Summer Series Book Review - Sheila Gregoire - The Marriage You Want

What does healthy intimacy look like in Christian marriage? And what happens when biblical language gets tangled with cultural stereotypes? In this powerful and hope-filled episode, we welcome Sheila Wray Gregoire—author, researcher, and founder of BareMarriage.com—to discuss her latest book The Marriage You Want. With wisdom grounded in Scripture and backed by extensive research, Sheila offers a compelling call to mutuality, emotional connection, and healthy sexuality within marriage.

This conversation gently acknowledges that these insights may not apply to relationships marked by coercion or abuse. If that's your story, we hope this episode offers language to describe what’s not of God—and affirms your worth, safety, and dignity.

Whether you’re rebuilding your marriage or simply curious about God's design for intimacy, this episode brings both practical insight and compassionate encouragement.

SHOW NOTES:

Sheila Wray Gregoire Resources

• Bare Marriage podcast
• Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended 
• The Marriage You Want: How to Build a Relationship that Brings Out the Best in Both of You
• She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self, and Speaking Up

🎧 Also available on YouTube.

Safe to Hope episode with Sheila

Safe To Hope is one of the resources offered through the ministry of Help[H]er, a 501C3 that provides training and resources for those ministering in one-another care, and advocacy for women in crisis in Christian organizations. Your donations make it possible for Help[H]er to serve as they navigate crises. All donations are tax-deductible.

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We value and respect conversations with all our guests. Opinions, viewpoints, and convictions may differ so we encourage our listeners to practice discernment. As well, guests do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of HelpHer. It is our hope that this podcast is a platform for hearing and learning rather than causing division or strife.

Please note, abuse situations have common patterns of behavior, responses, and environments. Any familiarity construed by the listener is of their own opinion and interpretation. Our podcast does not accuse individuals or organizations.

The podcast is for informational purposes and is not a substitute for professional care, diagnosis, or treatment.

Transcript

Julia
Hi, Safe to Hope friends and welcome back for another week of our summer book series.

Before we jump into today’s conversation, I want to offer a gentle and important caveat. Today we’ll be exploring topics including healthy sexuality, intimacy and marriage. We wanted to take a minute to highlight that we’re not talking about relationships marked by abuse, coercion or fear. If that’s your experience, this episode may not be applicable to you. Instead, we hope that this conversation helps you to better understand what God’s calling is for mutual, safe and healthy relationships, and maybe also give language to what isn’t of God. So if you’re in a situation where there is abuse, this is not a roadmap for fixing that relationship. Sometimes, hearing a topic like this can stir something in us, sort of an instinct that says, “Wait, that’s not what I’ve known,” or “This doesn’t feel right about my story,” and if that happens, that’s worth listening to. We hope this episode helps you cultivate wisdom and discernment, and, above all, reminds you that you deserve safety, respect and dignity in every part of your life and body.

Now with that in mind, we’re honored to welcome Sheila Wray Gregoire into our conversation. Sheila is the founder of baremarriage.com and is the host of the Bare Marriage podcast. She holds two Master’s degree in sociology and public administration, and alongside her team, she has led the largest studies ever conducted on evangelical teachings about sex, marriage and intimacy. Her work brings data and lived experience into dialog with Scripture, helping many disentangle cultural assumptions from biblical truth. She is the author of several books, including the groundbreaking The Great Sex Rescue, which uses research based insights to challenge harmful messages and call the church back to a vision for mutuality and consent. Today, we’ll be talking about her newest book, The Marriage You Want, which builds on that very foundation, casting a compelling vision for emotional, physical and spiritual connection that honors both partners and nurtures real growth.

Welcome, Sheila.

Sheila
Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Julia
We’re so happy to have you, and you’ve been an expert contributor with us in the past. So it’s great to have you back. I wanted to start off because my, I have a daughter who is about to turn 12, and she has been working through your book. Actually, She Deserves Better. We’ve been doing that together.

Sheila
Oh! Cool!

Julia
She’s about a third of the way through and I told her that I’d be interviewing with you today, and she was excited! She was like, “Mom you get to talk to a real-life author!” Authors are celebrities in our household. But she’s like, “I want to ask a question. Can you ask a question for me?” So, here it is, from my 12 year old daughter, “Tell me a little bit about your story.”

Sheila
Oh, well, I’m Canadian first of all. I think that’s an important part of my story, because while I grew up Evangelical, I grew up kind of adjacent to what was happening in the US. I was born in downtown Toronto. Grew up in downtown Toronto, and my youth group was very multicultural. We were focused on, you know, bringing the Gospel to the nations, because God had brought the nations to Toronto, most multicultural city in the world. So, you know, Christianity, to me was, how do we bring the message of Jesus to the people who’ve never heard it? And that’s very much what we focused on. And I that, and so when I got married, you know, that was still very much our approach. And I just hadn’t realized how much Christianity had changed until my daughters got to youth group, and because I was thinking their youth group was going to be the same as what I went through, and it wasn’t that purity culture had hit.

And as they got older, and as I started writing more and more about marriage, and then finally read some books about marriage, I realized that this isn’t healthy, like, I don’t know what happened, but this looks nothing like the Jesus that I was taught about when I was 15, 16, 17, so we’ve just been kind of on this huge road ever since of doing major research projects to look at how did this like, what went wrong? What? What have we been teaching women about God’s purpose for their lives and their relationships and how and what’s the effect that that has had on women, and how can we get back to what to what Jesus really wanted from us?

Julia
Yeah, I so appreciate your work, and I think what you have to offer so unique from what’s out there, because it is research based. It’s research backed, and it comes from the experiences and the stories of other women. I think a lot of times in what you what you kind of address in your book, is this idea that data and research is considered like an allergy in the Christian community. Yes, where does that come from?

