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Episode 282: What Makes Men Cheat? New Research Spotlight

• Sheila Gregoire • Season 8 • Episode 282

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It's time to walk through some super interesting studies that have recently been published--and see what they say about the intersection of infidelity and beliefs in male hierarchy. Keith joins Sheila to react to the studies!

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Sheila: Welcome to the Bare Marriage podcast.  I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage.  And I am joined today by my husband, Keith.  

Keith: Hey, everybody.

Sheila: And we want to start this podcast by saying thank you to a special group of people.  As always, our patrons, who make our life wonderful and provide my safe space on the Internet.  I can go there.  This week I went and said, “You know what?  I just feel like I have made so many mistakes lately, and I need some encouragement.”  And they were wonderful.  And they give just even just $5 a month, and that helps fund a lot of our expenses including our research and a lot of our social media team.  So it’s really, really, really important.  So thank you to them.  And if you want to join, it is just $5 a month, and you can just go to patreon.com/baremarriage.  And the link is in the podcast notes.  And then, of course, if you want to give more, you can—we also have a nonprofit within the United States, the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation.  And the link is there too.  Today though we are going to do that evidence based part of what we do.  And every now and then every couple of months I like to do a podcast where we talk about some new studies that have dropped because we really do like to talk about peer reviewed studies.  We are peer reviewed now.  So back in the fall, we had an article appear in the journal, Sociology of Religion, and we have about five more articles that are just about ready to submit.  Some written by us.  Some written by other people in conjunction with us.  So we’ve got some partnerships with different universities looking at all our data sets, so that’s really, really fun.  But, of course, there are many articles being written by many, many people at universities finding some really cool things that I just want to bring to you today.  Okay.  So first of all, I want to deal with—I saw this thing on Threads, and I thought it was really funny.  And I thought we could open with this.  Okay?

Keith: Okay.

Sheila: So a woman posted, “According to research, women who give birth after age 33 have double the chances of living past 95, and those who give birth after 40 are four times more likely to reach 100.”  Okay.  What is a problem—

Keith: According to research, my agenda follows.  

Sheila: So what is a way that you can take those stats and misinterpret them or misuse them?

Keith: You should have your babies later in life because you will live longer.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.

Keith: Exactly.  They’re trying to make some really strange statement by saying this stuff, right?  But the studies do show—presumably there was some factual base to this.

Sheila: Oh yeah.  I think the numbers are correct.  Right.    

Keith: But it’s like you’re implying one direction of causality rather than the other way around.

Sheila: Yeah.  Or just correlation, right?

Keith: Yeah.  The two are correlated.  But you can’t say that one causes the other.  It might be that the thing that you think is—the cause may be reversed or the two may have a common cause. 

Sheila: Yeah.  Which is that people who are healthier are often able to give birth later in life.  And so because they are already healthier, they are more likely to live past 100.

Keith: Yeah.  And if I’m an unhealthy person and I’m trying to have a baby later in life, I may not be able to be successful at that because my health status precludes it from happening.  So I am weeded out of that population.  So of all the people who had babies when they were older, that’s a select group.  It’s like those pictures of the bomber planes with the bullet holes in them.  

Sheila: Oh yeah.  I love this story.  Yeah.    

Keith: Survivorship bias, right?  So basically the idea is that you—planes would come back from the front lines.  And there would be bullet holes in them.

Sheila: Yeah.  In World War Two.   Yeah.

Keith: In World War Two.  Yeah.  Sorry.  In World War Two.  And so there would be bullet holes in them.  And so your initial response would be, “Oh, we should put more armor where those bullet holes are because that’s where the planes are getting shot.”  And it’s like no.  No.  No.  No.  No.  Those places are fine to get shot.  That’s why they made it home.   

Sheila: It’s the other places.  

Keith: It’s the parts of the plane that don’t have bullet holes in them that you need to put more armor on because those planes aren’t coming back.  Right?  So these things are counterintuitive sometimes.  And you have to think why did this happen.  And it’s not necessarily your first thought.  Sometimes our instinctual responses lead us in the exact wrong direction from where we should go if we thought through it logically.

Sheila: Right.  I actually find this stuff fascinating.  This is some of the reasons that I love looking at studies and trying to think through stats and logic because—yeah.  I find this stuff really, really fascinating.

Keith: Yeah.  It’s really kind of neat.  Yeah.

