I was watching an episode of Friends the other night. My wife and I usually enjoy watching that show, both because its subject matter is frequently, from our moral perspective, bizarre, and because its presentation is as funny as television comedy gets.

In that episode, Chandler and Monica were approaching their wedding day. Monica saw Phoebe going through the excitement of "falling in love" with someone. Despair overtook her as she contemplated the idea of never falling in love again. And this is what struck me as most bizarre- she was in panic over the idea of sleeping with the same person for the rest of her life. Some of you may recall that, in the wake of the Jude Law fiasco, Kate Hudson made some related comments about the impossibility of monogamy.

Of all the concerns I had about marriage, that dread of sleeping with the same woman for the rest of my life was not remotely among them. I was reminded on watching that show of a dialogue in a book by Doug Wilson that perfectly captures why this is so.

"I can't imagine anything more boring than what you say God requires. Making love to only one woman for life. God! That's like buying one record and taking it home and playing it over and over and over again."

"I'm afraid your analogy is a faulty one. It is not like buying one record, it is like buying one instrument and learning how to play it. If you are committed, boredom is not a danger."

That's right on the money. Every human being, and hence every husband, and every wife-- is a person, with limitless possibilities in and out of the bedroom. My wife is nowhere near a broken record, playing the same song over and over again.

No virtuoso ever spurned an instrument because he had played every beatiful combination of notes and mastered everything that instrument had to offer (certainly for other reasons, beyond the scope of the analogy). A lot of amateurs, though, have turned aside instruments out of boredom, but that thing they call "boredom" is the dull, aching feeling you get when you don't want to do hard work.

This also gives the lie to that other famous excuse for getting it on-- testing your prospective marriage partner for physical "compatibility." That is right up there among the dumbest things I've ever heard in my life. God designed us so that the effect of a physical relationship is to bind two people together, regardless of everything else going on. That's not to say everything will always go smoothly. It is to say that making it work is about practice, patience, and hard work, and not about some mysterious element of physical "compatibility." A husband and wife who show each other the love Paul describes in Ephesians 5 will not fail at applying the Song of Solomon. A husband and wife who love each other in that Christian sense will ultimately find knowing each other in the biblical sense rewarding. A couple that shares enmity over the dinner table will not find bliss in the bedroom.

The quotation I used above is from Doug Wilson's book, Persuasions: A Dream of Reason Meeting Unbelief. It is an apologetics book written in dialogue form, in which a Christian is walking along a road, and encounters unbelievers of various stripes. It is sort of a Pilgrim's Progress-type book, but centered around the encounters, and not the journey.

Here another gem from that same chapter:

"It is a common misperception that opposition to the perversion of a thing is the same as opposition to the thing itself. But of course the idea is absurd."

"How is it absurd?" Randy asked.

"If someone wanted to draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa, would that be an act of vandalism?"

"Of course it would."

"If you had the opportunity to stop such an act, would you?"

"Certainly."

"Would you step in as a friend of art or as an enemy of it?"

"As a friend."

"But suppose the vandal reviled you as an enemy of all that is beautiful. How would you answer him?"

"I would not need to answer him. The accusation is absurd."

"Exactly so. Absurd is the right word. And if you have understood the argument, you will stop accusing Christians of being the enemy of the very thing they desire to protect. Sexual immorality destroys a very great gift of God. Immorality is vandalism."