Sheila
Oh, there’s a big history of this with the Snopes trials and things like that. But there’s this idea that science is against Christianity, that scientists are out to disprove Christianity, and so we shouldn’t be listening to science. And that’s just simply untrue. Jesus said that he is the WAY, the TRUTH and the LIFE, which means that as we pursue truth, we are pursuing God. We are learning more about the nature of God as we learn more about the world that he made and how he made us and and Jesus told us in Matthew 7, very clearly, he’s talking in context about false teachers. You know, look, how do you tell which is the narrow way, which is the wide way? And there’s going to be different opinions. And he says, when there is you judge by the fruit, because a good tree can’t bear bad fruit, and a bad tree can’t bear good fruit, so you have to look at the fruit. And that’s what we’re all about. We’re like, okay, if Jesus said to judge the fruit, that’s what we’re going to do, because too often, what’s happened in marriage literature, in Pastor sermons about marriage, is it’s all based on people’s opinions of certain Bible passages, and it isn’t based on what actually works. And we’re like, Look, if God said this and he meant it, then it should result in flourishing. It should result in relationships which are marked by intimacy and kindness and mutual respect, not by fear and abuse. And so, you know, let’s just, let’s just take a look at what actually works and what doesn’t.

Julia
Oh so true. And I love that passage and how you sort of frame that as a helpful road map for us, because, I mean, Jesus does step into that place where there is confusion and there are multiple messages, and you know, he’s trying to encourage his followers to not be deceived by even just religious language that can sound true and it can sound similar to what Scripture says, but ultimately it leads to bad fruit and destruction.

Sheila
Yep, yep.

Julia
There’s also just that the concept that Scripture and observation can coexist at the same time, right?

Sheila
Oh, absolutely true.

Julia
What we see and in Scripture does bear out in the world, and we can observe and the created world what is true.

Sheila
Yes, because Scripture, a scripture, is not going to go against truth. It just isn’t. And so if we discover that something is true, then that tells us something about Scripture too. You know, like, like, if we know, for instance, that you know that mutuality works best, that people are just that people marriages work best when people feel intimately connected. You know that that when people feel truly seen and truly known and truly loved, that we’re going to see marital satisfaction rise like, if we know that that’s what it means to be satisfied in marriage, then we’re going to look at the Bible passages on marriage differently, because we’re going to say, okay, marital flourishing is about being truly known and loved, because that’s what we know works. And so we’re going to look at things like, you know, submit to to one another. We’re going to look at wives submit to your husbands. We’re going to look at husbands, you know, lay your life down. We’re going to look at those differently, because we know this is supposed to lead to intimacy and truly knowing one another. It’s not supposed to lead to weird power dynamics, because power dynamics don’t work.

Julia
Ann Maree, did you have any questions about her research in particular with this book or other books?

Ann Maree
No, I’m learning as you’re going. I didn’t know you had two master’s degrees in sociology. How does that even happen? I mean, did you have to take the same courses twice?

Sheila
Well, I have one in sociology, one in public admin, and then, and then our statistician, Joanna has an masters in epidemiology. So we have a lot of different we have a lot of different we have my husband’s a physician and my daughter’s in psychology. So we have a whole bunch of different studies in our team. And then, yeah, we’ve recently been published in the sociology of religion journal with our first peer reviewed article as well.

Ann Maree
Excellent. Yeah, good. I mean you guys like you’re, you’re a powerhouse with your educations, and I’m really, I guess, jealous that your family all gets to work together that way. Thanks for sharing.

Julia
So there are a lot of Christian marriage books out there that you’ve referenced. And I mean, as a therapist, there’s a lot of couples that come in for counseling who actually need a lot of help, and unblending and untangling from the books and the messages that they’ve heard over time, but they don’t always know it. So lot of books out there, what would you say is the difference that your book offers? What makes your book different?

Sheila
What happens in pretty much every evangelical marriage book except for ours, with maybe some exceptions, but very few is that they’re based on a faulty premise, and from that faulty premise flow four other teachings that actually people down a bad road. So they’re based on the faulty premise that men are supposed to be an authority over women. So they tend to take that as their starting point. Well, when you believe that there’s a bunch of things that necessarily have to flow from that. One of them is that men and women are polar opposites. They were created completely differently. Because we need a reason why God put men in authority over women. And it has to be that men and women are very different. And so we see this taught, you know, men are rational, women are emotional, men are visual, women aren’t. Men want sex. Women want emotional connection. We’re presented as two different species that really don’t understand one another, and that is not based in science, that’s not based in the reality on the ground at all. And then what happens is people get married, they hear all this stuff and marriage isn’t flourishing, and they’re wondering why, and they’re told, your problem is your expectations. You know, you’re expecting too much. Nobody can meet your needs except for God. You need to go to God with your needs. And so they do that. Maybe they do more devotions. They get more into God for a couple of years, and that keeps them going for a while. But the problem is, marriage still isn’t working. So then they’re taught, well, marriage is hard, you know, don’t you understand? Marriage is hard? You’re just supposed to slog it out. God created it to make you holy, not happy. This is God’s way of refining you. And so you keep going for a little bit longer, but eventually everything breaks. Your body’s falling apart, your emotional health is falling apart. You can’t do it anymore. And so then they bring out the trump card, which is you’re not allowed to divorce. So you can’t divorce. You need to stay in this marriage. But don’t worry, because there’s tremendous rewards for you in Heaven. And if you look at basically any evangelical marriage book, you will find each of those five things, but they all flow from that faulty premise that men are in authority over women, and what we do instead in The Marriage You Want is we take a big step back and we say, okay, if we know that what we want is to feel really intimate and to feel like I’m truly known. I’m able to express who I am, and you still accept me, and we’re able to talk about our feelings and our weaknesses and everything, and we just live a passionate life together. What things go into that? And I’ll tell you, authority works directly against that. Putting men in authority over women does not lead to flourishing. It actually does the opposite. It leads to women having a 50% more likely to say, I am frequently in pain. It’s related to a lot of measures of emotional immaturity. Men much more likely to be emotionally dysregulated. Women, much more likely to be passive aggressive. It’s related to not having shared hobbies, not enjoying spending time together, like all kinds of negative things. Yeah, mutuality is related to happiness.

