Episode 266: Demolishing the Love and Respect Dichotomy Definitively (with Data)

The idea that men need respect while women need love has been treated as gospel truth in the evangelical world. Best-sellers have been written based on it; it informs almost every marriage sermon. What if it’s not true? Using data from our marriage survey of 7000 people, we show how reality is very different—and what this means for how we should talk about marriage!

TO SUPPORT US

• Join our Patreon for as little as $5 a month to support our work
• For tax deductible donations in the U.S., support Good Fruit Faith Initiative through the Bosko Foundation
• And check out our Merch, or any of our courses!
• Join our email list!

LINKS

• Pre-order The Marriage You Want! https://amzn.to/3YQfqMy
• Send your pre-order receipts to preorder@marriageyouwantbook.com to get our pre-order bonus and an invite to the launch team!

THINGS MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST

• Take our marriage survey yourself as a date night!
• Our synopsis of everything wrong with Love & Respect (with other posts and podcasts linked in the bottom)
• Our open letter to Focus on the Family
• Jonathan Pokluda clip
• Female Influencer clip #1
• Female influencer clip #2
• Josh and Jana Howerton
• Josh Howerton “Give him a crown”
• Steve Gaines’ sermon on respect

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Sheila: Do men desperately need respect while women desperately need love?  Well, that is the thesis of a lot of bestselling books in evangelicalism like Love and Respect, For Women Only, His Needs, Her Needs, Marriage on the Rock by Jimmy Evans, Power of a Praying Wife.  Basically all of the best sellers say that respect is this God-given need of a man.  And today, on the Bare Marriage, podcast, we have new data, and I’m so excited because we are going to share with you what is actually the case.  I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your marriage and your sex life.  And I am joined by my husband, Keith.

Keith: Hey, everybody.

Sheila: And I’m really stoked about this one.  This one has been years in the making, but we have some awesome stuff to share with you from our data from our new book, The Marriage You Want, which is out in March.  

Keith: Yeah.  It’s exciting.

Sheila: Yeah.  And in that book, we’re not talking about gender roles and gender essentialism and all the things that evangelical books have typically talked about when it comes to marriage.  Instead we just ask the question what leads to a healthy marriage.  

Keith: Mm-hmm.  And we don’t just talk about our personal experience.  We talk about what the data actually shows.  So the actual—we look at everybody, and we say what actually works and what doesn’t work as opposed to just this is what I think that we should believe so let’s just all do it.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And we don’t distort our findings.  So it’s super fun.  And I am so stoked about this.  And I want to start by actually bringing Joanna and Rebecca on the podcast to share the data, and then you can come back.  And we can talk about what we think about this love and respect dichotomy.  All right, everybody.  This is the one we’ve been waiting for.  I am so excited.  I am joined today by my daughter, Rebecca Lindenbach. 

Rebecca: Hello.  Hello.

Sheila: And my coauthor and stats wonderful person, Joanna Sawatsky.

Joanna: Hi, everybody.

Sheila: And I think this is the seventh podcast that we have done in January.  Every year our annual thing on Love and Respect because it is a terrible book.  It is a terrible thesis, and we have shown over and over again how much it harms.  And this is how we started Great Sex Rescue.  I read the sex chapter.  I freaked out.  I wrote about it on the blog.  Everybody else freaked out, and then, Joanna, you prepared a report.  We sent it in to Focus on the Family because we thought, “Well, maybe they just don’t realize how harmful this book is.” 

Rebecca: Correction.  Mom and Joanna thought Focus on the Family might just not realize.  I from the get go was like there is no way in hell that these people are going to change anyway.

Joanna: Well, I have very strong memories of being at the Home Depot garden center with my husband.  Solidly months after we had sent in the report and being like, “I really think they’re going to get back to us.  I really just—I think they are.”  They did not.

Sheila: And, of course, they didn’t.  And so we decided that we needed to go big or go home.  So we surveyed 20,000 women on how messages like those found in Love and Respect affect women’s marital and sexual satisfaction.  And that became The Great Sex Rescue, which was our first big book.  And then we followed it up—I rewrote The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex.  We wrote The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex.  We wrote She Deserves Better.  And now our new marriage book is coming out in March, The Marriage You Want.  Keith and I wrote that one.  

Rebecca: Which—can I just say the title is so funny?  And we thought of the title on a walk.

Sheila: We did.

Rebecca: We’re terrible at thinking of titles for books.  Okay?  She Deserves Better was given to us by our editor.

Sheila: What we said was just we want to give the idea that girls deserve better.  She deserves better.  And then a week later they came back.

Rebecca: And then Stephanie was like, “What about She Deserves Better?”  And we’re like, “Oh, yeah.  That’s a fantastic title.”  And in the one, mom and I were on a walk, and I was just—and I said something like, “We just need a title that, in essence, says marriage shouldn’t suck.”  And mom is like, “Yeah.  The marriage you always wanted.”  And I was like, “Could that be the title?”  And my mom was like, “Could that be the title?”  I was like, “It’s a little bit wordy.  What if we drop always?  The Marriage You Want.”  It’s like yeah.  That works.

Sheila: And then we surveyed another 7,000 for this one in our marriage survey, Joanna.  And one of the things that we wanted to do was test the Love and Respect thesis.  So Rebecca, would you explain why we just didn’t buy it?

Rebecca: Well, see, here’s the problem.  The Love and Respect thesis is built—is based on two different—I guess we can call them studies.  So the first one was a survey put out by Shaunti Feldhahn in her book, For Women Only, which asked men would you rather feel alone and unloved or inadequate and disrespected.  And 75% of men chose alone and unloved.  

Sheila: I think it was 74 or 72 or something.  But yeah.  

Rebecca: It was approximately three quarters of men.  Let’s be real.  The arrow bars on that were off the charts, so I could probably—it’s—but—so about three quarters of them said they prefer to be alone and unloved.  So from this, Shaunti concluded that men need respect while women need love.  Emerson Eggerichs, in the book Love and Respect, decides to strengthen that finding by saying, “Of course, women need love and not respect.  Look at greeting cards.  How many of them talk about respect?  And how many of them talk about love?  Therefore, women need love, and men need respect.”  And I just want to say I can follow this logic and prove anything.  This is a dangerous game to play because I can prove—you know how many comedians make jokes about men pooping their pants versus women pooping their pants?  I can say, therefore, men need to wear Depends all the time.  And women don’t.  We don’t make conclusions—oh, and God designed men to not poop on the toilet.  You could make that argument.  It’s the same argument.  This is a dumb argument.  You can’t take something that’s hyperbolic and for a specific point in your life and draw overarching conclusions.  But that is literally the two studies.  So also a big thing to know about that original study, about the alone and unloved and inadequate and disrespected, Shaunti Feldhahn even admitted in the first edition of her book—I can’t remember if she took out the admittance in later editions or not.  I don't think she did.  She says that the person who she had paid to put out this survey actually said that they might want to remove this question because people said they couldn’t tell the difference between the two questions.  And that is a big deal.

Sheila: Yeah.  I’m going to read—this is the first edition.  I’ve got it right here.  Okay?  Here’s Shaunti Feldhahn in the original edition.  “When I originally tested the survey questions, I was perplexed that many men had a hard time answering the unloved versus disrespected question.”  So already she is calling it the unloved versus disrespected even though that isn’t—it was alone and unloved versus inadequate and disrespected.  So she’s already doing something that is interesting.  “Because they appeared to equate the two.  Chuck Cohen, the survey design expert, warned me that might happen.”

Rebecca: In other words, he said this is a terrible question.

Sheila: And then she goes on to say that even her pilot studies said that they couldn’t really answer this well.  And she said, “Finally, the light bulb came on.  If a man feels disrespected, he is going to feel unloved.  And that’s why they can’t figure it out.”  That’s why they’re having trouble with the question.

Rebecca: Which I cannot tell you how much that is not the academic appropriate response to a pilot study failure of a question.  That is so far beyond anything that you would have been taught in any survey design class.  You can’t just say, “Hmm.  I didn’t get the finding I want.  What if, instead, I can get the finding I want?”  That’s not what you do.

Sheila: So here’s what happened.  So Emerson Eggerichs based his book, Love and Respect, on Shaunti’s survey question, and you’ll find—they both were published in 2004.  So both books came out at the same time.  And they were in communication with each other before they were published because Eggerichs relies on Shaunti’s survey data and actually quotes the fact that she had hired this survey design expert, Chuck Cohen, even though she admits she didn’t listen to his advice.  

Rebecca: Even though Chuck Cohen probably does not want his professional name associated with this specific question.  

Sheila: She admits that she didn’t listen to his advice, but Emerson Eggerichs gives it a long footnote in Love and Respect saying that this proves his thesis.  So the whole thesis for the book Love and Respect—which again let me read you the subtitle.  The Love She Most Desires, The Respect He Desperately Needs.  So she has desires.  He has desperate needs.  The whole thesis is really based on that one survey question and the idea—and he says the idea about greeting cards.  He throws in one other thing.  That the Aretha Franklin song, Respect—“R E S P E C T.  Find out what it means to me”—that that was actually written by a man because a woman wouldn’t write it because respect is—and I—it’s like, “Emerson, the reason you even know that song is because it went huge.  The reason it went huge is because women liked it and reacted to it and found themselves in it.”  If women relate to this song, then maybe it’s saying something to women.   

Rebecca: It’s just ridiculous how—I mean the word for it genuinely is asinine in how bad the takes are and how poorly the research was constructed.  These are educated people.  

Joanna: Well, the problem is they weren’t actually seeking to do research.  So Dobson—James Dobson, the former head of Focus on the Family—wrote about the idea of love versus respect in his previous books.  It seems to me that there was a desire to update the book with new faces, a new, shiny title that you could sell, and that, therefore, the thing was go and find data that supports this thesis.  That’s not what research does.  What research does it says, “Well, what actually is the relationship between wanting to feel loved versus wanting to feel respected?”  Where you’re open to finding anything, right?  Finding the opposite of what you found—what we expected, finding that there’s no association, finding that is exactly what you thought you would see.  That’s not what happened.  They went looking for data that specifically followed their conclusions.

Rebecca: And then they looked at greeting cards.  

Sheila: They looked at greeting cards.  And we have talked in previous podcasts about many of the issues with Love and Respect.  We’ve looked at how they handle sex.  We’ve looked at how Emerson Eggerichs says that you can’t tell if a woman is aroused, how sex is just about a man’s physical release.   We’ve looked at how he thinks that men want their wives to sit there and watch them paint walls without talking and how the pinnacle to a man is a wife who doesn’t talk ever.  We’ve looked at how Emerson Eggerichs misuses Scripture and actually takes whole phrase out so that the Scripture sounds like it’s saying the opposite of what it is saying.  We had a whole podcast with Nijay Gupta on that.  We’ve looked at so many aspects of this book and how harmful it is.  But what we could never do is actually definitively say the thesis is crap.  We could say we think the thesis is crap.  We could say that—

Rebecca: We could say their research doesn’t prove their own thesis.

