Revisiting “The Sex Talk You Never Got” with Sam Jolman

Last year, we had a powerful conversation with author Sam Jolman about his book The Sex Talk You Never Got—one of our most-listened-to episodes of the year. Now, Sam returns to share more about the book’s impact and to dive deeper into its themes.

This time, he and Dan explore the biblical story of Amnon and Tamar in 2 Samuel 13, a tragic account of lust, power, and sexual violence that resonates deeply with age-old struggles of the human heart.

Sam unpacks how a man’s sexuality is shaped not only by personal choices but also by the unspoken legacies of family and culture. He challenges men to move beyond a simplistic “behaving vs. not behaving” mindset and instead engage their own stories with honesty, grief, and healing.

Their conversation also examines the cycle of violence—how Absalom’s attempt to avenge Tamar only leads to further destruction. True healing requires humility, repentance, and a willingness to confront painful histories.

This conversation is a call to courage: to name harm, seek healing, and embrace a sexuality that honors and protects rather than consumes and destroys.

Please note that this episode contains discussions of sexual development and sexual abuse, including rape, and may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

Related Resources:

• Be sure to check out “The Sex Talk You Never Got” by Sam Jolman, available wherever books are sold.
• Listen to our 2024 conversation with Sam Jolman about “The Sex Talk You Never Got” on the Allender Center Podcast.
• Join a Recovery Week: Are you ready to step into a deeper journey of healing? Recovery Week is a transformative, holistic experience designed to create a safe, relational space where survivors of sexual abuse can process their stories with care and courage. Here, you’ll be invited to engage the deep impact of your past while discovering a path toward restoration, connection, and self-compassion. Take the next step toward healing. To learn more, visit theallendercenter.org/recovery-week.

About Our Guest:

Sam Jolman (MA LPC) is a trauma therapist with over twenty years of experience specializing in men’s issues and sexual trauma recovery. Being a therapist has given him a front row seat to hear hundreds of men and women share their stories. His writing flows out of this unique opportunity to help people know and heal their stories, and find greater sexual wholeness and aliveness. He received his master’s in counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary and was further trained in Narrative Focused Trauma Care through the Allender Center at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. Sam lives in Colorado with his wife and three sons. Together they enjoy exploring the best camping spots in Colorado in a pop-up camper. Sam goes to therapy, loves fly fishing, and can often be found trying to catch his breath on the floor of his local CrossFit gym. Read more from Sam at his website, on Substack, or your favorite social media.

Episode Transcript:

Dan: I have really good news and I have sad news, and the sad news isn’t, shall we say, catastrophic, but I’ll just say I am so sad that today my colleague and dear friend Rachael Clinton Chen is in the middle of what I would call a two or three-year-old meltdown, epic meltdown. That I guess just wouldn’t be the sound that most of you would want to hear as the good news is that I get the privilege of being with Sam Jolman. And Sam, welcome again to another discussion on sexuality.

Sam: Dan, thank you for having me. Of course, we’re both missing Rachael as she is having her nervous system hijacked.

Dan: Yeah. As we said earlier, I’m so grateful that when my grandchildren who don’t generally at this point have what I would call epic meltdowns, but when they come close to something like that, I just sort of look at ’em and go, look, you’re not my kid. I’ll sustain you until I can get you to one of them. But you’re as well, just a tad beyond that as well.

Sam: Yes, yes. We are in the second birth of the teen years, which have a different version of emotional regulation, which is not dissimilar.

Dan: No, it’s not. In many ways as you age and you get into your seventies, the meltdowns between Becky and I have a certain resonance to toddler and adolescent as well. So just to say affective regulation is not our primary focus, but it’s a good beginning to say. We’re going to be talking about again, your fabulous book, The Sex Talk You Never Got: Reclaiming the Heart of Masculine Sexuality. It’s doing well. At least many, many of my clients and friends have encountered the work, not only on behalf of their own children or grandchildren, but it’s a way of reentering what most of us again did not get. And even if we “know” some of the information, there is something so restorative in reading your work. So before we jump in, I just, how are you and how is the book doing and how are you experiencing people’s response to what you have written?

Sam: Yeah, it has been a wild ride. I’m trying to hang on to the wild mustang of it all, which is the gift as a writer, and as you know, the greatest part of the whole profession of being a writer is when somebody meets God or experiences transformation in your words, there’s nothing more humbling and sacred about that. So getting people’s response and hearing stories has been just an overflow of gratitude. So I’m very honored that God is meeting people in those pages.

