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Episode 280: The Problems with the Book The Love Dare--And How It Papers Over Real Problems

• Sheila Gregoire • Season 8 • Episode 280

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The Love Dare, based on the movie Fireproof, has been a huge best-selling marriage book for two decades. But does it actually contain good advice? Today on episode 280 of the Bare Marriage podcast, we show how The Love Dare simply regurgitates all the typical harmful evangelical marriage advice, telling women to make themselves smaller; never bring up issues; paper over problems; and, of course, never divorce, even if you’re being abused.

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Sheila: Welcome to The Bare Marriage podcast. I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire where we like to talk about healthy advice—well, what is it that we like to talk about?

Rebecca: Healthy.

Sheila: Healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage.

Rebecca: Yes.

Sheila: And I am joined today by my ill daughter, Rebecca, who is still getting over a cold. This has been our life for the last few months, but you are being a trooper, and you are coming on this podcast to be my sidekick as we talk about a book that I just read—

Rebecca: Absolutely.

Sheila: —that is terrible, but before we do that, I would like to talk about a book that I read that is wonderful, and I would like to thank the sponsor of this podcast. Zondervan and Aimee Byrd’s book Saving Face. Aimee was on the podcast last week. It was a wonderful interview. I really, really love this book, talking about how to get to true intimacy, vulnerability, and authenticity in our relationships and in our church communities. It’s so important, and I love what she’s saying, and I encourage everyone to pick up the book. You’ll be hearing more about it from me in a minute, but today we’re going to do something that is always painful but fun and kind of energetic and energizing for me but still painful which is we’re going to look at another book. And that book is The Love Dare by Alex and Stephen Kendrick, of the Kendrick brothers who have made movies like Fireproof, Courageous, Facing the Giants.

Rebecca: War Room.

Sheila: War Room. Yes, yes, and they wrote this book Love Dare which was one of the absolute bestselling Christian marriage books of all time. It’s a 40 day dare that you work through. It always sells super well on Amazon. We looked at including it in The Great Sex Rescue, but as I read it, it talked about sex, but it didn’t talk about it enough that I felt that I could give it a serious scoring to it.

Rebecca: Yeah, I also feel like The Love Dare from what I understand also doesn’t intend to be like a theological—it’s a series of challenges much more than it is like a here’s what God says about X, Y, or Z. Now that does not excuse it as you are about to find out, but it did make it hard for us to fairly assess it on our rubric. And as much as people who are mad that we called them out like to protest otherwise we are really focused on being fair and doing this in good faith and not just kind of doing whatever we could to whoever we could.

Sheila: Yes, that’s right. I did though put it through our rubric for this podcast so I have put it through the rubric. We have created a one sheet for it which you can download. It was up on the blog yesterday, and there are links in the podcast notes so that you can download the highlights of everything we’re going to say in this podcast. But I want to do something different with The Love Dare than I’ve done with other books that we’ve taken on because usually when we do this, we bring—I bring some guests on, and we talk about everything that we hated about the book, and we go through the book. And we try to be fair. We talk about things we like too, but we go through the book systematically. The thing about this book is that there’s one main critique I have of it which I don’t necessarily have of other books.

Rebecca: And it’s related to one of the reasons why we didn’t include this one in The Great Sex Rescue. Should I say? Should I say quickly what it is?

Sheila: Yes.

Rebecca: This book is more of—like Love and Respect, His Needs, Her Needs, Sheet Music—all these books are foundational books in the culture that shaped how people saw sex and marriage. The Love Dare is not that because The Love Dare is the equivalent of the regurgitated grubs that a mommy bird feeds her baby bird. It’s just taking from what’s already there, and it’s just putting into a different format.

Sheila: And it is the blandest—

Rebecca: It is so boring, guys.

Sheila: Most boring book I’ve ever—it was hard. It was painful, and so what—

Rebecca: And I just want to say like we did GSR and the books that we chose—

Sheila: Great Sex Rescue.

Rebecca: Great Sex Rescue, sorry.

Sheila: We talk about everything in acronyms.

Rebecca: Because if my kids are around, I can’t talk about The Great Sex Rescue in front of a five-year-old especially not a curious five-year-old who really likes asking, “What’s that?” No, but the fact was we were trying to figure out which books had shaped the culture, and then The Love Dare was just so wow, okay.

Sheila: And it came out right around the same time as the movie Fireproof, and Fireproof was one of the first really big Christian movies, and I remember seeing it in the theaters. I don’t even know when that was like it was a long time ago.

Rebecca: I was quite young. I think 2008 or something, 2007.

Sheila: And all the Christians were gushing over this movie, and all the atheists were going—and just the regular were going, “Are the Christians okay?” because it was a weird movie.

Rebecca: It was really weird.

Sheila: It presented this fairytale view that someone who is terrible in their marriage, all he needed to do was read this book, and they’ll suddenly have this big heart change, and they’ll become this wonderful person, and all the ways that you hurt your spouse in the past won’t matter anymore.

Rebecca: Exactly.

Sheila: And that’s kind of the theme of a lot of the Kendrick movies. It’s very fairytale like. It’s very—you just pray and everything is fine, and there’s healing. It really doesn’t necessarily work that way so for this book, I did something different to prepare for this podcast. I put out on my different social media channels, “Hey, give me some typical evangelical marriage advice.” And by the way, if you are not following me on social media channels, please do so. On YouTube, we’re starting to—we do an extra video every Friday where we do a roundup which doesn’t necessarily get seen on other social media channels.

Rebecca: It’s kind of like a mini podcast.

Sheila: Yeah, it’s kind of like a mini podcast. I’m super active on Facebook and Threads and Instagram and a little bit Blue Sky. And the thing about algorithms is they can change so if you’re only following me on one place, choose one other place to follow me now too. But especially join our email list because no one can take that away from us, and you write awesome posts every Friday.

Rebecca: Thank you.

Sheila: So what I did is on the social media channels, I said, “Give me your best marriage advice.” And I think I had like over 800 comments on all of the different platforms, but most of them were repeats because there’s only so much advice. And I managed to distill it down to 32 different things, and what I want to do, Becca, is I want to see how many of the 32 you can guess—

Rebecca: Okay, I’ll try to do this quickly.

Sheila: —in just a few minutes.

Rebecca: I’ll try to do this quickly.

Sheila: Okay, so I have a checklist here so you go ahead.

Rebecca: All right, I’m going to say don’t say anything negative immediately. Go to bed at the same time. Obviously there’s got to be something about submit to your husband in there.