Julia
Yeah, the breakdown is far and wide. And I love the fact that your book does bring in your data. What you found in the surveys that you’ve done, I think there are four different surveys that have been used in other different I guess, researches about marriages and relationships, and you get to see in each chapter all the findings that you had based on your surveys, which my husband and I participated.

Sheila
Yay. Thank you. I know they were super, super long. It was, it was tremendously long. You wouldn’t believe that was actually the cut down version, but yeah,

Julia
So looking at just general gender stereotypes and roles. You’re saying that those categories pit one against the other, essentially and one of the quotes that you had, that I loved, is you say that when we take cultural stereotypes, baptize them as biblical and direct others to emulate them. We’re treating stereotypes as if they’re equivalent to God’s will for our lives. And I love that quote. What I heard in that quote is that when we elevate these cultural stereotypes, it’s a form of idolatry.

Sheila
Yeah.

Julia
Yeah, and it’s also, I think what I’ve kind of been processing myself Is it being a form of syncretism, where we look actually more like the culture, although we’re trying to do something different and set ourselves apart from the culture. But it’s the same thing,

Sheila
Absolutely, and God made us all with different personalities, circumstances, gifts, etc. He gives each of us gifts that are different from our neighbors. It says in Ephesians 2 verse 10, that he has works he planned before the very creation of the world for us to do. He thinks of us as individuals, and yet we treat ourselves not as individuals, but as these stereotypes. And it doesn’t work. I think my favorite part of doing this book was the math. There’s this one section in the chapter that you’re referring to where I was like, “You know what? I’m just going to see if I can figure out the math on this”. So one of the big stereotypes that we hear is that men are logical and women are emotional, right? That that men are thinkers and women are feelers. And I thought there is a way to measure this, because the Myers Briggs Type inventory, which is a personality test, has as one of its measures feeling versus thinking. So we found a data set of 60,000 people that had taken it, and we took a look, and sure enough, it fit the stereotype. Okay, so 56% of men reported being thinkers, and 73% of women reported being feelers. So that fits the stereotype. Women are more likely to be feelers, men are more likely to be thinkers. But how do you tell the chance of some of two things occurring at the same time? So the chance of a thinker man marrying a feeler woman? Well, you multiply the percentages together, and when you do that, I think you get around 41% so that means that every single sermon, every marriage book, every piece of marriage advice you have ever heard that assumes that the guy is the rational one and logical one and the woman is the emotional one, does not apply to 59% of marriages. So it’s like there is no point in talking about stereotypes. Why don’t we just simply talk about, hey, let’s value the emotional perspective, let’s value the logical perspective. And how do we make sure in our marriage that both of those perspectives are honored and, yeah, and cherished.

Julia
And you also point out that there’s more difference within the genders than between the genders.

Sheila
Yes, anyone who knows, anyone who knows anything about bell curves and standard deviations will know that there is more variation between women than there is between the average woman and the average man. And you can think about this with regards to height. You know, if you look at, if you look at 95% of women, if you look at what the shortest woman and the and the tallest woman in that 95% there is a greater difference among women than there is between the average woman and the average man.

Julia
Ann Maree, were you gonna say something? I think I jumped in.

Ann Maree
No, that’s okay. I was just I remembered something. Sheila, I think I don’t know if you said it on our podcast or you said it somewhere else, but going back to even the dynamics of those two things, being rational and being emotional, as if anger is not an emotion,

Sheila
Oh, I know.

Ann Maree
So we aren’t even factoring that in to the data. You know, which emotion is she more emotional with? Right?

Julia
And if that were true, let’s just go with the assumption that men are more rational women are more emotional. Wouldn’t we, both genders, want to be more Christ-like, and more holistic and who we are. So if men do tend to be more rational, wouldn’t we want to foster emotional intelligence and growth in that area?

Sheila
Exactly. And that’s what we should be looking for, right? Is, how can we make sure that we are well rounded, that we aren’t just, you know, a shallow version of what humanity is, you know, but that we are, we are valuing all the different parts of what it means to be human and I think for a lot of people, that’s very difficult to do, because so much of their personhood has been cut off from them, and especially men, just when you look at the way that we socialize both boys and girls, you know, girls are allowed to talk about their feelings. Boys aren’t, and boys are often punished for it, to the extent that a lot of men simply aren’t capable, like actually are not capable of even identifying what they are feeling. I remember my daughter, my oldest daughter, has a five year old son now, and when he was three, he would have these temper tantrums. And Rebecca, my daughter, used to have temper tantrums back in the 90s when she was three. And we were taught that the that you cannot let the child get the upper hand. You have to do a timeout. You have to be very firm. And we did that. It totally didn’t work. But now they’ve learned so much more. What they know is that temper tantrums and toddlers are not because these toddlers are trying to take control of the family. They’re not because the toddler is trying to challenge authority or be obstinate. It’s because the toddler is experiencing an emotion that’s overwhelming them, and they don’t know how to deal with it. And so Rebecca knew this, and so what she would do is she would try to help Alex deal with his emotions, you know, like, “okay, we’re all going to do jumping jacks now. You know, we’re going to take deep breaths. You know, Alex, you look like you feel frustrated. Are you feeling frustrated? Sometimes, when I feel frustrated, I go, grrr!” you know, things like this. And my little grandson is just so good at this, like he’ll come up to me, “Mimi, I am very disappointed.” He can totally express his emotions now at the age of five, and I think it’s beautiful, but so many of us so were not taught how to do this, especially boys. And these boys grow up to be men who still have this god given need to connect. We all have this need to connect and to feel intimate with someone else, but if we aren’t able to share who we are, because we aren’t able even to confront who we are, then we’re going to take shortcuts in that connection, because we still have the need to connect, but we don’t have the tools to do it, and so many men end up channeling their needs for connection into sex. Sex helps them to feel connected without doing the work of connection. And it doesn’t work, and it just can make your it can actually make your marriage feel more and more distant the more you have empty sex that is, that is that is being used to replace actual emotional connection.