Sheila: Yeah.  We could say that their research question is bad.  We could say that there was a woman named Shauna Springer—and I have talked about this.  A psychologist, who asked—who surveyed women asking them the same question alone and unloved versus inadequate and disrespected.  And women answered the same as men, so there was no gender difference.  So we could talk about that, and we did.  But we could never actually talk about what it is that people want because we hadn’t measured it.  And guess what?  Now we have.  And what we—here, Joanna, why don’t you—

Rebecca: Here’s what we did.  We went to the greeting cards aisle and the hot wheels aisle.  And what we did—

Joanna: No.  So the problem with the question as it was originally constructed—I mean there are many problems.  But one of the big problems is that it’s double-barreled, which means that you’re saying this and this versus this and that.  The problem is is it actually that they don’t want to be unloved and disrespected.  Or is it something about being alone and inadequate?  Or is it something about the combinations thereof?  We don’t know that.  So what we did is we said the obvious thing to do is just decouple all of them and make it a ranking question.

Rebecca: For anyone who is struggling to understand the double-barreled, I’ll give you an example right now.  Would you prefer to have a chocolate chip cookie and get shot in the face with a paintball gun or would you prefer to have spinach and get a free stuffed animal?  If you asked 800 children that question and then you said, “Children prefer vegetables.  It’s your fault if your kid is a picky eater,” that’s the problem with a double-barreled question.  They are clearly not responding to the cookie or the spinach.  They are clearly responding to the paintball gun versus the stuffed animal.  And you just can’t ever tell which one it is unless you actually—that’s an obvious one.  But there are a lot of times where you can’t figure it out until you parse it away.

Sheila: Yeah.  For instance, if you said, “Would you prefer to feel sad and forlorn or mad and angry,” that’s one thing.  Now you should never do that because they’re synonyms.  Why would you add extra words?

Rebecca: Well, sometimes you can.  Sometimes you need to.  That’s fine.  There’s no nevers in psychometrics.

Sheila: Right.  But at least sad and forlorn and mad and angry are synonyms.  The thing is alone and unloved are not synonyms.  And disrespected and inadequate are not synonyms.  They are not the same thing.  

Joanna: Yeah.  And it’s okay to use a double-barreled question if then your interpretation is going to be people would—men would prefer to be alone and unloved.  Women would prefer to be—we would presumably have measured women.  And, oh, look.  They also would—don’t want to be—

Sheila: But, again, in Shaunti’s book, she actually called it the unloved versus disrespected question.  

Joanna: Exactly.  Precisely.  And therein is the problem.

Sheila: So she didn’t called it a double barreled.  She reduced it to unloved and disrespected even though that isn’t what she asked.

Joanna: No.  And so what we did is we—again, we decoupled it.  So we said, “Okay, folks.  Rank what would you be most uncomfortable with being?  Is the worst thing to be alone?  Is it to be inadequate?  Is it to be disrespected?  Is it to be unloved?  Put those in order.”  And so people did.  And the one that people were most uncomfortable with across the board—people don’t want to be unloved which is fair.  Both men and women.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And let’s give you the stats.  Okay?  So this is all in chapter one of The Marriage You Want.  It’s a side bar.  We have a three page side bar.  So this isn’t a major point of our point because we’re really not tearing down other books in our book.  But we did need to address this because it’s such a common teaching.  So here we go.  So women, 43.4%, said that being unloved is the worst, and men, 40.5%.  Okay.  So both men and women don’t want to be unloved.  That’s not what Emerson Eggerichs or Shaunti Feldhahn said, but that is very clear—and it’s overwhelming.  But let’s take respect, Joanna.  What happens—who is it that doesn’t want to be disrespected?

Joanna: It’s women more than men.

Sheila: Did you all hear that?  Okay.  Joanna, I want you to say that again.    

Rebecca: But the greeting cards, Sheila.  The greeting cards.  They lied.  Next you’re going to tell us that the backs of cereal boxes—because women do all that silly shopping stuff.  What about the cereal boxes?  Sorry.  I’m done.  I’ll let you guys talk about the smart person stuff.

Sheila: Okay.  I am going to give you the stat.  All right?  24.8% of women said that the worst thing would be being disrespected versus 17.6% of men.  Let that sink in.

Rebecca: So it’s actually a bigger difference than between men and women on unloved.  

Sheila: That’s right.  Mm-hmm.

Joanna: Yep.  And it seems to be that the driver of this change, from my perspective—we don’t know.  We have to do further studies on this.  Is that there is actually—men are much more concerned about adequacy than women.  So while 20.2% of women said that they’d be most uncomfortable with being inadequate, that number was 31.9% for men. 

Rebecca: And this makes sense with what we know about childhood socialization, right?  This makes sense from—about what we know about adolescent development, about how boys play versus how girls play.  Boys tend to play with things that are skills based.  Video games, sports, those kinds of things.  Even hobbies tend to be skill based for boys versus social based for girls.  So the idea that social dynamics would be actually more important for women on average and skill based dynamics would be more important for men actually holds up with what we already know and has been well established in developmental literature.  

Joanna: So essentially, any—a lot of the gender difference that we’re seeing is driven by the inadequate part of the question.  The other really interesting finding that we have is that people—what they are—the happiest to live with, across the board, more than 50% of both men and women are like, “Look.  If I’ve got to pick, I would take being alone.”  

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  It was almost identical.  It was 53.5% of women, 53.1% of men.  It was almost identical saying, “Yeah.  Alone doesn’t bother me.”  

Joanna: Yeah.  I mean and think about it.  Would you rather be a hermit, who lives alone and has a nice time, in the forest glade, not feeling particularly loved, (cross talk)?

Sheila: No one around to love me.  Yeah.  But I get to knit.  I am spending my life knitting and listening to Jane Austen on audio books.

Joanna: Yeah.  Honestly doesn’t sound like a terrible life.  Versus—

Rebecca: I think that’s—I mean both of our husbands have had a point of time—maybe all of our husbands have had a point in their life where the idea of living in a cabin on a mountain in the woods with nothing to do but your hobby is just kind of—that’s the happy place in their head they go to when they’re stressed.

Joanna: My point has been for years that if my husband, Josiah, hadn’t married me that I think he would have become a wildlife photographer and been the guy, who is waiting to find the Siberian tiger for six months in a hide.  It’s like, “That is you, honey.  You would love it.”  

Rebecca: So what the original question did was it paired unloved with the most positive option alone, and it paired disrespected with the—with a heavily unpopular notion, which is inadequate.  So even though men actually feel the strongest about not wanting to be unloved, it was artificially made less unpalatable by being paired with alone.  And disrespected was actually made more unpalatable by being paired with inadequate.  But she doesn’t talk about it as the alone versus inadequate principle.  She talks about it as the loved versus respect even though men are flipped from what she, herself, found.  In other words, alone is the stuffed animal, and inadequate is the paintball gun to the face.  And so it’s totally flipped the polarity.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  And so just to sum up, okay?  When women rank alone, unloved, disrespected, inadequate, what you get is—from worst to best is unloved, disrespected, inadequate, alone.  Okay?  When men rank them, you get unloved, inadequate, disrespected, alone.  So both of them say unloved is the worst.  Both of them say alone ain’t that bad.  But then the inadequate and disrespected is flipped for men and women.  So we’re actually quite similar.  We’re actually very, very similar.  And both of us need love primarily.  

Joanna: Who’d have thunk?

Rebecca: Which should be a relief to everyone because, hey, it’s easier to meet needs that you also understand and need.

Sheila: And yet what has happened in the Christian world is this idea that respect is this special thing that only men need is so pervasive.  And we asked on our patron group—I put up a post.  And I said, “Hey, do you all want to be my research assistants?  I need Instagram reels and TikToks and stuff of preacher or whoever talking about this love and respect dynamic.”  And we got sent so many.  And I don’t want to play them all for you because it—for the sake of time.  It would just take too long.  But I think you all know this, right?  In all of the books that we’ve talked about, that we’ve done one sheets of like Jimmy Evans that we just did at the end of last year, that’s his big thing.  Is that men need respect.  And that this is a need that men have that women don’t.  That women just want that emotional connection but men really need to feel respected.  Let me read you the intro in Love and Respect.  This is actually how Emerson Eggerichs starts the book.  “Love alone is not enough.  You may remember how the Beatles sang, ‘All you need is love,’ but I absolutely disagree with that conclusion.  Five out of ten marriages today are ending in divorce.”  No citation.  And no.  They’re not.  They never—it never has been five out of ten marriages.  But whatever.  Okay.  “Are ending in divorce because love alone is not enough.  Yes.  Love is vital especially for the wife, but what we have missed is the husband’s need for respect.  This book is about how the wife can fulfill her need to be loved by giving her husband what he needs.  Respect.”  

Rebecca: In light of that horrible research question being thoroughly debunked, that’s embarrassing now, isn’t it?  This is embarrassing.  Men don’t need respect in a way that women don’t.  If anything, women are craving respect in a way that men aren’t.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  I want to show you though that this isn’t just Emerson Eggerichs.  So here, for instance, is Jonathon Pokluda, who is the pastor at Harris Creek Baptist Church, I believe.  He’s talking about how men need respect and women need love.  He started this by talking about how women need love.  And we’re just going to play the respect clip.  Okay?

Jonathan Pokluda: As to how, in this season, you make your wife feel loved because you will not succeed in marriage without doing so, ladies.  Women, you need to know that you will not, under any circumstance, have a happy, healthy marriage unless your husband feels respected.  It will not happen.  You will not be the first person in the history to achieve it.  And he gets to decide if he feels respected or not.  You cannot build your case as to why he should feel respected.  You will not have a happy, healthy marriage unless he feels respected.  The Word of God is brilliant.  It is 10 for 10.

Sheila: And that’s just a pretty typical one, right?  Men need respect.  Here’s another one.  This is from an influencer account because I just want you to show how—I just want to show it’s not just pastors and authors.  This is going through Christendom everywhere.  And seriously, we have so many of these.  I’m just picking and choosing just a few snapshots.  

Rebecca: And, as always, make sure—remember that influencer accounts are really big, and they have a lot of following.  Don’t believe them, please.  

Sheila: Yes.  Please don’t.

