Summer Quickies: Great Sex with Busy Lives

Hello. Welcome back to the Naked Marriage podcast. We are Dave and Ashley Willis, and on this podcast, we undress the truth about sex, intimacy, and lifelong love. And we are continuing in our Sexy Summer Quickies, which I hope you've been enjoying. We've been having so much fun doing these, and we are unpacking the 12 biggest questions that people have about sex, and there's a lot of them. And so today we're going to talk about a really great subject that I think a lot of us can relate to.

Yeah, yeah. And it's. I think, like, as you said, we can all relate. How do we have a great sex sex life in the midst of busy lives? You know, we're busy with kids, we're tired, A lot of us are working. You know, how do we make sex a priority when at the end of the day? So often we're just tired from. From the demands of the day. Yeah, well, we are going to talk all about that, and I think that it'll be something that encourages you and hopefully gives you some practical tips. But first, we want to tell you about an important resource. So check this out.

Busyness. I think all of us can relate to this, and in different seasons, it probably is busier than others. But so many times we get questions from people where they're like, listen, I want to have sex. I want to have a great sex life in my marriage, but I don't know how to because I'm just exhausted by the end of the day. And they'll often say, you know, we have lots of kids, and we're running our kids everywhere, and our jobs are busy, and they're, you know, we're involved at our church and we're involved in these different, you know, extracurricular activities and these volunteer activities. And so when we get to the end of the day, you know, my, like, our emotional bandwidth is just tapped out. And you know, what I would say to that is, again, and we've talked about this briefly kind of earlier on in our Sexy Summer quickie series is, again, we control our schedules, guys. Like, we control it. And I know that is so much easier said than done, believe me. Dave and I have had to monitor and adjust many times because sometimes we let our schedules control us, but that is actually something we have power over. We have the power to say no and the power to say yes. And so when it comes to sex, we have to make it a priority. And sometimes that means putting it on the calendar.

Yeah, that's so good. I saw a visual display one time I'm a kind of a visual learner. And this guy was giving a talk, and it really stood out to me. And it was about priorities and time. And he had. You maybe have seen something like this before. It's been done a few different ways. But he had this, like, big plastic jar, and he had these items on a desk. It was like. It was big rocks, little rocks, sand and water. And he took the big rocks and he put them all in the big plastic jar, and it looked pretty full. And he said, okay, is this jar full? And people would say, yes. And then he would take the little rocks and he would pour it, and they would kind of fill in the cracks between the big rocks. And he said, now, is it full? And they would say, yes. And he'd take the sand, fill it in. It would fill in the cracks that were still left, and then he would take the water and fill it in, and it filled everything else. And it was exactly enough to fit inside the jar. And then he did it in reverse. He had the big jar and he put in water first and then sand and little rocks. And the big rocks wouldn't fit at all after he put in those little things first. And he said, the big things represent the big, important parts of your life, your priorities. And if your priorities aren't being attended to first, there won't be room for them. But if you make sure those priorities are fit into your life first and then put in all the little things, the sand, the pebbles, all the smaller things around it, and it will all fit. But you have to start with the big things. And your marriage is one of those huge rocks. Your sex life in particular is one of those big rocks where you've got to say, we're prioritizing this. This isn't going to be the afterthought. This isn't going to be something at the end of a day when our jar is already full with all of the junk from the day we're going to try to jam in this rock that doesn't fit anymore, we're going to start with it, and we're going to build the day around saying, how do we put our marriage first today, even in the midst of raising kids, even with our jobs, how do we prioritize that? And if you'll make that a priority, like, I want to always put my faith first, my marriage next, my kids, work, everything else. And it's not going to always work out exactly in terms of time. You might have to go spend 10 hours at work and you're not going to have necessarily 10 hours to do other things. But in terms of our priority, you can put other things first.

It's so true. And priority really is kind of the key word here is we have to make it a priority. Make sex a priority. Everyone and everything else will take precedence, and especially when you're raising kids. I just wanna camp out on that for a minute. You know, we have four boys. We've talked about that. They're ages 15, 13, 8, and 5. And so we get how crazy it can be with raising kids. And, you know, I remember having babies and nursing those babies and then getting to the end of the day and trying to get my mind in the mode to make love. And I remember telling Dave, like, I don't feel sexy at all right now. Like, I have spit up on my shirt. I have. You know, I'm sore. You know your body is sore when you're nursing a baby.