Julia
Yeah, and those stereotypes and those roles don’t benefit anybody.

Sheila
No, exactly. And men are not naturally less emotionally healthy than women. I want people to understand this God did not make women more emotionally attuned. This is something that we’ve socialized girls to be, and just because you’re a woman does not mean you’re automatically more emotionally healthy than your husband, and just because you’re a man doesn’t mean that you’re not emotionally healthy. It’s just that, in general, men haven’t been given the tools in the same way that women have, and that can create a lot of problems in marriages.

Julia
Yes, oh. I could just listen to you talk. Thank you so much for the work that you’re doing and just the awareness that you’re bringing for the healing and redemption of our families and our marriages and for both genders. So important. We need more conversations like this. You talk in your book a lot too about compromise and how just the idea of compromise can make things much, much worse.

Sheila
Yes, okay, so when we hear, “Oh, we just need to compromise. We each need to just meet each other’s needs.” And so many of our Christian resources are based around that idea of how you each need to meet each other’s main needs. So Five Love Languages, right? If you speak their love language, they’ll speak yours.

Julia
I have something to say about that.

Sheila
Love and Respect, if you if he loves her, she will respect him like it’s all this tit for tat transactional stuff, right? The problem with any kind of transaction or anytime kind of compromise. And there are many problems, but one of them is that it only works if you’re starting on an even playing field, and many couples are not. And to explain this, we use the concept of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. And I know psychologists have found a lot of issues with this, but let’s just take it generally, because I just mean it generally, not into the specifics, okay, but basically, needs exist on a pyramid, and the bottom ones are the ones that are just their survival, right? Food, shelter, water, air, etc. You can’t meet the ones further up the pyramid until those bottom ones are met, because that’s just survival. And then once you’ve survived, you can meet just general happiness needs. Once those are met, then you can get to thriving. And marriages are like that too. There’s just stuff at the bottom tier of marriage, right? You need to get the rent paid. You got to get the kids out the door on the school bus. You got to get dinner made. And a lot of us are just in that survival tier, where all of our emotional energy and physical energy is just going to getting through the day, and we don’t have any margins for anything else. Once you get beyond that, you can start focusing on your relationship and doing things that you actually like. So you can find a church, you like, a job, you like you can think about spending time together, investing in some hobbies. And then once we’re above that, you can get to thriving where we feel truly known. We’re running after God’s purpose for our lives. We feel like we’re in the groove, right? And what often happens is that one spouse, and especially the woman, is in survival mode while the husband is up there exploring things he really enjoys or living out what he feels is God’s calling for his life. And we see this a lot in ministry couples, where the husband is just enjoying ministry and enjoying the fame that comes from that, especially in mega church pastors, etc, and the wife is down there, barely making it, because everything is on her shoulders. And we used in The Marriage You Want the example of a couple named Gabriella and Brad, where married 10 years. Gabriella is a nurse, does a lot of shift work, frequently exhausted trying to balance these three kids, Brad hasn’t shown up for the kids much. They’re mostly all on her shoulders. Their sex life was really dwindling because she’s so exhausted. And then six months ago, he confessed that he’s been using porn their entire marriage, and their sex life has gone to nothing. And he’s upset about this, so he takes them into the pastor’s office. They tell their story, and the pastor says, “Well, yeah, you just need to compromise. So Gabriella, Brad needs sex more often, and Brad, you need to help Gabriella with the kids, so you need to start doing bath time.” And this seems like a great compromise. They each get what they want, but the problem is they were not starting on an even playing field. Gabriella had everything on her shoulders. She was carrying everything for that family, and Brad was actively hurting her and had not rebuilt trust. And so we don’t get to talk about what Brad needs until he has gotten into the trenches with Gabriella, until he has fulfilled his jobs of caring for the family, and until he has rebuilt trust, then we can talk about it, because compromise only works when you’re on an even playing field.

Julia
Yes, and you do identify too, that the couple is on the lowest tier, right? Or is on the tier of the lowest birth weight?

Sheila
Yeah, the marriage exists on the tier, on the lowest tier any individual is on. So if one person is barely surviving and one person is thriving, your marriage is barely surviving.

Julia
Yes. So you get in the trenches on the lowest tier, yes, yeah. And the clarification is helpful that sexual intimacy is not on the lowest tier. It’s not a need, and I think that’s where we get that wrong, too, where sex is framed as a need for the man, that the woman just doesn’t have that need. She has a desire, maybe, but the husband has that need, and we get that backwards, and then we place more obligation on the woman to then not deprive him of his need.

Sheila
Right, exactly. And meanwhile, we’re ignoring the fact that she’s been deprived her whole marriage, because sex makes her feel used and sex isn’t pleasurable for her.

Julia
Yep, that’s right, yeah. So I’d love to shift over then into both your chapter on sexuality and your research, because you talk about obligation sex, and in your book, The Great Sex Rescue, that was the point, or that was the part of your book that was most impactful for me, because I’ve seen literature in the secular world that does give credence to the fact that when there’s messages of duty given to a woman, then she does experience sexual pain. And your research confirms that, yes, but it also exposes that there are spiritual messages given to women that make it unique, and pain is actually experienced as what, twice the amount?

Sheila
Yeah, it’s hard to know. We think it’s, I think it’s close to two and a half times, but it’s really difficult, because so many studies have different rates of instances of sexual pain because of how you measure what sexual pain is. But it does look like Christian women certainly experience significantly more sexual pain with obstruction, obstructive penetration, meaning that they can’t even have intercourse, and a lot of that is due to obligation sex messages.

Julia
So tell us what that is. Can you define that for us?