Dan: I love what you just said because having done this for a few years, I don’t think there’s anything that surprises me more than when somebody says, I was reading something you wrote, and especially when it’s on vacation, it was on the beach reading, and I’m like, you’re reading The Wounded Heart on the beach. Oh my goodness. I have many other good novels I’d recommend, but still the honor of somebody taking the labor that we do virtually, of course in private and it becomes then public. So just any one story that comes to mind that you’ve heard, I’d love to just have you share it.

Sam: Yeah. There was a father who decided he was going on a road trip with his son, and his son was, I think late teens, like 19, and he decided to do the audio book with his son as a platform for a conversation to actually have sex talk with his son. And so they spent 19 hours listening to the audio book and stopping it and talking, listening more. And I mean, just what an honor beyond honors, right, to be, yeah, the context for that personal of a conversation. And the son ended the car ride the road trip by saying, dad, I think I officially had the longest sex talk you ever got. So that was, well, it was just so fun to hear.

Dan: The book was out on the table, and my son and his daughter and son were upstairs in my office where we have a ping pong table and they saw the book, and Andrew, my son, picked it up and looked at it and immediately said, wow, I bet you learned a lot from what you tried to do with me. I said, I did. I learned so much. And he goes, well, I can tell you what you did was a lot of hard work on both our parts. And I’m like, oh, just even that was enough of a sense of honor. But it’s such an important beginning to talk about the realities that we’re inviting our audience into today. So want to be not so much a shift, but when we talk particularly about the war that men face, certainly one of the issues is to struggle with power, with beauty, with a sense of doing harm. And so as we enter into this discussion, the section that you invite us to consider of the relationship of Amnon to his half sister Tamar in 2 Samuel 13, I’d like to have you tell that story and then help us know what you see in the story, particularly how you used it in the book.

Sam: Yeah, it’s a story, as you pointed out when we were off recording, it’s a story that’s in a flow, and I know that we’ll get to that of David and beyond, but the basics of the story are that Amnon notices his sister, half-sister is beautiful, which in and of itself is not a problem. That could be a blessing of his sister. And he’s noticing beauty, which in and of itself again is not problematic and maybe even I would say hardwired that it’s a good thing that a man can notice and reverence beauty well, but he can’t handle the power of his half sister’s beauty over him. And at some point he says something like, I must have her, something like that. And so he plots with his servant to trap her, and he feigns sickness and asks for her to come be his attendant to help him while he’s sick. And once she’s in the room to attend to him, which in and of itself, you just think of the setup for this woman’s heart to be invited to take care of a brother. And we don’t know the whole story, but she agrees just that willingness to show love to her brother. But the door, the servant bars the door, and again, it’s almost unbearable, I think next to the crucifixion. This is…

Dan: One of the hardest stories.

Sam: Yeah, yeah. It is pure agony to read what plays out. But she pleads with him. She realizes the setup. He jumps out of bed at some point, and the sickness, the ruse is up, and she pleads with him, please, brother, don’t do this to me. You know the shame it will bring on me, and

Dan: You’ll be a fool. You’ll be like the fools of Israel. So she’s brilliant and being able to, in one sense, talk about the effect on her humanity, but also his.

Sam: Yes, good point. Yes. And he won’t take it. And so he plays the fool and he rapes her, and it says, no sooner had he raped her than he hated her, and he hated her to the extent that he had been enamored with her. In other words, that switch of lust, which is elevation to denigration, what had been the awe for her beauty became this hatred to discard her, again, this revenge on the power she had held over him. And again, power only in the sense that she was glorious, made so by God and he couldn’t handle that and had to have power over her.

Dan: I’m sorry, I interrupted.

Sam: Please, please.

Dan: She not only begs for the abuse not to occur, but she also after the rape has occurred in that culture, if he had taken her as a bride we’re not going to step into the issues of was that how could marriage in this sense? But the reality is there was a way to mitigate the shame. If he had taken her as a bride, it would not have had the same cultural effect. But even that enraged him enough that his hatred seethed even more and literally sent her out for utter humiliation. So you’ve made to me such an important connection, and that’s the interplay between lust at a level of such obsession. He was consumed with her, and yet in the violation as quickly as the consuming exploitation and lust turns almost immediately to a violence and desire to degrade and humiliate. What does that tell us? Particularly about a human heart, but a man’s heart with regard to the struggle that he bears with regard to lust.