Sheila: Yep.

Rebecca: Get your wife flowers. That’s constant. You’re a parent fir—sorry, you’re a spouse first, not a parent. 

Sheila: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca: Don’t speak badly about your spouse to others.

Sheila: Yep.

Rebecca: Have a date night at least once a week. Pray together. Okay, gosh, this is actually hard. How many more can there be?

Sheila: Okay, there’s quite a few. Do you want me to go through them?

Rebecca: Yeah, sure.

Sheila: Okay, go to God instead of your spouse for your needs.

Rebecca: Oh, gosh, right. That’s obvious.

Sheila: Husbands are the final authority. Get the log out of your own eye (inaudible) what you're doing to make him upset. Stay at all costs. Don’t give up. Build up your spouse and compliment him and he’ll become amazing. Marriage is hard.

Rebecca: Oh, of course.

Sheila: She needs affection. He needs sex.

Rebecca: See, the problem is just I have mental blocks against all of these so I can’t come up with them on my own.

Sheila: Think about a good time to bring things up. If you have to talk about something, watch your tone. Love is a choice and an action, not a feeling. Reconcile and forgive. Husband is your spiritual leader. You are not your husband’s Holy Spirit. Tell yourself that you love him and practice gratitude and you will start to feel it.

Rebecca: Oh, gosh, yeah.

Sheila: Prayer can change your spouse. The home is her domain and her responsibility. If the husband loves as Christ, everything will be perfect, and she will want to submit. Lower your expectations. Let his words or insults roll off you like a duck and don’t take offense. There’s no such thing as the one. Whoever you are with is the one. Greet your husband as soon as he walks in the door and only talk to Christian counselors.

Rebecca: And you know what? Not all of those are terrible.

Sheila: No.

Rebecca: I actually firmly believe there’s no such thing as the one. Like that’s a thing. There’s not a right person, and it’s like—but at the same time, there are a lot of not-the-ones. Like that’s the thing that’s missing.

Sheila: Oh, I forgot. I forgot a bunch. I had scrolled down. Do you want to hear the rest?

Rebecca: Yes.

Sheila: Marriage is meant to make you holy not happy.

Rebecca: Yeah, obviously.

Sheila: If you respect him, he’ll become a king and treat you well. Have sex a lot. Marriage is about dying to self. Wives don’t understand the pressure that men feel.

Rebecca: Of course they don’t.

Sheila: And don’t ask for what you need. That’s nagging or being demanding. Win him without a word.

Rebecca: (inaudible).

Sheila: Okay, now that’s all.

Rebecca: No, and I think like a lot—but the thing is a lot of these things are not inherently bad. Greet each other nicely the minute you get home. That’s like a perfectly fine, normal relationship skill. That is important for people to know, and that is easy to just plow over if you’ve had a stressful day just to start griping at each other immediately or taking it out on your spouse who is your safe person. That’s easy to do. But also like, guys, a lot of this is just bad.

Sheila: But here’s what I thought was so interesting about that is that people came up with this stuff super easily, and I only had 32 things. Like I said I had over 800 comments if you combine. And it was just the same thing over and over and over again. This—none of this—is new.

Rebecca: No.

Sheila: None of this is new. This is what is in the water in Christian literature. This is everywhere. All of this stuff is taught all of the time everywhere that we go. And so when you have a book that just kind of mimics all of this—

Rebecca: Yeah, because these appear in The Love Dare.

Sheila: And that’s what I want to talk about. So then what I did there’s 40 days in The Love Dare each with a different thought and then a different action step that you’re supposed to make on those days. And I said how many of these can I match up to what people said? And here is the answer. We had 29. Twenty-nine of the 40.

Rebecca: Twenty-nine out of 40.

Sheila: Out of 40 chapters could be one of those things. Now some of those things had several chapters. Like some of—the thing about don’t bring up anything, don’t take offense. I think there were three chapters that talked about that as the main issue. But 29 of their chapters could be matched to something that someone said. Five of the chapters mentioned something else that people said without necessarily being the main thing, and then there were six chapters that didn’t correspond. So out of 40, there were only six that people didn’t come up with.

Rebecca: What were the six?

Sheila: Well, I will tell you. One is take initiative to look for what you should do in your marriage. That’s not a bad thing.

Rebecca: No, that’s not a bad thing. That’s actually a fine one.

Sheila: We have a chapter on taking initiative in The Marriage You Want. Now the way that they framed it was probably—

Rebecca: Penis first.

Sheila: That wasn’t bad. They had one about don’t be rude and watch your manners.

Rebecca: That’s not bad advice.

Sheila: That wasn’t bad either.

Rebecca: A lot of people are rude.

Sheila: Then they had love fights fair. This was actually my favorite chapter.

Rebecca: Yeah, love fights fair isn’t—

Sheila: They had three pages on how to have good fights when you are fighting, and that was decent.

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s fine.

Sheila: That was fine. I didn’t mind that one. Love promotes intimacy which was—well, they had two chapters on—and love completes each other which are both about kind of getting to know each other better which are fine. And people didn’t really mention get to know each other because that’s not typical evangelical—that’s just basic marriage advice. Not evangelical per se. And then the last one was love as Jesus Christ which is just the gospel. You can’t have a good marriage without Jesus, and people really didn’t necessarily say that in the same way. They had another day on how you need God so I included that in the thing.

Rebecca: Yeah, that makes sense.

Sheila: So those are the ones that weren’t covered. Everything else there was a chapter on it, and it didn’t say anything that you wouldn’t expect it to say.

Rebecca: That’s really funny. So it just shows this is what we’ve noticed again and again though is a lot of these books they’re just regurgitated information. You had Tim and Beth—not Bethany. What’s her name? Beverly.

Sheila: Beverly.

Rebecca: Tim and Beverly LaHaye’s book, and you kind of have Sheet Music just restating it. And then you have Married Sex restating Sheet Music. Like there’s not a lot of difference between a lot of these books. Their core messages are the same. They’re just kind of remarketed, and The Love Dare I will say props to that marketing team. They did a great job remarketing stuff everyone already knows. But the question is how did they get away with it? How are we getting people just buying the same book over and over and over again in all different formats? And now there’s like a million different challenge books that go along with it that are telling you the exact same thing.

Sheila: Right, and I want to say too even though this was regurgitated marriage advice, it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t as harmful as the other books. And in fact in some ways, I think it was more harmful than some of the books we’ve covered, and so I want to actually go through just a few—I’m not going to—like I said, I don’t want to go through the entire book. I don’t want to summarize the entire book, but I do want to read a few quotes.

