Why You Need Intimacy in Your Marriage (An Interview Granted Pastor Chuks Nduka By Mercy Ekah of Thisday Newspapers)

“There isn’t enough time”. This has been the common excuse given by so many married couples that lack intimacy in their marriage. Wives and husbands are entreating that they are so overwhelmed with the demands of work and children that they simply cannot create any space to share intimate moments with their partner.
The result is often an increasing sense of disconnection that gets expressed as problems with communication, disagreements over finances, parenting conflicts and insufficient sex.

The truth is, intimacy is not what happens between the sheets. Intimacy means fostering a warm, friendly, informal atmosphere that makes it easy to share mutual interests, habits or affections.

Intimacy with your spouse should be the breath of your relationship. Yes, intimacy should include physical touch and carnal pleasure, but it must also be a core value that leads you to a deeper understanding of your partner.

By improving the sense of connection, feelings of trust and mutual respect typically increase. Once those cornerstones are in place, it is remarkable how much easier it becomes to resolve conflicts of any nature.

It was in recognition of this fact that Founder, Breach Repairers Assembly, Pastor Chuks Nduka came up with a yearly event tagged, “Couples’ Day Out”, couples are encouraged to develop intimacy in their marriages.

This year’s education held penultimate Sunday in Surulere Lagos featured raffle draws, renewal of vows, couples' game and lots more.  Overall winner of the couples' game won a king sized family bed donated by Gaziba Furniture while others also won other mouth watering consolation prizes and gift items were made available for all participants.

Explaining what informed his decision to venture into such, the initiator of the Couples’ Day Out, Pastor Chuks Nduka said he got the mandate seven years ago to talk to people in the secondary schools and undergraduates in the universities with the main objective to drive purpose as well as to raise a new generation of Nigerian youths that are purpose driven and know their mandates in God as well as to build the right leadership - positive leadership believing that tomorrow’s leaders are today’s youths.

“We believe that if we must impact the leadership at the top, we must start grooming a new generation of Nigerian youths that are purpose driven “, he noted.

However, in process of doing this, Nduka realised that a few of those youths he had come in contact with were into drug addiction, cultism and all sorts vices and as he traced their background, he realised that their family line stories were very ugly and negative.

“Some of their parents were not in agreement and the vices they got into was as result of rebelling against their homes and they expressed the wish to us that some of the things we talked to them about should be told to their parents. They told us that we needed to do things to bring the homes to together and that once their parents were together, what we were saying would be more meaningful and that informed our beginning to call for family meetings”, Nduka recalled.

Speaking further, the cleric who is of the view that the right couple create the right family and the right family is the right society said, “We began with couples, healing marriages and in the process bringing young people together and over time we began to celebrate family meetings like today.  We try to create in them the right foundation, believing that the right family is the right society.”

He said the yearly competition, which is totally free for all couples, is open to any body and not necessarily members of the Breach Repairers Assembly, adding, “for us, it is just a game to spice up the love in a home.“

Nduka strongly believes that s a couple, when you nurture your intimacy, you will have a union that is happier, healthier, and filled with surprises while you get to know your best half a little better gather insight into each other’s interests outside of the bedroom and “then you might be surprised at what happens once the door is closed.”

He said, “For us we just fell that a healthy society begins with a health family, that has been our discovery for the past seven years. We have found out that a lot of youths do not have the right foundation from the home front and that is why they go out there rebelling against the society because they are angry with the parents at home and that is why we seize any opportunity that comes our way to gather families and discuss the way out. “

Nduka explained further that the major lesson of the whole affair was to educate couples on intimacy. “It will shock your to realise that in the city of Lagos for every proper couple programme I do, when I ask couple to take inventory of the quality time that they share together, it is not more than six minutes a day …  they are walking in different locations, they come back home late from Lagos traffic and when they get home, somebody is watching TV while somebody is cooking. So they are never together. The only time they share together most times even within the six minutes, they are discussing the bills, so there is no intimacy. So this whole game is just to let couples learn to increase the intimacy time. We want couple to get to understand each other because we believe too that for you to formulate a healthy home, you need to start with understanding, sharing expectations as you discuss your interests and by so doing, intimacy builds.  For today’s winner, they are very close couples and they spend quality time together so that was why most of the questions that were asked, they knew them quite well.”

Overall winner of the couples’ game was Chinedu and Grace Anaje, a lawyer and businesswoman respectively who had been married for abut five years with two kids.

“We worship here at Breach Repair Assemble and this a commission that God has instructed the head pastor, Chuks to carry out. Primarily what God has called him to do is to repair homes and this is one of the programmes he does yearly to ensure that broken homes are mended in line with the word of God”, Chinedu noted.

The competition, which had over 17 contestants contending for three star prizes, saw Mr. and Mrs. Anaje emerging as the top winner of a complete bed set donated by Gaziba Furniture.

Speaking on what stood them out of all the other contenders, Chinedu said, “The essence of the competition is to measure the level of intimacy between husbands and wives and to let them know that marriage is ministry that God has ordained and that there was a purpose for which God instituted marriage. For me, this is about why this programme was organised.

The Anajes, whose absolute knowledge of each other won them the ultimate prize, said they have been opened to each other since they were married.

“If you are married to your friend, you would be opened to each other, so for me, I specially believe that I married somebody who is my friend and lover and that leads to such openness. There is nothing hidden between us.  For example a lot of men do not allow their wives access to their phones but for me, my wife can do whatever she likes with my phone and that is the level of intimacy that we have between each other.  If you don’t have that level of intimacy, it means that there is crack in that marriage and before you know, it becomes a big one that would be too difficult to amend”, Chinedu noted further.

Mr. & Mrs. Ifeanyi Odoemena and Mr. &Mrs. Austin Ihemanma won the second and third place prizes respectively.

Speaking with THISDAY at the event, the guest speaker of the day, Dr. (Mrs.) Nkem Okoro said, “I am always excited any time family is given prominence and every opportunity people have to encourage couples to remain in their marriages and have very happy marriage; and that is exactly what has been done today - enhancing love between husbands and wives.

Okoro who spoke on Enriching Marital Sex, focused on how couple can have exciting sexual life in their marriage, taking them through the foundation of sex, which she said is ordained by God.

“It is God’s idea right from the beginning in the Garden of Eden at creation. The creation of reproduction is also sexual activity because they have to meet sexually to have children. So you can see that sex is God’s idea and God ordained it, so sex is God’s gift of God for mankind but He wants it to be within the concept of marriage. Anything outside marriage in relation to sex is sin. So we teach couples to have it in the best way because we noticed that before marriage, a lot of people feel the appeal for sex but immediately they are married the devil sets in and they don’t even have time for sex again”, she explained.

She said therefore that her message aimed at rekindling sexual interest between couples and improve on the frequency of their sex life. “We have noticed that sex is linked to so many issues like insomnia but is quality sex, orgasm will result and there is a hormone called oxytocin that is released during the process which is ten times powerful than Velum 5 to stimulate good sleep, relaxation and the rest of it,” she added.

In a nutshell, she educated the congregation on recreation, sex techniques and actions to take to make it glorious in bed and during relaxation time; as well as how to enjoy after and much more, she asked couples to be thankful to each other and be grateful to God who ordained sexual life in marriage.