Rebecca: They have actually less power than people, who—and protection than people in traditionally published fields.  And they deal—

Sheila: So I’m not going to tell you which account this is.  You can see.  If you click on the link, you’ll see it.  But we’ll just play it.  So we don’t want to—

Social Media: Ladies, listen.  Your husband craves respect.  Respect, to a man, is like love is to a woman.  And statistics show that a man would much rather have your respect than your love, if he had to choose.  And it’s common when women feel unloved to cry, right?  Well, when men feel disrespected, they get angry.  Now I’m not excusing the angry outbursts, but I’m trying to help us, as women, understand that when they seem triggered and they’re in that anger mode it’s quite likely because they feel disrespected.  So if we can learn that language, then we can step back and identify.  Is there something that I needed to do differently so that he felt more respected by me?

Sheila: And I love in that how she actually says statistics prove this.  She says statistics prove this because people think this is actually scientific.  And it isn’t.  Let’s do even more of a deep dive into this.  Okay?  

Joanna: Okay.  So first of all, I want to give a giant caveat because my hope is that next year when we do this we will have a paper out about this love versus respect thing.  And we did a whole project with Good Fruit Faith through the Bosko Foundation to find researchers, who were going to write papers with us on different questions.  And we have a researcher.  She is actively drafting the paper.  She and I were just—swapped a bunch of emails in December as she’s prepping the method section.  And she’s doing a great job.  Unfortunately, she—both got pregnant and moved to the Arctic.  And she just said, “I’m still going to get it to you.”  And I was like, “Girl, I have also moved to the Arctic.”  I did it postpartum.  But yeah.  No.  It’s going to be a bit.

Rebecca: Yeah.  We are not in delusional land here.  It’s fine.

Sheila: Yes.  But this is where some of the money that we raise—and we’re so grateful to everyone, who was part of that fundraiser that we had in December as well.  

Joanna: Yeah.  So we are so excited to see what those findings show.  I honestly don’t know what they are because I haven’t been running the number.  Rachel has been doing that.  And she’s doing a fabulous job.  But I ran a few things for this podcast.  So first of all, we asked a question about did you believe when you got married that men need respect and women need love.  And then I looked to see does that map onto how you rank love and respect today.  Because if there was any validity at all to this idea, it should—and no.  Nothing for women.  For men, if men believed when they got married that men need respect in a way that women can never understand, they were actually less likely to rank respect as their first choice, and they were more likely to rank inadequate as their first choice.  So essentially, it’s just not really very valid.  Then I also looked—we had a survey instrument called the Kansas Marital Conflict Scale, which I really like.  Honestly, if you’re just like, “Hey, I want to do a check in on how we handle conflict,” genuinely check out the Kansas Marital Conflict Scale.

Sheila: Well, we actually have it.  We created our—the marriage survey that we did put out.  If you want to take it with your spouse and just do it as a check in, we actually have it as a free download.  So I will put the link to that in the podcast notes.  So it’s a fun one to take together and then talk about.

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  But especially, I really like this—sorry.  My personal favorite of those check in things is the Kansas Marital Conflict Scale because it’s like, hey, how are we doing.  When the poop hits the fan, how do we hash things out?  What are we doing well?  What aren’t we doing well?  How can we each improve?  So that scale says, “Okay.  When you’re starting to have an argument or a disagreement about something, does your spouse insist on contradicting many of your ideas on the issue before they even understand what your ideas are?”  Sounds a lot like respect.

Sheila: That sounds like respect to me.  Yes.  Uh-huh.

Joanna: Yeah.  Okay.

Rebecca: Well, it sounds like disrespect.

Sheila: Right.  Mm-hmm.

Joanna: Yes.  Exactly.  Do you feel disrespected in your marriage essentially?  So comparing, the nevers, obviously, are going to be higher in their marital satisfaction than the almost always people.  And I compared men and women.  So for men, the never in the marital flourishing scale, which was the measure of marital satisfaction that we used heavily in The Marriage You Want, from—comparing never to almost always, the change is 17.85 points out of 100 points.  

Rebecca: So in essence—so disrespect, for men, reduces their marital satisfaction by 17 points.

Joanna: 17.8 (cross talk).  Yes.

Rebecca: By 17.8.  Okay.  

Joanna: A lot of points.  For women, it decreases their marital satisfaction by 25.97 points.

Rebecca: So disrespect impacts women’s marital satisfaction more than it impacts men’s marital satisfaction.

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  Yep.  

Rebecca: Ouch.

Sheila: Okay, everyone.  I want you to sit on that for a minute.  Okay?  And just think about how many pastors have given sermons that you’ve listened to talking about how much men need respect and just sit on that.  Now we’re not saying that men don’t need respect.  They do.  It drops it by 17.8%.  We’re saying that people need respect.  

Joanna: Who would have thunk it?

Sheila: And women, especially, I think need—when you’re in a society where women are not as respected as men, women are going to feel more of a felt need for respect because they have more of a history of being disrespected.  

Rebecca: And even though a lot of people have the experience that in the general public women are kind of just, in general, respected as much as men are in day-to-day life, a lot of people in evangelical environments have not experienced that because they have been raised in churches that believe that a woman’s job is to be second to a man, right?  That’s the entire—that’s the soup they’ve been simmering in.  

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  So then I ran it again just to make sure.

Sheila: Give us some more, Joanna.  This is awesome.

Joanna: I did the same thing again just to—maybe it was just a fluke because that’s best practices, right?  You run it twice.  So the next question in the scale is does your spouse make you feel that your views, even if different from yours, are really important to them.  So essentially, are you respected?  And for men, almost always saying that versus never feeling that way, the change is 25.67 points.

Rebecca: Awesome.

Joanna: Yep.  For women, it’s 35.78 points.

Rebecca: So once again, respect benefits both men and women in relationships but women to an outsized amount.

Joanna: Yep.  The gender difference that we found could be explained by other factors.  There may be some (cross talk) issues there.  Who knows?  But the point is it really matters for both of them.  And if anything, we have some evidence that it’s a larger effect size for women.

Rebecca: But I think all of us are fine just saying it doesn’t need to be a competition, folks.  Just respect, love.  Those things are needed for both of you in a relationship.  This does not need to be a weird, “Okay.  Well, I love you seven times, so I deserve seven respect now.  I have had my—I have done a four respect for you.  Can I please have four love?”  This is just how relationships work regardless of gender.

Joanna: Yep.  Yep.  And the other thing is that we could say, okay.  We know that actually being respected or disrespected in your marriage matters.  But this whole ranking thing doesn’t seem to matter much.  There’s a little bit of evidence, maybe, that’s saying that you want to—would least like to be unloved versus least liked to be respected is associated with slightly higher martial satisfaction.  The trends are teeny weeny.  It’s not a huge effect size.  So maybe it’s all just kind of benign.  But then we looked at the impact of believing when you’re married that—when you get married that men need respect in a way that women can never understand and, lo and behold, that is associated with a bunch of negative outcomes including lower marital satisfaction today.  

Sheila: Okay.  Now this I want to sit on for a minute.  Okay.  So this I want to sit on.  Say that again.  If people get married believing men need respect in a way that women can never understand, what happens?  

Joanna: They have lower marital satisfaction today.  

Sheila: So imagine you are getting married.  And the premarital curriculum that your pastor uses is the book Love and Respect.  I hear every week—I get emails from people saying, “My pastor wants me to read Love and Respect, and he says that we have to read it or else he won’t marry us.”  So they’re teaching this.  And what if you believe it?  What if you believe it because your pastor took you through this book?  Your marriage is going to be worse, people.

Rebecca: Yes.  It’s likely to be worse.  It’s more likely to suffer.

Joanna: I think that that’s because we’re saying, “Women, you can’t understand your husband.  Your theory of mind does not apply to the man who you share a bed with.  Your ability to understand somebody else’s mental state just does not apply to him.”  And that is really negative and means that you can’t anticipate how he’s going to react.  That you have to treat him like a toddler and acquiesce to his every whim, right?  There’s all sorts of stuff that’s packaged with this idea that amplifies—just believing that men need respect may or may not be benign.  I don't know.  But really pairing it with the in a way that you can’t understand and if you don’t do it it’s going to be horrible and respect means all this other stuff, it adds and adds and adds so that we see a very large effect size.  That’s like a 10-point drop in the scale that we used for this.

Rebecca: Which makes sense to me because what this is, in essence, doing is healthy relationships are ones where we have partnership, right?  Where we’re equally yoked, where you are together with someone who carries the burden with you and together it is lighter than it would be for either of you alone, right?  That’s great.  The cord of three strands is not easily broken.  There’s all these different lovely, biblical metaphors for what relationship is supposed to be like.  But what the love and respect teaching says is, actually, you cannot use yourself as a—in essence, a tool to try to figure out what’s reasonable here because you might be looking at this—because this is often what happens.  You might be looking at this man, who is not helping around the house, who is not able to have hard conversations, who is slacking off at work and putting your family in financial peril, and you can’t think, “Well, what would I expect of myself,” and hold him to that standard.  You have to hold him to a completely different standard.  And the standard that’s set for men is very low.  And so what ends up happening is instead of just dealing with issues because I’m like, “Babe, I do it.  Do it,”—instead of that being the situation where we’re actually partners and we are able to hold each other to the same standards we hold ourselves—within reason, of course.  There are certain things that I am terrible at that Connor is excellent at and vice versa.  But within this general concept of both of you being just functional, normal, adult human beings, we’ve now separated it into husband and wife.  And husband and wife can’t really understand each other.  And so if you expect husband to do wife things, you are wrong.  And if you expect wife to do husband things, you are wrong.  And everyone just keeps on trying to passive aggressively meet each other’s quote unquote needs that, apparently, they don’t even have.  And as a result, resentment builds, and you get into these negative patterns where you don’t ever fix the root issue because you’re so focused on meeting needs that aren’t even there or are there just as much for yourself but you’re not thinking, “Well, what do I expect from myself in this situation,” because you’re not allowed to.  Or you’re not understanding the—God’s design for your man.

Sheila: Yeah.  And can I just throw in?  So Joanna made this gorgeous chart that is on page 43 of The Marriage You Want, which is available to preorder now.  The link is in the podcast notes, and we will be starting our launch team next week.

Rebecca: I’ve already gotten seven messages from people, who want to join a launch team.  Friends, it is coming.  I am so happy you’re excited.

Sheila: Yes.  It’s actually coming right now.  So when you send in your preorder receipt, you can get into our launch team, which gets you an early copy of the book.  It means you will be able to start reading this book next week.  Okay?

Rebecca: One person messaged me on Christmas asking how to join.  And I was like, “Friend, I am—Merry Christmas to us that you are so excited about this.  But I am eating waffles with my kid.”  And whoever it is knows that it’s them, and I know they listen to the podcast.  And so I—you are the best.  I love you.  Also that gave me a big laugh on Christmas.  We will see you in the launch group.