Rebecca: Again, the book is so similar to the other ones that we’ve summarized. We don’t want to be repetitive.

Sheila: Yeah, and I kind of feel like it would be. It’s very similar to The Excellent Wife. It’s very similar to Marriage on the Rock. All the things that we said about those books apply to this one too. Here though is the premise of this book. And on my one sheet, I will actually read you the bottom of my one sheet when I summarized—well, I’ll read you the top, and then I’ll read you the bottom. You can download this one sheet of The Love Dare with all the problems. Here’s a summary of the issues. Number one views the success of marriage as based on whether or not the marriage remains intact rather than on whether people are healthy, whole, and safe. And that is the main goal of this book is to keep marriages together. Rather than focusing on growing intimacy, it encourages people to gaslight themselves into believing any problems are not real or important.

Rebecca: Yeah, and that’s why then having all these chapters about getting to know each other are so tricky because you’ve now taught people like hey don’t speak up. Convince yourself you’re okay. Lower your expectations, but also you should be honest and vulnerable with each other. You can’t do both of those things.

Sheila: Yeah, okay, three it confuses forgiveness and reconciliation and does not acknowledge that one can forgive without restoring the relationship. And the forgiveness is really problematic because it focuses how on once you forgive you feel peace, and it’s so wonderful, and it never once talks about the fact that the person who is doing the bad thing that needs to be forgiven needs to stop it and needs to rebuild trust. It’s like no you just need to forgive. And then it presents a view of sexual intimacy that is coercive in nature because of course it is.

Rebecca: Again it’s like four for four for our evangelical books so far.

Sheila: And here’s my synopsis that I put at the very bottom of this. Two men with no credentials or education in marriage counseling wrote a 40-day challenge that invites people to paper over the problems in their marriage even big ones like infidelity and abuse and tells people that no matter how much your spouse sins you sin just as much. Instead of showing couples how to deal with issues, it encourages people to ignore those issues setting up those in abusive marriages for much harm. It values marriage over the people in it, presenting a terrible version of how Jesus sees us. Basically. But I cannot say enough how much the theme especially of the first ten days is no matter what problems you have, ignore them. So one of the days for instance, it tells you to make two lists: the things that you love about your spouse and the things that they do that really bother you. And then it tells you to take that paper about the things they do that bother you and keep it because we’re going to use it on another day’s challenge. And then when that other day’s challenge comes, do you know what they tell you to do with that piece of paper?

Rebecca: I assume you have to burn it right?

Sheila: Yes, very good. Ding, ding, ding.

Rebecca: I have been to summer camp.

Sheila: And you’re supposed to forget about it, forget about all these things. So it’s never about how do I deal with things.

Rebecca: It’s never a question of okay is this still an issue or have we moved past this? It’s not encouraging people to introspect on am I still grieving this? Am I still hurt by this? Have I had trust earned back for this area? No, it’s just burn it.

Sheila: Right, and here’s the—what it tells you to do on that day. Okay, here’s just some highlights from that chapter. You cannot point out the way—the many ways that your spouse is selfish without admitting that you can be selfish too. So if your spouse is doing something wrong, remember that you are as well. If you’re thinking that your spouse not you is the one who needs work, you’re likely suffering from an undiagnosed case of ignorance with a secondary condition of selfishness.

Rebecca: Oh my gosh, okay, literally this goes back to what I said in the other podcast where it’s like you’re taught to see yourself as a selfish and prideful and wrong without looking at the evidence of are you selfish and prideful and wrong? It’s just the evidence is that you have been told that you are selfish, prideful, and wrong. And it’s like you’re allowed to look for evidence.

Sheila: Exactly, like it could be that you’re actually correct.

Rebecca: And there are lots of marriages where both of them are absolute problems. There are actually lots of marriages like that, but there are also a lot of marriages where it’s very clearly one person is the problem.

Sheila: But even if you both are problems, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems.

Rebecca: Yes, exactly.

Sheila: Even if he’s watching porn and she’s driving you into debt or something like that or maybe she’s watching porn and he’s driving you into debt. It doesn’t matter. Let’s say that’s what’s going on. The answer is not to say well you’re both sinning. You’re both selfish so let’s just put it on a piece of paper and burn it.

Rebecca: The answer is you’re both sinning, you’re both selfish, so you both have to deal with this. The answer isn’t to just burn it. The answer is to be like okay so deal with it. 

Sheila: Okay here’s another example of how you’re supposed to deal with this stuff. Under love is not jealous—so love is happy for your spouse. When your spouse is happy, you get to be happy for them as well.

Rebecca: If this is football, I’m going to lose it.

Sheila: Oh, it’s better. Oh, it’s better. So he may be enjoying golf on the weekend while she stays home cleaning the house. He boasts to her about shooting a great score, and she feels like shooting him. But what is the solution. She gets to celebrate with him about the great golf game he had.

Rebecca: That is really something. I would love to—like my question is have their wives had lobotomies? What is their expectation here? This is wild. Really? The answer isn’t hey be happy with him and decide that you’re going to get to have next weekend off as a result? But that’s also fine. Here’s the thing. I always like to do the other perspective. Okay, if this is a couple where they alternate who gets the weekend off, and it’s genuinely fine. When they have the weekend off, they genuinely have the weekend off, and she’s not coming back to mounds and mounds of laundry and dirty dishes. He actually takes care of everything when she has the weekend off, and then she’s griping that he spent his weekend off off. That’s inappropriate. That is not what is happening here. That is absolutely not what is being said here. It’s like but isn’t it so lucky your husband gets to play golf? No, it’s not. Sit down, Bradley. Get home.

Sheila: Okay, here’s another example of how we’re supposed to reframe things by remembering that it is God who meets our expectations, and it is God who meets our needs. So your husband may be late coming home again, but God will always be right on time.

Rebecca: That is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. I’m sorry. There’s no other word for it. It is stupid. That is a stupid perspective. Like I’m sorry. I know people get mad when I use snarky language. I don’t actually care. That is one of the most asinine comments. That is shallow. It’s flighty. It’s putting God in a weird position of being like the weird clingy boyfriend that you don’t really—who doesn’t—this is weird, guys. This is not—imagine being God and seeing your beloved daughters having husbands who are staying late at work and ignoring and neglecting their kids and making their lives a living hell, and you’re sitting there and you’re like, “Tell him to get home,” and they’re like, “God, you’re here for me all the time.” That must be infuriating for God. That’s my—if I as a mother was seeing my kid in a relationship where they’re being emotionally neglected and they’re like, “I know I can always call my mom,” “Stop calling me then. Stop it.” I don’t want to be the crutch in your bad relationship. Don’t put this on me. Don’t use me as the crutch that gets you through this horrible relationship with an absolute just wreck of a human. Deal with this. Address it. Make it better. Don’t blame me.

