comes from the things we do perfectly. It mostly comes from the things we got wrong and had to learn from.

Adam Grant told a story on his podcast with Brené Brown that puts this in the body. Grant was a competitive diver, and he said his coach used to tell him, “Make it feel wrong.” If you want to change a dive, the old way feels right to you, and it’s wrong. So the corrected version is going to feel wrong at first. The wrongness is the signal that you’re actually changing something. If it felt comfortable, you’d just be repeating the thing you already do.

This lands directly on marriage and on sex.

When you start relating to your spouse in a new way, it is going to feel wrong. Awkward. Stiff. Like you’re acting. When Wade starts reaching for Maren before he has proof she wants him, it feels exposed and unnatural, because his whole nervous system has been organized around waiting. When Maren starts initiating from a place of choice instead of waiting to be magically overcome with desire, it feels mechanical to her at first, almost fake.

And both of them want to read that awkwardness as evidence they’re doing it wrong. It’s the opposite. The awkwardness is evidence they’re doing something new. The old pattern feels smooth because they’ve practiced it for three years. Of course the new one feels wrong. That’s what changing feels like from the inside.

So when you try something different in your marriage and it feels clumsy, that clumsiness is not a stop sign. It’s the feeling of a stroke being corrected. Make it feel wrong, and stay with it long enough to find out it was right.

The paradox in the word “cleave”

Here’s one that hits especially close to home for those of us who were sealed in the temple.

When you were sealed, you made a covenant to cleave to your spouse. That language comes from Genesis. A man shall leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife.

Cleave is one of a small handful of English words called contranyms. That means it has two directly opposite meanings.

The first meaning is the one you probably heard in the temple. To cleave is to cling, to adhere, to stick to something so firmly that nothing separates you. In this sense, cleaving to your spouse means becoming one with them, staying attached, refusing to let anything come between you.

The second meaning is the exact opposite. To cleave also means to split, to divide, to cut in two. A butcher swings a cleaver to separate. A stone cleaves along its natural fault lines. Same word, opposite action.

Etymologically, these are actually two different Old English verbs that ended up spelled the same way. One meant to adhere. The other meant to split. They merged into one modern word, so when you make a covenant to cleave to your spouse, the word itself is holding both meanings at the same time.

So your covenant asks you to do both. You are promising to cling to your spouse, and you are promising to remain distinct enough from your spouse that there’s still a you they can cling to. If you dissolve into them completely, there is no separate self left for them to attach to. If you hold yourself so apart that you never really merge, you are not doing what the covenant asked either.

You cling and you stand apart. You become one and you stay two. The sealing covenant, at the level of the language itself, asks you to hold both.

That is not a flaw in the covenant. That is the covenant.

The paradoxes living inside your sex life

Now let me bring this all the way home, because your sex life is one of the most paradox-rich parts of your whole marriage, and most of the frustration I see comes from people trying to resolve tensions that were never meant to resolve.

Here’s the first one, and it’s the one underneath Maren and Wade. Esther Perel writes about this in Mating in Captivity. Love wants closeness, familiarity, security, knowing every inch of each other. Desire wants a little space, a little mystery, a little of the unknown. Love says come here, stay close, never leave. Desire says I want to want you, and to want you I have to be able to see you as someone slightly separate from me.

This is why couples who merge into one undifferentiated unit, who do everything together and finish each other’s sentences and have no separate self left, often watch their desire quietly disappear. They got all the closeness and accidentally smothered the spark. The paradox is that a great sexual relationship asks you to be deeply connected and a little bit separate at the same time. You hold both, or you lose the heat.

David Schnarch built a whole approach around the second half of that, what he called “differentiation.” His idea is that you have to be able to hold onto yourself while staying close to your spouse. The person who abandons themselves to keep the peace, who has no opinions, no separate desires, who just tries to be whatever the other person wants, becomes very hard to desire. There’s no one there to reach for. The paradox Schnarch points at is that you become more available for real connection the more you actually belong to yourself.

And here’s the third one. Desire is a paradox in both directions. It pulls away when you chase it, and it doesn’t show up when you assume it should just appear on its own without any cultivation. Emily Nagoski’s research is clear that for a lot of people, desire isn’t something that arrives out of nowhere and then leads to sex. It shows up in response to the right context, after things are already underway. So the person lying there trying to force themselves to feel desire, demanding it show up on command, is doing the one thing that guarantees it won’t. And the person who thinks desire should just show up without them doing anything to cultivate it is going to keep waiting, because that’s not how it works either. You have to build the context and let go of controlling the outcome. You have to want it and stop managing it at the same time.

There are more of these. Here are a few you’re probably living inside right now.

Commitment and freedom. The awareness that your spouse could walk away is part of what makes them staying meaningful. When either of you feels trapped, something in the love starts to shut down. When you both know you’re choosing this over and over, on the easy days and the hard ones, that’s when commitment becomes actual love and not just endurance.