Sheila: So I do want to look at a couple of new studies.  And I thought today, on this podcast, we could focus on cheating, on infidelity, because there has been a bunch of stuff that has come out that I find really interesting for what we’ve been talking about as you will hear in a minute.  Okay?  So first of all, I just want to remind you that last year—so in May of last year, of 2024, we did a similar episode.  And we talked about some new studies.  And one of them was about cheating and sex frequency.  And I’m going to—

Keith: Because the standard evangelical diatribe constantly is if women just had more sex, their husbands wouldn’t cheat on them, right?  The Focus on the Family thing saying, “Maybe porn is such a problem with me these days because women are just cold in the bedroom.”  That’s the kind of concept out there.  And that’s just in the water.  And it’s just not true as that study showed.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  I’m just going to read to you from the abstract from the paper.  And, again, we talked about this last year.  But just to remind you all because it’s really cool.  “The evidence from this study exposes the falseness of the belief that having more sex with your partner will keep them from cheating.  Neither the quality nor the frequency at which couples have sex serve as a deterrent for infidelity.  Despite the components of passion and intimacy appearing to be relatively meaningless toward averting infidelity, there is a silver lining.  That is, it is evident that the decision to be unfaithful is solely an individualistic quality in which zero culpability should be directed toward one’s partner.”  Yeah.  Yeah.  Because you know what?  If you’re not getting any sex and you want sex, you don’t cheat.  

Keith: Right.  You work on your relationship.

Sheila: You would on your relationship.  And if your partner is really, really so bad that you think you have to cheat then no.  You deal with the relationship.  You separate.  You divorce, if necessary.  You get therapy.  Whatever.  And I’m not trying to throw the word divorce around.  But you don’t cheat.  No matter how bad things are that’s not an excuse for cheating.  And this shows that it’s not even about sex frequency anyway.  So anyway, I thought that was interesting.  So now let’s go on to some of these newer articles.      

Keith: Okay.  Sure.  Okay.  So you gave me these three articles ahead of time.  I didn’t know which one you were going to—what order you’re going to do them in.  So this is actually the one that I understood the most because this is the most medical sounding.  So I got this one.  One of them was in total sociologyese.  Sociology has its own language, right?

Sheila: It does.  It does.  Yes.

Keith: But that was a hard slog that one.  But anyway I read all three of them.  This one was really good.  And I like this one.  I’m glad we’re talking about it first.  “Both hostile and benevolent sexism predict men’s infidelity.”  That’s this one.  And it’s from the Journal of Sex Research.  Yeah.  Journal of Sex Research.  And it’s recent.  

Sheila: Yeah.  I think it was April 2024.  So yes.  About a year ago.  Mm-hmm.

Keith: Good.  Yeah.  So what did you want to say about it?

Sheila: Okay.  Yeah.  So what this one is arguing is that we assume that people who are outright sexist are going to cheat, right?  People who are just flagrant misogynists.  

Keith: Yeah.  Not everybody assumes that, but a lot of people do.  Yeah.  Yeah.  

Sheila: Right.  If you’re going to say, “Hey, who is most likely to cheat,” we’re going to go with people who are putting women down, people who think they’re—men who think that they’re super amazing and women are trash, those are the ones who are the most likely to cheat because they don’t value women.

Keith: Sure.  Fair enough.

Sheila: Okay.  Okay.  But what this study is looking at is what about benevolent sexism.  So let’s talk about benevolent sexism.  Okay.  So what do you think that means?  What does it mean?

Keith: Well, so benevolent sexism is that—it’s a form of sexism where men still have a very diminished view of women compared to men, but it’s got a much more paternalistic and sort of—it comes across a lot nicer and sweeter.  But it’s like men are supposed to take care of women.  Men are supposed to look after women.  They’re the weaker sex, so we need to look after them.  That kind of paternalistic kind of I’m going to look after you.  It’s very evangelical.  

Sheila: Yeah.  It actually is.  It’s extremely evangelical.  It reminds me of in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which John Piper and Wayne Grudem edited.  There’s this one line about how men bear the burden of making decisions for the family, right?  And they talk about what a burden it is to have to make all the—to have to decide.  And it’s like, okay, if it’s such a burden women would gladly join you.  It’s like no.  No.  No.  No.  No.  It isn’t that—we want to keep it, right?  Or how Emerson Eggerichs says what a burden is placed on men because they are ultimately responsible for the family.  That’s a huge burden that he has to bear.  And he might actually be called to die for you, right?  He might actually be called to give up his life for you.  And so because of all that, you need to give him respect.  You need to let him rest.  You need to defer to him.  You need to let him make the decisions because he bears this incredibly hard burden, right?  And he’s willing to bear this burden for you.  

Keith: Yeah.  And we’re both equals.  We’re both equals.  You and I are equal, but you do all the mundane stuff that I don’t want to do.  And I go out and slay the dragons because we’re equal that way.  This mentality, right?  That men are the providers and the dragon slayers and the—all this great stuff and that you just look after the kids.  And we say that they’re the same but clearly we show that we don’t value it as much.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  And so benevolent sexism really is this idea that men are here to care and protect women.  And that they have this added responsibility that women don’t have and that society does—society needs men to step up to the plate and take on these responsibilities.  Now I’m not arguing that society doesn’t need men to step up to the plate.  But it needs men to step up to the plate—yeah.

Keith: But there’s a difference.  Yeah.  We’re both equals.  We’re both contributing to this relationship as opposed to the kind of idea that no.  No, dear.  This is not your area.  This is mine.  Go fix your make up, sweetie.  That kind of benevolent sort of—it’s not nasty like I hate women.  But it’s still—women know it.  Women know what it feels like to have men, who nobody would say they’re sexist but they’re totally sexist.  That’s benevolent sexism, right?