Sheila: I know. I know.

Rebecca: This is objectively disrespectful to God. Like seriously if you’re in that position, it’s like you’re using God as a soother for your bad marriage. Anyway, sorry. All right, Rebecca here jumping in to remind you that so much of what we do is made possible because of our fantastic Patreon group. You can become a patron of the Bare Marriage team simply by joining for as little as $5 a month and get access to our exclusive Facebook group, one of the only places on the internet that all three of us actually still hang out. Of course, if you give more than $5 a month, you also unlock perks such as our monthly patrons only podcast, free books, merch, and more. So please head over there. If you love what we do and you want to see more of it, this is one of the best ways to make that happen. Thank you so much to our patrons who allow us to do projects such as the study for the book She Deserves Better and many of the papers that are happening right now. So head to patreon.com/baremarriage and become a part of the team.

Sheila: Well, exactly. I want to read something else that’s about gaslighting because a lot of what this is this book is gaslighting you. You think there’s a problem, there’s really not a problem. It’s really you that’s the problem. So on the love is not selfish day—

Rebecca: It’s like if you never go into the bathroom, is the bathroom really flooding?

Sheila: Schrodinger’s bathroom. Schrodinger’s marriage.

Rebecca: Schrodinger’s marriage, yeah.

Sheila: So ask yourself these questions about—when you're trying to figure out if you’re selfish. Do I truly want what’s best for my husband or wife? Do I want them to feel loved by me? I have no problem with those two questions. It’s the next two that are different. Do they believe I have their best interest in mind? Do they see me as looking out for myself first?

Rebecca: Yeah.

Sheila: Because the thing is your spouse might very well see you as looking out for yourself first because your spouse is entitled.

Rebecca: Or your spouse is just ridiculously immature. Like what if your spouse was raised to believe that unless they’re getting everything they want in a relationship, their partner is failing them even if they’re not doing their half of the bargain?

Sheila: Yeah, so it’s just a problem. Okay—

Rebecca: The questions could be are my spouse’s expectations reasonable? Like you could ask am I meeting my own expectations of myself? You could ask those questions because obviously people can have unrealistic expectations of themselves, but that’s also within them. That’s your responsibility quite frankly, but that’s not what they’re asking. They’re like but does my spouse feel like you’re doing everything perfectly? It’s like well is your spouse a reliable narrator? We don’t know.

Sheila: Yeah, and this is the problem. When you tell—when you instruct people that the way they can judge how good their marriage is how your spouse sees it, that isn’t necessarily true. We need to focus instead on what does this marriage need? What does health look like which is what we did in The Marriage You Want.

Rebecca: Yeah, objective measures.

Sheila: We said here are objective measures of what a healthy marriage is, and how can we get there because one spouse may actually be undermining it. And they never give an out for that. Another thing they do is throughout the book they really try to be gender neutral. I will give that to them so every dare is gender neutral. They talk about how your spouse can do this not wife or husband in general, but every now and then when they are giving examples, they’re just so blatantly sexist. So I want to read you this one. This is describing what selfishness looks like. “When a husband puts his interests, desires, and priorities in front of his wife, that’s a sign of selfishness. When a wife constantly complains about the time and energy she spends meeting the needs of her husband, that’s a sign of selfishness.”

Rebecca: Oh, okay so when he’s going to golf three times a weekend, it’s selfish. And when she’s like, “Hey, you’re going to golf three times a weekend,” that’s also selfish.

Sheila: She’s being selfish. Like it’s just so crazy.

Rebecca: I bet—the funny thing is I bet they think they cooked with this. I think they’re like, “Man, we really—we figured it out, guys.”

Sheila: All right, three other big things I want to talk about. The first of course is sex.

Rebecca: Yes, of course.

Sheila: How they handle sex.

Rebecca: I imagine that it’s incredibly balanced. It focuses on female pleasure. It talks about how if she doesn’t want sex there’s a deeper problem going on that needs to be addressed. That’s probably exactly what they said, right?

Sheila: Well, here’s what they do say. “Sex is not something God allows us to withhold consequence.” 

Rebecca: Oh, yes, of course. The threat—the rape threat. Yes, that would be one.

Sheila: God is the rapist because if God is telling you this, he is a rapist.

Rebecca: Eat your turnips, and then—

Sheila: Okay, there’s also this really weird thing that God gave us sex in marriage as “the only way to protect our moral purity.”

Rebecca: The only way?

Sheila: The only way.

Rebecca: The only way.

Sheila: It’s really bizarre.

Rebecca: The only thing that is holding you back from being morally impure is a vagina. It’s the only thing. It’s the only thing. Ignore all the other verses.

Sheila: They try to talk sex up by saying how it’s a picture of intimacy and God and it’s a gift that God gives us, etc. etc., but then again they go into how you can’t withhold and so if your spouse comes requesting physical intimacy your love should welcome them in. And it gives no caveat of any kind ever.

Rebecca: It’s like—and here’s what people don’t understand—what they think is because they’ve made sex to be this good thing and talking about how it’s intimate. You are close. You love each other. It’s a sign of love. Then they think that it’s okay that they’re threatening you. But if someone makes you a gourmet chocolate cake with mousse and a chocolate ganache on the outside and says, “This is a wonderful cake. It tastes so good. It was made by the finest pastry chefs in France, and if you don’t eat it, I’ll shoot your puppy, but also it’s a wonderful cake.” And you’re hearing [puppy whining noises] off to the side when you, and you eat the cake. It’s going to be confusing because you’re like my taste buds are saying this is good, but my anxiety level doesn’t like that. And that’s what happens with sex. It is. It’s what happens with sex. It’s why we have so much arousal nonconcordance in the church as well where you have women being like, “I don’t know how I feel about this because on the one side I like feeling like I’m loved, but I don’t like sex. And I can’t figure out why,” or, “I can’t figure out why I can’t orgasm.” It’s like because someone is threatening to shoot your puppy. It’s not acceptable. This is the thing making the threat pretty doesn’t make it less of a threat. It just makes it more psychologically confusing. Like at least if it’s bad, it makes sense psychologically. Like if you have to eat a bowl of spiders or I’ll shoot your puppy, yeah, okay, this actually tracks. This situation is more in line because you’re doing a bad thing because you’re a bad person. Like it’s so psychologically confusing when you’re given something that’s supposed to be good in a way that makes it so incredibly psychologically bad. It’s very confusing. And it’s so—it’s just so backwards and it’s so twisted, and it’s shooting themselves in the foot or again another body part, but it’s just—a biblical foot, sorry. The Old Testament nerds will love that. I just think that there’s an issue here where it’s not suddenly okay to threaten someone because you’re making the threat sound nicer. As long as there’s a threat, it’s not actually good.