Sam: Again, I would say there is no willingness on his part to be humbled, to be overpowered, even by his own sin, to let himself be broken over it. And I mean, it puts the exclamation point on lust is about power. It is not about an overflow of sexual desire, like, oh, I just have an abundance of sexual desire and I need some sort of outlet or release for it. That is not lust. Lust at its heart is about power. It is, I’ll take this. It is why Jesus compares it to coveting. I will have this, I will own this as property. And so to see, again, here’s a man who is acting in pure power and sexualized power, which is even worse. And I think it puts his exclamation point on if a man does not live sexuality from his lover heart, which is a heart that’s willing to be emotionally intimate and vulnerable, that’s willing to risk, that’s willing to be open to being overpowered by another’s glory, by another’s presence, right, and is willing to risk his own vulnerability, as Brene Brown would say, vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage. And so to be a man of courage is I’m willing to live out of my love or heart willing to live vulnerable in a relationship. And that’s the seat, the center of your sexuality. If you won’t live from that, you’ll live from something else. And what’s that other place, right? It’s something around the ego. Sex becomes a source of ego stroking, of emboldening power becomes a mirror that you use to simply self-aggrandize to live with an inflated view of yourself. That sexual pleasure now becomes simply an ego stroke. I think Amnon puts that on pure display.

Dan: Oh, pure. We’re using a word that pure reading, utterly impure, but the reality of hundred percent lust driven consumption and important, I think what you’ve underscored and you do so well in your book, is to help us understand that desire arousal in and of itself as his, in one sense, taking in of the glory and the beauty of his sister is not problematic, but it’s the demand and consumption to devour. So in that sense, there is this element of I own you. I’m entitled to you and I will fill myself, I will be satiated by your beauty. And in that consumption, it is a form of killing. It’s a devouring of the other. So as you name that with regard to this really tragic and heartbreaking story, I kind of want to go before and then after. The before is not just chapter 12, it’s the story of Nathan’s engagement with David. And then I want to kind of go to the next, which is the chapter after, and that’s setting up the murder of Amon. So what we’re looking at is what happens before and after the egregious reality of this level of consumptive destructive power to not just consume beauty but destroy it. And that’s just such an important phrase. Again, yes, we’re not just eating beauty, we’re killing, degrading beauty. So take us into the story with David and all that that holds before we get to the aftermath.

Sam: The writer of 2 Samuel is brilliant in how he makes this meditation literature, so literature that you’re meant to meditate on and feel the resonances from other stories. And so the story of David is to set up as kings go off to war, which is, I think it’s in 2 Samuel 8. He’s describing David’s work of going to war as actually tending the garden. There’s a mirroring of subduing the earth, which is back to Adam, the call to Adam, so not going to war, so the writer wants sub at night on the top of his palace and the garden in his palace, I believe it’s or the roof of his palace. The word for roof is a similar word to the word for garden. And so the image there is again, he’s inviting you to see David as an Adam figure walking the garden, and he’s meeting a beautiful woman. As Adam is meeting the beauty of Eve right, now, again, this is not his wife, so we know that this is a woman given to another man, but he sees a beautiful woman in what the writer wants you to know is a garden, his rooftop garden. And so far the scenario is you’re meant to see Adam or hear Adam, but then what does he do with the beauty? Now, Adam broke out in poetry and reverence and honored the equality of Eve in terms of her glory, in terms of her standing with him. She’s an equal. David says, I won’t settle at just being an awe. He could have backed away, said, wow, what a beautiful woman. And she’s not mine to take, she is bone of my bone. She’s another human being, but instead he says, I must have her. And so the language used there is he sent his servants to take her to fetch her. It’s the same language used of Eve taking the fruit again. I will cover her, I will take her. And so he treats her like property, and again, turns what could be awe, just reverence into lust is now I will use my power to abuse. And again, who refuses a king? The fact that people think this is an affair is insane,

Dan: Egregious, insane.

Sam: Yes. You don’t say no to a king, right? It is why Esther, story of Esther, she trembles at going before the king because he could take my life in an instant. So Bathsheba has no power here. You don’t refuse a king. And of course, she doesn’t to guard her life and the story plays out as we know. And even then, he’s abused his power. But again, that sense of I must take more power, which is to commit murder to cover up. He won’t humble himself even then.