Sheila
Yeah. So, what we were measuring was we asked women, do you agree? Or were you ever taught that a woman is obligated to give her husband sex when he wants it? About 41% of women said that they had been taught that. 39% said they say they agreed with that at the point where they got married. And if you start marriage, agreeing with that, your chance of experiencing sexual pain increases to just about the same statistical effect as if you’d been abused, because our bodies interpret obligation as trauma, and because both trauma, both abuse and obligation, say to women, you don’t matter. He has the right to use you however he wants. And if sex is supposed to be a deep knowing, which it is, you know Genesis 4, verse 1, Adam knew his wife, Eve God created sex to be a deep knowing, but it instead becomes an owing, then what you’ve really done is sex, instead of making you feel more intimate, actually erases her as a person. And that’s a very traumatizing thing.

Julia
Yeah. And you’re also bringing God and spirituality into this.

Sheila
In essence, God is your pimp, yeah. Because God is telling you that you have to do this no matter what. Yeah.

Julia
Wow. I think we need to study that more and more, and we need to talk about that more and more in the Christian context. So again, thank you for doing that. You talk about intimacy and what it is, what it should look like. Intimacy is not just about sex, although it does involve sex. Um, so talk to us a little bit more about that.

Sheila
Yeah, I want to make it clear too, when people, um, when people give the obligation sex message, when they tell women they’re obligated to give sex, there’s a reason they’re doing it, and the reason is based on fear that if women don’t feel obligated, they just won’t have sex. And so the only way that men are going to have sex is if we pressure women into doing it and make women feel like they’re sinning if they don’t. But that is simply not what the data says. It’s just simply not true. So for instance, we looked at, in our most recent survey for The Marriage You Want, we look to just we took just the women who said they have a very low libido, and we asked them three questions, do you orgasm when you have sex? Do you have pain when you have sex? And do you feel emotionally connected during sex? And just those three questions explained 86% of the low libido. If we had also asked, Does your husband watch porn? Do you do all of the housework? You know, we probably could have explained the rest of it, like when women have low libido, there is a reason. So frequency and libido are a symptom. They aren’t the problem in and of themselves. And we found that when women frequently reach orgasm, when there’s high marital satisfaction, when there’s no sexual dysfunction, when there’s no porn use, and when they feel emotionally connected during sex, frequency takes care of itself. So we don’t need the obligation message to have sex in marriage. We just need sex to be good for women,

Julia
Yes, and we’re so focused on frequency, yeah, that is the number one concern that couples have when there’s sort of a problem, or there’s an identified problem, in their sex life is frequency, yeah, when actually what you’re advocating for is incorporating the right ingredients, and healing into the relationship, which to your point, frequency does take care of itself, and it increases. And it’s not as if women are born with a low libido. It’s the canary in the coal mine that’s yeah.

Sheila
And when you look at studies of teen girls and women in their 20s, their libido is very high. When you look at women who are getting ready to be married, their rate of how often they fantasize about sex, how often they have sexual feelings, is basically the same as the guys, so they get married with the same sexual drive. But if sex is bad for women right off the bat, their libido often tanks. So when sex is good for women right off the bat, they tend to have as good a chance of having a high libido as their partner does. But if sex is bad right off the bat, they learn “this isn’t for me,” and there’s a lot of unlearning that needs to be done in so many marriages, and it’s much harder to unlearn than it is to do it right out of the gate. But we found that among evangelical couples who wait for the wedding night to have sex, on that first sexual encounter, 80, I think it’s like 87% of men reach orgasm, compared to just 15% of women. So it’s very backwards, and that’s orgasm through any means, not just through intercourse, yeah.

Julia
And there’s so much hope too, for both men and women who may struggle with a low libido, is that things can change, things can heal. And you’re not defined by this. This isn’t who you are. This is not kind of your destiny.

Sheila
No, it isn’t. And I do want people to hear that you can heal, but I also want them to hear this, which is, it is much harder to heal the longer you go. So it doesn’t mean that you can’t heal, but it is much harder. And what we found in many different areas of marriage, and sex was one of them, was something that we named the unfairness threshold. And it’s this. It’s this, I don’t know how to describe it since a graph, but it’s what happens over time to marital satisfaction in certain key areas. And when it comes to sex, if a woman doesn’t reach orgasm, it doesn’t necessarily bother her in the first five years, but by year 10, it’s really starting to bug her. By year 15, she’s quite upset, and by year 20, the marriage is basically sexless. So it’s like you can put up with something for the first couple of years, but you can’t put up with it forever, and that’s true for sex. It’s true for housework and uneven distribution of mental load. It’s true for kin keeping if she’s looking after both sets of families, you’ll find it doesn’t bother her in the first five years, but by year 20, she is so done. She’s just so done. And then, and that’s true over and over and over again. So yes, you can heal. You absolutely can. And in The Marriage You Want, we walk you through how to do that and how to have conversations. But I really, really hope that what couples take away from this is it’s so much better to do it right from the outset, and not to say, well, you know, it’s Christian of me just to give grace, and it’s Christian of me not to let this bother me, because that doesn’t work long term, not when intimacy is supposed to be the goal of marriage. You can never get intimacy if you just put up with things without talking about them. Things that really are, are are not fair,

Julia
Yeah, and there’s a real obstacle for many women specifically to speak up and to communicate for their needs and what they want, especially if they’ve been conditioned and in the spiritual context to say again that this is a man’s needs. This is just a desire for her, and she’s required to obey.

Sheila
Yeah, and in that same and in that same spiritual context, she’s also told that if you speak up, it’s disrespectful to your husband. So.

Julia
Ann Maree, I saw you do a thing.

Ann Maree
No, I’m just, I mean, again, my mind is just kind of blown because my I go different directions, like when you were talking before about the compromise idea of, I was thinking about safety in a domestic abuse situation, and we say so many times you can’t heal from your issues while you’re living in an unsafe condition. And so there’s you know, that carry over into a different idea. And I’m again, how, and I think Julia is going to ask this question, maybe even next, but how do you even come close to an intimate relationship when you live under the umbrella of twisted Scripture in your church, right? I don’t know. Did I steal your thunder there, Julia?

Julia
Do that? No. Go for it.