Sheila: No, exactly. Exactly. Okay, so that was sex. Now I want to move on to forgiveness and then divorce.

Rebecca: I’m surprised there is a divorce. Oh, I’m sure I know what the divorce one is. It’s like you failed The Love Dare probably.

Sheila: Okay, so in the forgiveness section, they talk so much about how Jesus died for us, and so we need to forgive, and they present Christianity as being the answer. I think we talked about this on another podcast how they say that you cannot have a good marriage without God, that love is impossible—that’s actually the title of one of the chapters. Love is impossible. You cannot do it without Jesus. Which do these people even know any non-Christians?

Rebecca: That’s the problem. They don’t. Like I’ve known so many people who are not Christian or who of different religions who have wildly amazing marriages, who love their spouses, who love their children, who love their community members.

Sheila: It is really—

Rebecca: Just because something we believe is from God does not mean that it can only be owned by people who have said the sinner’s prayer. Those are two different things.

Sheila: Right, yeah, exactly. So they talk all about forgiveness, and they never talk about rebuilding trust, and they never talk about reconciliation, how reconciliation is not the same thing as forgiveness. I did a really good podcast on this with Susannah Griffith in her book Forgiveness After Trauma. I’ll put a link in the podcast notes to that because it’s an important subject, but we won’t rehash that because we’ve done that. Then what if you actually do still have problems because lo and behold maybe gaslighting yourself doesn’t work and papering over problems doesn’t work. So you do get to call in mentors. You do get to go for help.

Rebecca: Well, that’s good.

Sheila: And here is—

Rebecca: That was sarcasm by the way. It’s not good to call in mentors in the context of the Kendrick brothers. I’m going to be very honest.

Sheila: Okay, so if your marriage is hanging by a thread or already heading for a divorce, then you need to stop everything and pursue solid counseling. Call a pastor.

Rebecca: There we go. I knew it was going that direction.

Sheila: A Bible-believing counselor or a marriage ministry today.

Rebecca: Yep, I knew it was going that direction. It’s like pastor, biblical counseling, or someone who is going to do this from the Bible, not from evidence, and a marriage ministry, like Focus on the Family who doesn’t believe in divorce.

Sheila: Yes, and the number of things that have hit the news—I mean John MacArthur’s church how they went to elders and marriage mentors for counseling, and women were told to go back to men who were abusing their children—sexually abusing their children. This hit the news. There’s so many records of this of women being told to return to abusive husbands so if you are having trouble in your marriage please see a licensed counselor. And the licensed counselor can still be a Christian if you want.

Rebecca: And you can talk to friends. You can bring in people in your life because not everyone can afford counseling. Let’s be very real. It’s expensive. Talk to people who have actual good marriages where they are egalitarian. If you have to talk to a friend, don’t just talk to a person who’s been married the longest please. Talk to someone who actually has a good marriage and who you can be honest with.

Sheila: Yeah, okay, and then we get to there’s about three days—three whole days out of 40 on this which is basically you cannot ever divorce, ever, ever, ever. So it talks about if your spouse has been unfaithful and then they say some spouses move towards a tragic divorce meaning that you are the one who caused the tragic divorce.

Rebecca: Yeah, the divorce is tragic. It’s not the infidelity.

Sheila: Right, if you divorce your unfaithful spouse, you’re the one who caused the tragic divorce.

Rebecca: Yeah, which is just evil.

Sheila: And then they say, “Marriage is not a contract with escape clauses and exception wordings. Marriage is a covenant intended to cut off all avenues of retreat or withdrawal.”

Rebecca: Again this is just—that is not a nice picture of marriage.

Sheila: But that’s not even what Jesus said.

Rebecca: I was going to say. That’s not even biblically accurate. It’s not, but also there’s never any discussion about how the man also is held to his vows because what this really—if you’re saying, you can’t leave even if you cheat. You can’t leave even if he abandons you when you’re sick. You can’t leave even if he plunges your entire family into debt. You can’t leave because this is all telling women they can’t leave. Let’s be very clear—for the most part. Then what you’re saying is, you are held to your vows no matter what, and he is not held to any of his because in the majority of these cases where we hear from these evangelical authors, the thing that they’re decrying is women divorcing their husbands. That’s why they talk so much about if your husband has an affair or stuff like that or if your husband is out golfing all the time. Like it means she is held to all of her vows and he is held to none of his. And that’s not what a covenant is. If you’re sitting here and you’re saying there’s no escape from this, then you also had better be saying, “Men, sorry, you don’t get a social life anymore until you don’t have toddlers anymore.” Like, “Sorry, men, you have to do what your wife wants as well because she is half of the picture.” Like, “Sorry, men, you have to deal with your porn problems and all this because if you—” This is the thing they’re not saying and so women if your husband is not sexually faithful, yeah, you never have to get back in bed ever because he broke his clause and he can’t leave you. That’s not what they say. What they say is you can’t leave him so even though he has had an affair, you have to be a happy wife and you have to make sure you’re meeting all his needs. If they were honest and if they—if this bad theology, if they were being internally consistent, they would then say, “Women, you don’t have to have sex with them ever again.” That’s what it would be.

Sheila: But they don’t.

Rebecca: But they don’t.

Sheila: No, they don’t. They say that you cannot withhold. And here’s how the—I’ll sum it up. “When you have done everything within your power to obey God—meaning to stay and fix your marriage—your spouse may still forsake you and walk away just as Jesus’ followers did to Him, but if your marriage fails, if your spouse walks away, let it not be because you gave up or stopped loving them because love never fails.” So the only way that your marriage can end is if your spouse walks away.

Rebecca: Yeah, not because you did something to force them to end the marriage.