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  And so this study had three different hypotheses that they were measuring.  So whenever you’re doing a study, you have a hypothesis.  You’re saying, “Okay.  This is what we think is going to happen, but now we have to devise some sort of way of measuring whether this is true or not,” right?  And so these are their three hypotheses.  Number one is that both hostile sexism and benevolent sexism positively predict heterosexual men’s infidelity.  

Keith: Yeah.  So their theory is that it doesn’t matter if you’re the outright misogynist, Andrew Tate type or if you’re just the paternalistic, so-called benign sexist.  It doesn’t matter.  You’re both going to be having increased rates of cheating.  That’s their hypothesis.    

Sheila: Right.  And then hypothesis two is where they’re trying to explain why this happens.  What’s the commonality between these two things that makes it happen?  And here’s how they say it.  “The indirect association between ambivalent sexism”—

Keith: So ambivalent means both directions.  Both the hostile and the—

Sheila: Yeah.  So bidirectional.  Yeah.  Yeah.

Keith: Ambivalent doesn’t mean I’m not sure I want to be sexist today.  Ambivalent sexist means both types of sexism, right?

Sheila: Yes.  So “the indirect association between both types of sexism, both hostile and benevolent sexism, and infidelity would be through the importance placed on power in one’s intimate relationship in general among heterosexual men.”  So the reason that you cheat is because you have this inflated sense of power, and you have actual power.

Keith: Yeah.  Because not every person who is benevolently sexist is going to have a power thing, right?  Some of them are benevolently sexist just because—for a variety of different reasons.  But for some of them—no.  No.  No.  The man being in charge is going to be a big deal.  And their theory was those are the guys of the benevolent sexists who are going to be the ones that cheat the most.

Sheila: Yeah.  Because benevolent sexism is still sexism, but, honestly, I think there’s a lot of men who are in that camp because they want to be good guys.  And they were raised in church, and they were told what it means to be a good guy is to really look after the people around you and to be responsible, make all the decisions.  I remember reading a book by Larry Crabb.  Oh gosh.  What was it called now?  Awhile ago.  And he was saying when he first got married he really felt that.  And it was such a burden.  It honestly was a burden because he carried it really hard.  And he was like, “I need to make all the decisions,” and then he realized, “Wait.  I’m not letting my wife in.  She could actually be so helpful here.  And I’m hurting myself.”  But he’s like, “Even though I’m hurting myself, I have to keep doing it because this is the right thing to do.”  So he didn’t even want to do it.  He didn’t like doing it.  He would have preferred to be a partner, but he really felt “but then I’m letting go of my responsibility and I’m not living up to what God wants for me,” right?  So there’s a guy.  He wasn’t chasing power.  He just honestly thought that’s what he’s supposed to do.  And then when he sat down and thought about it and actually studied it and realized, “No.  Wait.  That’s not what God is calling me to do,” it was a big relief.  And his marriage worked so much better.  So we’re not trying to say that all people who are benevolent sexists are doing it because they want power or they’re bad.  Sometimes you just grow up in this milieu, and some men are honestly wanting to love their wives altruistically.  And this is just the way they’ve been told you do it, and it leads to real problems.  And we talked about some of that in The Marriage You Want as well.  Okay.  Here’s our third hypothesis.

Keith: Yeah.  The third one.  I remember the third one too.  So it’s good.

Sheila: Yeah.  What is it?

Keith: So the third one was basically that women are not going to know—are not going to think that they’re the same.  So the hypothesis is that both types of sexists are going to be more likely to cheat, but women are going to not see it in the benevolent sexist.  They’re going to disproportionately think that hostile sexist men will cheat more, but they are going to underestimate how much benevolent sexist men will cheat.  And they’re going to be wrong.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  

Keith: And that’s the third point.  Spoiler alert.  I think you know how each one of these three things went because we’re talking about it today.  But those are the three concepts.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Mm-hmm.  So they did three different studies to measure all these.  Yeah.

Keith: Okay.  Sorry.  Go ahead. 

Sheila: Yeah.  No.  Go ahead because you’ve got it in front of you.

Keith: Okay.  So one of them was basically they quiz them on their intention to whether they would cheat.  So it’s like if you could get away with it would you.  Basically.  It was more complicated than that, but they were questioned along those lines, right?  And so they anonymously answered would I if I could get away with it sort of thing.  And they measured that to your level of sexism, right?    

Sheila: Right.

Keith: The second one was actually asked point blank like have you ever cheated on your spouse.  Sorry.  Have you ever cheated on your romantic partner?  And then there was a grade from never to well, once or twice to several times to over 10 times.  They sort of mentioned how often they had cheated previously.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And they were also measuring your power in the relationship and—

Keith: Yeah.  That was sort of the third section of the study.  Yeah.    