Sheila
It it’s really, really hard. It’s really tricky. And I would say the answer to that is very different, depending what your marriage is like, if you live under twisted Scripture in your church, but your marriage doesn’t really reflect that twisted Scripture, then we can talk about it. If your marriage actually reflects it, that’s a huge red flag, because so many churches teach that the husband has to be in authority, that if she speaks up, she’s being disrespectful, that you have to let him make the decision because she is easily deceived, that she is responsible for making sure that he doesn’t sin through having frequent sex and through making sure that he feels flattered and respected, because he can’t be expected to act honorably if he feels disrespected. And so this is what we are being taught in this in the wider Christian world, and if your marriage at all reflects that you cannot have an intimate marriage because an intimate marriage can’t coexist if your needs don’t matter, because the definition of intimacy is that you get to be truly fully known. You cannot be truly fully known when you exist in an unequal power imbalance, because when you’re in a power imbalance, you can’t actually share who you are, and so intimacy just can’t happen. That’s the bad news. The good news is that most people who believe all this toxic crap don’t act it out. And I think that, I don’t think people understand that. Because when people say, “Oh, I know tons of complementarians with great marriages,” yeah, that’s because they’re acting like egalitarians. And the in most complementarians do most people who say that they agree that the man has the authority in marriage, don’t act it out, which is good, because as soon as you act it out, abuse rates increase. Divorce rates increase 7.4 times. John Gottman found an abuse rate of 82%. Like this is bad stuff, so most people don’t act it out, and so a lot of people in these toxic churches are not acting it out so their marriages might still be okay, but just being in that kind of an environment does end up hurting you, and it’s going to hurt your kids. And I think that’s the key thing, is even if you are somehow managing to come out unscathed, your kids likely won’t you. Uh, and so I would just challenge people that there are good churches out there, and if you’re in a church that is treating women like they don’t matter, then you are actually promoting that idea, even if you don’t personally believe it. By giving your time and money into that church, you are allowing that church to spread that message. And any abused woman who goes to that church is going to be further hurt. And so you really, you really need to decide, is this something that that’s worth propping up? Because there are good churches out there. There’s very good churches that do preach Jesus, and that do preach the equality of all and the dignity of all and the worth of all, and those are the churches that we need to find.

Ann Maree
Yeah, thank you. Yeah. And I think in many ways, I’ve said this, that the children in a home are like the thermometers, but also they but also, I think adults too. I would say I was one of them. When we’re swimming in that water, it’s like the frog in hot water. You don’t know. You just don’t know. And then that bubbling that’s going on, that’s saying your marriage is not what it should be, not what it could be, the intimacy is not there and not recognizing, oh, because we’ve been swimming in this water, and we may not have acted out all of the twisted doctrines, but they’re part of our being. I mean, it’s part of our DNA at that point.

Sheila
Yeah, there’s a really interesting study done by Holman and Burdett in 2021 that found that women who go to structurally sexist churches, so churches where they can’t hold certain offices, have worse health outcomes than women who go to egalitarian churches. Men, however, do not. Men’s health outcomes are fine, but women’s health outcomes if they go to a sexist church, are actually worse than if they didn’t go to church at all, which is huge, because religiosity is a huge boost to health normally. So normally, being a Christian is a huge boost to health, unless you go to a structurally sexist church and we found that as well, right? Like, like, people who believe that the husband is an authority are more likely to be in pain and they’re more likely to be chronically exhausted. Or sorry, women who believe that, or whose husbands believe that, more likely to be pain, more likely to be exhausted.

Ann Maree
Yeah, so you’re giving us the corroborating evidence to your data, I mean, your research, it’s physically apparent where you’re going to church and what you’re believing. Yeah, ouch, yeah.

Julia
And the body bears it out. The body tells the story of what’s happening oftentimes, yeah. I’m thinking too about just the roles in the church, and how that correlates with roles and marriages. And you know how Jesus dies for the church, how Jesus sends the church out to be a light in the world. And Jesus also deploys his beloved church with gifts. Gifts, to contend for the faith, to encourage one another, to rebuke, to prophecy, to teach, to discern false prophets, to expose false prophecy, and how necessary that is for all of us to do together, because it’s a commandment that all of us have been given, man and woman in the church and in marriage. So I’m just kind of like reflecting on that as you guys are speaking and wanting women to use their gifts and those callings not just in the church, but in their marriages, but then they have to contend with the teaching that they’re not supposed to speak up, they’re not supposed to communicate, and how do you compare that with what’s commanded in Scripture, to test, to prophecy, to teach, to admonish, to rebuke, and how that’s supposed to allow the church to thrive in the kingdom to grow, and if that’s true of the church in the world, how would that not also be true between me and my spouse?

Sheila
Yeah, no, exactly, because we’re supposed to be iron sharpening iron. We’re supposed to be spurring one another on to love and good deeds. And how can we do that if one person becomes invisible, and if one person overshadows the other, that’s not really a marriage, celebrating two people. That is one person on the throne that the other person is worshiping and that doesn’t that’s not a marriage. It’s something, but it’s not a marriage.

Julia
So how would you advise couples of, um, let’s say they’re hearing this podcast, and they maybe have heard these teachings before. They want to put them away. They want to pursue one another. They’ve never had an emotionally connected marriage. What would you say to them?

Sheila
Yeah, I would say start, everything starts with just spending time together, you know, like, sometimes we make things way too serious and way too difficult, just work at having fun. A lot of us don’t know how to be a good husband and wife, but everybody knows how to be a friend. Start with being a friend. You know, have fun. Do stuff together, do a puzzle, just spend some time together. Because the more low key time that you can spend together, the more you can have those conversations that are perhaps a little bit trickier. And I think a lot of us have just gotten really bored with each other, because our lives just have gotten kind of to do with all of the errands and stuff that needs to get done, and we’ve lost sight of who we are. So I think just getting back to figuring out how to have fun. What do we like doing together? How can we spend time together? That’s important, and we have a workbook that goes along with the marriage you want. There’s a study guide that couples can do together with a lot of really fun questions, and it doesn’t take very long. It’s not super onerous, but it can start those really big questions that we just need to start asking if we want to figure out, yeah, how do we build emotional connection? And it also points to the things that we don’t talk about enough that steal relational joy. And the number one thing, I think that was just so obvious in our findings, is mental load. You know, when women are bearing most of the mental load, when women are doing most of the housework, marriage, marital satisfaction just plummets even more than if the sex life falls apart, even more than if they have money problems. Women just can’t bear in this, in this culture where there, where everything is so busy and there’s so much to keep track of, women cannot bear the whole thing alone, and yet women are often being asked to and that’s exhausting. You just can’t live like that.