Sheila: Right, and you are not allowed to walk away so no matter what happens you can’t walk away, and if they walk away, it has to not be because you drew boundaries or something. And they—I don’t think the word abuse ever appears so they don’t even acknowledge the fact that 25% of evangelical marriages at least are abusive. They don’t even acknowledge it. It just doesn’t exist. It’s just ridiculous. And this book is bought as a gift for weddings, to help couples who are going through hard times, like we need to stop. We need to stop buying this book as a gift. We need to stop buying pretty much any evangelical book—marriage book as a gift that does the typical evangelical advice which is pretty much everyone we’ve looked at. 

Rebecca: And that’s exactly what we want to talk about for the second half of this. Why do these books keep selling if they’re all saying the same thing? 

Sheila: Yeah, because they do.

Rebecca: And I have a theory.

Sheila: Okay, what is it?

Rebecca: So there’s something when you have anxiety or depression that people fall into called rumination. And the reason you fall into it especially when you’re anxious and I’m speaking as an anxious person here is that it gives you a little bit of a hit of feeling like you did something even though you didn’t.

Sheila: Rumination just in case—

Rebecca: Rumination, yes. Rumination is the process of thinking about something in an obsessive way. So when I was in university for example and I had a lot of stress about my grades. So I’d ruminate about what grades I needed to get in order to get the GPA I wanted instead of studying. And rumination is often done instead of the positive behaviors that would actually help us so when we’re depressed we ruminate about how we think everything hates us or we think we’re a horrible person instead of actually getting up and doing the dishes that have been sitting there and causing us to feel like we’re horrible people, instead of getting up and getting in the shower, instead of getting up and going for a walk. We ruminate instead. I think that because all this marriage advice is just so similar, and it’s all about thinking about your marriage differently. It’s training people to ruminate instead of actually doing anything to make their marriages better because all of this advice is about think about how he might think of you, think about how your thinking of him right now and how that—if he knew how you are thinking about him, how that would make him think about your perspective towards him as a husband, and all this stuff about how think about how you could possibly have been selfish and rationalize to yourself how you’re also selfish so you don’t actually have to do anything. It is textbook rumination.

Sheila: Let me give you an example. I just opened this at random. This is day 27. “Eliminate the poison of unrealistic expectations in your home. Think of one area where your spouse has told you you’re expecting too much and tell them you’re sorry for being so hard on them about it. Promise them you’ll seek to understand.”

Rebecca: Yeah, but where’s the actual measurable outcome here? And this is the problem. Rumination does not have a measurable outcome, but it does a wonderful job of putting off the inevitable. It’s in essence procrastination. It’s another form of procrastination.

Sheila: And that’s what we found, and that’s what so many women have told us is that they read these books, and then they’re able to stay in the marriage for five more years.

Rebecca: Exactly.

Sheila: They still end up divorced a lot of these women but because they read these books, they stayed in the marriage for five more years.

Rebecca: Because you feel like you’re doing all this work, and I think what happens is these women and these men too in these marriages, they feel like we’ve had so many great conversations. We’ve had so many heart-to-hearts. We were honest with each other. We talked about how we’ve been hurt. We’re doing so much better, but you talked about it. You thought about it. You’ve analyzed it at your date night you do weekly on a routine because your pastor told you that you have to even though it’s hard to find a babysitter. You do it every single week. You do your marriage checkup every single week. And I don’t have a problem with a marriage checkup as long as it’s not the only thing that’s being done. If all you’re doing is talking about how you should be talking about your marriage so that when you talk about your marriage you have more things to talk about next time, what are you actually doing? It’s rumination. It gives you that hit of yes I am in control because I’m doing something, but you’re not doing something. There’s a tweet that Joanna sends me every now and then that she saw. It was like, “Hey, you know that project that you’re thinking about that you really need to do? Thinking about it doesn’t count as doing it. Go do it.” She and I—we’re like that’s our mantra now.

Sheila: Well, and this—and prayer comes into this as well because people think if I pray, I’m doing something. And that’s really what the War Room was about. We’re going to talk about that movie along with a couple of novels when we come back.

Rebecca: Maybe in the fall.

Sheila: Summer or fall. But in the book, it says—in this book it says, “Instead of nagging and complaining and scolding, why don’t you pray? And you’ll find that’s a much more pleasant way to live.” Bring your concerns to God. You can’t change your spouse as if the only options are nagging, scolding, and complaining.

Rebecca: And I find that the idea of using prayer as a rumination tool is once again offensive, and I personally believe that using prayer as a rumination, as a way to avoid the responsibility that we have to actually speak up and do what is needed to bring goodness into the world, that’s offensive as well. That’s not actually faith. And I am someone who believes very strongly in the importance of prayer and in the power of prayer, but it’s also—again it just feels cheapened when it’s like instead of doing the thing that you know will make a difference—that God has equipped you to do by the way—just use God as your crutch. Use God as your rumination tool. 

Sheila: Hebrews—is it 10:24 or 10:25—10:24 tells us to spur one another on to love and good deeds. It doesn’t just tell us to pray for one another that they will do love and good deeds. It says to spur one another on. Like as we interact with people, we should be spurring them onto love and good deeds. Romans 8:29 tells us that God has predestined us to look more and more like Jesus. It is God’s will that we all be conformed into the likeness of Jesus, and we are to spur one another onto good deeds. We are to be iron sharpening iron, and yet, all of these books tell you don’t ever bring up anything bad. Don’t ever say anything bad. Burn all the bad stuff. Only talk about the good stuff. That isn’t iron sharpening iron. That isn’t spurring anyone on to love and good deeds.

Rebecca: Additionally there are so many warnings and examples throughout Scripture of God saying if you know the right thing to do and you do not do it, that is bad. That is sin. And there are so many examples of God being angry at His people for offering all these sacrifices and these prayers and these songs and these psalms while they’re not doing what needs to get done.

Sheila: Yeah, I’ve been asked to endorse a lot of books, and you know what? I often say no, but when I got contacted about Aimee Byrd’s latest book, I looked at it immediately because I knew it was going to be amazing. And I want to read to you my endorsement which is actually on the cover of the book. “In this beautiful work, Byrd gets vulnerable reminding us that we can never truly know God until we can face the truth about ourselves.” And in Saving Face, Aimee Byrd, who has gone through so much abuse in the Christian community and has come out the other side, she just weaves in stories of her own life and what she has learned to show us how understanding our stories helps us understand God, helps us understand each other, and she invites us on this journey of discovery. It is a beautiful book. It is a challenging book. It is a book that is going to stay with you, and I don’t say that about a lot of other books. So please check out Saving Face, and thank you to Zondervan and Saving Face for sponsoring this podcast. And so let’s just talk about how change happens in a marriage because I think a lot of people don’t understand this. In any given relationship, there tends to be a balance. It’s like you’re both involved in a dance, and everyone knows what their steps are. If one person does one thing, the other person is going to react and do this. It doesn’t mean it’s a good dance. It doesn’t mean it’s a helpful dance, but you all know what your steps are. You’re sort of operating in a balance because you found your roles. You found how you tend to interpret that.