Sheila: Using different methods.  And a lot of times actually incidentally when people do these surveys they used what’s called previously validated question sets for a lot of the measures.  So when it comes to power in relationships or especially when it comes to benevolent or hostile sexism there are a lot of previously validated question sets for those things.  When people do a study, they don’t recreate the wheel.  They go with the question set that’s already been validated to say, yes, this measures benevolent sexism.

Keith: Exactly.  And by validated, that’s what you mean.  This has been shown in previous studies.  Not in the study where I’m trying to see how sexist people behave in this situation.  But in a totally different study where I do this questionnaire and then I show, okay, this questionnaire does measure sexism really well, right?  

Sheila: And so then good research practice is to use those same measures in your own set.  And that’s what we did in The Marriage You Want.  We used four different measures of marital satisfaction.  It was really fun.  Joanna came up with them or found them.  And then you don’t have to create your own question sets.  

Keith: So it’s not like I wrote—it’s not like we wrote some question saying, “How happy do you feel in your marriage?”  Blissfully, I float on the clouds every morning when I wake up thinking how I’m married to him and those kind of questions, which don’t sound reminiscent of anybody else’s questions that we’ve critiqued on this podcast.  But whatever.  So they’re very structured.  And they’re also very objective.

Sheila: Yeah.  So what you can do, for instance, in our surveys for The Marriage You Want we used these four different measures of marital satisfaction, right?  That are already out there.  But then we added our own element, which was the thing we’re actually studying which was in a lot of cases like—well, we did two different ones.  We did beliefs of the evangelical things, and we did mental load, which were the two things we were really, really measuring.  So that was fun.  In this study—

Keith: Yeah.  And how they affected your marital satisfaction.  And the really cool thing about our study was that it was a matched pair survey as well.  So we could measure if the husband believed this stuff, how did it affect the wife’s marital satisfaction and vice versa, which was really cool.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  And so what these people did is they used these already validated question sets of sexism and then they’re adding their ones about cheating.  And there’s often validated ones about cheating too.   

Keith: Yeah.  And they talk about which questionnaires they used and all that kind of stuff.  Yeah.

Sheila: So they’re talking about all the questionnaires.  So they’re just combining them in different ways to measure something different.  So that’s really cool.  That’s how studies often work, so it’s really neat.  So guess what they found?  They found that their hypotheses were correct.  Okay?  And I want to read to you one of their—when they write up, and they kind of conclude what they found.  They say this.  “The results of Study 1 revealed that both hostile sexism and benevolent sexism uniquely predicted infidelity among men.  Study 2 replicated the findings of Study 1 and further identified the high importance placed on power in intimate relationships in general as an intermediary variable in this process.”  So do you want to explain what that means?  

Keith: Yeah.  So you went into Study 2 there, right?  So Study 2 is saying that how do men value power in relationships.  So the men who felt that they were supposed to have higher power in the relationship than their female partners were more likely to cheat, right?  So of the benevolent sexists, that was the thing that was kind of the driver, right?  If you had that, you’re more likely to cheat.  If you didn’t have that, it was more fuzzy.  So that one particular thing was sort of like the one ring to rule them all.  That was what caused this to occur which I find amazing, right?  Because the idea of protecting and providing and all that kind of stuff, that’s what you hear in the evangelical church, right?  And it sounds benevolent, and it sounds so good.  But when push comes to shove, the thing that’s the most important is that the man is in charge, right?  Because if I said to you, I am my wife’s servant, Mark Driscoll would have a—blow a gasket, right?  John Piper would say, “That’s not a godly marriage,” right?  If I said I was my wife’s servant, they would all lose their minds, right?  But if I said I’m a servant leader, then that would be fine.  And even if I said I was a leader, that would be fine.  So the issue is not the service.  It’s being the leader because that’s the key.  So what you’re doing is you’re taking the benevolent sexist guys and what you’re making sure is you hype up the element of that that is the most correlated with men cheating.  That’s what our theology is doing when we push that issue of it’s so important that you be in charge.  It’s crazy.

Sheila: Yeah.  We make infidelity way more likely.  And then they say, “Study 3 further demonstrated that the link between men’s benevolent sexism and infidelity was obscure to women, such that women rated men with benevolent sexism as having a lower likelihood of infidelity than men with hostile sexism and believed the likelihood of infidelity among men with benevolent sexism to be similar to men with no sexism.”  I remember hearing awhile back the accusation that whenever a woman gets big evangelicalism she turns liberal.  And people were bemoaning this about Rachel Held Evans, about Beth Moore, about Amiee Byrd for sure, and about me and others.  And I remember thinking, “Is it that they turned liberal,” and by liberal, of course, they just simply mean unwilling to live under male power anymore.  Or is it that when women starting preaching about Jesus and when other women started listening to us and finding freedom those in power felt threatened and they just fought back?  That’s what Aimee Byrd experienced and probably to a great extent than any one I have ever witnessed.  I have never seen anyone bullied online as much as Aimee Byrd, and she wasn’t even calling for anything really radical at the beginning.  She was just simply saying, “Hey, how about if we let women and encourage women to learn theology too?”  But that was a bridge too far for way too many, and they raked her over the coals.  They said all kinds of terrible things about her.  They started groups online to talk about how terrible Aimee Byrd was.  And it just escalated and escalated and escalated.  Aimee left her denomination and had to find a new path forward, and there’s a lot of trauma from that.  And in her new book, Saving Face, which is the sponsor for this podcast and Zondervan, she points us to how theology isn’t even the root to transformation.  Instead it’s about getting vulnerable with God, letting God see our wounds, and letting God into our stories because it’s only as we see other people’s faces and as we see the face of God that we can even understand our own.  It is a beautiful profound work.  And if you have been reeling from feeling betrayed by the church or maybe betrayed by others that you loved and thought should love you, this is just a lovely work calling you home and helping you to process that hurt but also understand who you are and who Jesus is in the midst of it.  So I highly recommend Saving Face, and the subtitle is Finding Myself, God, and One Another Outside a Defaced Church by Aimee Byrd.  And the link is in the podcast notes.  And I think this is what’s going on in the church.  