Sheila: So we are recording this a couple of weeks before it comes out.  But on January 16 when this comes out, you will be able to just send us your receipt.  You can just forward it to us.  Take a screenshot.  Whatever.  The email address is in the podcast notes with a link to how to do that.  And then you’re going to get an invitation to join our launch team.  You’re going to get a preorder bonus and all kinds of really cool stuff.  But one of the things that is in the book is a ton of charts.  If you thought Great Sex Rescue and She Deserves Better had charts, you don’t even know charts.  Okay.  This has so much data.  And I want to read some of the effects that we found on what happens when you believe when you get married that men need respect in a way that women can never understand because Becca was just talking about how you feel like you just don’t connect anymore because you’re such totally different species.  So when men feel that when they get married, they’re 48% more likely to say that we don’t have shared hobbies.  And their wives are 71% more likely to say we don’t have shared hobbies.  So we don’t do things together.  The men are two times more likely to say my wife doesn’t know how to make me laugh.  And their wives are—

Rebecca: That’s sad.

Sheila: - 2.56 times more likely to say my husband doesn’t know how to make me laugh.  

Rebecca: Oh gosh.  That’s actually really sad.

Joanna: I know.

Sheila: I know.  And then when you look at sexual satisfaction—let’s just look at this on the wife, okay?  So when the wife believes that men need respect in a way that I will never understand, right?  She is 51% more likely to say I’m not satisfied with my sex life.  She’s 54% more likely to say I don’t feel emotionally close to my husband when we have sex.  They are 74% more likely to say that the feel sexually inadequate.  This is what we are doing when we teach this.  That men need respect in a way that women can never understand.  We set people up for worse marriages.  

Rebecca: And what I find ironic is all these books always talk about—in every book.  Every marriage book talks about the need for communication, right?  Because communication is important.  You have to actually talk.  Love and Respect starts off by saying you can never truly know what each other thinks.  Every expert knows that healthy communication is needed for a good marriage, and Love and Respect literally—just shoots that in the foot.  It’s like how much can you really communicate with someone you can never understand.  What does communication even mean then?  Right?  It’s just terrible.

Sheila: And it hurts emotional maturity.  Okay.  Guys, if men believe when they get married that men need respect in a way that women can never understand, they are 31% more likely to say I’m easily overwhelmed by my anger.  Which, interestingly, Emerson Eggerichs talks about in Love and Respect.  How men stonewall and have anger outbursts.  And he teaches it like it’s normal.  It’s like it’s not normal, Emerson.  It’s people who believe like you do.  People who function in marriage like a team don’t do this.  And the problem is that you have taught an entire generation of Christians that this love and respect dichotomy is a real God-given thing and that men need respect in some way that women just don’t.  And it isn’t true, and it’s hurting marriages.  

Rebecca: And you know what?  We’ve talked about this seven times now.  And I just want to say, my esteemed colleagues at Focus on the Family, Emerson Eggerichs, et all—whatever their corporation is called—like Shaunti Feldhahn, if you all just done something year one, we would have sex different podcasts in Januarys.  And there is an easy way to make all of this go away.  And it’s to say, “Hey, you know what?  New research has found that our premise was wrong.”  You could apologize.  That would be awesome.  I am through asking for that.  I want to reiterate, as I did last year I think—or maybe it was the year before.  Because people always say, “Okay.  But what would you do if they apologized,” well, we’d say, “Thank you for apologizing.  Also this stuff still sucks.  And the damage is still done, so we’re going to keep talking about it.”  You also get to be heralded as a good person, who apologized.  That’s the benefit of apologizing frankly.  But what I want to say is I know you guys don’t have the guts to apologize.  I know that you do not have the cajones to actually do the right thing.  So here is what I am, once again, asking you to do.  I am asking you to retire, to buy a cabin, and to rescue foster rabbits or become a wood whittler or start doing—join your local nature group.  And you know how every now and then there’s baby beavers that are orphaned and the baby beavers need places to live for six months until they can live on their own and build their own lodge?  I want you to rescue baby beavers.  That is all we are asking.  We are asking for you to say—to nope out of there, to get out of there, to stop selling your books, and you don’t even need to say anything publically because, again, I know you don’t have the cajones to do so.  So all I am asking you is to take the millions of dollars that you have made by ruining people’s marriages and go buy yourself 70 rabbits, if that’s what you want.  Rescue bluebirds.  Do something like that.  

Sheila: Knit.  Knit.

Rebecca: We are not asking you to do anything difficult.  I am just asking you to stop.  I am asking you to stop speaking at conferences.  Stop hosting marriage events.  Stop going on news shows.  Stop hosting a podcast that spouts this drivel.  Go and rescue bunnies.  That’s all we are asking.  And if you aren’t even willing to do that, if it’s this important to you that you keep shelling what has now been proven by not just us but multiple people to be complete drivel, then start reading a lot the Scriptures about God’s judgment because I just don’t know what else to tell you.  I am giving you an out here, and it involves bunny rabbits.  Take it.  Anyway, that’s my speech I give every year.  

Sheila: Yes.  Thank you for that speech.  Thank you for that.

Rebecca: That’s all we’re asking.  We’re just asking for you to adopt bunny rabbits.

Sheila: Yeah.  And here’s why this matters too. Even if Shaunti Feldhahn and Emerson Eggerichs and Jimmy Evans all stepped into the background and all retired and raised bunnies, there’s still your Jonathon Pokludas, who are teaching this stuff.  There is still these influencer accounts who are teaching this stuff.  There is still Josh Howerton, who is teaching this stuff.  And the reason they’re teaching it is because this was in all of our books.  And it is not going to stop until we stop buying the books and until we stop listening to the pastors who are saying this and until we start speaking up.  And so the way that you can change things is get a hold of The Marriage You Want because what we are doing in that book is we are saying, “Hey, guess what?  Marriage is not about gender roles.  Marriage is not about two separate species, who can never understand each other.  Marriage is just about building the partnership and teamwork that you’ve always wanted.”  And guess what?  It works.  And when you don’t put all of this stupid stuff on top of it, marriage can actually be quite life giving and easy.  And that’s what we found is, hey, when you function as a team, when you function as a partner, when you don’t put all the stupid gender roles things, marriage works great.  And that’s what we want for you.  And I think that’s what you want.  That’s the marriage that you want.  And so let’s read the book.  Show people the charts.  Take a photocopy of page 43 and give it to your pastor.  That is the chart about what happens when you get married, if you believe that men need respect in a way that women can never understand.  Take a photo copy of that and say, “Hey, when you preach this, this is what happens.”  And maybe, just maybe, we will eventually make some headway because it is women who most need respect.  Not men.  But guess what?  We both need both love and respect because they’re both important.  And we’re all human.  I got to tell you, hon, I totally love the sidebar in chapter one of The Marriage You Want where we share this data about our findings on love and respect. 

Keith: Well because it’s such a popular thing.  It’s said by so many different people in so many different places.  And it’s almost like the goal is if you say it enough times people will believe it’s true.  And that’s really all it is because the data just don’t support what they’re saying.  But they just keep saying it again and again and again and again until people just think it’s true.

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  And it makes no sense.  And I was just blown away when Joanna told me those extra stats that she ran about how—yeah.  When women don’t feel heard, when women are constantly contradicted by their husbands, that affects the marriage worse than when men don’t feel heard.  So we’re talking about this as a unique male need.  And it isn’t.  

Keith: Yeah.  No.  Men and women need love and respect.  

Sheila: Yes.  And lack of respect actually affects women more in a marriage than it affects men.  So wow.  Wow.  Let’s all remember that.  Okay.  I want to get into the nitty gritty with you though about what is it that people mean when they say that women need to respect their husbands because that’s what so much of this is predicated on, I think.    

Keith: Absolutely.  And that’s the reason why it’s so important to them because it’s—we all know that men need love and respect.  Women need love and respect.  So why is it such a—why is there such a push to say that it’s a unique male need?  And there’s a very particular reason for that.

Sheila: Yeah.  So that’s what we want to talk about.  So before we even do that, I turned to the dictionary.  Let’s just do some dictionary definitions of love and respect.  Okay?  

Keith:   Right.  Because that’s one of the things about Love and Respect, the book, is Eggerichs never really comes out and gives us a clear definition of respect.

Sheila: He doesn’t.  No.  He never says this is what respect is.  Instead he says this is what respect—this is—these things will mean respect to a man.  And the things he talks about—hierarchy, authority—

Keith: Again, because it’s supposed to be a moving target.

Sheila: Right.  And if that’s how you define respect as hierarchy and authority, then it’s something that women can never get.  

Keith: Yeah.  And also, as the husband, I get to tell you what’s respectful and the fact that you tell me that I’m wearing clashing clothes is disrespectful.  So don’t tell me that.

Sheila: Yeah.  Or the fact that I want you to stop leaving wet towels on the bed is distrustful.

Keith: Yeah.  That’s disrespectful because I get to define it.  That’s crazy.

Sheila: How convenient.  Okay.  I picked out the two biggest definitions of love and the two biggest definitions of respect.  Okay?  Because the words do mean different things, right?  So love.  “A strong feeling of warm, personal attachment or deep affection such as for a parent, a child, a friend, or a pet.  Or active self-giving concern for the wellbeing of others.”  Okay?  Now when the Bible tells us to love one another, it’s really talking about that second definition.  Right?  Active, self-giving concern.  It’s not saying you have to have strong feelings of warm attachment for everybody on earth, but it is saying that you need to work towards in an active way to—

Keith:   Yeah.  Because having strong feelings of affection for everybody is not rational, right?  So the definition of love has to be the one that’s more just what you actually do.  This is going to become important later when you talk about the definitions of respect.

Sheila: Yeah.  But also the thing about these definitions is you can have an act of self-giving concern for the wellbeing of others and put up boundaries.  Right?  Because if I’m looking out for your wellbeing and you’re an alcoholic, right?  That might mean that I say to, “You can no longer come home drunk, or I will not have you in the house with the kids when you’re drunk,” because your wellbeing is best met if you stop drinking.  And so I’m going to put up boundaries that will encourage that behavior or will at least not harm others in the process, right?  So you can have boundaries while you still love someone and while you’re looking after their wellbeing.

Keith: Yeah.  Loving someone doesn’t mean you need to let yourself be hurt by them, right?  And also the loving thing is often to help people get better, right?

