Bare Marriage

Episode 273: Are Traditionally Christian Marriages Linked to More Immaturity? The Data Speaks!

• Sheila Gregoire • Season 8 • Episode 273

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It's episode 273 of the Bare Marriage podcast! We found that certain beliefs are correlated most with emotional immaturity--passive aggressiveness; outbursts of anger; emotional dysregulation. In our research for our book The Marriage You Want, we found that when couples believe the husband should  have the tie breaking vote, they score lower on maturity.

Is this because emotionally immature people are drawn to these beliefs? Or do these beliefs hamper maturity? Today we talk about why it's actually both, and what that means for our own personal responsibility.

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Sheila: What if giving a husband authority in the marriage is linked to emotional immaturity?  Hi, 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 today by my daughter, Rebecca Lindenbach.

Rebecca: Hello, hello.

Sheila: And this is a great week, and this is a terrible week for us personally.

Rebecca: Yes.

Sheila: It’s a great week because next Tuesday our new book, The Marriage You Want, launches, and I’m really excited about that.  We have put so much work into it.  This is the book that I just pray will change the Christian conversation about marriage because it’s healthy.  It’s safe.  It’s evidence based.  It’s everything that I ever wanted in a marriage book.

Rebecca: Well, and it’s also written in a way where if you are—if you have friends who are still kind of really in that traditional churchy, Christiany kind of situation, it’s not going to scare them off immediately.

Sheila: Yeah, like it’s not The Great Sex Rescue for those of you have read Great Sex Rescue.  And I love Great Sex Rescue, but this isn’t tearing down what’s come before.  This is about hey if we’re going to build something healthy from the ground up, what does it look like?

Rebecca: Yeah, you need both.  You need Great Sex Rescue and The Marriage You Want.  They’re totally different books.

Sheila: So that launches on Tuesday, and it’s like you’re always on tenterhooks when you have a baby launching into the world, and so we’re just hoping that people buy it and love it.  And we’re so excited to hear what people are saying, and we’ve already got some reviews coming in on Goodreads from our launch team which is really exciting.  This is also a terrible week—

Rebecca: Yeah.

Sheila: —for us which is why my husband who’s the coauthor of The Marriage You Want is not here with us this week because last Friday—last Friday my father-in-law passed away, your grandfather.

Rebecca: Yeah, and so—yeah, if any of you read the newsletter, you already know that.  You also know that’s why we didn’t have a Friday video this week.  We were not really in the mood to—

Sheila: Record one.

Rebecca: Yeah.  So clearly we’re in the mood now, and we can record now.  So that was a little sarcasm, no, we’ll be okay.

Sheila: We’ll be okay.

Rebecca: We’re still just in the weepy, you know, everyone who has lost someone important to them knows how that is.  You’re in the weepy zone for a while I feel.

Sheila: So, yeah, and he passed away.  It was a long time in hospice.  It was just a very, very, very tiring week, and he lasted a lot longer than people thought he was going to so it was just exhausting for his four boys.  And he passed away on my mother’s-in-law birthday.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Sheila: So I think he just didn’t want her to be alone on her birthday so he lasted until then.  Anyway so that is what we are up to this week.  So we have the funeral tomorrow.  When this comes out, it will be tomorrow, and so Keith is preoccupied with that.  So he will be joining us for the podcast next week I think, but we’re giving him a little bit of time off right now to be with his family.

Rebecca: And just to do nothing if he needs to do nothing.

Sheila: Right, and so Rebecca, you were here.  Now we had planned—we have been going through the book week by week, looking at different chapters and different aspects of it, and we covered responsibility.  We covered the unfairness threshold.  We covered the marriage hierarchy of needs.  We covered mental load and housework.  We covered balance, and all that wonderful stuff.  And we were going to move into emotional connection and resolving conflict, but I wanted to save those for when Keith is here.  So I think we are going to do those in a couple of weeks, and instead, I was talking to you about what could we riff off of?  What could we talk about you and me together?  And one of the things that I thought was really interesting when I was flipping through the book recently was—and I had never really seen this before—but this is a visual thing, and our book is filled with charts.  There are so many charts like way more than in Great Sex Rescue or She Deserves Better, and different kinds of charts too because we did a matched pair survey for this which means that if a woman—if a wife said something, we could see how that affected her husband.  Or if the husband said something, we could see how it affected the wife so we have a lot of charts like that.  And for a lot of different aspects, we look at how this one thing affects six different areas of marriage like how it affects decision making, household management, health outcomes, friendship with your spouse, sexual satisfaction, and emotional maturity.  And one of the things I thought was so interesting is when we look at what happens if you believe when you get married that your spouse has a tie breaking vote, and normally that’s that you think that your husband has the tie breaking vote, so what happens if you think the husband as the tie breaking vote when you get married?  And when you look at this, it has effects on every area—negative effects on every area.  But boy does it correlate with emotional maturity.

Rebecca: Yeah, emotional immaturity.

Sheila: Yeah, like this seriously impacts emotional immaturity.

Rebecca: Yeah, so if she believes at the time that she gets married that he should have a tie breaking vote in their marriage, both the wife and the husband are more likely to score low on—or to have a lower emotional maturity score.

Sheila: Yeah, so they’re going to have more outbursts of anger.  They’re going to be more passive aggressive.  They’re going to be more easily overwhelmed by their anger.  They’re going to say my spouse is not a cheerful person.  So this is a marriage where people are angry.  They’re not cheerful.  They’re passive aggressive.  That’s not good.

Rebecca: It really increases your chances of being in that group.

Sheila: And so I thought that we could talk about why because you said something in—I think it was last week’s podcast, kind of like a throwaway line.  No, last week’s was Joanna and I talking about acts of service so it must have been two weeks ago, but you did a throwaway line.  And this one throwaway line I had so many people commenting on it, but you were saying that a lot of the boomers grew up and parented out of trauma from both the Great Depression and the war.

Rebecca: Yeah, and the Vietnam War.  Like they just went through a lot.  The Boomers did actually go through a lot, like the Boomers do get a lot of crap and rightfully so—sorry, Boomers—but also they went through a lot.

Sheila: Right, and so I want to trace this through history to show you what I think this emotional immaturity thing is here so let’s just take a step back.  Let’s leave this chart aside for a minute, and if you’re on YouTube, I think Connor is going to show you the chart that I’m talking about and you can see why emotional immaturity really factors in here, but let’s just paint a broader picture.  Let’s take a step back.  So explain what you mean about how Boomers—yeah—had this trauma and how that affected parenting.