Keith: Absolutely.

Sheila: I think that many women will say that the chance of someone cheating who is a Christian but a complementarian is much less than someone who isn’t a Christian but is totally egalitarian.  I am conflating two (cross talk) here.  

Keith: Kind of apples and oranges there.

Sheila: And we don’t necessarily know that’s true.  But what we do know is that—

Keith: If you have benevolent sexism, you are higher risk of cheating, right?  And if you are pushing the point that the man is supposed to be in charge, that’s the big part of it, right?  And this is the thing—I just want—can I just say one thing about that too?

Sheila: Yeah.

Keith: So this is the issue is that human beings are not fully rational.  We are emotional creatures, and we don’t always get it right.  You can believe to the core of your being something is true, but you have to look at what the data actually shows.  And what this study shows is that the idea that benevolently sexist men are less likely to cheat is the way people feel, but it is not the reality.  And this is true because I have heard this in the church, right?

Sheila: Oh yeah.

Keith: That it’s like egalitarians and stuff—they’re not—they don’t have that same burden to care for their wives.  If you were a complementarian, traditional man, you have a less likelihood to cheat because you take it so seriously.  All that kind of stuff, right?  

Sheila: Oh yeah.  Oh yeah.  And John Piper actually wrote a paper about that.  Okay?  Yeah.  John Piper wrote an article back in 2018 right at the height when MeToo got going.  Okay?  And he was saying that sex abuse allegations and the egalitarian myth.  So he was saying it’s a myth that egalitarians would be less likely to do all this abuse stuff, okay?  And one of his main arguments is that by arguing for egalitarianism you are robbing men of the idea that they need to be men of valor and that they need to protect women.  So without complementarianism, men are not going to feel like they need to act well towards women.   Right?

Keith: Yes.  All the assumptions involved in that that they don’t even introspect, right?  So what they’re saying is—    

Sheila: Here.  Actually, I’ll give you his own words.  Okay?  He says this, “My point in the article and in this podcast is that the egalitarian assumptions in our culture, and to a huge degree in the church, have muted, silenced, nullified one of the means that God has designed for the protection and the flourishing of women. It has silenced the idea that men as men, by virtue of their created, God-given maleness, apart from any practical competencies that they have or don’t have—men have special responsibilities to care for and protect and honor women.”  And so he’s saying like when you take that away then men aren’t going to protect women and women aren’t going to flourish.  And so—yeah.

Keith: He’s specifically saying that if you tell men that they are not by God’s grant given authority over women to protect and care for them that the only other option is men who are in power and authority over women and no longer have an obligation to care for them.  That’s what he’s saying.  

Sheila: No.  No.  No.  He’s actually saying if men and women feel equal then men will not work to women’s benefit.  They will not help women flourish. They will not protect women.  And because they’re not protecting women, we have this sexual abuse crisis.   

Keith: Right.  Okay.  Got you.  

Sheila: Because men think that they’re equal to women and because women think they’re equal to men, men have no need to protect women.  And so there’s this big sexual abuse crisis.    

Keith: Yeah.  Okay.  And I’m actually going a step ahead.  So you’re right.  Let’s come back to that.  So this is what he’s saying.  What he’s saying is it’s a myth that egalitarian men are less likely to cheat.  He’s saying that’s a myth.  What’s the evidence it’s a myth?  He feels that way?

Sheila: Yeah.  There is no evidence.    

Keith: He’s just saying these people are saying this, but it’s not true.  This is true instead.  Zero data.  Zero data.  

Sheila: And, actually, the late Rachel Held Evans, who just passed away—the anniversary of her passing was just this week actually.

Keith: Yeah.  Just this week.  Yeah.