Sheila: Yes.  So you don’t give your addict child money if you know they’re going to spend it on drugs, et cetera, et cetera.  Okay?  Now let’s look at respect.  These two definitions are very different.  Okay?  So they both—respect means both of these things, and I agree with both of these things.  That respect means this.  But they’re very different.  So the first is “esteem for or a sense of the worth or excellence of a person, a personal quality or ability, or something considered as a manifestation of a personal quality or ability,” right?  So I respect the way you parent our kids.  I respect you because you’re so kind.  You’re so capable.  You’re so whatever.  It’s basically—it’s earned, right?  That definition of respect is earned because you have done something that has impressed me or that I think is worthy and cool.  Okay?  Then there’s this one.  “Deference to a right, privilege, privileged position, or someone or something considered to have certain rights or privileges, proper acceptance or courtesy,” right?  So you have to respect your boss.  You have to defer to them.  And it doesn’t really matter what you think of them, right?  

Keith: Yeah.  When the judge walks in and they say, “All rise,” you stand up.  And if you don’t, you get fined.  

Sheila: Right.  Right.  So you have to respect the position.  Respect this.  Okay?  Those are very different definitions.  But what I think has happened is that in evangelicalism we’ve conflated them.

Keith: Yeah.  Exactly.  Yeah.  So love has two different means, and respect has two different meanings.  So with love, we know which one it is.  What do they do with respect?  Well, they just want to have both, right? 

Sheila: Yeah.  That’s what it is.  

Keith: I want to have the deference because I’m the husband.  And I also want you to think I’m worthy of esteem regardless of what I’ve done.  So we all know it’s ridiculous to say that you should feel affection for a person you have no connection to.  That’s not what true love is.  But then for somehow, respect—respect means you should actually feel respect no matter what they’ve done.  It’s ridiculous.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  And we’re going to—what I want to do in this part of the podcast is I’m going to play a whole bunch of clips of different people illustrating—

Keith: That this is actually what they mean.  

Sheila: This is what they’re doing.  Before I do that, I do want to read something that went totally viral on Tumblr.  I don't know.  Probably like 15 years ago.  And every time the discussion of respect comes up someone reads this.  We don’t even know who said it.  It was a Tumblr account called stimmyabby.  So we don’t know who that is.

Keith: Yeah.  Because the most fundamental aspect of respect is just treating each other with basic human dignity, right?  And we all deserve that regardless of our position in life.

Sheila: Yeah.  Which is their privilege and position is that we are all human.  And so—  

Keith: We need a basic amount of respect for each other person, right?

Sheila: Yeah.  And this is what she says.  I think—I am assuming it’s a she.  “Sometimes people use respect to mean treating someone like a person, and sometimes they use respect to mean treating someone like an authority, and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say, ‘If you won’t respect me I won’t respect you,’ and they mean, “If you won’t treat me like an authority, I won’t treat you like a person,’ and they think they’re being fair.  But they aren’t, and it’s not okay.”  

Keith: Yeah.  Exactly.  

Sheila: But who in evangelicalism is used to being treated like an authority?  Well, it’s men because we’ve been taught that men are in authority.

Keith: Yeah.  Well, and men deserve that authority, and men have been given that authority by God.  And that men are supposed to be in charge, and women are supposed to follow their lead.  And that’s what is taught constantly, constantly, constantly.   And then they feel that there is this big crisis because women aren’t respecting their husbands, right?  So apparently, it’s this fundamental need—that men have a fundamental need for respect, and they’re not getting it.  

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s God given.    

Keith: It’s God given.  (inaudible)  So if you have a fundamental need for something, then the only logical thing for me is to teach people how to get that need met themselves.  If you believe that men have a fundamental need to be respected, then the best way to accomplish that is to teach men to act respectably.  

Sheila: Okay.  Makes sense.

Keith: Right?  Most men who are in these kind of circles do want to be good men.  Okay?  But not all of them.  And when you give the message not men need to act respectably but the message is men need to be respected and you say it’s a fundamental need, then the men who are the worst among us are entitled to feel that they have the right to something that they are not actually doing.  Now if you honestly believe men have a need for respect that women don’t, which I think is garbage, but let’s say you honestly think that.

Sheila: Well, and we don’t just think it’s garbage.  Our data actually found that it’s garbage.  That’s a huge difference.  And I want everyone to hear that.  It simply isn’t true that men need respect in a way that women don’t.  Yeah.

Keith: If you think that, then you really should be telling men to act better because telling women to treat men respectfully when they haven’t earned it only rewards the bad men.  It doesn’t help the good men because the good men are already acting respectably, and they’re being respected.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  

Keith: It only helps bad men to say these things.

Sheila: Yeah.  If you have to keep teaching this all the time, then you’re really preaching to women who have bad husbands because the women with good husbands are not having trouble with this at all.  And that’s the issue, right?  Now we all do—yes.  Need to treat each other respectfully as people which means I need to honor your right to do things even if you do things badly and even if you do—and even if you treat me badly.  But at the same time, as a person myself, I have the right to have boundaries.  And this whole message of respect actually takes boundaries away from women.  But, of course, the reason that so much of this gets talked about in the church and the rationale for it, supposedly, is but this is biblical, Keith, right?  Ephesians 5:25 very clearly tells wives to respect their husbands and husbands to love their wives.  And so you can’t get away from that.  There are so many problems with that.  But basically Love and Respect is based on that one verse.  He took one verse, and he made a whole book about it.  He ignores the fact that elsewhere in Scripture we’re all told to love one another, right?  Men are also told—women are also told to love their husbands because we are all to love one another.  That’s actually—oh, I don't know.  The Golden Rule.  The greatest commandment.  This kind of is important stuff.  And men are told to treat their wives with respect too in 1 Peter 3.  

Keith: Yeah.  And women are obviously supposed to love their husbands, right?

Sheila: Right.  That’s what I mean.  We’re all taught to love and respect one another.

Keith: And it’s so funny because then people—people will say we—criticize us saying that, “Well, Emerson Eggerichs never meant women only need love and men only need respect.”  But then it’s like you can’t have your cake and eat it too, right?  Either we both need both in which case stop making it an either or thing.  Or admit that it’s an either or thing and admit that you’re wrong.

Sheila: Yeah.  And as I read in the beginning of the—in the earlier section of this podcast, he actually says this book is about how the wife can fulfill her need to be loved by giving her husband what he needs.  Respect.  So she’s not going to be loved until he feels respected.

Keith: Yeah.  He’s allowed to say to her, “I’m not going to love you until you respect me,” but she is definitely not allowed to say, “I’m not going to respect you until you love me,” because that’s—they say that—  

Sheila: He would argue he was not saying that because he would argue that he says both love and respect are unconditional.  But right there he is saying that.  He is saying that.

Keith: It’s what works at the time to get the agenda done which is that men be in charge.  It’s not about health.  It’s not about health.

Sheila: But let’s take another look at Ephesians 5.  Okay.  So yes.  It has that verse.  But what was Paul writing in to?  What culture was Paul writing in to?  And at that time, women had no rights.  And you know what follows this—

Keith: Well, this is the thing is—you talked about earlier the definition of respect.  One of those definitions is deference to a person in authority, right?  Women, in general, in this society had to defer to all men.  In general.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Their husbands had the right to murder them in Roman times.

Keith: Well, I don't know it—was it that simplistic?  Definitely the rights of women were low.  I mean like women had slaves, so there were men that had to defer to women sometimes.  But the overarching idea was that women were less than men.  That was the—that was what people believed.  

Sheila: And what is it?  The paterfamilias.

Keith: Paterfamilias.  Yeah.  He was in charge of everyone in the family.  All the minors, all the slaves, all that kind of stuff, right?  And that’s another thing too is that this whole thing about wives respect your husbands the next thing that comes after is how slaves should treat their masters.

Sheila: Exactly.

Keith: Right?  So if you’re saying that it is a—for all time women need to treat their husbands like this, that also says a lot what you think about slavery if you think that the Bible is unchangeable and we have to follow it because it says that in this verse.  There’s some scary correlations that come if you read the next few verses in my mind.  But this was written in the time when women had no rights.  So, therefore, it is quite reasonable to say give your husband the respect he deserves because he deserved that respect.  Don’t deprive him of something that society has legally says he’s owed. 

Sheila: Well, yeah.  And you can tell because Paul’s approach to slavery was like, “Look.  We can’t overthrow this.  Jesus didn’t come to give us a different kind of government.  Jesus came to change our hearts so that we would act as yeast through the whole batch of dough so that we would be salt and light to the world.  And so the world would eventually change,” right?  He didn’t come to overthrow governments.  And so the question for the new—early church was how do we act as Christians, how do we be salt and light, given the injustices and oppression in the world.  And Paul said, “You don’t try to overthrow it because we can’t.  Instead we subvert it by choosing to submit rather than being forced to submit.”

Keith: Yeah.  And if you think of what Paul is saying to husbands and wives here given the context of the fact that women had zero rights, what he’s saying is absolutely revolutionary and so incredibly progressive and empowering for women.  And it’s just so devastating that people today when we ostensibly live in a time where we believe women and men are equal are using those exact same empowering verses to disempower women.  To try to put them back to the way they were in ancient Rome.  I mean we even have people talking about women shouldn’t be allowed to vote in these circles because that’s the natural consequence of interpreting this in such a literal way without understanding the context of the time it was written.

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s just—it’s crazy.  So I want to listen to some clips.  Can we do that?

Keith: Okay.  Sure.

Sheila: All right.  So this first one shows how we’re treating the Bible.  Okay?  So this is Pastor Steve Gaines from Bellevue Baptist Church.  He’s a former chairman of the SBC.  Okay?  So this is a really, really big guy in the SBC.  And I’m just going to play part of this clip.  And I will put a link—I’m only playing a part for time’s sake.  I’m not trying to edit this guy.  So we’re always going to put links.  We always do that.  We put links so that you can go and listen for yourself and see if I’m—

Keith: Taking him out of context.  Whatever.

Sheila: - treating his—taking him out of context or whatever.  Okay?  But here is part of what he says about is a wife—is the wife’s biblical duty.

Steve Gaines: Is your biblical role, fourthly, to give your husband genuine respect.  Look at verse 33.  “Nevertheless each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband.”  And he’s already told you to submit to your husband, but now he tells you to respect your husband.  To respect someone is more than to submit to someone.  You can submit to someone without respecting them just because they’re stronger than you.  But when you really respect someone, it’s a lot easier to submit to someone.  Your husband needs to know that he is your hero.  1 Peter 3 again says, “In the same way, you wives be submissive to your own husbands so that even if any of them are disobedient to the word they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives.”  Now watch.  As they observe what?  “Your chaste,”—and what?  “Respectful behavior.”  There it is.  Respect does not mean that wives are inferior to husbands.  It does not mean that husbands can be abusive.  It does not mean that husbands can demand sinful behavior.  But what it does mean is that you are to respect and have a great deal of admiration for your husband.  You say, “How can I do that?”  Let me give you some ideas here.  Allow him to be the leader.  You say, “In what?”  Well, just let him be the leader.  Don’t tell him every move to make.  Allow him to lead.  And never undermine his authority with the children.  Ladies, if one your children is being ugly to your husband, step in there and say, “No,” to the child.  “You will not dishonor your father in this home.  You will not.”  Stop correcting the way he does things.  Don’t tell him how to dress.  He’ll probably ask you if you won’t tell him.