Rebecca: You’ve got an equilibrium.

Sheila: You’ve got an equilibrium. That’s a good way of putting it. Now how do you change that equilibrium? You can pray for the other person to change, which doesn’t actually do anything necessarily because as we talked in a previous podcast about the book Power of a Praying Wife, God gives us free will. And God does not—God does not violate free will, and so if someone is determined to treat you badly, God doesn’t stop them from treating you badly.

Rebecca: Or even if they’re not determined, but they’re just—this is the relational pattern they’re used to, and they’re oblivious.

Sheila: Yes, God does not—and they don’t want to change. They may not want to change, and so God doesn’t violate free will. He can change circumstances. He can talk to someone, but they don’t necessarily change. And so you can’t just say if I pray hard enough, God will change that person because God does not violate free will, all right? God can draw us, but it’s still our decision whether or not we come. I know that causes some people to get the heebie jeebies, but anyway, okay, so we’re at this equilibrium. How do we get this person to change? Well, you know when you are on the seesaw with kids when you were a kid, what happens if you get off that seesaw? The other person goes flying. You can change the equilibrium by changing what you are doing, and that really is what drawing boundaries is. Okay, so you just decide I am just simply not going to act this way anymore. If my spouse goes out golfing all day Saturday and I am staying home and doing housework—

Rebecca: Then you're just leaving all day Saturday next week and being like, “I’m going.” If he’s like, “Well, I’m going to go to,” then you leave an hour earlier, and you leave the kids at home.

Sheila: Yeah, or you just simply stop doing his laundry.

Rebecca: You figure out some way to be like I’m not dancing this tango.

Sheila: I am not dancing this tango. I am not—

Rebecca: This is where the idea of it takes two to tango does work because it’s not about how it’s equally to blame on both sides, but it’s like you actually do have the power to change the dynamic. It’s not about oh well this bad thing happened? Well, it takes two to tango. That’s not what it means.

Sheila: Now sometimes changing the dynamic makes it worse. I want to be very clear about this because any time you change the dynamic, it doesn’t necessarily get better. It could get worse. So please be careful especially if you’re in an abusive relationship. If you change the dynamics or they feel threatened, that’s often when things escalate. So if you are in an abusive relationship and you're thinking about leaving, please get some help around you. Make sure people know what you’re planning on doing that are safe for you. Get—contact the police, whatever, because I just want to acknowledge that sometimes when we change the balance, we can put ourselves and our kids in even more danger. But in marriages that aren’t physically abusive like that, changing the dynamic that is how you change—how you react to people, how you interact because you’re saying I am not going to continue in this dance. If we’re having sex that’s really terrible for me because I never feel any pleasure and I feel used, I can simply say, “Hey, I am not willing to be treated like a sex doll, and so I would love to make love. I would love to have a passionate sex life, but I am not willing to have intercourse with you anymore when it is merely about you getting your needs met and you don’t care for mine.”

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s very easy to make a boundary of we will have sex as soon as I’ve had an orgasm. That is actually a very good boundary because then you’re guaranteed that both of you will have a good time. Like why isn’t that the boundary for—this is the situation where you don’t have to always make it something where it’s—boundaries can be common sense is what I’m saying here. The boundaries can be commonsense. It’s like I will do whatever laundry is in the hamper, and I’m not picking up stuff anymore. So I will do whatever laundry is in the hamper, and then if he doesn’t have laundry, he doesn’t have laundry. And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t put the laundry in the hamper personally, but then if Connor wants to do laundry, I grab it myself and put it in the right hampers. But this is the thing, you can look—I don’t mean this in a patronizing way so don’t take this in a patronizing way. But I have also noticed as I’ve become a parent as you’re talking about marriage stuff as my job as well that a lot of it’s overlapping, guys. The same principles that happen with parenting exist in other relationships too as in what you put up with will happen more. What you don’t put up with will eventually either become an extinct behavior—

Sheila: Or a huge issue that shows you the truth about the reality of your relationship.

Rebecca: Exactly, exactly, and so there is a situation here where if things are frustrating and bad, you get to just stop. And you get to say, “Hey, I don’t want to do this dance anymore. I want a new one, and you are free to join me.” And that’s not you being unloving. It’s not you being selfish. It’s not you being prideful. It’s just not putting up with crap anymore, and it’s refusing to get in the rumination cycle that gives you those boosts that says, “Yay, I did something today,” without actually doing anything.

Sheila: Yeah, because how many women especially have spent years journaling like crazy about all their prayers for their husband, and they make more and more specific prayers, and they have checklists where they can mark it off if they see God work. And they’re looking at all the ways that God is working in my husband, and you're examining things, but you’re not actually saying anything or doing anything and you’re reading all these marriage books, and you have all these prayer journals. And nothing is changing, and you’re not changing, and the problem is it makes people feel like they’re doing something, and they’re fixing something when they’re not. It makes me really upset because we’re not helping people. We’re actually getting people stuck in marriages where if they just spoke up things might actually be better.

Rebecca: And I think the question if you think you might be stuck in a rumination cycle, I guess the question I’d ask is when did you see meaningful change? What have you done to have meaningful change? What boundaries have you put in place? Because if you can’t think of anything, you’re probably stuck in the rumination cycle. And the rumination cycle is—it’s so attractive. It’s so nice to get sucked into because you get all of the psychological benefits of feeling like you’ve done a great job without any of the cost of actually doing that great job, and it’s why it’s so hard to break out of. It’s why it’s so hard to break out of if it’s anxiety related or depression related because there’s other things going on at the same time, but it’s also hard to break out of relationally as well because there’s such huge costs to kind of making that—what’s the word? It’s not righting the ship. It's the opposite of righting the ship. My brain. I’m so sick. I’m just losing words.

Sheila: I know what you mean. I don’t know either.