Sheila: She wrote a great article in response to this which I will link to in the comments.  But one of the points she made is—okay.  He’s basically arguing that the fact that the sexual abuse scandals are outside the church proves that it’s egalitarians and not complementarians who cause sexual abuse crises.  But the only reason that we don’t know about the all the sexual abuse crises in the church is because the church isn’t listening to women.  And this was before, of course, the Southern Baptist Church thing came to light and all of the stuff we’ve seen lately.  It’s like no.  The sexual abuse crises are there.  You’re just ignoring them and not dealing with them.  And what we now know is that—the abuse crisis in the church are, in many ways, worse than what we’re seeing in some other places.  This is terrible.  And what I often think of too is this whole idea that unless we give men power they won’t protect women, if women are at risk or something—it really sounds like if I don’t get my way I’m going to take my ball and go home.  

Keith: Oh yeah.  It’s very infantile.  But that’s kind of what I was trying to say with my earlier thing is that—so he’s saying that it’s a myth.  No data, right?  The data actually show he’s wrong, right?  The data show conclusively that he’s wrong.  But he really believes it.  And I think he’s sincere because in his mind there is no universe in which you can really be equal.  They just don’t think it exists.  So they think that there’s either sexism where you’ve got an obligation, or there’s sexism where you don’t have an obligation because they can’t even conceptualize the idea of true partnership, right?  Because they won’t let themselves, right?  Because if you just stop and you say, “Okay.  Forget all this preprogramming about the man is supposed to be in charge and all this and just go the Bible and say, ‘Hey, what if we both are supposed to be equals before God?  And how do we build our marriage?’”  And you read the Bible in a—with that light.  You see everything differently, and it makes so much more sense. And it fits with the data in the real world.  The only problem is that you have to give up that, and they just will not give that up.  And so they can’t even imagine of a concept of how it could be that—why would an egalitarian man be faithful to his wife?  Why?  What does he get out of it?  And they don’t realize that that is a telltale sign that their heart is wrong in the first place.  If you’re asking those kind of questions, you have missed the boat.

Sheila: You’ve missed the boat.  Okay.  I want to talk about—you said where is the data.  Okay.  I have some more data.  So I decided to look up studies about who it is that is the most likely to be heroic.  

Keith: Right.

Sheila: If men protect women because they’re complementarian, are men actually more likely to protect women?     

Keith: This is the, oh, you women want to be in charge of everything.  Well, it’s not going to be women and children first on the Titanic anymore.  That kind of nonsense, right?  Yeah.  Okay.  

Sheila: This is where it gets super confusing and super—I love this stuff.  This is one of the things I was like, “Oh, this is really cool,” when you actually go down this rabbit hole.  Okay?  And I looked at a whole bunch of different studies.  And I’ll link to the main one I’m talking about here.  But here’s the basic issue.  We tend to define heroism and protection in a certain way.  And it’s when a man physically puts himself at risk in a very spur of the moment, dangerous thing to save someone else, right?  And I agree that that is heroic.  I am not trying to diminish the fact that that is heroic.

Keith: Yes.  That’s right. 

Sheila: We think about some of the mass shootings where men throw themselves over students in schools or whatever.  That’s wonderful.  Now, of course, female teachers have done that too.  

Keith: Absolutely.

Sheila: We tend to define heroism as a male thing in that.  You picture the man doing it.

Keith: As a pediatrician, okay?  So here’s the thing.  So women have babies.  Through the course of human history, we’ve only continued to exist because women continue to have babies, right?  That has been a very dangerous thing throughout all of human history.  And then women nourish those babies with their own bodies.  Do we consider that heroic?  I bet you if men did it we would.  I’m not trying to get all feminist here.  But come on.

Sheila: But here’s what the article is saying.  What if there are other ways that you can physically put yourself at risk?  And what if we include those in the definition of heroism?  Then who is the most heroic?  Okay.  And so I’m just going to read you what they said in the abstract.

Keith: So besides childbirth.  Other ways.

Sheila: Yeah.  Not childbirth because that’s—I mean I agree.  But yeah.  Okay.  But if we’re talking about things where you actually put your physical body at risk for strangers or for other people, okay?  This is what it says.  “Heroism consists of actions undertaken to help others, despite the possibility that they may result in the helper’s death or injury.  The authors here examine heroism by women and men in two extremely dangerous settings: the emergency situations in which Carnegie medalists rescued others and the holocaust in which some non Jews risked their lives to rescue Jews.  The authors also consider three risky but less dangerous prosocial actions: living kidney donations, volunteering for the Peace Corps, and volunteering for Doctors of the World.”  So I assume that’s Médecins Sans Frontières.

Keith: Yeah.  Something like that.  I don't know. 

Sheila: “Although the Carnegie medalists were disproportionately men, the other actions yield representations of women that were at least equal to and in most cases higher than those of men.”  So yes. 

Keith: So both men and women can be heroic.  Yeah.  

Sheila: Right.  And actually, if you expand the definition so that it isn’t just throwing yourself in front of a train or throwing yourself in front of a bullet but to wider things, women actually show up in the more—women are more likely to hide Jews.  Women are more likely to give kidney donations.  Women are more likely to join some of these Peace Corps things.  At least as likely.

Keith: Yeah.  The things that happen in the background that don’t have glory associated with them but that just honestly help other people, not for the benefit of that person.