Rebecca: Yeah, well, they had—a lot of Boomers were raised by parents who—I mean my Boomer grandparent was raised by a father who was in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

Sheila: For years.

Rebecca: For years, like that Unbroken book and movie. That’s my family. That was what my grandma was raised in, and in the U.S., a lot of people in my grandparents’ generation were also drafted for Vietnam. So you have your parents going through a war, and then you go through a war you don’t want to be in which was one of the highest rates of—like the Vietnam vets went through a ton because they were so scorned by their countrymen as well because of the horrors that were being enacted in Vietnam, right?  It was a terrible situation, and so you have a lot of these people who were just in survival mode constantly because they did not have parents who were able to be emotionally available to them, and that’s not an issue of oh they didn’t know better.  I don’t even know if they did know better or if they could have.

Sheila: Yeah, because we’re talking about serious PTSD so if you think about all of these women in World War Two, okay, and the men are all off to war, right? So you have your sons off to war. You have all of the men are off to war, and then they come home.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Your husband comes home after years at war.  Maybe you already had kids before he left.

Sheila: Or maybe your boyfriend comes home, and you were young.  And you were just waiting for the men to get home.

Rebecca: And get married immediately.

Sheila: You get married immediately, and he’s got PTSD.  And so what do you do?  You try to keep the house as calm as possible for him so you send the kids out to play on their own, right?

Rebecca: Yeah.  Maybe he literally couldn’t handle loud noises. 

Sheila: Yeah.  So this is the generation of parents who really didn’t parent, like the kids ran around on their own. And the household really revolved around the man making sure that he was comfortable because everyone was so traumatized at the men being gone, and now suddenly the men are home.

Rebecca: Well, and then again, it doesn’t get better in the next generation. For many American families, it didn’t get better. Either you’re terrified of getting drafted. You get drafted.  You know someone who was drafted and died.  There’s just a lot going on, and so you have just these generations upon generations upon generations of just try to get through, like just try to get through on—when you’ve been running on empty emotionally, when you have been handed not just an incomplete toolset, but an actively sabotaged toolset.

Sheila: Yeah  You’ve got PTSD out the wazoo.

Rebecca: And not just that, even if you don’t, your caretakers did. Your society like frankly did. Your—and if you don’t personally have PTSD, you might have survivor’s guilt. You might have—maybe you weren’t able to fight because of disability or sickness.

Sheila: Which was my grandfather.

Rebecca: Yeah, exactly. And then you have to live with knowing all these people who went and died and you didn’t, and that wreaks havoc on the mental health. Like there’s all sorts of stuff that happened for generations upon—like in a row. Then is it any wonder that it’s kind of all focused on these quick fixes, these rituals, these just do the right thing and everything will be okay?

Sheila: Yeah, because all of these people were raised by parents who really couldn’t be emotionally present for them so a lot of people grew up with very anxious or avoidant attachment styles. And attachment styles are super interesting if you ever want to read about them. There’s some great books on attachment styles.

Rebecca: Sue Johnson I think does a lot of attachment styles. Hold Me Tight?

Sheila: Hold Me Tight. Mm-hmm.  I think so, yeah. So a lot of people grew up with avoidant or anxious attachment.

Rebecca: Or were just completely neglected emotionally.

Sheila: Right, right, and so what do you do if you have avoidant or anxious attachment? You look for certainty.

Rebecca: Yes.

Sheila: You want your life to be certain, and you want to put it in boxes, and you can’t handle chaos. You can’t handle nuance.

Rebecca: And at the same time, these women could not get divorced in the same way. The protections did not exist. The society was totally different in how it handled divorce. It was much more difficult to leave a difficult marriage. There were not financial protections. It was harder to get good employment as a woman. There was just—this was a tougher point to have options and so it’s kind of like grin and bear it. Pray, and I guess you’ll get your reward in heaven because that’s the best we can offer you. It’s not the best we can offer anymore.

Sheila: No, it isn’t.

Rebecca: It’s not.

Sheila: But a lot of people grew up in these families with anxious attachment, and so where did they gravitate to? They gravitated to churches that offered them certainty.

Rebecca: Yes.

Sheila: So everything was formula based.

Rebecca: Yeah, they didn’t have the emotional space for nuance.

Sheila: Right, and so you gravitated to the James Dobson Strong-Willed Child parenting.

Rebecca: Yes, if you spank your child 27 times a day, they are 27 times less likely to go to hell. The more you spank, the less hell.

Sheila: Yes.

Rebecca: Whatever the formula is.

Sheila: Yes, and I think those types of attachment styles often gravitate to abusive churches too because they gravitate to churches that are in control over you because people don’t want to have chaos.

Rebecca: Yep, exactly, it’s kind of like take the devil you know situation. It might suck, but at least I know what it is because I can’t handle the unknown even if the unknown could bring something better. The anxiety is just too high.

Sheila: Right, and so because of that often people who have grown up with anxious or avoidant attachment often gravitate to areas where they get to control others, and so men especially will gravitate to churches where they are told, “Hey you get to be in control. And this isn’t you being selfish. This isn’t you being wounded. This is you being godly.”

Rebecca: Yes, it’s masculine. It’s biblical masculinity.

Sheila: And so the men who often have attachment disorders gravitate to complementarianism, and that is what we found. And complementarians—we’re going to be talking about complementarianism in this podcast, but complementarianism is basically the belief that God created hierarchy in marriage. So he made men to be in hierarchy over women in marriage. A lot of people think complementarianism means that the sexes complement each other so they’re different. No, mutualists, egalitarians believe that as well. Like the sexes are not—

Rebecca: Yeah, exactly. My husband and my roles in our family have been very equal in terms of our power in the relationship but have been very dictated by our actual sex because only one of us could nurse in the middle of the night.

