During our second year of marriage, my wife and I lived back to back. We had moved to the Twin Cities so she could attend her Masters of Nursing program, and I picked up a job tending bar to pay for our (then) small monthly bills.

The program was intense, demanding late nights of study and long days of classes and practicum, which left us little time together. That and my meager income didn’t allow for many dates, since even grabbing takeout would blow our budget. Between the two, it seemed that our lives were a recipe for stress and anxiety, which isn’t exactly the best thing for a young marriage.

Arousal is normally a source of great shame for many, yet the response of being aroused by beauty is a stunning act created by God, calling us to the beauty of heaven. Pornography has caused us to demonize something potentially glorious. When arousal controls you, the problem is not your arousal itself; it’s your choices. We must learn to enter into our fear of beauty with integrity, boundaries, and courage.

When facing my deepest shame and terror, I had to answer my deepest question and greatest fear: Am I a good man despite the evils I have perpetrated?

Halfway up the verdant mountainside of the Sentinel by the Sea (a hill by comparison to the Rockies, but glorious by Irish standards as it rises from the North Atlantic) my wife Susie looked back at me, and I saw a familiar gleam in her eyes. Though she was raised in a flat place, Susie has the soul of a peak-bagger—a term we use in Colorado in reference to those people who aim to reach the summit of as many mountains as their legs will carry them up.

Our buddy Dan Allender and his friend Tremper Longman III wrote a book on sex called God Loves Sex. We do too, and we love the book. So we asked Dan to write the first “sex” article for And Sons. Better him than us.

What would a magazine for men be without some regular conversation about women, or The Woman, or beauty, or the waterfall called relationship?

(Long, I-just-don’t-know-if-we-can-get-that-bent-wheel-off-the-car kind of pause men are familiar with.) Where to begin? Where to pick up with the dilemma? While we will give two helpful hints for navigating the whitewaters of Eve, we’re not going to start with the girl.