Rebecca: It doesn’t have the risks of making waves, and you get to feel like maybe I can still hold on. Maybe I can still hold on, and the reality is that a lot of marriages if you deal with it when it comes up don’t get worse, but if you do this thing where you’re trying to convince yourself you’ve done enough, when it’s still bad and nothing has changed, they’re the ones that get worse.

Sheila: Yeah, because you’ve just now spent five years, ten years, 15 years reinforcing the behavior that is hurting you and that you don’t like. That’s what we do. By the way, in The Marriage You Want so in our marriage book which we just published last month, chapter seven is all about how to address these issues and stop then. We (inaudible) in chapters six and seven. We have some great stories from you and Connor in there that you have shared on the podcast before, but when you can deal with stuff especially early in your marriage like speak up and say, “Okay, wait, I don’t actually like this. Let’s do something about this,” as opposed to when you’re upset about something saying, “Oh, I’m just selfish. I am selfish for being upset.” It’s like no, you’re upset. Here’s the thing. Look. What is the point of marriage? Why do we want to get married? We want to get married because we want to be truly seen and known and still loved and accepted, and we want to truly see and know someone else and love and accept them and go through this life together, knowing that we have a partner at our side. You cannot be truly known and accepted if you can’t tell the other person what you’re thinking and feeling, and all of this advice tells you to keep it to yourself, to keep your deepest feelings, your deepest thoughts to yourself because they just come from selfishness.

Rebecca: Yeah, exactly.

Sheila: So if you follow this advice, you will never, ever have intimacy. You might have an intact marriage, but is that the goal or is our goal true intimacy? Because you know what? If you get true intimacy, you’re not going to be worried about divorce anyway. We don’t need to be so scared that people are going to divorce. We need to instead say how can we get people to have a healthy marriage that no one is going to want to divorce from.

Rebecca: Yeah, for the most part people don’t have to be convinced not to get divorced. For the most part, people take a long time to decide to finally get divorced. Like there’s a huge—

Sheila: People don’t divorce on a whim.

Rebecca: They really don’t. And obviously people will say, “Well, I knew one couple.” Okay, fine. We all know one couple, but statistics don’t lie. And you can’t refute statistics based on one single anecdote. And you know what? I talked about this in the newsletter a while ago too where there are times when the grievances are not valid. I think I shared about how on stressful days I can’t handle when the dining room table is covered in homeschooling crap, but on days where I’m not stressed, I actually actively love it. I think it looks like childhood. It’s so nice, and look they made Play-Doh pigs. And that’s the kind of thing where it’s like yeah, I look at myself. Is this valid? Am I actually mad at Connor for not cleaning off the dining room table? No, I’m not. I’m just stressed because of work. That’s the kind of thing that we take some introspection, and it’s like do I need to lash out about this? That’s different than what this book is telling people where it’s like if you have legitimate problems in your marriage, if you’re unheard, if the sex is bad, if your husband has had an affair, if he’s going out for golf trips and leaving you alone with the kids after he’s also been at work for 50 hours that week, you can’t say anything? How do these people not see that those two things are different? That’s what makes me so frustrated. It’s like it’s either that we’re ignorant because we haven’t put the work in, we’re just actually not intelligent enough to make those connections, or we’re actively seeing it and we just don’t care because the most important thing is that women don’t leave men because they refuse to actually become good husbands. And none of those options are good, and most of those options are leading to so many marriages being thrown into these relationships with zero relational skills except for self-gaslighting, getting set into those rumination cycle that does eventually by the way break after like 20 years, and then ending up divorced when they probably—a lot of these people could have gotten onto a better track in year two and year three. And who would have known what would have happened?

Sheila: Yeah, because if you don’t deal with stuff until you’re 20 often you’re so entrenched in this dance, that it gets too difficult.

Rebecca: It gets really, really hard.

Sheila: It gets really difficult to untangle, but if you deal with it in year one before you’ve even figured out the steps yet, then you can change the whole trajectory and so let’s stop giving people these crap books.

Rebecca: Yes, please.

Sheila: And all of these books didn’t say anything new. Like I said, I asked on social media, people came up with the entire book pretty much. They came up with the entire thing. This is all stuff we’ve already been told ad nauseum, and it doesn’t work. And this is what the vast majority of books say over and over and over again in their own way. Love and Respect, For Women Only, Marriage on the Rock, Power of a Praying Wife, Love Dare. They’ve all said the same thing, and it doesn’t work because it’s not focusing on what actually brings change. And it’s not focusing on health and intimacy and wholeness. It’s focusing on preserving a marriage especially where a husband is in authority over the wife, and that doesn’t lead to intimacy. And so let’s just let it go. We don’t need to keep buying these books as gifts. Let’s stop putting these books on people please. If you see them at thrift stores, buy them so that you can rip the covers off and recycle them so they don’t end up in someone else’s house.

Rebecca: At this point, it kind of feels like you’re cursing their marriage. I’m going to be honest.

Sheila: And if you have bad books and you want to keep them, in my copy of The Love Dare, I have one of our hazardous materials stickers on.

Rebecca: Yes, anyone who is watching on YouTube can see how it looks in real life.

Sheila: So when you’re looking on the side, you can see that it says warning that it’s harmful with a skull.

Rebecca: On the spine of the book.

Sheila: On the spine of the book, and then on the front it says hazardous materials.

Rebecca: For research purposes only, right?

Sheila: Yes, and these are on the spines of all of our books so you can get these stickers if you want—if you have bad books that you want to keep but you want to alert those coming into your house that you don’t actually recommend this book, it’s a great way to do it. Or if you’re a prof or a counselor.

Rebecca: It’s just a lot cheaper than getting into book rebinding. Let’s be real here.

Sheila: Yes, and it’s a great conversation starter. But we can stop this, people. We can stop this. You all know what all the crappy advice is, and I’m going to have a post up next week where I go through my checklist of all the crappy advice that people said, and next time you find a marriage book see how many of these marriage things you can find. And we can do better. We can just do better. So pick up The Marriage You Want to do better, and please pick up Saving Face because as we’re talking about what it means to be truly intimate, and what it means to really know each other, this is what it means. Aimee points us on such a great journey in Saving Face on how to get there and how to build true, authentic community which is the exact opposite of what The Love Dare is telling us to do. So we’ve got the links to the one sheet for The Love Dare to Saving Face to The Marriage You Want. I’ll link to the other things we mentioned in the podcast notes, and thank you for joining us on Bare Marriage. And we’ll be here again next week. Bye bye.

Rebecca: Bye.