Sheila: Right, so it’s not about gender roles. It’s about authority, okay?  And our research found that acting on traditional general roles so when she stays home with the kids and he works outside the home, that’s fine. So is both of you working. What you do isn’t necessarily negative, the problem comes when you believe that one is God ordained. So when you believe that gender roles are God ordained, then we start to see negative outcomes. Next Tuesday The Marriage You Want launches, and our launch team has been busy reading early copies of it, and we’ve got about 60 or 70 reviews now on Goodreads which is awesome, and I want to read to you just a couple. One man wrote, “My wife and I have never come across a better Christian marriage book. Based on real data, Scripture, and research, this book challenges the reader to build an intimate and passionate marriage of friendship and mutuality. It has helped both of us connect deeper as a couple and to understand all the small elements that combine to make a great marriage. Hint: it’s not about ascribing of gender roles like so many gimmicky Christian books. Rather The Marriage You Want is teaching us how to build an amazing friendship, and to love each other like Jesus. This is what the true foundation of a God-honoring marriage should look like, and this profoundly thought-provoking book will teach you how to build a wonderful marriage and relationship from the ground up.” So I love that. So pick up The Marriage You Want today. So the gender roles themselves are not that. So complementarianism doesn’t mean that men and women do different things in marriage. It means that one is an authority over the other.

Rebecca: And it means that what men and women do is ordained by God, and if you step outside of it, you are kind of like, you’re trying to usurp God’s natural order. That’s often said in comp circles.

Sheila: Yes, and one of the ways that we measured this in our survey was this idea of the tie breaking vote.

Rebecca: Yeah, because that’s really the biggest one. Because there’s a lot of different like in every area of religion, there’s a lot of different areas of complementarianism where they kind of disagree with each other a little bit, but the one they all agree on is that in an argument, the man has the tie breaking vote because he has a penis.

Sheila: Right, which is—and I find this really because is it really a tie breaker—a tie breaking vote means that there’s a third person voting, right?

Rebecca: No, his penis votes. So he votes, she votes, and then his penis votes. That’s why she can’t have it, Mom, because she doesn’t have a penis.

Sheila: That must be what it is.

Rebecca: Yes, that’s why—because see women have boobs. There’s two of them so it doesn’t break the tie. The man has only one penis. Sorry, this is way too much. I don’t know if you’re going to let this stay in, but anyway. What if the boobs disagree? And then you’re in the same situation as before?

Sheila: Seriously, though, the whole idea of it being a tie breaker when there’s only two people basically all it means is that he gets what he wants. So if they agree, he gets what he wants. If they don’t agree, he gets what he wants.

Rebecca: Yeah, but they call it the tie breaker as if there is some arbitrary like third-party mediator coming in.

Sheila: Yeah, and it’s not. And so that’s what we were measuring, and that’s where we found there was emotional immaturity. And the women, who also have some of these attachment disorders, also gravitate to complementarianism because it offers them an out as well.

Rebecca: Yeah, that makes sense.

Sheila: And I think that’s what people don’t quite understand is like in a lot of ways complementarianism covers up for anxious or avoidant attachment because it gives people a formula for how to do marriage where you don’t have to be vulnerable, you don’t have to be intimate, you don’t actually have to work on relationship. You just have these roles you have to fulfill. So here you have these people who gravitate towards certainty because it allows them to cover up for the fact that they do have anxious or avoidant attachment because people with anxious or avoidant attachment have an issue with being vulnerable and with intimacy because you’re just scared—

Rebecca: It’s been threatening in the past.

Sheila: —he’s going to leave you. Yeah, intimacy is threatening, and so you’re trying to protect yourself, and one of the great ways to protect yourself is to have these certainties, these boxes that you fit in. And that’s why you see like emotional immaturity being so heavily correlated, like it’s the one area of marriage so heavily correlated with the tie breaking vote. I want to read you an example of a complementarian. I posted this in a blog post back in the fall where I was writing about this concept. So this is from the book Gospel Powered Parenting, which is like a Reformed book. And it’s the bad kind of Reformed, like the super, super conservative.

Rebecca: Yeah, not like just the general Reformed theology idea, but the one where it’s like you are a worm that God despise and wants to spit on and rejoices.

Sheila: Yes, I have a wonderful friend that I was with this weekend who was recently ordained with the Reformed Church of America, and she’s wonderful. Anyway, this is not that kind of book.

Rebecca: Yes, we’re talking—yeah.

Sheila: So he says this, “When Mom joyfully submits to her husband as to the Lord recognizing that he is her head as Christ is the head of the church and that she is his body as the church is the body of Christ, it makes an attractive statement. When she does this for an unworthy husband not because she trusts him but because she trusts Christ to care for her, it points her children to Christ. Her behavior says Christ is trustworthy. It says the Son of God is infinitely good. You can trust him. My father is very imperfect, but Mom trusts Christ to take care of her. If she can trust Jesus this way, I can also.”

Rebecca: Yeah.

Sheila: That’s like scary.

Rebecca: So first of all, it’s like you're going to groom your own children to put up with abusive behavior.

Sheila: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is.

Rebecca: That’s what it is. They’re not even hiding it.

Sheila: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is.

Rebecca: If Mom can trust Christ to take care of her in this way, I can also. Yeah.

Sheila: Yeah, so it’s okay for me to be in an abusive relationship because Mom is in an abusive relationship, and she’s trusting Christ.

Rebecca: Or even if it’s not abusive. Like it’s okay to put up with mistreatment and allow people to walk all over you.

Sheila: But when you think about that quote, could an emotionally healthy person ever have written that?

Rebecca: I just don’t think so.

Sheila: No, and this is the thing. You read so many of these books, and you realize an emotionally healthy person could not write that. Like I think about Kevin Leman’s quote about how her period is a difficult time for her husband. And so she learned to give him hand jobs because faithfulness is a two-person job. Could an emotionally healthy person have written that?

Rebecca: I really don’t think so.

Sheila: Could an emotionally healthy person have said what Emerson Eggerichs said about a relationship—how what men really want is for a wife to not say anything and just sit there and watch him paint a wall? Would an emotionally healthy person have said that?