Julia
Can you explain that more what mental load is?

Sheila
Okay, so let’s say that you ask your husband to be the one to take Johnny to hockey. Okay, I’m in Canada. It’s hockey. It’s the law, right? So you gotta take your kid to hockey. What is it that you are asking your husband to do? So he thinks I am asking, I am being asked to put Johnny in the car, put his hockey equipment in the car, take it to the rink, and then bring him home afterwards. But taking him to hockey is a lot more than that. It’s making sure that his hockey equipment gets cleaned. It’s making sure he has new hockey equipment when he goes through that growth spurt. It’s making sure that last week, when we borrowed the helmet from Brad, because we forgot ours at home, that we returned it. It’s making sure that we know which week we’re bringing the snack to the practice, and that we remember to take the Tupperware container home. It’s making sure that we understand that if our little kid is being bullied by little Fred, who’s actually grown three sizes this year, that we are intervening to make sure the coach is aware of this bullying situation. It’s making sure that when there’s a fundraising drive, you’re the one who goes to grandpa who doesn’t know how to give money online, but you collect that check from grandpa, and you make sure that it gets to the hockey. Like, this is all the stuff that is right. Like, it is not getting the kid in the car and driving to hockey, it’s everything else. It’s making sure the fees are paid. And you guys can probably think of even more things that it involves. And the problem is that often we think that driving is all that’s involved, and because everything else is invisible, it’s not quantified. And he often doesn’t pay attention to all those other things that she’s doing, because he’s never had to, and so he doesn’t even see it. I was explaining this to another woman that I was getting interviewed for The Marriage You Want, and she didn’t know the concept of mental load. And when we got off the interview and the camera was turned off, she said, “You know, last week we run, we run this ministry together, my husband and I and we had invited this couple to come and do some workshops. And my husband said, ‘well, let’s just have them stay at our house, because we have the room, and it would save so much money from the hotel.’ And I just went into panic mode because I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve got to clean and I’ve got a meal plan and I’ve got to figure out the groceries’. Is that meant to load?” And I’m like, yes, because she said it didn’t even occur to my husband how much work this was for me. And I’m like, Yes, that is meant to load. Because, you know, so often men will make these plans, because they don’t realize what everything goes into it, because they’ve never had to carry that. And so the more that we can spread the mental load around and have him own hockey practice so you are responsible for tracking down grandpa’s check for the fundraiser, the more he’s responsible for everything that comes off of her plate and gives her some breathing room so maybe she can meal plan.

Julia
Yeah, it’s the mental load and it’s the emotional labor too.

Sheila
Yeah. Figuring out the bullying, figuring out, okay, our kids aren’t getting along. What are we going to do about that? Yeah.

Julia
Ann Maree, any questions so far, I want to give you space to jump in, because I just keep going.

Ann Maree
I’m just, I’m laughing back here because I’m heading into a week where I’ll be helping take care of five of my grandchildren. When I took this on, I asked my husband, and he’s like, oh, yeah, sure, we can do it. Now that we’re two or three days away from it. Is he taking off work? No. So I’m like, what was he thinking when I asked, Should we take this on? And also, my daughter has given me a multi-colored spreadsheet of where they all have to be at different times of the day, every day of those that they’re gone. So I’m just like, oh, mental load Yes, I’m going to die when it’s done.

Julia
I there’s many marriage books that people have read that I just cannot advise that they go to, Christian marriage books. And yours is one that I highly recommend many women who are in abusive relationships, they’re the ones who are reading all the marriage books, right? They’re the ones who are doing the research. They’re the ones who are trying to figure out what’s going on, what they can do better, what needs to change, passing those books on to their husbands. I have not seen a Christian marriage book that will raise flags for abusive dynamics until yours. So I just want to say how greatly I appreciate that. You’ve raised the flag about entitlement, about emotional abuse, about manipulation, and I think a resource like this is going to save so many people.

Sheila
Yeah, that was our prayer, because we know that people who are in destructive marriages are far more likely to read marriage books, and yet all of these authors say, Oh, my book wasn’t meant for those in abusive relationships like you can’t say that, because most people in abusive relationships don’t know they’re in an abusive relationship. That’s right. So what you need to do, what your book needs to do, is to help people identify whether this is actually not a me-problem. This is not something I can fix, because I’m not the cause of this. This is abuse. And so we did try to make sure that, yeah, pretty much in each chapter, we were like, Okay, wait, but if this is going on, that is not normal, that is not acceptable, that’s not something that you can fix, yeah.

Julia
Yeah. And your advice is to talk to somebody and to go to a licensed professional,

Sheila
Yep, licensed, please, licensed, yes.

Ann Maree
Okay, yeah, this is the biblical counselor, though, we both have to have training when, yes, we need the training, because I’ve had enough people come to me for help previously, when I was counseling who also got bad advice from licensed counselors. So just understand, I don’t know what it’s like in Canada, but here it’s a specialty to know more abuse and trauma. So, yeah.

Julia
You can’t talk about relationships without talking about repair. And I appreciated too, what you said about forgiveness and what forgiveness looks like, what repair looks like, what reconciliation looks like. You mentioned in your book that there’s the advice given that forgiveness is it’s sort of one of those things that people are told before they get married. “The best piece of advice you can remember is to forgive one another,” which isn’t necessarily untrue, but you contend with that idea by saying, Actually, let’s talk about repentance. Let’s talk about repair, just as much as we talk about forgiveness. And you give some principles for what good repair looks like.