Sheila: All right.  A couple of things there. Did you notice that little throwaway line where he says, “It’s easy to respect someone when they’re stronger than you”?  That was scary.  How did no one—oh my gosh.  So basically what he’s saying about submission is that they can force you.  He’s basically saying, “Look.  You don’t want to be forced to submit.  And it’s easier to submit and do what he says if you respect him.  And so, women, respect him.”  That’s basically what he’s saying.

Keith: Yeah.  The idea that women need to submit and defer and respect men in a way that men don’t need to reciprocate it only—I mean it is a helpful marriage teaching in a system where you honestly believe men are superior to women and deserve something that women don’t deserve because then it’s a—it’s kind of like keeping women out of danger.  Because if you believe that men are strong and big and can hurt you so the best—your best solution is to placate them, then that’s good advice.  But that’s actually damning because a better thing would be to say, “Hey, guys, you are generally bigger and stronger and scarier.  So if you want to be Christ like, you need to become gentle and humble in heart.  And you need to model humility, and you need to take on the form of a servant just as your Lord and Savior did,” right?  That would be the message that would be Gospel centered to me.  The message that, well, God has ordained that men are bigger and stronger so women need to knuckle under is antithetical to the Gospel to me.

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  Okay.  I thought this was funny too.  He had this one point where he stumbled over his words.  It was really the only time.  This was a longer section.  About six minutes.

Keith: What an interesting coincidence.

Sheila: The only time he stumbled over his words was when he was trying to define respect.

Keith: Yeah.  What a coincidence.  Yeah. 

Sheila: Because they can’t define, right?  And then he eventually said admiration.  You’ve got to admire him.  Let him know he’s your hero, right?  So many people say that.  (cross talk)

Keith: They have to know they’re your hero, right?

Sheila: Yeah.  And then, of course, and how do you show him that kind of respect?  And here’s what it all comes down to, I think.  You allow him to be a leader.  And then he goes on to say—we didn’t play the whole clip.  But he goes on to say that you can’t criticize your husband for how he raises the kids.  You shouldn’t speak up about anything he’s doing wrong.  Basically, you should just never say anything.   The message is shut up.  Never say anything to critique or to correct him.

Keith: Yeah.  Yeah.  And it’s crazy because respect—you can treat somebody respectfully and correct them.  You can offer correction to someone in a respectful way.  Where in these circles is that being discussed?

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s not.

Keith: It isn’t being discussed because to correct your husband is disrespectful.  He blatantly says that.  If you correct your husband, you are disrespecting him.  I can talk to you and correct you, right?  Because I’m a man.  And you have to take it. And if you don’t take it, you’re being disrespectful.  You can’t correct me though.  What?  How do I get corrected then, right?  Aren’t we supposed to be iron sharpening iron, right?  It’s just crazy.  It doesn’t make any sense.

Sheila: No.  It really is strange.  And we’ve got—in The Marriage You Want, we have a whole chapter on how to bring up things that are bothering you in a respectful way because we do need to bring things up in a respectful way.  You shouldn’t be lambasting someone or being mean to someone or overly criticizing people.  

Keith: All the sitcoms where dad is a complete dolt and doesn’t know anything and we make fun of how stupid dad is.  That’s disrespectful because not all men are dolts, right?  But the ones who are we should call them out because they are.  Yes.  Don’t be disrespectful when people deserve your respect.  But you just don’t get carte blanche respect when you’re being an idiot.  That’s ridiculous.  And a person who is worthy of respect—those kind of people want correction when they’re off track.

Sheila: But here’s the main thing.  Okay?  If you want to build a good marriage—and this is what we were saying in The Marriage You Want.  This was the huge part.  I think it’s chapter seven, I believe.  But if you want to build a good marriage, the only way to do that is to feel like I am seen, and I see you, right?  We are both seen.  And the only way—and we’re both seen, and we’re both still loved and accepted, right?  Yeah.  And the only way we can get to that is if I’m able to tell you when things are bothering me and you’re able to tell me when things are bothering you.  If I never speak up about the things that are bothering me because to do so would be disrespectful, we aren’t building an intimate marriage.  We aren’t building a true partnership.  And you’re going to feel more and more and more distant, and that is what our data found.  When people feel like I can’t speak up about the things that are bothering me or it is somehow wrong to do that or I don’t know how to do that, their marriage really suffers.  And yet, these people are teaching that this is the hallmark of a good marriage is that women don’t speak up.  

Keith: Right.  And they wouldn’t say that.  But that’s what they believe because when you teach something—it’s like in medicine.  You give a medication.  There’s a side effect.  You’ve got to be careful about the side effects, right?  So one of the side effects of teaching women that they need to respect their husbands and that means never correcting them is that you’re going to have some wives who don’t communicate their needs to their husbands.  So if you really value the two being—just fulfilling their roles, it’s not about men being in charge.  It’s just about them fulfilling their roles.  When you preach don’t correct your husband, there should be a lot of, well, that doesn’t mean don’t ever say anything.  You still need to share your heart with him.  There should be ways to instruct that—I don’t ever hear that in the evangelical church.  All I hear is don’t correct.  Watch him painting the wall.  This is the kind of stuff that gets taught because they don’t actually care about women communicating to their husbands.  They just care about the men being in charge.  

Sheila: Which means they don’t actually care about intimacy or they just simply have no idea how intimacy—they don’t even understand intimacy, which I think is also quite likely.  That they’ve never experienced it and don’t understand it.

Keith: The definition is that I, as a husband, don’t need—if I’m corrected, that hurts me.  That’s bad.  What kind of a view of intimacy is that you’re not allowed to tell me what I need to hear to make me a better person?  What view of intimacy is that?

Sheila: And what view of Christianity is that?  It’s absolutely crazy.  Okay.  So let’s listen to another one.  What I find interesting about this clip is that—it’s from Jana Howerton, who is Josh Howerton’s wife.  Josh Howerton is a mega church pastor in Texas.  He was the one who made that wedding night quote unquote joke that wasn’t a joke.  Stand where he wants you to stand.  Do what he tells you to do.  And we’ve talked about Josh a lot.  About his plagiarism and just about a lot of issues.  And here Jana is—and for those watching on YouTube, you’ll see the actual video.  The rest of you will just hear Jana’s words.  But Josh is sitting right beside her thumbing up everything that she’s saying and just making rather—he’s just being silly.  It’s like ugh.  Please.  But this is what often happens—

Keith: I’m supporting my wife as she says how she’s supposed to do everything I want.

Sheila: Yeah.  And I want to say I don’t—I wondered about whether or not to share this one because I, personally—from what I have seen of Jana, she’s the more intelligent one.  She’s the more thoughtful one.  Some of the clips—and I’ve shared them on my blog where he interrupts her when she’s sharing something super personal and very well thought out.  And he makes a joke.  I don’t think that this is necessarily—reflects who she is.  I think this reflects the relationship she’s in.  So I don’t know that these are actually her thoughts.  I think that she’s—

Keith: Well, I think she’s like a lot of women.  She’s trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make any sense.  I mean you’re a woman, and you grow up in this culture that women are equal but they need to submit to men.  Women are equal, but they can’t be preachers.  Women are equal, but—women are equal, but.  Women are equal.  And you have to make sense of that.  And if you’re an intelligent woman who wants to value the Bible—

Sheila: And who loves God.  And I truly believe she loves Jesus.

Keith: And who loves God and wants to value the Bible and is told the only way to believe the Bible is to believe it this way.  There’s no other interpretations.  And if you interpret it in any other way than the way that we’ve taught you, you are no longer a Christian.  That’s what they say.  You’re trying to make sense of it.  And this is her trying to make sense of how that works, I think.

Sheila: Yeah.  And so—

Keith: And I have so much sympathy for women who have to live in that cognitive dissonance.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Especially mega church pastors’ wives.  And I just want to say to any mega church pastor’s wife—and I mean this.  Or any wife of any of these authors that we critique.  If you ever want to reach out to me, my contact form is there.  You can DM me on any social media.  I will get you help anonymously.  And I will never, ever say it online that you reached out to me.  I won’t even tell it to all of my team.  I can be anonymous because I know a lot of you mega church pastors’ wives are in trouble.  And so just know that there’s a whole network of us that can help you.  So if you ever want to reach out to me, please do.  Okay.

Keith: Well, there’s so many stories of women, who have come out of this.  When they finally said, “I can’t hold this any longer.  I can’t toe the party line.  I can’t believe—I can’t defend the indefensible anymore,”—and that’s what they’re doing.  They’re just trying their best to defend the indefensible.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  Okay.  So with that being said, we are not critiquing Jana Howerton here.  I just think it’s so interesting how this message is being put in the mouths of women. And over and over again, it’s actually women who are preaching this to other women so much about what it means to respect their husbands.  So here we go.

Jana Howerton: There are three things your husband needs to hear more than I love you.  The Bible tells husbands to love their wives.  But it tells wives to respect their husbands.  And that’s not because husband don’t need love.  It’s because respect is a unique need for a man.  So here are three things to help your husband feel respected.  Number one, he needs to hear thank you for providing for our family because sometimes, as wives, we can ignore the work our husbands do and only talk about the task he hasn’t done.  And he feels taken for granted.  Number two, this will surprise no one.  But he needs to hear I want you.  Because when the bedroom feels like a lifelong game where he is playing offense and you’re playing defense, he feels rejected.  Number three, he needs to hear you are so good to me.  Ladies, happy wife happy life is true.  Just not how you think.  It doesn’t mean I better keep my wife happy or she’ll make me miserable.  It means men judge their success as a man based upon the happiness of their wife.  So when you say you are so good to me, he feels that he is succeeding as a man.  Encouragement in the mouth of a wife is strong in the heart of a husband.

Sheila: Okay.  Again, note how she said a unique need of a man.  We’re going to hear that over and over again in these clips.  Unique need of a man.

Keith: So it’s not that men don’t need love and women don’t need respect.  Oh, until it is, right?  It’s just crazy.

Sheila: Okay.  Before we get into the heart of what she said, I just want to talk about that one thing about providing because you said something to me once that Chris Rock actually said about providing. 

Keith: Oh yeah.  Yeah.  Well, and this is the other side of it too, right?  The people who believe these very staunch, old fashioned, men are in charge kind of views say it’s harder for the man than the woman, right?  And you women complain, but men—it’s so hard for us.  And Chris Rock does this whole routine where he talks about a woman can be just loved for who she is, but a man is only ever loved for what he can provide.  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  And how hard this is on men.  Yeah.