Rebecca: Yeah, no. That’s just the thing. And here’s the thing we’ve been talking a lot about attachment issues, and obviously I do want to make sure it’s very clear. And I know we’ve talked about this in previous podcasts, but in case this is the first one of ours that you’re listening to, a person of any attachment style can have a healthy relationship. Genuinely. It might be a little bit more difficult. You might have to—you already have more baggage to unpack. You might have more things. You might benefit more from marriage counseling. There are certain people who genuinely don’t benefit from marriage counseling because they kind of already know a lot of it. We talked about that a lot in school. That’s kind of like you're securely attached from a good family. People like yeah, I know we have to talk. I know what that means. No, that was on me. There are certain—there’s those kinds of people who because of the way you were raised, you just don’t have the same skill set but that doesn’t mean you can’t get the skill set. So it’s not like oh, I’m anxious attached because I had bad parents growing up or because I had—not bad parents just there was a lot of trauma growing up. Sometimes it’s not parents. Sometimes it’s that you were sick a lot as a kid. Sometimes it’s that—

Sheila: Or you grew up in the Great Depression or your parents did. I mean obviously—

Rebecca: I mean we’re not talking to a lot of those people now.

Sheila: But a lot of people are immigrants, and they did.

Rebecca: Yes, exactly. You grew up in—and things were unstable. Say they were refugees. There’s all these different things that it could be, right?  That are totally outside of parenting choices. Doesn’t mean that you’re doomed. Doesn’t mean that at all. It just means that typically we have kind of biases in how we act and how we react to relational stimuli. That’s really just how this attachment stuff describes is what’s your default? Is your default one that comes from a place of believing the world is inherently good and safe? Or is your default coming from a place that taught you from a very young age that you are in danger? You need to protect yourself, and that others are probably going to abandon you. That obviously is going to change how you treat your spouse, and so those are things—I’m just saying—don’t give up hope and don’t be like well it’s the best I can do. No, no, no, get the skills because you absolutely can have a totally healthy relationship. We’re not saying that you can’t if you’re anxious avoidant or if you are even disorganized attachment. We’re not saying there’s anything there. You just need to do the work and get the skills, and you’ll be happier and better for it anyway. Just want to put that little rant out there. Just want to make sure we said that. But that being said, that brings us to the second thing we wanted to talk about which is something that we’ve been talking about for a while is we talk about toxic teachings here a lot right? We talk about toxic teachings a lot. And toxic teachings affect us in a lot of different ways, right? And they put people in different trajectories for different reasons. And this is where we have to talk about what we call multi-causality or this is where—in research this is a really common thing where something leads to the same outcome but for different reasons for different folks. That happens a lot of the time. So the way that we’ve kind of come to conceptualize it with doing all this research and doing all these focus groups and talking to at this point thousands of people about this stuff is roughly four categories of people. There’s your people who were frankly at a crossroads. Maybe they had like pretty good—they had an average childhood. There’s nothing that’s like one way or another going to push them one way. Maybe they had an abusive stepparent but they also had a really encouraging grandmother figure who taught them a lot about autonomy. Like these things are complicated, and you’re sitting there at the crossroads, and you go to church, and you went to a Southern Baptist Church that taught you about modesty and submission. And so you are at a crossroads, and you went down the negative side because you were trying to be a good person. You’re trying to like—the kind of kid who is seeking out God, like that is a self-selected kid there. You go to church. You want to have stability in your life, and you want the stability, and you didn’t wander into a particularly healthy church, and you ended up with a Brio magazine subscription, and you followed every rule in it because you’re desperate for some stability. And you end up marrying a really just kind of a repeat of the worst parts of your history kind of guy because you got bad advice. So this is your crossroads person.

Sheila: Right, you married the guy who looked super Christian because he was super confident and he quoted Bible verses and everything, but he really didn’t display kindness.

Rebecca: We talked to one woman when we were interviewing for She Deserves Better whose secular family taught her a lot about consent, and then she started going to—she was sexually assaulted as a child, but then she started going to church. And so she had her secular atheist family teaching her about consent, and then the church was teaching if you have sex with someone, your body remains a part of them forever. And she ended up experiencing quite a bit of sexual assault that was perpetuated, and she didn’t feel she could talk to people about because of the church’s teaching. So that’s the idea of this crossroads where you have the two teachings, and if you hadn’t had the negative ones from church, you would be in a different place today.

Sheila: Right, so it really was the teachings that got you going in the wrong direction. It was the teachings itself.

Rebecca: Exactly, so there’s those ones where it’s kind of like clear cut. There’s other people where they got—they were on their path for a100% great life and then the teaching knocked them down to an 87%. But they’re okay, right?  Now we saw a lot of those in our data as well. The teachings absolutely harmed them. So those are the first two groups where it’s people they’re—the things that they wanted and what they chose from life was genuinely because of what the church said. They had an alternative, and the church put them in a new direction from where they were originally going.

Sheila: The crossroads. They chose the fork.

Rebecca: Or the people who were always kind of going in a great direction, and it kind of just blipped a little bit but they were able to get back. This might be a lot of people where like the modesty rules caused them to have massive self-esteem issues, but they’re kind of working through that, and they still married a really great person. And they still understood the character above all else. They’re the kinds of people that end up in really great relationships, but there was stuff they had to unpack, right? But then there’s two other groups, and these two groups are kind of also opposites of each other. So there’s the one group of people who were just never, ever going to buy this stuff, like in a million years, and ended up totally fine and not really affected by purity culture or these teachings in the same way. These are your people where their personality was such that they are not going to do anything they don’t want to do no matter what. They’re not going to buy your crap. They are the ones who as our prime minister has been saying, there is a snowball’s chance in hell that they are going to buy anything that doesn’t make sense to them. They’re probably your ones who are more naturally independent and contrarian, right?

Sheila: Yeah, and they just—they just simply don’t trust authority necessarily.

Rebecca: Yeah, I will say—I’m in that category. And anyone who’s listened to the podcast knows I’m in that category. You all know the first time I stood up to church authority, I was ten years old. Like this is something—for a lot of people, this is kind of in their bones, in their DNA of—

Sheila: And there are a lot of people like that. When you think about your average Southern Baptist Church—I don’t think people know this.  But studies have shown that the majority of people in the pews in Southern Baptist Churches believe that women can be pastors.

Rebecca: Exactly. There are a lot of people who actively do not agree with who is in authority, and where they’re able to go places and they are the ones who do chew the meat, spit out the bones because their natural inclination is oh why would you believe that? Like gosh darn, that’s dumb.

Sheila: Yeah, so for them, the churches don’t necessarily hurt them because they just ignore the stuff that’s harmful.

Rebecca: Yeah, and they have a level of like self-assuredness, critical thought, and the feeling that they are allowed to use said critical thought.

Sheila: Yeah, now we still think you should not go to a harmful church.

Rebecca: Absolutely. Gosh darn.

