Most of the guys in my life who might be considered husband prospects end up being either weak or harsh when I get to know them better. Or else they say the right things, but never seem to really DO anything. While I don't think I'm looking for perfection, it still gets discouraging. Am I expecting too much?

Some of you readers are in your twenties (or younger). For you, marriage is still a very believable part of your future. You think about it often, but there's no real hurry. If you're a guy, you may still be doing rather a lot of playing (not playing around, just playing). If you're female, you may be busy setting up the details of your life: starting your career, getting the right wardrobe or home furnishings together, that sort of thing. Neither of you have ruled out marriage, of course, but you're determined to be VERY careful about it.

Or perhaps you're in your thirties. That's a different place to be. As your birthdays go by, you begin to realize that marriage is not something that just happens, or happens to everyone. You begin to contemplate the unhappy thought that it might not happen to you.

By the time you're in your forties (or older), the pain of being single may be something you've adjusted to. By now you probably have the other parts of your life pretty well in shape. You have figured out who you "are." You hopefully have developed a stable means of support. You definitely have formed habits of living that are workable for you, patterns that might not be all that easy to give up.

But wherever you are in life, the prospect of marriage still affects everything. Much as our culture has endlessly insisted we can make it on our own, that marriage is just an option for some (along with lots of other options), something deep inside tells us otherwise. You see, we are born sexual.

Part of our sexuality is physical. That part strongly longs for another person's touch (and more). Still, the fear of getting close to another person can sometimes drive our sexual longings inward. They can even become misdirected into homosexuality. But both of these reactions are the result of something that has been broken. A child who is raised in a secure, healthy and loving family (and who has not been damaged by something outside the family) will be content with his or her sexual nature and will be ready for marriage in the natural course of time.

What our culture doesn't understand, and we might not either, is that a large part of our sexuality is also spiritual.

How many people do you know who, in one way or another, are having their physical sexual needs met and yet are still miserable inside? This misery may drive them to all kinds of sexual experimentation, or to a series of sexual partners, but it never really goes away. They might think that this kind of sexual "freedom" is freeing, but it most certainly is not.

It's not until we are properly joined to someone in both the physical and the spiritual sense that we become sexually satisfied and complete. So let's think about what that means.