Keith: And how hard it is on men.  And it’s like a quiet auditorium.  You could hear a pin drop, right?  And I know there’s a lot of men in that audience saying, “Yeah.  That’s how I feel.  Nobody loves me for who I am.”  But here’s the deal, dude.  If you’re one of those guys, okay?  The answer is not to keep holding onto this garbage about how men deserve respect in a way women don’t and then don’t need love the way women do and pitch all that useless nonsense and start trying to build a world where both men and women are seen for who they are and loved for who they are.  That’s the solution, my guy.  Not this nonsense.

Sheila: Yeah.  When you say that a main part of being a man is that you have to be the provider, so you have to bring in more income, what does that do when you don’t?  And why are we, in the 21st century, still saying that when I know so many families where the wife brings in more income or where they both bring in roughly the same income?  

Keith: What’s the wife supposed to do if they both work and she gets a raise at work and now she’s going to make more money than him?  I need to turn down that raise to obey God because then I will be making more money than my husband, and he will be less of a provider than I am.  It’s ridiculous.  I mean that logically is what follows.

Sheila: Yeah.  But I do believe that many, many men do feel—yeah.  This heavy pressure to provide and be the provider.  And it’s like my dude.  If you don’t want to feel that pressure, just simply realize you’re a family.  You’re a team.  And you can each do what works best for—and that—and, again, in our data, that’s what we found works best is when you figure out as a family how to do this.  Not in gender terms, but in terms of what are our circumstances.  What are our gifting?  What are our qualifications?  What are our whatever?  And you just do what works for you.  

Keith: Yeah.  You provide for your family what you have to provide for your family, right?  Sure.  Money.  Sure.  Time.  Your personal talents.  All that kind of stuff, right?  And your wife provides those things too.  And you, as a team, do that.  But if we enshrine the idea that the man is the sole financial provider for the family, then we get into the dichotomies where all he’s supposed to give is the money and all she’s supposed to give is the love.  And it’s like that is not healthy.  But that is the natural end point when you start going down these pathways, right?  It’s crazy.

Sheila: Okay.  Now the other thing she said—she said you’re supposed to tell him you want him and give him sex, right?  And you’re supposed to tell him—

Keith: Yeah.  And that’s respect.

Sheila: Right.  And, again, this is where we get into trouble with the definition of respect.  What does sex have anything to do with respect?  Seriously.

Keith: Yeah.  How does that—I mean it’s the deference, right?

Sheila: Yeah.  In deference.

Keith: You’re deferring to him because he wants it so he gets it.  I mean that’s the only definition of respect that makes sense when you see how they then go on to define it.  It’s that whatever he wants he gets.  And what he doesn’t want he doesn’t get.  Like criticism or helpful feedback.  

Sheila: Being held to account.  Yeah.

Keith: All that stuff, he doesn’t want that.  He doesn’t get it.  The stuff he does want he does get.  Just by what they say and how they teach, that’s their definition of respect.  

Sheila: Which is scary.  It’s downright scary. 

Keith: And it’s inappropriate because you don’t—you should not get that unconditionally.

Sheila: Yeah.  And then she said that you’re supposed to say you’re so good to me, right?  What if he’s not?  And this is what they never do.  She said, “This doesn’t mean—happy wife happy life doesn’t mean that he has to make her happy.”  No.  It means that you need to be happy so that he can feel like he’s doing his job.  

Keith: Right.  Well, do your job, dude.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And you know what?  There is some truth to that.  I know a lot of women who are very discontented, and we all need to take—both men and women need to take responsibility.

Keith: But there’s a lot of men that are discontented too.  And this is the issue is it should just be a—you know what?  Appreciate what your spouse does for you.  When your spouse is nice to you, tell them it meant a lot that they were nice to you.  Male.  Female.  It doesn’t matter.  

Sheila: Yeah.  When your spouse works hard whether it’s at providing a paycheck or whether it’s providing a meal or a home or whatever, say thank you.  Yeah.  Mm-hmm.

Keith: What does it benefit anyone to say regardless of how the other person acts—

Sheila: You are so good to me.

Keith: - that you need to say to them, “You are so good to me,” right?  I mean and, by the way, do we hear evangelical mega pastors up there on stage preaching to men, “Men, when your wife is shutting you out of the bedroom completely, when your wife is treating you like garbage, when your wife is constantly disrespecting you in front of your friends, you should be saying to her, ‘You are the best wife ever’”?  Do they preach that?  Do we hear that?    

Sheila: No.  

Keith: I mean I’ve never heard that once, but it’s constantly on the—the shoe is always on the other foot.  No matter how he treats you you need to respect him.  It’s crazy.

Sheila: I want to play something now from Josh.  Okay?  So Jana’s husband, Josh.

Keith: Oh, this is—yeah.

Sheila: Yeah.  Just carrying this last point through a little bit more, okay?  So here we go.

Josh Howerton: Strong in the heart of a man.  I hear this a lot.  Man, you’ll hear me talk about wives respecting and following the leadership of their husband.  So people say, “Yeah.  But I’ll respect him when he’s respectable.”  Listen.  You cannot disrespect a man into respectability.  Give him a crown, and then he becomes a king.  So our job is to speak into him what God sees in him, and then he becomes that.

Sheila: You know what I call that?  Manifestation theology.  Yeah.  Name it and claim it.  Believe it enough and it will happen.  It is simply not relationally true.  In fact, here’s what happens.  People like to take the path of least resistance.  And people do not change until the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of changing.  

Keith:   Right.

Sheila: So what he is saying is make is super, super easy for him to stay exactly the same, and then he will change.  

Keith: Exactly.  

Sheila: Right?  Give him all the accolades.  If he is acting badly, give him all the accolades.  Treat him like he’s amazing.  Treat him likes he’s doing a great job, and that will make him change.  Yeah.  That’s not how humans work. 

Keith: It’s nonsense.  It’s nonsense.

Sheila: That’s not how humans work.  But if your goal is to get women to put up with men’s bad behavior, this is great advice.  And if your goal is to keep marriages together no matter what, it’s great advice.

Keith: So forgive us for thinking that’s the goal because it only works if that’s the goal, right?  And also it’s a very convenient excuse, right?  Because if he doesn’t act out—if you give him the crown and he doesn’t act like a—act the right way, right?  If you do all the respectful stuff and he still treats you badly, well, it’s still your fault.  You must not have respected him enough because we know this is true, right?  It’s like I said earlier.  If we keep saying it’s true enough times, it’ll just be true.  That’s not the way that reality works, but that’s what they say.  So it’s like if it doesn’t work, you just obviously didn’t respect him enough.  It’s like manifestation theology, right?  If you want to be healed, you’ll be healed.  Well, you didn’t get healed.  Well, you obviously just didn’t want it enough.  

Sheila: You didn’t pray enough.  You didn’t have enough faith.    

Keith: You didn’t pray enough.  It’s always the fault of the person, right?  Now if she confronts him and says, “No.  No.  You need to change,” and he changes, they don’t take that as a data point that says, “Oh, maybe confronting your husband once in awhile is good.”  The data point they take from that is look at how good a husband he is because he did it even though his wife disrespected him so much.  Right?  And I’ll tell you something.  And if she confronts him and he becomes more of a jerk and says, “Well, I’m not going to change,” and refuses to change they won’t hold him accountable for being a bad person.  They will say, “Well, no wonder he’s not changing.  Look at how she’s harping on him all the time.” 

Sheila: Well, and that’s exactly what Emerson Eggerichs does in Love and Respect with the wet towels, right?  So he’s leaving wet towels on the bed.  She’s asking him to stop.  She goes away for a week.  He says, when she comes home, “It was so great not to have the nagging,” and the solution is she learned not to ask for him to stop leaving the wet towels on the bed.  So she just keeps picking them up.  So he’s rewarded because he’s allowed to define what she’s doing as disrespectful.

Keith: Yeah.  And all this perpetuates this idea that if you just treat him respectfully he will act respectfully.  So if you treat him respectfully, he will act respectably.  I mean it perpetuates that idea.  Which is not true, right?  But they can always explain away any contradiction, and they can just continue to believe what they want to believe even though it’s not true.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And our data says it’s not true.  But it’s not just our data.  Multiple things.  In our book, we rely on a lot of peer reviewed studies, so it’s not just ours.  We’re looking at—we looked—we scoured the literature about what makes great marriages.  And over and over again, a big part of what makes great marriages is the ability to speak up when something is bothering you.  

Keith: Yeah.  Absolutely.

Sheila: And we looked at a lot of studies about how you speak up, when you speak up, what do you do when it’s a small issue versus a big issue.  And over and over again, that ability to say—

Keith: And how to balance the letting things slide versus actually making an issue.  All that kind of stuff.  That’s what we need to talk about.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And instead they just tell women, “Don’t say anything.”  

Keith: Yeah.  Okay.  A healthy view is you don’t want to bring up every—you don’t want to die on every little—every little anthill is not a mountain, right?  You got to balance things, right?  And you have to—you can’t die on every hill, right?  At the same time, there are important issues you need to discuss.  So instead of giving couples the tools where they can know when to bring it up, they can know how to bring it up, they can know how far to push it, they can know when they need to go to the next level, all that kind of stuff, what they do is they tell men, “If it’s an issue, you make it an issue and make sure she knuckles under.  And, women, if it’s an issue, learn to live without because you need to submit to him.”  I mean I’m sorry if you think that is me exaggerating, but that is what I hear when I read Christian resources.

Sheila: Oh yeah.  Oh yeah.  Over and over again.

Keith: So there’s a solution.  Men are supposed to do one thing.  Women are supposed to do a different thing.  For a human experience, which is I’m—you’re doing something that’s bothering me.  How do I handle that?  I handle it differently as a man than you’re supposed to handle it as a woman.

Sheila: Yeah.  No.  That doesn’t work.  It doesn’t work.  

Keith: It’s crazy.

Sheila: The data clearly shows that we are humans.  And we need intimacy.  We need connection, and that can’t be built when we’re lying about our relationship.  And all of this advice is telling women to lie.  

Keith: Yeah.  It’s not telling them, “Make sure you continue to confront him still but try and do it in a way that’s—you would want to be treated like him.”

Sheila: Yeah.  That’s kind, and that’s clear.