Sheila: But the simple fact is there’s a lot of people in harmful churches who don’t believe the harmful stuff.

Rebecca: And also I went to harmful churches. I was not personally affected by teachings, but I was affected by the constant betrayal of leadership.

Sheila: Yes.

Rebecca: The teachings didn’t really affect me.

Sheila: No, no, it was the leadership.

Rebecca: But on the other hand, on the other—here, here, I’ll put it this way.  There’s also a group—so there’s that group of people where you’re never going to buy it no matter what. Then there’s the group of people who already bought in, and the church cements it. So these are people who already bought in. It’s not like the first two groups where both of them were on a trajectory, and it changed. These are people who were on a trajectory, and the church cemented it, right? The previous people who were never going to believe it, they were on a trajectory, and the church couldn’t do nothing about it.

Sheila: Right, right, right.

Rebecca: So on this one, the people were on a trajectory, and the church cemented it. There were people who were on a trajectory towards wanting a life—and this is hard to talk about it, but it’s important we talk about it. Whose core desires is a life that doesn’t have a ton of responsibility. They just want to have a nice life. They really want to be praised. Maybe they just—they really have this deep need for people to think highly of them. They want to be the it girl. They want people to look at them and say, “Man, she’s got it all together. Wow, look at her and her perfect kids. Wow, how does she do it all?” The people that crave that kind of affirmation, they’re already looking for something that gives them an easy ticket towards an easy life, and the church says here you go on a silver platter.

Sheila: Yeah, that’s godly. That’s godly for you to not want responsibility. It’s godly.

Rebecca: So this is not the women who were on a path towards like wanting to do specific like callings where the church said actually you shouldn’t be a pastor, and then they changed their mind for example, right?

Sheila: Right.

Rebecca: These are people who don’t want a big life, and by big, I don’t mean big as in like they want to have a small life, that’s actually fine. But what I mean is big life is that they don’t want anything asked of them. You want comfort. Our goal is comfort. Our goal is to have an easy life, to have people like us, to have those little bits of praise, and to feel like you’ve got it, quote unquote. And this is the problem is sometimes these toxic teachings that hurt us, hurt us because they give us over to what we already wanted instead of doing what the Holy Spirit is supposed to do which is direct us away from that which is actually a worldly desire and towards the desire to seek His kingdom, and His righteousness above all else. And yes, that means carrying your cross, and carrying your cross is incongruent with a life that is based on not having to do very much, not having to think. If you’re uncomfortable with conflict, and you just want to become a mom and a wife and you don’t really want to have to do much, complementarianism is really attractive.

Sheila: Yeah, and you don’t have to grow that much. You can go to Bible studies. You can try to grow spiritually, but you don’t have to put yourself out there. Yeah, you don’t have to go through conflicts. You don’t have to do any of that stuff.

Rebecca: And there are so many people who romanticize the idea of being totally at someone’s mercy, totally at someone’s whim where all you have to do is keep the house, and he’s in charge of everything else, but he’s genuinely in charge of everything else. These things are romanticized because we want ease, because we want praise. We want approval. We want whatever it is, but it’s not actually—the core desire is not to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others and the world, it’s to sacrifice weirdly ourself for ourself. And we talk about this a lot in our focus groups. We heard from a lot of women who went through this. They say, “I was saving face for years.” It’s—and it’s hard to talk about this because there are still people who are in horrible marriages, right?  Who went through things no one should have to go through. And part of the reason why we keep going through it and for a lot of these people who seem to be self-selected into these groups, is because there’s this desire to have it all together and to have it all. And then when you don’t have it all, the embarrassment—because our core desire is to be seen as having it all the embarrassment is such that it’s really hard to reach out.

Sheila: Yeah, and so you end up posting on social media how wonderful your husband is—

Rebecca: Meanwhile you're struggling.

Sheila: You’re really struggling.

Rebecca: You’re really struggling, and this is why it’s so hard to talk about because these are internal factors. We talk a lot about the external factors. The external factors are easy to talk about because—

Sheila: The bad teachings, the toxic churches, et cetera, et cetera, yeah.

Rebecca: That’s a little more comfortable to talk about because—and we see a lot of people saying I was tricked. I was coerced. They tricked me into this, and that is often true, but it is not always true.

Sheila: Or it is not the complete story.

Rebecca: Exactly.  It is not the only truth. You can be tricked because you really wanted to believe it versus other people in your church weren’t tricked because they didn’t actually want to believe that. They were okay with a life that was hard. They were okay with the idea they would have to sacrifice. They were okay with the idea that they might be asked to really grow and challenge themselves and do big things that were uncomfortable and maybe people wouldn’t like them very much and maybe they wouldn’t have as much time to have the picture perfect Instagram family, and maybe they wouldn’t be able to be the it girl, but at least they would have done something meaningful, and that’s the core desire for them.

Sheila: And we’re not trying to say that raising kids and being a stay-at-home mom is not meaningful.

Rebecca: Gosh, no.

Sheila: Because I stayed at home. You’re staying at home.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Sheila: I homeschooled all the way through. You're homeschooling your kids. We absolutely believe that.

Rebecca: A bunch of stay-at-home moms over here.

Sheila: Yeah, that is totally meaningful, but it is not the only meaning in our lives.

Rebecca: Well, and the difference is it’s not something that we are willing to risk everything else for, and that’s what I—that’s what we’ve noticed in our talking with lots of people and looking at all of this—what’s the word? I guess media, like the books, the articles, the podcasts, everything we review for our work is there really are kind of two groups of people. There’s people who are like I’m going get married no matter what, and they will settle in order to  be married, and then there’s a ton of people who say I really, really want to—sorry, of people who want to get married, there’s two people, right?  People who say, “I desperately want to be married, but I will only do it for the right person.” Being in the second group is so important, and that—

Sheila: It’s very, very, very important.

Rebecca: And it’s not that these people want to be wives and mothers any less than these people. It’s that they understand that there are certain things that’s too high of a price to pay, and that’s what we’re talking about here. What were the internal factors that led you to believe these things and that found things like men being in charge of a marriage attractive? And we have to address those core internal factors if we’re ever going to see any real emotional growth.