Dan: So let’s just underscore what we’re looking at is so important to hear. Every sermon I’ve ever heard on this passage talks about David’s affair. It’s comparable from my standpoint to the interaction between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. And if you note that in the last even six weeks, she has begun to talk about it as a form of abuse because of the egregious difference in power in that sense, much more so with David and Bathsheba, the notion that you would be put to death if you made a king sad. That’s part of the incredible risk Nathan is in the middle of and being told by God to confront David, if he pisses David off, he’s going to die. Not only will his message die, he’s going to die. Therefore, the brilliance of how Nathan sets the trap to expose David to himself, I think is one of the most, shall we say, wiser than a serpent innocent as a dove presences. But getting back to this, we’re talking about sexual violence. David perpetrated sexual violence. And then as we know, when it became clear that he got Bathsheba pregnant, he now is in a position of having to do even more harm, but in some ways, physical harm, emotional harm. He killed both of them. And so he sends Bathsheba’s husband into a setting in which it’s inevitable he’s going to die. It really is first degree murder. So what we’re at least attending to is the generational effect of sexual violence of that kind of consuming and destroying. So when you work with men, again, just such an obvious sentence, but how do you engage the Amnons who are in some ways the children who have watched their own parents commit grave sexual sin?

Sam: We all have a sexual inheritance. And epigenetically, but also in terms of the stories and the shame and the violence that trickle down until somebody’s willing to feel it and grieve it and walk through it. So just to understand, we have a setup, and it may not be overt, maybe it is, maybe there are stories we remember actually of our parents on sexual misgivings or acting out, but it’s often in the air, in the water, and that stuff gets past, most men don’t come to counseling thinking about that stuff. It’s just the air they breathe. And so when men come to counseling with me about the only way they talk about their sexuality is, am I behaving or not behaving, right? Am I sinning or not sinning? Am I lusting or not lusting? That’s about the only place they know to start, and that’s a good category for them to be thinking of what’s going on in their own sexual behavior. But there’s often a difficulty in stepping into what’s the story? What’s the energies that have shaped my sexuality, both in their own personal story, but also their inheritance. And that’s often just so hidden and out of sight that they haven’t stopped to think about or grieve or process what has energized them sexually.

Dan: Given that we are such a radically individualistic culture with in some sense, the assumption that the divide between people, particularly between parents and our own lives in one sense, have only tangential connections when indeed the writer of 2 Samuel is insisting that we see in some sense David’s sin as a shadow in the presence of Amnon and indeed his daughter Tamar. So when you begin to help men look at… even your father’s stack of pornography, which you could not have helped but have access to in some sense, and this is always the point, I get pushback from men. He didn’t just make it available. Oh yeah, he had it hidden in his sock drawer. But every parent knows that a child will explore every crevice of a home in that parent’s absence. So when we begin to go, no, your father actually wanted you to step into the world of his own consumption and violence, what do you tend to get from the men that you’re engaging when those realities come to the surface?

Sam: Well, like you said, the pushback of.. Come on really? It can sound initially like a conspiracy theory of some sort. What do you mean? And again, some of that is just, it feels normal. It feels like the air that I breathed, and he was a good man, and as you’ve said, Dan, so accurately what Jesus thinks, your father is an adulterer or a murderer. So that’s the entrance to the kingdom is that level of humility and acceptance about our own sinfulness. But what’s amazing is after that initial pushback, I’m always amazed at how their bodies begin to speak, which is tears. And something tender rises. Often they don’t even know what it is, but tears will start to flow or they will feel moved in their body with something that they initially don’t have a name for. In other words, the body remembers and when given kindness to start to feel will hold a deeper truth about what they experienced. And that is always sacred ground when they begin to have space for that level of kindness to their own story.

Dan: Well, when we work with men in the sexual abuse recovery work, when you have men who have direct clear physical violations that they have endured as four year olds, 10 year olds, 16 year olds, et cetera, again, I do not want to in any way minimize the heartache and in some ways the horror of what they have wrestled with, but they know they’ve been abused. And oftentimes with great horror and tragedy, there is that violation that came through the grooming, that created that sense of connection and attunement that always, always bears the war of complicity. And then that added to what arousal there was. That’s hard work. But what I’m getting at is it’s the men who have been in a sexualized world where it is just part of the milieu, and there’s no direct physical sexual touch that that feels like I was sexually abused. It’s those men, in other words, the Amnon’s, that even if they do not perpetrate incest or a form of sexual abuse, it’s the reality that it’s so hard to believe that that kind of atmosphere, that water actually has an effect on my soul. And this is where again, we can see without a shadow of a doubt, Amnon’s evil. And yet he’s also the son of a man who is committed evil in not having an affair but in raping a woman. And if it didn’t seem to have the same level of set up plan construction, nonetheless, this is again, not an affair. This is sexual violation, and that’s part of the water. So take us into what happens after. And that is we’re not just looking at sexual harm, we’re looking at other forms of violence.

