Defrauded

There is a word in the Bible for what is happening in your marriage, and no one has ever said it to your face. Paul uses the Greek verb apostereo twice in his first letter to the Corinthians, eighteen verses apart - once for commercial theft (1 Cor 6:8) and once for spouses withholding sex from each other (1 Cor 7:5). The same verb. The same letter. The same moral category.

In Paul's framework, sexual withholding inside marriage is theft. And theft, in Scripture, is sin.

Defrauded is the book Christian men have been waiting forty years for their pulpits to preach. It names the wound: that what is happening in many evangelical marriages - the slow drift from intimacy into roommate cohabitation, the affection without intent, the indefinite postponement of the conversation no one wants to have - is not a personality difference, not a season, not a temperament gap. It is a specific biblical category that the apostle Paul addressed directly and that the modern church has been too uncomfortable to teach.

Written for the deprived spouse - most often, though not exclusively, the husband - this book names the pattern, describes the cost to the deprived spouse honestly (identity, sleep, faith, friendships, numbing), describes the cost to the other spouse with equal compassion (responsive desire, purity-culture hangover, unnamed trauma, the exhaustion she has carried alone), then puts the Bible under all of it: 1 Corinthians 7 without the softening, Proverbs 5 with the verse the church skips, the Song of Solomon read as intended, and the Greek of apostereo.

This is not a book that gives husbands permission to demand. The right Paul names is the right to be given to, not the right to take. Marital coercion is never authorized by this argument or any argument. What this book does authorize is the naming - the long-deferred conversation, the moment a man finally says aloud what has been wordless for years, in words his wife can hear.

If you have been carrying this without language, the language is in this book.