Sheila: And we do talk about this by the way in chapter eight. We go through how to grow emotionally when you have maybe given into some of these things that have put you down the wrong road. So how to grow emotionally as a couple, how to grow emotionally ourselves, how do we work on ourselves because that is part of having the marriage you want is growth. But I just want to reiterate and sort of bring this back full circle as we’re wrapping up is what we’ve found is that people who are emotionally immature gravitate to the idea of the husband having the tie breaking vote. We’ve already talked about why women do. Briefly the reason why a lot of men do is that it does give them a sense of control, and it also gives them an excuse not to grow because you know what mutuality does is it forces you to become vulnerable and talk and work things out.

Rebecca: Oh, you have an accountability partner.

Sheila: Yeah, and when you don’t want that because that’s too scary—vulnerability is scary then you gravitate towards complementarianism.

Rebecca: Absolutely.

Sheila: Because if you're a guy and you're afraid of opening up and you can’t really communicate emotionally and maybe you carry shame, then if you’re complementarian there’s no impetus to grow.

Rebecca: Yeah, I mean for pity’s sake. She still has to have sex with you no matter what you say or even no matter what you do because that’s her role as a Christian wife. It’s like a contract more than it is a relationship in a lot of these scenarios because you have roles you have to fulfill and she has roles she has to fulfill.

Sheila: So then that’s why both of you are attracted to it. That’s why we see this, but then once you are in that relationship, that complementarian relationship, it also breeds emotional immaturity.

Rebecca: Absolutely.

Sheila: Because you don’t practice the skills of conflict resolution in the same way.

Rebecca: So you have these other couples who have been married in mutual marriages for ten years at the same time as the comp marriage who’s been married for ten years, and the egalitarian couple has been wrestling it out for ten years. Maybe she made a stink—the she being me in this case—made a stink in the first three months about every single thing that her ticked her off about her new husband because it’s like I am not living with that the rest of my life, right?  And then they deal with it, and things are actually really good, and they’ve got ten years of practice, and now the comp couple has never actually really duked it out in a fight. They’ve never actually been able to communicate, and she just keeps pushing it down and pushing it down, and now it’s ten years in. They don’t have the muscles to do it. They don’t have the relational muscles. They have atrophied. They haven’t worked them out and so now it’s even harder.

Sheila: Right, and this is something which I get into debates all the time on social media with people because I’ll say most people don’t need a tie breaker.  78.9% of Christian couples function without a tie breaker, and they say, “Well that isn’t possible.”

Rebecca: Yeah, it isn’t possible for you.

Sheila: Because you’ve never used those muscles.

Rebecca: Exactly.

Sheila: That’s where we see a lot of this emotional immaturity coming in, emotional dysregulation where people have anger outbursts, et cetera, et cetera, because you haven’t had to work on that mutuality. And so I just found that really interesting when I looked at that chart, and I realized wow that emotional immaturity that’s where we see these affects of complementarianism the most. That and sex but especially emotional immaturity. And that’s something I think people have to grapple with if they’re going to teach about complementarianism—like okay, obviously we are egalitarian because that is where the evidence leads, and we believe that’s what the Bible says. But if you’re still going to teach complementarianism, you do need to grapple with the fact that people who practice it and believe it—

Rebecca: Tend to be more emotionally immature.

Sheila: —tend to be more emotionally immature.

Rebecca: Yeah, and I guess that’s—as we’re wrapping up too, I do just want to say like I know that it’s—all of us have our areas of strength and weakness. I know we said that already. Every personality type is needed. Every proclivity—every one of us has things that we are more likely to gravitate towards and things that really skiv us out that other people really like. I love public speaking. That is not common, right? You do too. At the same time, there’s a lot of stuff that I am not good at because of the kinds of—the passion and purpose and the drive that I do have for life. It also has been directly related to my crippling depression episodes. That is a thing. That is a thing. Our greatest strength tends to be our greatest weakness as well, right?  So we’re not talking in this podcast about how everyone needs to become an ENTJ.  I need to make that really clear.  For anyone who knows Myers-Briggs stuff we’re both ENTJs. That should surprise none of you who knows Myers-Briggs stuff. But we’re not saying that. We’re just saying that I don’t want to see another generation of women not asking themselves why do I want an easy life? Not asking themselves why am I so attracted to the idea of being at someone else’s whim? Not asking themselves why is it so important to me to be seen as popular and pretty and why am I not comfortable being just who I am and take it or leave it? Why is it that women reach that point at age 40 and why are we wasting 20 years of our life? That’s what makes me so angry because I think frankly 40, 50-year-old women, they got it. I don’t freaking care anymore. Like this is where older millennials and Gen X are at at this point.

Sheila: Yes.

Rebecca: You’re like I don’t freaking care. Deal with it. This is me. Hot flashes and everything, right?  But so many women, we are wasting our twenties and thirties worrying about being pretty, being popular, being good enough, having people like us.  And then we hit 40 or 50, we stop caring about it, and then we look back on all those wasted years.  I don’t want to see anymore wasted years in this generation.  I don’t want to see decisions that are made based on things that aren’t going to matter in 15 years anyway.  I don’t want to see children being brought into the world, into relationships, that are doomed from the start because we’re so focused on being liked that we stop asking ourselves if we even like ourselves.  I don’t want to see that anymore.  And those are the internal forces that are giving power to these patriarchal messages.  Because as long as women are convinced to hate themselves unless they’re perfect and unless we look perfect to other people and as long as women accept the idea that we should judge ourselves based on if other people think we’re popular enough, they’re going to keep winning.  We all just need to have some menopausal energy.  

Sheila: When you’re young.

Rebecca: That’s what I’m saying.  We just need to accept that—at some point, we’re all going to be menopausal anyway.  So why are we wasting our twenties and thirties bending over backwards for standards that we’re not even going to care about in ten years?

Sheila: Amen.  Amen.  Absolutely.  Can you tell that Becca is passionate about this?  Seriously, this is the one thing that you have been talking about for years that we’ve never talked about on this podcast.

Rebecca: That’s because I’m a psychology major.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And so you really wanted to say this.  And yeah.  I’m glad you got to.  Joanna has something that she really wants to say.  So we are going to turn now to stats with Joanna, and Joanna is going to come on just for a few minutes and talk especially about something from the podcast last week.  Well, it is time for stats with Joanna.  Hello, Joanna.

Joanna: Hello.