Sam: Yes, I had a man, I spoke this last weekend, and I had a man stand up in the audience and be open to sharing vulnerably his story in this gathering of men. And he said, I struggled with sex addiction and my own unwanted sexual behavior, and his eyes began to fill with tears. And he said, it took me a while to realize that the origins of my struggle had begun in the wake of my father’s anger. My mother and my father would fight, and my dad would go into rages and for comfort, my sister and I would snuggle in a bed together, my older sister and I. And he began to almost be unable to talk at this point. And he said, it’s not even that a whole lot happened, but to be with my sister and the way she would comfort me in the wake of my father’s rage began to sexualize something for me that later became a form of acting out sexually and sex addiction. So here is again, what a sacred, tender, kind engagement this man had with his own story that he could recognize even his father’s rage with his mother was creating a sexualized environment, right? There was something about his entitlement to his own rage in his own home. And that had led to this man as a boy receiving comfort from a sister who, and again, he didn’t give the full picture of what happened, but a kind of sexualized moment. And all of that is in the context of this rage. And you wouldn’t think, well, that’s sexual abuse, right? But there’s something being energized in that home that’s creating an entitlement for power and harm that led to this man’s harm.

Dan: Well, I’m going to read a section of your excellent book that gets to a part of what you’re saying. “We mistakenly think a man turns to lust or porn because he’s overflowing with sexual desire. And then in a moment of weakness or temptation he gives in, we think his so-called sex drive led him to lust, but we rarely stopped to think about what preceded the arousal in his body. I believe nearly every pornography and masturbation ritual is first and foremost an attempt at soothing, a dysregulated and anxious nervous system.” Now, to hold this with what, again, I don’t think I have the verbal capacity of a neurosurgeon here, but anyone who abuses has committed a form of evil, doesn’t mean they’re evil. There are some no question who are evil, but every form of abuse is a form of evil. Yet the context never justifies, never excuses in some sense of the word never explains, but it does create the opportunity for a humanity to understand what might prompt this case, a brother using his sister as a means of co-regulation. And it is no less wicked, but it’s also deeply tragic, not just for the one abused, but for the one abusing who is not addressed and couldn’t likely address all the dysregulation in his body. How do you live in that neurosurgical fine cellular line between not excusing, but understanding something of the impulse of what a man may do?

Sam: Yeah, you just think about a story like a father’s rage in a home and children witnessing their mother suffering at least emotional if not physical violence in another room and being rendered powerless. And I mean, panic level of powerless in the wake of that, the reach for something, even if it’s just creating a simpler story to live in than that one which is unbearable, right? The dissociative engagement with a sister towards some kind of soothing, but also a story that’s easier to bear. And even if it’s fantasy or just an act of release, some outlet, as we might say, there’s a reason we call it acting out. It’s an attempt to get something that’s unbearable within outside of us. And as you’ve said, that can be an act of harm and evil that you’re acting out, that you’re reenacting, but that being an easier thing to sit with than the unbearable environment that they’re within, as well as, again, the kind of permissiveness being modeled to take advantage of others. This is the space in which people can be violated. Obviously that’s what this father is screaming, literally screaming is my anger… I don’t need to honor other people when I’m angry. It deserves an outlet. So just the swirl of all that, that is unbearable for a child. So again, sometimes in our sinfulness, it’s easier to create a different story to live in. And sexual sin, sexual harm is sometimes an easier story, right? To live in than the story of unbearable, powerless abuse. And I will have power.

Dan: You’re again, inviting us to a level that doesn’t have a clear, fundamental black and white right, wrong. When we do often in the summer, when we do a week on behalf of women who have been abused. Again, it’s in the figure of somewhere eight to one. Usually a man has perpetrated sexual abuse to a woman. And so the reality is I’m hearing stories heartbreaking stories of men having violated 4-year-old, 8-year-old, 12-year-olds. And then the next week we sit with men who have a history of past abuse, and the majority of those men have been abused by men. But also many have experiences as what you’re describing. And that is where there has been an acting out of something of the deep relational, personal soulish harm. Again, back to the phrase, there is no excuse, there is no justification. It is wicked. It is a perpetration of evil. Nonetheless, the perpetrator, there is a humanity that we can’t escape, that there are stories that indeed created a war comparable to, again, Amnons evil. It isn’t just the perpetration of abuse, though evil in and of itself. It’s all that went before in the plot. All that went on in the actual, but even more so when terrible evil’s been perpetrated, he perpetrates even more evil in creating an environment in which he’s going in a profoundly patriarchic world, going to be excused. David doesn’t bring any consequences to his son for what became known by everyone, yet there is violence that comes from Absolom. So just before we end, I just want to capture that last bit. Violence follows violence, and oftentimes there is a setup to do harm to ourselves, but often there seems to be almost a violence that attempts to bring justice, but only brings even more harm. Again, what do you do with the end of that portion of the story, Absalom?

