Answer
In this counseling answer:
“Thus, it is going to take time for him to learn how to satisfy his wife because driving her machine also involves looking at the road signs instead of just letting her do things to him and having a car wreck. He learned to drive, I assume, so he can learn to drive your body mad in bed, too!”
Wa ’Alaikum Salaam my dear sister in Islam,
You (or, rather, your husband) can try a few more things before the divorce.
First, your husband needs to ask Allah (swt) to help him (if he hasn’t already). Your husband is dealing with learning how to be a man. This is enlightenment which only comes from Allah (swt). Figuring out how to be a man is, by definition, what it is to be a man.
Don’t get me wrong; your husband should ask humans too, in particular men who have similar issues. However, he should ask other people AFTER he asks Allah (swt) because the challenge which he faces is about being a man. He needs to ask his Creator what He is demanding of him in creating him a male, In Sha’ Allah.
Next, your husband needs to thank Allah (swt) for gifting him with you. Then, he should tell Allah (swt) that he is very curious as to how to deal with his gift. Allah (swt) does not give us beyond our ability to deal, and Allah does not abandon us. In reality, your husband is ahead of the game. Most men wish they had what he has! Your husband just needs to figure out what to do with it – how it works and how to work it (and you are not an ‘it’, please do not misunderstand my meaning!)
From my knowledge, the first way to use this gift is to get the right perspective on it. The fulfillment of his desire in bed follows the same paradigm as fasting; when he feels hunger, he can’t eat—until he can. THEN, he goes for it. Some men suspend their need (to eat and to cum) by thinking about other things which distract them from what is tempting them. But it has to not turn him off either to the point when he loses his erection (then, he won’t be able to please you for the same reason but a different path). However, that technique is a band-aid. The real solution is recognizing what is going on in sex other than “calisthenics”, and other than love even. Once he gets that, his body will follow automatically.
Just like when we fast. When we value the ibaadah of fasting more than we value eating, that makes our fast easier—because we want ibaadah more than we want to fulfill our bodies’ desires. You actually desire to fast more than you desire to eat no matter how tempting the food is or how hunger you are. Your desire to please Allah (swt) is greater than your desire to eat. You may have to nap to reach your goal, or you may have to go shopping to distract yourself from your bodily desire. But those strategies are fine (even though they are band-aids) as long as you want to fast more than you want to eat.
So, what is sex really other than a home-workout which burns tons of calories? What I am about to say may sound strange, so bear with me until you get to the end of my explanation: sex is a kind of war. But, it is a good, innocent, healthy war. It is called the battle of the sexes. To do this good war, a man needs to know what is being done to him by his wife. He needs to realize that his emotional strength is being tested (by means of sexuality) in order to see if he will be a good provider/protector. It is subconscious, so if you did not know that you are doing that, you are normal.
When we try to please our husbands with our bodies, sometimes we recognize that we are trying to drive him mad with desire for us, but a lot of times we don’t. Making him crazy for us makes us feel confident in ourselves. It makes you feel secure with him, feeling that you are a worthy wife and that he will keep you around to protect you and provide for you.
But, most of the time we are not aware of his feelings as we are lost in our own desires. Most of the time, all of us (male and female) just want what we want. We don’t think about what the other person is feeling, or why they are feeling it, or what it all means.
So, one of the first things a husband needs to figure out is what is being done to him in bed, what physical beauty is for, subconsciously. A woman uses her body to see how strong her man is. She wants to see if he will be a good provider and protector—stronger than what she can do for herself, by herself. In other words, if she is stronger than he is, he is of little use to her as a man. I am not talking about physical strength; I am talking about emotional strength!
All that to say, if a man can view sex with his wife as an innocent, good, and healthy war instead of as sex, this way of thinking will stimulate within him something very different in reaction to her physical beauty. It will stimulate thoughts which will not make him cum, not succumb—because in war, that is what you have to do to win. In fact, he will feel like doing the opposite of cumming: it will make him want to hold out because that is how you win wars – and that is how testosterone works.
Testosterone dulls feelings, be it feelings of pain or anything else, to the point of making a person’s feelings almost nothing. Testosterone drives men to do battle and make them want to stay in battle, despite the pain. In a real war, the feeling dulled is a pain, so you can keep fighting. However, in the battle of the sexes, it dulls the sensations which would make you not able to deal with that, which would defeat you in bed: desire. When men realize what their wife is (subconsciously) doing to him in bed (a battle), his wife cannot get the better of him because that awareness stimulates in him his warrior spirit. Instead of him being in fun mode, he is in battle mode—a completely different headspace, one that makes him strong instead of the opposite.
Another important way in which a person, not just a man, gains strength in life is by means of oversight. In other words, a woman needs a man who is like a good driver. I mean like the driver of a car. When we drive a car, we cannot be one-trick-ponies. We have to have oversight—great oversight. In order to manage all the things that go on when we drive, we need to keep our car on the road properly, deal with on-coming traffic, lane-changers, pedestrians, bicycles, lights, stop signs, kids screaming, cell phone ringing, police and ambulance sirens, etc. If we only see one or two of those things and fail to see all, we will have an accident, and it could be massively expensive and/or deadly—as your husband’s problem is now threatening to kill your marriage.
It takes time to learn to drive a car because we have to learn to see all those things and coordinate them, all at the same time, instantaneously. Thus, it is going to take time for him to learn how to satisfy his wife because driving her machine also involves looking at the road signs instead of just letting her do things to him and having a car wreck. He learned to drive, I assume, so he can learn to drive your body mad in bed, too! Tell him to lift his head up and look around to see the road signs. He is probably afraid to look up because men’s sexuality is visual. He needs to look up because it is a battle. When he looks up, he will be able to avoid being blind-sided by your beauty, unexpectedly, taking him unaware, off guard, and defeated!
If he starts to read your road-signs, he will be reading your sexual prowess as not for him but as the training tool for him to figure out how to be a man. Subconsciously, you will raise the bar (a thing which he should love, not hate), until you can’t anymore, which means you will cum—first. He will glory in his superiority (a thing which men love to do), but he will not be glorying in his superiority over you. He will be glorying in his superiority over his own base carnal desires, his lower self. However, if he continues to see your physical beauty as something created only for his pleasure and not as the learning tool as it is, your marriage will continue to go downhill.
If this fails (or even as band-aid), there is a topical cream which numbs sensation(s): Lidocaine, also known of as xylocaine and lignocaine. Your husband can put this cream on under a prophylactic (aka: condom or rubber). Do not use it without a prophylactic because then it will numb your sensations too if it makes contact with your birth canal, and that is not what you want.
May Allah (swt) help you and make it easy for you to defeat Shaitan in his efforts to destroy yet another marriage.
Salam,
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