Sheila: Hello.  Hello.  Hello.  So we are talking about emotional connection, which is at the very end of the book.  So as you know, the book is based on the acronym BARE.  So BARE.  So we talked about balance in the podcast.  We talked about the marriage hierarchy of needs that fall into balance.  We talked about affection and date nights and feeling connected.  We talked about responsibility and what happens when there is unfairness in the marriage.  And now we want to get to the end of the book where we’re talking about how to really feel connected, how to feel close like you know each other, like you’re actually intimate.  And I know there’s some things that you really want to share about this.  So why don’t you just jump right in?

Joanna: Okay.  So chapter eight of the book is what we’re really talking about today.  And I first of all want to point out that we have so many charts and so many graphs in this chapter, and it makes my heart so happy because we’re talking a lot about what actually works, guys.  What are the things that actually matter?  And at the same time, I have been doing a blitz, a I am trying to make like Sheila in 2019 where she read all of the marriage books, and I am doing another pass through for another project that we’re working on.  And I have been reading—

Sheila: Yeah.  So just let me say.  Back in 2019, I read all of the marriage books, and I rated them on our rubric for how it scored on healthy sexuality when we were writing our book, The Great Sex Rescue.  And you can get that rubric.  It is free.  You can download it, and the link is in the podcast notes.  And you can see big name marriage books scored on sex.  But now you’re rereading them and reading some new ones for a different project.

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  Yes.  So oh, super secret, fun project that we’ve been talking about in the Patreon, so go check it out on the Patreon if you’d like to.  But I’ve been rereading all of these books.  And I just want to say that I am tired.  Because as we were writing the book—or as I was writing the stats and you were writing this book—that’s actually accurate to how it actually went down.  What were we focused on?  We have how does feeling confident that your spouse is going to share important stuff with you—how does that affect how you feel about your marriage?  Guess what?  To the shock of zero people, it makes a huge difference if you feel that your spouse is going to share stuff with you.  If you’re worried they’re going to be secretive, that’s not a good sign, right?  We found that it really matters if you think that you can learn with your spouse and with other people in your community but especially with your spouse.  We found that it matters if your spouse can emotionally regulate and if you can emotionally regulate, right?  Not being overwhelmed by anger is a really important thing.  Of course.

Sheila: Yes.  We found that being able to share your weaknesses with your spouse is hugely important.

Joanna: Yeah.  Okay.  And these are all, again—my personal opinion—very obvious things.  One of my big concerns going into this book was are there going to be interesting stats.  Or is it all going to be like, “Wow, Joanna, such deep statistics.  No one could have ever foreseen that you would say this or that you would find this in the data”?  And yet, here we are.  And so I was reading The Five Love Languages.  The highs were high in that book.  The lows were low.  The idea can be useful.  A lot of the book was great.  There were some parts that—where I was genuinely moved.  And some parts of it were gross.  But what really stood out to me—there was this one—there were a couple of moments where they were anecdotes like he says this.  She said that.  And this happens in Love and Respect.  It happens in lots of books where the thing that he’s worried about is very different than the thing that she is worried about.  And Gary Chapman was talking about the importance of your town and of not making demands of your spouse in the words of affirmation chapter of The Five Love Languages.  And he describes a man, who is asking his wife because he just absolutely loves her apple pies.  And so he just would really like her to please—“Could you please, honey, make me an apple pie?”  And this is compared with a woman, who is demanding that her husband clean the gutters right away because they really need to be clean, and there are actually trees growing in the gutters.  And you must clean them out.  And then there was all this you can’t be a demanding spouse.  You must watch your tone.  And I’m like you know what?  Let’s back up.  Let’s back up.  What’s justified here?  

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  If there’s trees growing in your gutters, I’d be freaking right now too.  

Joanna: Yeah.  It would be like, “Look.  Either you clean them out, or I’m going to have to call a company to do it.  And we’re not going to be able to afford X thing.  Or I’m going to have to do it, and then you will have to X, Y, Z.”  That’s the level of consequence that is warranted from that kind of an anecdote.  And I just am so frustrated because the concern is not, wait, what’s actually happening on the ground.  What’s the lived reality of your marriage?  What’s justified here?  Are you justified in giving an ultimatum?  Are you justified in making a demand?  Are you justified in saying, “I will not be treated like this”?  Or is it I would just really like an apple pie?  And then yeah.  Don’t make demands. 

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  They’re so not the equivalent, and it really is amazing.  Here.  I’m actually going to read the quote because—let me read the actual quote about the gutters.  Okay?  Because this is wild.  “The wife who says, ‘Do you think it will be possible for you to clean the gutters this weekend,’ is expressing love by making a request.  But the wife who says, ‘If you don’t get these gutters cleaned out soon, they are going to fall off the house.  They already have trees growing out of them,” has ceased to love and has become a domineering spouse.”  How is that ceasing to love?  There’s trees growing out of the gutter.

Joanna: And she is not saying, “You are an ignorant, horrible person, who is lazy.”  No.  All she’s saying is, “This really needs to happen, and here is why.”  Problem.  Reason for it being a big problem. 

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  But, again, the focus is on the tone and how you ask it and especially for women.  Especially for women.  That women cannot be firm.  That women cannot actually share what is truly going on.  Okay.  There’s trees growing out of the gutter.  That is an important piece of information to share.  But in order to—but to share something that is super, super bad is somehow not loving and being a domineering spouse. 

Joanna: Yeah.  And I think the problem is that, frankly, it’s really easy to tell what tone of voice a person is using, right?  It’s easy to be like, “Oh, she was being sharp.  Or he was being sharp,” right?  You can hear that.  It’s pretty simple.  There’s a yes or no, right, wrong.  It’s very clear.  When it comes to—I don't know—sometimes you’re justified in making a demand.  Sometimes it’s right to give an ultimatum.  Sometimes it’s not.  You’re going to have to look at your life and think about what’s actually justified in your situation because you are a grown up.  And this is your life.  And we can give you broad principles, and you can then apply them to your personal situation.  One of those feels really easy even if it’s actually very hard as somebody who—I can get sharp when I’m stressed.  That’s not a thing that I find particularly easy.  But I can at least tell if I succeeded or failed. 

Sheila: Yeah.  Mm-hmm.