Sam: I mean, it initially tastes like justice. There’s a sense of somebody did something, and yet it’s more death and harm. So again, as you pointed out earlier, the willingness to be made a fool and the willingness to self-sabotage, you think of Amon and then Absalom, the willingness to reenact their father’s sins and make them their own, rather than stand up and say, you were the fool. You were the one that wasn’t Adam in the garden as the writer wants us to see. You could have been a good man, and their willingness to not stand up and reject their father and move on from him and create a different legacy so that joining of the foolishness of their father’s own sin and be willing to be made a fool, even if excused for it. The foolishness is obvious, all as you pointed out, that trap of evil that says, your shame is a covering and your foolishness will protect you. There’s a prophet that says of Israel, they dearly loved their shame. Oh, the agony of that, right? Not their glory, but they saw their shame as something of comfort. Oh, that willingness to be seduced by shame and foolishness.

Dan: Almost again, as if I can jump into the deep end of shame, I become immune to shame. I become a kind of shamelessness. And we saw that with Trump’s boast, with regard to what he can do with women because of his position and power. It’s the story across the board with, shall we say, powerful men in the context of almost any place of authority, the potential to be able to consume and then make someone pay. These are the deep channels that we’re deeply disrupting and saying, look, this story isn’t just a story of what happened a long time ago. We’re in a world in which consumption and violation are inevitable and murder, a form of destruction. When David’s son Amnon is living out his own violation of all that he was. And then his other son kills the way he killed. And so we’ve got to disrupt, in some sense our sexual history. And I think that’s one of the things that your book invites in a way that, again, I just want to underscore, this isn’t just a book if you have young children and want to prepare your children for addressing their sexuality. It’s brilliant in how that is indeed a gift. But this is really as much for men like me or others who need to engage what we didn’t get. And indeed ask Jesus to begin to bring healing to our own intergenerational sexual wars that often as you put so well, we have not faced, we’ve not owned. And in that, I just feel like there is the potential to be able to say, we can come alongside of Tamars. Tamar is someone we can engage in a sexual abuse recovery week, but as much, if not more, the Amnon before he violates or once he has violated, we can open the door to a level of playground of redemption. Where there’s no excuse and no fuzzing, the issue of harm done. But also where once humanity can begin to be restored. Before we end, I’d just love for you to be able to talk about what it’s like for you when you get to work with an Amnon.

Sam: When a man begins to recognize that the story of your sexuality is not just about learning to be behaved. There is actually a far richer life you get to live, which is you get to become a man who awes at beauty, and you get to experience the pleasure of beauty with reverence, right? You don’t just stay behaved like a little boy. You get to live the fullness of Adam being in awe of beauty. And so watching men turn towards healthy sensuality, healthy reverence for beauty, and getting to hear stories from men who have emailed me and said, or shared stories of a deepening relationship with their wives, where they’ve been able to be more in awe of their wives and take pleasure in the depth of their wives. And we’re not just talking about superficial beauty here, but the wholeness of glory. What one writer called the fullness of our moral beauty, even the beauty of virtue in a person. So when that clicks on in a man, oh my gosh, watch out. It’s revolutionary. The world was right full of men who could actually reverence and be in awe of the glory of a woman and did not take a woman’s power as threat. Actually a source of pleasure and joy and worship to God. Wow. I mean…

Dan: Yeah. Well, it’s what the heart was made for. So just even the glimpse or that fragrance in the air as spring begins to come to cold climates that have been difficult to live in, it’s again where something in us is meant to come alive. And so, Sam, thank you. Thank you for your labor, The Sex Talk You Never Got. It’s a book book and far more, it’s a way of engaging the reality of our fallenness, but in the power and glory of what redemption brings. So I, along with many, thank you for that labor on our behalf.

Sam: Dan, thank you so much for having me here. It’s been a great conversation.