Sheila: Right.  And yet, we don’t count this as women being protective.  But women actually really do a lot of very protective things.  And so in a lot of these complementarians’ minds, the only people who can be protective are men.  But if you look worldwide, it often is women especially in so many countries where—and in our own society too where the men often abandon the families.  And it’s the women who—and the grandmothers in so many countries who are doing all this work to try to provide for kids.  It’s like women are being the protectors in large cases.  And so to make the point that, well, men have to be given this extra power because otherwise they’re not going to protect, women already are.

Keith: Yeah.  And it’s like if that’s the case cultures where sexism is more of a thing should have fewer men abandoning their families.  And cultures where there is more egalitarian sharing of power in the relationships should have—

Sheila: More men abandoning their families.  And they don’t.  

Keith: More men abandoning their families.  And we see exactly the opposite, right?

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Especially if you look at European studies because Europe is an interesting case because you have some extremely egalitarian societies like Scandinavian countries.  And then you have some where you still have a lot of residual sexism like some of the southern European nations.  And you really see the dichotomies.  Yeah.  Really interesting.  

Keith: Well, and it makes sense because if your whole mindset is I have to do this because I get something out of it like I get to be in charge so therefore I will take care of my family—if the idea of the two of us are going to work together to make a great marriage, if that’s just not enough of a perk for you, come on.  Anyway.

Sheila: Okay.  So let’s take a look at more stuff.  Okay.  Do you want to take the second one, which is also about power and infidelity?  Okay.  Mm-hmm.

Keith: Sure.  Okay.  Okay.  So the second one is called The Power to Flirt: Power Within Romantic Relationships and Its Contribution to Expressions of Extradyadic Desire.  So extradyadic is one of those sociology terms.  Outside of the dyad.  Outside of the two of us.

Sheila: Yeah.  Remember the term dyad because it’s going to come up in the next study too.  So yeah.  Dyad is when there is a romantic partnership between two people.  So extradyadic basically means extramarital in our—what we’re usually doing, but it’s not necessarily just marital.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Whether you’re going to go flirt with someone that you’re not with.  That’s all it’s talking about.  Okay. 

Keith: Or that you’re going to want to anyway.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And I want to read the abstract because it’s really good.  Okay?  And usually, in papers, there’s an abstract at the top which it’s just—is a really short synopsis of what the study was and what the conclusions were.  And here it is.  “Power in non-romantic contexts makes people confident in their ability to attract potential partners, increasing their mating motivation and the likelihood of acting on this motivation.  Four studies investigated whether perceptions of power within romantic relationships would also activate mating goals, intensifying desires for alternative partners.”  So in other words, if you think you’ve got power in your relationship, are you more likely to have the goal of trying to cheat?  Okay?  “And so in Studies 1 and 2, participants underwent power manipulation and then described a sexual fantasy or evaluated photos of attractive strangers.  Studies 3 and 4 used face-to-face interaction and daily experiences methods to examine the mechanisms underlying the link between power and extradyadic desires.  Overall, high perceived relationship power was associated with increased interest in alternatives.  Perceived relative mate value explained this association, suggesting that what determines whether power elicits extradyadic interest is not power perceptions alone but rather the feeling of having a higher mate value than one’s partner that accompanies elevated power and affects whether high-power individuals will prioritize their own needs in ways that may hurt their partners.”

Keith: Right.  

Sheila: Okay.  So basically what they’re saying is this—all right?  When you have more power in the relationship, you’re more likely to see yourself as having higher value in that relationship.  And so when you see your mate as a lower value person, that feeling that they’re lower value is going to make you look elsewhere.  Okay?  More likely to look elsewhere.

Keith: I could do so much better than this person.  And you may not say that out loud, but somewhere in that—the deep recesses of your psyche that idea of I could do better.  And so you’re going to be subconsciously on the prowl.

Sheila: It reminds me of James Dobson.

Keith: Oh yeah.  I didn’t take the bait.

Sheila: With that hilarious anecdote.  We had a podcast with Laura Robinson on this.  I’ll put a link to it in the podcast notes where he was telling this ridiculous anecdote about how he was at a stop sign once.  And a woman looked at him and smiled, and he just knew that she was inviting him to follow her to her house and sleep with her.  And he says, “I didn’t take the bait.”  It’s like why are you assuming she’s coming on to you because she’s smiling.  That’s a lot of confidence, buddy.  That is a lot of confidence that other women want you.  And that’s what they’re really measuring is this confidence that, oh yeah, I can get someone else.  Other people are crawling all over—are falling all over themselves for me, right?  

Keith: So in the first two studies what they did was they actually power primed them.  Is that what they said the word was?  So what they basically did was they got them to remember a time in their relationship where they had power over their spouse.  They won an argument.  Or they had this—and they got them to imagine that.  And they got them to describe it in detail, and that was to get that part of the brain kind of revved up.  And then they did—for example—for one of them was they show pictures of people of varying levels of attractiveness and say, “Do you think you could want to get with this person?  Or that you would be able to get with this person,” and that kind of stuff.  And basically the people, when they were primed, when they were pre revved up with this idea of I’m powerful, I’m—they were more likely to say, “Yeah.  I’d kiss her.  I’d want to be with him,” that kind of stuff, right?  But when they didn’t rev them, they were less likely to do that, right?  So the idea of telling people, “You live in your power over your spouse,”—

Sheila: Primes people to think that—to want to flirt and to want to have affairs.    