Joanna: But if it’s about what is the emotionally mature and healthy thing, what are the—maybe there are multiple different emotionally mature and health things.  Then which of the options am I going to choose?  What is the most wise way to move forward?  There is not the same level of easy answer here when you’re actually talking about it frankly in a way that is more in line with reality.  Again, if the gutters have trees growing out of them, she’s allowed to point that out.  And, again, I would argue that she’s allowed to do that with a bit of sharpness in her tone, and that would be perfectly acceptable.  But I think that the challenge is that, again, there’s just not the pat answers. 

Sheila: Right.  And that’s what we try to do in The Marriage You Want is we’re trying to give people tools to figure out, okay, what is the best thing to do here to grow intimacy.  And sometimes that best thing is to be very firm and even sharp in some cases but just very firm.  And sometimes the best thing to do is to leave it and just show grace, and we can’t tell you what that is, right?  All we can do is say, “Hey, here are principles that help grow emotional intimacy.”  And one of the things that is the biggest key to emotional intimacy is being able to share what you are actually thinking and being able to share what you’re actually feeling.  And all of these books tell you not to.

Joanna: Yeah.  Yeah.  And to not actually be honest with your spouse and to—I mean, again—I’m sorry.  I’m stuck on the gutters thing, okay?  But you could have a situation where when we read this in (inaudible).  We’re like, “What the heck?  This is ridiculous.”  But what if he has multiple sclerosis, right?  What if there are other things happening?  What if they have the money to hire someone, and they don’t want to?  There’s so many issues, so many things that could complicate the story.  And so it’s important for us to be able to, again, speak honestly with each other and parse out what are the things that are happening in our story regarding our family of origin, our emotional needs, our jobs, our health issues, and on and on and on so that we can actually get to that intimate place of being able to connect emotionally and build a life together.  I really loved looking at having people to rejoice with and having people to mourn with because that’s ultimately what we want.  We want a community, who can gather around us.  I mean I know stupidly—I’ve taken up running in the last year.  And I really enjoy sending the texts after I run a new fastest time, which is not very fast.  I am not a good runner.  But dang it if I’m not proud of myself, and I want somebody else to know that I did the thing.  And I’m texting my husband like, “Yes.  I did it,” or mid run, “This is really hard.   I don’t like it, but I’m going do to it.”  Why do I do that?  Because I want to feel seen.  I want to feel known.  That’s part of community.  And ultimately, that’s what we want for our marriages is we want people for—we want this for ourselves.  And we want this for everybody, who is reading the book and listening to the podcast.   To have the kind of relationship where you have the ability to mourn with each other, to be with each other in life’s hardest moments, to hold each other up, and also to rejoice in the wins of life, and to just be a witness to each other.  And we can’t really witness each other if we can’t see each other.  

Sheila: Because we just want to be known.  We just want to be known, and we want to know our spouse too.  And when we put people in boxes and say, “This is how you have to act all of the time no matter what,” then you can’t really know anyone.  You can’t even know yourself sometimes because you’re gaslighting yourself about what you’re thinking and feeling.  And that’s so much of what the advice we’ve had in the evangelical church is if you’re upset, don’t have expectations, cover it up, go to God with your needs, not your spouse.  We’ve been told that if we’re upset about something don’t share it.  And don’t even let yourself feel it.  That doesn’t build intimacy.  It doesn’t lead to a good marriage.  And you’re allowed to want your gutters cleaned.  

Joanna: You are very much allowed to want to have clean gutters. 

Sheila: Yeah.  Thanks, Joanna. 

Joanna: You’re very welcome.

Sheila: So, Becca, if there are very trees growing from your gutter, it is okay to make a stink.  And I know that you would.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Sheila: Although quite frankly, Connor would notice before you would anyway.

Rebecca: Connor would absolutely notice before me.  I’m not sure where our gutters are.  Is that the thing at the edge of the house?  Like the eavestroughs?

Sheila: Yes.

Rebecca: Oh, okay.

Sheila: Yes.  We call eavestroughs here.  Yeah.  So on Tuesday, The Marriage You Want, launches.  It’s not too late to preorder it.  If you preorder it before Tuesday, you can still get our preorder bonus, which is our alternate conclusion.  It’s a long chapter that we pulled at the last minute, and I love it.  And you can get that for free if you just send in your preorder receipt to preorder@marriageyouwantbook.com.  The link is in the podcast notes.  And just remember this is the book—if we want to change the Christian conversation about sex and marriage, then we need to get this book out there.  Just like Great Sex Rescue has really changed the conversation about sex, I truly believe that this will change the conversation about marriage.  It talks about mental load.  It talks about housework, all the stuff that we, women, desperately want to talk about.  And it’s just a safe book.  It’s a safe book.

Rebecca: Yeah.  It’s a safe book.  It does really dive into the issues that most commonly plague marriages.  And we really did work hard.  I know you guys worked really hard to do it in a way that was both telling the truth unapologetically but also in a way that people could share with their still deep in it comp family and friends.  So, again, you don’t pull any punches at all.  

Sheila: Yeah.  But it accessible.  And there’s a work—a study guide that goes along with it.  You can buy it as a separate study guide, which has premarital curriculum, small group curriculum, couples curriculum, so much more.  So please take a look at that.  We would so appreciate it.  And if could just give one more plug, follow me on social media too.  And please, please subscribe to this podcast.  If you are listening to this podcast and you haven’t subscribed yet, whether you’re listening on a podcast app or whether you’re watching on YouTube, please subscribe so that you don’t miss anything.  We noticed on YouTube that about half of the people that watch our videos regularly aren’t subscribed.  So please subscribe.  It just makes sure that you don’t miss anything.  It helps us immensely.  And it helps get our stuff out there to more people.  So hit subscribe and like.  And you can find me on other social media platforms as well.  On Instagram.  On Threads.  Because again, it just helps our reach, and it helps more people find us.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Especially with YouTube, some people say, “Oh, well, I just don’t subscribe anymore because the algorithm doesn’t even tell me when my people have posted.”  It’s not about you, fam.  It’s about us.  If you subscribe, it helps us.  Even if you’re like, “Oh, well, it’s okay.  You always come up on my algorithm anyway,” subscribe just because we asked you to.  Let’s be very clear here.  I’m not trying to make your life easier.  I’m trying to help you make our life easier.

Sheila: There you go.  So subscribe and preorder The Marriage You Want and tell other people about it when it launches next Tuesday.  So thank you so much, and we will see you next week on the Bare Marriage podcast.

Rebecca: Bye.

Sheila: Bye-bye.