You'd point to your shirt and say, I'm leaking breast milk.

I am literally leaking breast milk. These are working breasts right now. They don't feel sexy. You know, Like, I mean, I'm just being gut level, honest with y'. All. And it was like, I just. And he would just say, oh, you're beautiful. And he would be so patient with me, which was very key and in that season. But I knew that I needed. I couldn't just forego sex for months on end because that was gonna be detrimental to our marriage. But I think when you do have babies and even young kids, we'll tell ourselves, let's just put sex on hold for a while because I'm busy. But when we do that, those months turn into years, and before you know it, that baby is 18 and they're leaving the house, and you have an empty nest and an empty marriage, and none of us want that. Like, that's never the desire. And so my heart goes out to all of you parents out there, because I know how hard this can be. Like, sometimes it takes moving heaven and earth just to go have a little sweet mommy, daddy time.

Okay?

Like, I get it. It's not something that happens naturally all the time. And you can't be spontaneous. I mean, it's hard to have spontaneity when you have all these kids in the house. And, you know, for us, as we've shared, you know, last week, our bedroom is very close to our living room area in our house. And so when I hear kids outside the door, it literally, like, squashes my libido to nothing because I just feel Like, I feel like my privacy is being infringed, and it's totally, like, unintentional. I mean, the kids are just being kids outside the door. But it's really hard for me as just a mom to turn that off. So what I have to do is I have to make sure that we create the time and the space to bring it into our routine. And again, we have the power to make those decisions, but we can't wait. Just like Dave was saying, with that awesome image. I'd never heard that before, but we can't let it be this little rock that just ends up, oh, it doesn't fit. Like, it doesn't fit. Sorry.

It's already full. It's already full.

Yeah.

Yeah. We gotta start with the big things. And I've tried to think about that image in my life. Like, am I leaving the big things out and filling up my day with these little things that don't matter? And there's a lot of time wasters in a day. You know, we're all busy. But I find myself, even in busy seasons, realizing I squandered a lot of time today. Like, I was on social media more than I needed to be, or I was watching TV more than I needed to be. And. And in balance, those things can all be fine and good, but we can't, like, give all of our day over to these other pursuits or hobbies or whatever else and then say, oh, I'm sorry, I'm just so busy that I can't give you. There's nothing left over for you. We've got to give our spouse the best of ourselves, not our leftovers.

Right. And I just want to make this very crystal clear. I know we keep on saying sex needs to be a priority, but when it comes to sex, it is. It is a priority of the marriage. But it's not the only priority in marriage. And in order to have a great sex life, we gotta be prioritizing our relationship with our spouse, communicating with our spouse, making sure we're serving them. And we're doing our best to really. To really get to know them and to talk. And not just about shop talk, I think, with kids, you know, and you've heard us, if you've listened to this podcast any length of time, you've heard us talk about this. We can't just have conversations about the kids or about work or about finances. We need to really listen to each other and share our hearts with each other. And all of those little acts of love and those conversations enhance our sex life. And so we need to make all those things a priority because they are all those things that make a better marriage.

Yeah, it's so true. So again, sex isn't the only part, but it is an important part, and that's why we're talking about it all summer long. But you also need to prioritize all the other parts of your marriage. Get to know each other, keep growing in your relationship. Keep dating.

Laugh together.

Laugh, my goodness, laugh. It's good for the soul. And so, guys, thank you for sharing this time with us. Hopefully sharing a few laughs, but also learning something that you can apply. And I hope that the one thing you take away from this episode is just saying we want to make each other a top priority. We want to make sure that we're putting each other first and then building around that instead of putting everything else first and giving each other the leftovers. If you'll keep putting each other first, your sex life's going to thrive in other parts of your marriage, too. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for leaving reviews, guys, on these podcasts. It really does encourage us because we read them all and it helps others discover the podcast. Thanks for reaching out and connecting with us on social media. We're avanashleywillis on Instagram. You can find us by searching the word for marriage on just the word marriage on Facebook and it will take you to our marriage page and just appreciate you guys being part of this online community with us. And we look forward to hopefully seeing you at a live event real soon.

That's right. So we hope you join us next time for yet another sexy summer quickie. We'll see you then.