Sheila
Yeah, I think that. And again, it depends on the offense, right? Like small things need small repair, but big things need big repair. And that means that trust needs to be rebuilt. There needs to be a total understanding and admittance of what not just what they did, but the impact that had on someone else, the impact that has, there has to be an acknowledgment of the trauma that the spouse felt. There has to be an ownership of that trauma that you caused it, and you need to give your spouse room to grieve. You need to give your spouse room to take a step back, if they need to, as they are judging whether this repair and whether this trust can be rebuilt, and trust can only be rebuilt when the aim isn’t I am going to do this to fix the relationship, but instead, I’m going to do this because I know this is the right thing to do, and no matter what happens to the relationship, I’m going to become a better person, and I’m going to do this right. And that’s the kind of heart change that we’re looking for. And what too often happens is especially in cases like porn, for instance, or abuse. Well, in Love and Respect. In the book Love and Respect, there was an anecdote where a woman had kicked a husband out of the house because he had been physically abusive, and then Emerson Eggerichs talks about how the man repented, and so he got back in, and it’s like, well, what does repent mean there? Because it sounds in context like you just apologized, and that means nothing if someone’s been physically abusive, that takes a long time to show that you are safe again. And just saying, Oh, but the he apologized. That’s not enough. And yet, when we teach that, well, you need to forgive, as Jesus forgave you. I mean, if you don’t forgive, then how can you expect Jesus to forgive you? And this is often what we’re taught. And so suddenly, the person who has been hurt, the person who has been victimized, is now made to be the abuser because they won’t forgive, and so they are the one who is chastised, and it’s very backwards. And so I think that as a as a Christian community, we need to be asking much more of repentance than of forgiveness, and we need to be saying much more. What does repentance truly look like? And repentance is a turning away and a doing things differently. It’s not just an I’m saying sorry.

Julia
That is so good.

Ann Maree
Yeah, that is so good. I had somebody mentioned once the fruit of repentance, meaning, think about how long it takes for, you know, if you planted an apple tree, how long does it take before it actually produces good fruit, right? It’s, it’s going to be a while.

Sheila
Yeah, we’re about to play on it’s like three to five years.

Ann Maree
Okay, well, there you go. So you’re looking for repentance in three to five years. You’re not looking for it next week, right? Yeah, thank you for saying that.

Julia
I think forgiveness and repentance, we tend to talk about how important it is, but it can be very trite, very watered down, very transactional. And if we are believers, then this should be where we have the market cornered, right? This is what we should do so well. And you know, just the idea too, that it takes time and it takes testing, and it’s a process, and you should gage the actions as you see from your spouse or from a friend or whomever it is. So thank you for speaking to that, because you can’t talk about relationships without talking about, what do you do when there’s rupture, and how do you repair?

Sheila
And also, I think people miss that the story of Scripture is one of transformation, right? Like we are supposed to be being transformed into the likeness of Christ, and when we focus our teaching on forgiveness and papering over problems, that’s got nothing to do with transformation, that’s just maintaining the status quo. So that’s actually working against Christ, not for him.

Julia
Amen. Ann Maree, any last questions?

Ann Maree
What are we not asking you that we should be?

Sheila
Um, you know, I think that my prayer for this book is that we set a new standard for what counts as advice in the evangelical world. That’s really our prayer for all of our books. But especially with this one, I think because there just has been such a dearth of healthy marriage teaching, I don’t know how all of these other marriage books got so popular. They were written by people who weren’t qualified. The vast majority are written by pastors or theologians. They don’t use peer reviewed research, they don’t use data. It’s just based on their own opinions. And so many women have spoken out. I mean, in their books, they even talk about how women came to me and say, “This isn’t going to work, but we know that God’s principles are true,” right, like Love and Respect, For Women Only, Every Man’s Battle. They all talk about how women came to them saying, this is wrecking my marriage, and the and their responses, then you gotta just get right with God. And so women have been speaking up for years and have not been listened to, and it’s just time for us to understand that healthy is healthy, and you can be healthy and still be a Christian, and you shouldn’t have to...when people say, “Yeah, I mean, it’s an okay book, you’ll have to, you know, eat the meat and spit out the bone.” Well, there shouldn’t be bones! No, like, we have such a low bar for our books because they’ve been bad. So our prayer is just that people see the difference between The Marriage You Want and the other books that they’ve read. It’s a fun read. It’s not depressing. It’s like fun, and the charts are super fun. And so I’m just hoping people see, oh, this is what healthy looks like. This is what healthy is.

Ann Maree
Thank you. Me too. Thanks. Yeah, what else to get?

Julia
I’m reading it. Reading it, you do get practical tools, and it is a book that offers so much hope and light. I think the other side of the equation, those books that you’re mentioning tend to be very dogmatic, but yours is very balanced. It’s it’s asking you just to contend with what you’ve been taught and to take up the space that you have and ask good questions and consider and so it’s very invitational, and I highly recommend it to all my clients. Thank you so much. Thank you. What’s next for you?

Sheila
Well, I just started a new book. So we started with sex, and then we moved to marriage, and now the next book I write is going to be more about Christian advice to women in general.

Ann Maree
Oh!

Sheila
And yeah. So that one’s fun. I’m trying to draft that out this summer, but it’ll be a while before it’s out, but that’s what we’re working on right now. It’s exciting.

Ann Maree
Embedded in all of your books has been some great advice, so it’ll be nice to see it all in one place, too.

Julia
Yeah. Thank you, Sheila, thank you for being our conversation partners today. Thank you for the work that you do. And God bless you. Thank you.

Thank you, Safe to Hope listeners for joining us today, for being a part of our summer book series. We hope these conversations and resources will bear good fruit in your life and remind you of the Lord’s goodness and healing love.

Our next episode during our storyteller Carya, will resume on July 8. Until then.