Conflict and closeness. The couples who tell me they never fight are rarely the ones with the healthiest marriages. The couples with the healthiest marriages have learned to fight well, to raise hard things, to disagree without cruelty, and to repair afterward. The absence of conflict is often just the presence of silence, and silence in a marriage creates distance faster than almost anything else.

Giving and receiving. A lot of women in our tradition have been taught that giving is the more spiritual choice and that receiving feels selfish. So they give and give in bed and then wonder why sex has stopped feeling like something they’re actually inside of. Letting your spouse give to you, being fully present in your own pleasure, is one of the most generous things you can do for them. Withholding your enjoyment doesn’t make you a better spouse. It cuts your spouse off from the experience of loving you well.

Planning and spontaneity. Scheduling sex feels like it should kill the mood, and it’s often the thing that actually protects the space for it. Couples who insist everything should be spontaneous end up going months without connecting, because life fills up and no one makes room. The paradox is that intentional planning is what creates space for what feels like surrender.

Comfort and adventure. A lot of couples think the comfort of a long marriage is the enemy of a hot sex life. It’s actually the fuel. The safety of knowing your spouse isn’t going anywhere is exactly what makes it possible to try something new, to say the awkward thing, to ask for what you want. Without that safety, sex stays cautious. With it, sex can go places it couldn’t before.

Small things and big things. The tiny daily acts of care, the way you say goodbye in the morning, whether you look up when your spouse walks into the room, are what actually build a marriage. Grand gestures don’t compensate for years of small dismissals. The paradox is that the ordinary is the profound. You don’t need a marriage overhaul. You need to notice your spouse walking through the door tomorrow.

Vulnerability and strength. The willingness to say I’m scared, I need help, I don’t know what I’m doing here, is what makes a marriage sturdy. Couples who perform strength for each other and never let the other person see them wobble aren’t the strongest ones. They’re the loneliest ones. The same thing plays out in sex. The most confident lovers I know are the ones who can say I don’t know what you like right now, will you show me.

Acceptance and expecting growth. You have to be able to accept your spouse exactly as they are today, and at the same time believe they can grow. Those sound like opposites. They aren’t. If you withhold acceptance until they change, they feel it and stop trying, because they never feel loved for who they actually are. If you accept them so fully that you never expect anything of them, they stagnate, and you eventually resent them for not becoming more. People grow the fastest in the presence of someone who sees them clearly, loves them anyway, and still believes they have more in them.

Performing and being present. The moment you’re trying to perform well in bed, you’re not actually there. You’re watching yourself from a slight distance, checking your technique, wondering if you’re taking too long, worrying about whether your spouse is enjoying it, wondering how your body looks from that angle. That watching self is the enemy of great sex. Presence is what makes sex actually good, which means being in your body, with your spouse, not observing yourself from above. The paradox is you have to show up fully and let go of trying to be good at it at the same time. The couples I see with the best sex aren’t the most technically skilled. They’re the most present.

Do you see the pattern across all of these? Closeness and separateness. Holding on and letting go. Wanting it and not chasing it. Freedom and commitment. Conflict and closeness. Giving and receiving. Planning and surrender. Comfort and adventure. Ordinary and profound. Vulnerability and strength. Acceptance and growth. Performing and presence. Every one of them is two true things in tension, and every one of them breaks the second you try to pick a side.

What changes when you stop solving it

So I’ll tell you where Maren and Wade landed, because it wasn’t a tidy resolution. It was something better.

They stopped waiting for the other person to go first. Maren accepted that she could move toward Wade without waiting for a moment to feel perfectly emotionally safe. She knew Wade was a good choice. She generally felt emotionally safe with him. A rough day or a tough moment didn’t undo any of that. Moving toward him in those moments was part of how the connection got rebuilt, not just the reward for it. Wade accepted that he could offer warmth and steadiness before he had proof Maren wanted him, and that his steadiness was part of what made her want him, not just his reward for being wanted. They each started doing the thing they’d been waiting on the other to do. It felt wrong at first. They did it anyway.

Tessa and Heath were stuck on a different version of the same lesson. Tessa had stopped initiating altogether, because every time she tried, it felt awkward and rusty and she hated the feeling. She’d decided the awkwardness meant she was bad at it. When she reframed the awkwardness as the normal feeling of a muscle that hadn’t been used in a long time, she could tolerate it. She let it feel wrong. A few weeks in, it stopped feeling wrong, because it had become real.

None of these couples solved the paradox. You don’t solve a paradox. You learn to live inside it, and the living inside it is the whole thing.

Your faith has been training you for this your entire life. Grace and works. Boldness and meekness. Confronting the brutal facts and never losing faith. Holding on to yourself and giving yourself away. You already know how to hold two true things at once. You do it every Sunday. You can do it in your bedroom too.

If you’ve been waiting for the tension in your marriage to finally resolve so that things can get good, I’d gently offer that the tension is not the obstacle. The tension is the place where the good things actually live. Stop trying to make it go away. Step into the middle of it, where both beams cross, and build your marriage right there.

If you want help learning to hold these tensions instead of collapsing them, this is exactly the kind of work I do with individuals and couples, just hit the Get Help tab above.