Keith: Yeah.  Treat him the way you would want to treat him.  Like Jesus says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” right?  The simple teaching of Scripture.  They don’t teach the simple teaching of Scripture.  They teach a completely manmade theology about how women are supposed to act differently than men in marriage.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  And it’s crazy.  Okay.  The other thing they say though is that all of this has to be unconditional, and that’s the last thing I want to show.  Just as love is unconditional—because if their idea is women need love and men need respect and since love can be unconditional, then obviously respect needs to be unconditional too.  And this is what they’re doing when you create this false dichotomy then you go to logical extremes, which make no—which really make no sense because respect cannot be unconditional.  Respect, by its very nature, is either earned—that first definition of respect.  Or if it’s unconditional in the second definition, it means that that person that is doing the respecting has no rights and is getting stamped all over.  Because if you have to unconditionally respect your boss, whatever, it means that you can’t quit no matter how I’m being treated.  I am stuck here, and I can do nothing about my situation.  And so they’re saying that is the ideal for a Christian wife is to be in a marriage where she is stuck and can’t do anything about her situation.  So she can’t have any boundaries.  And that is so unhealthy.  And I want to give you another example of this.  I’m not going to say who this one is.  It’s a younger woman.  And, again, I just—I don’t like to draw attention to who they are.  But this one has gone quite viral on TikTok.  I will put the link in so you can check it out.  But I’m not trying to specifically call this woman out.  But this is just so typical of what is taught at women’s conferences and marriage conferences.  So I just want you to hear it.

Social Media: If a woman needs love, the man needs respect.  That’s almost easy for us to say, “Well, he can get my respect when he earns it.”  Can you imagine if you your husband said, “She can have my love when she earns it?”  Just as much as women need love, your husband needs respect.  Not only was he created to be able to need this, to receive it, he was built that way.  He’s going to be drawn to the places where he actually does receive it whether it’s his workplace.  Some of us are like, “Why is he always out of the house?  What doesn’t he like to be at home?  Why does he always feel so grumpy or look so grumpy when he’s at home?”  But then, for some reason, when we’re out with his friends or when he’s at work, he’s thriving there.  You see so much joy in him.  It’s because he’s receiving respect.  He’s going to find respect in the relationships where he receives it.  And if that’s the case, we’ve got to figure out a way to understand that there is a true need for a man to be able to receive respect.

Keith: Yeah.  Okay.  So this is a classic illustration of what I was saying earlier, right?  They’re not teaching men to be respectable.  They’re teaching women that if he’s going off and ignoring you to go off with his buddies—I don't think she talks about affairs in there or anything.  It didn’t sound like she got to that, but a lot—that’s—it’s the same kind of idea.  You know what?  If he was getting respected at home, maybe he wouldn’t have run off with So-and-so, right?  This is the mentality.  They blame women when men act wrong.  It drives me crazy because they say that they—that this is harder on men, but women always, always, always bear the brunt of what goes wrong.  Every single time.  If you honestly believe that men are supposed to be the leaders and they’re supposed to take on the lion’s share of things and they’re supposed to be in charge of things, we should never hear this kind of nonsense.  A man should be coming up to that woman and saying, “You know what?  It’s not your fault if he goes and spends time with his buddies instead of you because it’s his duty to be your husband and to take care of you.  And he should be doing better, and you deserve better than that.”  That’s what we should be saying if we really honestly believe, right?  It’s crazy.

Sheila: Yeah.  But no.  And notice too—okay.  So this guy is spending more time at work and with his friends than at home.  And she says it’s because he’s respected there.  Is it?  Or is it because at work and his friends he doesn’t have the same kind of obligations and responsibilities?

Keith: Well, yeah.  Because that’s what respect is.  Respect is I don’t get challenged, and I get what I want.  And so when I’m with my buddies, they’re not going to challenge me, right?

Sheila: They’re not going to ask me to do the dishes.  They’re not going to make me do bath time.  

Keith: Have demands on me.  

Sheila: Yeah.  They don’t have any demands on me.  And so that’s, in a sense, what they mean by respect is don’t put any demands on him.  It’s not that he is being respected at work and with his friends.  It’s that he doesn’t have any responsibilities in the same way—in the same ways he does at home.  And he doesn’t have to open up and be emotionally vulnerable and intimate.  There aren’t the relational expectations on him.

Keith: Yeah.   A lot of men do run away from those kind of things because they’re not taught how to handle those kind of things.  

Sheila: And so the burden for all of this is put on women because—so if he’s someone who just doesn’t want to do all the stuff with the kids.  He doesn’t want to have to take care of the house.  He doesn’t want to keep being bothered by the fact that he’s watching porn and that that bothers his wife, right?  And so he’s going to go out there.  No.  You need to figure this out.  You need to fix your relationship.  And this is not a her problem.  This may very well be a him problem.  But we’re making it into a her problem when we define respect as basically letting him feel great no matter what he is doing.  And don’t put any demands on him.

Keith: And I don’t think any man, if they thought about it from a sober, objective point of view, would say that they want that kind of respect.  I think men want to be respected based on how they behave.  A man wants to say, “Hey, I feel respected because—and I deserve that respect because I act respectably,” right?  It’s only bad men that feel that they’re entitled to that when they don’t act that way, right?  So why is there so much teaching about it?  Is it that men are just—can men not act respectably?  Is our view of men—  

Sheila: And that’s really the key thing.  That’s what I want to end on.

Keith: Is our view of men that low?

Sheila: So here’s the question.  If we know that men actually do want love more than respect and that men actually don’t value respect as much as women do, then why is this taught so much?  I think the answer comes back to two things.  And we’ll explore this more in next week’s podcast.  But it’s basically two things.  One is that they have created a system where men get to be in charge, and they want to preserve that.  And so they’ve made that a central point of their marriage teaching.

Keith: Not just in teaching.  They get to be coddled.  And they get to—yeah.   And they get to get what they want, and they don’t have to deal with what they don’t want to have to deal with.

Sheila: Yeah.  So that’s a big one.  But the other one is this teaching allows men who are uncomfortable with intimacy, who are uncomfortable with emotional growth, who are uncomfortable with emotional language, who are uncomfortable just being vulnerable with their spouse to continue to be emotionally stunted because they never get challenged on anything.  And because we know a lot of men are struggling in this area—we know men tend to struggle more than women.  That is not biological.  We also know that.  

Keith: It’s because of this kind of teaching.  

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s not that God created men to be less emotional than women.  We’re actually just as emotional.  Okay?  It’s just that men socially and culturally have not been given the tools to value relationships in the same way, to work relationships, to be emotionally vulnerable, even to identify their emotions.  And so this kind of teaching allows those men to feel like I am doing amazing without actually having to grow.  And I think that’s what’s going on.

Keith: Yeah.  And if you just went to a system where we both contribute everything we have to this relationship as equals—I’m not in charge of you.  We’re just both equals, right?  That would cause men to have to grow and change and develop.  If a man couldn’t get away with saying, “The reason I’m not staying at home is because I don’t feel respected,” if a man had to deal with that, the fact that the relationship wasn’t strong and he—it was on him to also make that relationship strong as opposed to having the default of being allowed to go hang out with his friends.  And it’s still her fault that he’s abandoning the family, right?  It would challenge men to be more.  I just love how these really traditional circles talk about how they’re the real men.  They’re not.  They’re coddled babies, right?  The men who are in equal relationships with their wives, the ones who are true partners, who—they’re working together.  Those guys are actually doing the heavy lifting that these other guys refuse to do and offload onto their wives.

Sheila: Yeah.  And they get to sit back and say, “Well, I’m the leader.”  Yeah.  And they get all the credit for being the leader when they’re not actually doing anything.  And their wives are lying to them.    

Keith: And then they get the—they snidely call me a beta male and think I don’t see right through that and laugh behind my sleeve at them because nobody is insulted by you guys.  Dude, you’re a snowflake.

Sheila: And that’s what we try to do in The Marriage You Want is we’re saying, “Look.  How can we built a partnership?  How can we learn to talk to each other about what’s bothering us?  How can we learn to figure out mental load and housework?  And how can we learn to figure out sex?  And how can we learn to figure out all of these things in a way that honors both of us because we both matter?”  And it’s a fun book.  There is so much data.  And we just shine light on what it takes to be a partner and how happy people are when they adopt that kind of marriage.  

Keith: To be honest, some of the book is a bit of a challenge to guys who grew up in these kind of environments, which are taught that women are supposed to defer to men, because it’s asking you to step up.  It’s going to put some demands on you.  But the payoff is so good.  You’re a better person.  You’re a better husband.  You feel better about yourself.  You feel—the respect you have you feel you earned.  It’s so much better.

Sheila: And you get real intimacy with your wife and your kids—you’re going to have such a better relationship with your kids long term too.  And we’ve got a study guide to go along with it.  Couples can work through it together to help figure out how to grow in these areas.  It’s great for premarital curriculum.  It’s got small group curriculum.  Everything.  So excited about this launch.  And our launch team is opening now.  The actual, official launch team group is going to go—I think going on Monday.  But you can send in your receipts now and get our preorder bonus, which is going to be our alternate concluding chapter.  So we had a concluding chapter.  We had it all written, and then we scrapped it and wrote something else.  And so we’re going to give you the alternate ending of The Marriage You Want.

Keith: It was kind of my rants.  The rant I just did there a second ago.  And we said, “Yeah.  You know what?  We probably should probably tone that done a little bit.”

Sheila: Yeah.  And when you join the launch team, you’re going to get immediate access to the book.  You’ll be able to start reading it next week.  You’ll get a free copy of the audio book when that—when it lands on March 11.  So it’s truly awesome to join the launch team.  And all you have to do to join is just to commit to writing a review on—an honest review on Amazon and/or Goodreads.  So please check that out.  The link is in the podcast notes where you can send your preorder receipt.  And yeah.  And we would love to see you.  We’re so excited about a book that grows healthy marriages instead of perpetuating all these stupid things that the evangelical church—

Keith: That have no science behind them.  No data support.

Sheila: No science behind them.  That the church has been saying for decades.  Let’s get this better, people.  Seriously.  Let’s get this better.  We need to.  We need to.  So thank you for joining us.  And next week we’re going to have an awesome podcast.  We’re going to look at the five building blocks of pretty much every evangelical marriage book and why those books often lead to such terrible results because people are always saying, “Do you just hate every book, Sheila?”  And it’s like, “Surely, you must like some of them.”  And it’s like, well, when the foundation is the same of all of these books, there’s going to be problems.  So we’re going to look at the five commonalities—

Keith: Key themes.  

Sheila: Key themes.  And how that can really mess things up.  So it’s going to be awesome.  And we will see you then on the Bare Marriage podcast.  Please check out all of our links to all the clips we did, to that marriage survey you can take with your spouse.  That link is in the podcast notes.  And, of course, the link to join our launch team and to send in your preorder receipt.  So thank you, and we’ll see you again next week on Bare Marriage.  Bye-bye.

Keith: Bye.