Keith: You don’t mean to.  But you’re naturally going to think, “Yeah.  I do a lot for this family.  I deserve more than I’m getting right now,” right?  

Sheila: And you’re going to—yeah.  It just primes entitlement.  It primes entitlement.  And entitlement is linked to all this stuff.  In another study, they did the same thing where they primed you to feel powerful, and then they asked you to describe a sexual fantasy.  And then they saw the—that sexual fantasies were more likely to include other people if they had been—than their partner.  

Keith: They actually had a whole rater system.

Sheila: Yeah.  They did.  

Keith: They basically rated how serious you were about this fantasy.  They didn’t give any details in the article, but that’s the concept they were—

Sheila: I can just imagine trying to qualitatively code that.  That would be interesting.

Keith: We have a scale from one to five.  And the differences between people who have been power primed or not.  There was more intentionality in the group that had been power primed. 

Sheila: Anyway, in the discussion of this, they’re trying to explain why power matters and why high power versus low power can set people up for these things, and I thought some of the things they said were interesting.

Keith: Yeah.  And that was Study 3 and 4.  

Sheila: Yeah.  I just want to read what they said.  “High-power individuals, for example, are less likely to adopt others’ perspective and read their emotional expressions accurately.”  And multiple studies have found this that people with higher status are less likely to understand what other people’s emotions are.  They are often going to read the room wrong.

Keith: That’s been shown.  Yeah.  If you have the power in the room, you are less likely to know what’s going on.  Whereas if you’re a lower power individual in a group you’re much more attuned to everyone else’s state of mind and what everyone else is thinking because it’s a survival mechanism, right?  So the people who have the power and are confident in their power are less likely to see what other people need and expect from them.

Sheila: Yeah.  So just think about how that translates into marriage, right?  If we’re priming people to have power, well, those are the people who are less likely to be emotionally attuned to their spouse and—which is what we talk about in chapter 7 and 8 of The Marriage You Want and how important that is, right?

Keith: Yeah.  And moreover it directly contradicts Piper’s thesis that by giving people power you will make them more likely to take care of and understand the needs of other people.  The data show he is 100% wrong.  It’s 180 degrees in the other direction.  If you each have equal power, you will be attuned to each other’s needs.  As soon as one of you has more power than the other one, the person with less power is more attuned.  And guess what?  In those classic evangelical homes where the husband is the leader and the wife is the submitter, who is the one who is more emotionally attached?  Who is the one who is more emotionally aware?  Who is the one who knows what’s going on in all the relationships?  It’s her because he doesn’t have to.  So if you want to make men who are actually good at providing for their wives, tell them that you are a partner with your wife, and so you need to contribute.  And you need to contribute as a partner, and they will be good providers.

Sheila: Exactly.  Okay.  They also say—I’m going to keep reading here.  “That they are more likely to objectify others,” okay?  “And act in line with their own, rather than others’, preferences,” which, again—

Keith: Well, human nature.  If you give someone power, they’re going to use it for their own good, right?  And as much as you may say, “Oh, they won’t.  They won’t.  They won’t.  They won’t.  They have this power in order to benefit the wife, right?  I just find that so funny is like we’re horrible, disgusting sinners, who can’t do anything right except husbands will always use that power for the good of their wives.  It’s just crazy.

Sheila: Okay.  Then they say this.  “Even when powerful individuals recognize others’ feelings, they may still prioritize their own interests, showing less compassion, and willingness to help them.” Yeah.

Keith: Yeah.  And most of the time they don’t even realize that’s what they’re doing.  They think, “I’m doing what’s best for the family.  It just happens that the family needs this thing that I want.”

Sheila: Yeah.  Okay.  Now here’s how they explain unequal power and how that impacts couples.  Okay?  “Unequal power may also damage intimacy as the low-power partners may be overly concerned about losing their relationship and, therefore, feel less safe communicating their needs and raising complaints about their partners.”  And you think about how often women are told you are not allowed to ask for what you need.  It is a sin.  It’s a sign you’re being selfish.  It’s a sign you’re being disrespectful.  Remember the wet towels from Love and Respect, right?  She was called disrespectful when she asked him to stop leaving wet towels on the bed, right?  So it’s like women are told, “Hey, you are,”—and In For Women Only, Shaunti Feldhahn says women are in the wrong if they tell their husbands, “Hey, you’re going in the wrong direction,” when they’re driving.  You turned the wrong way, right?  Over and over again in our evangelical resources, women are told, “Hey, don’t point out when your husband is wrong?  Don’t bring up issues that bother you?”  Yeah.  This is exactly what’s happening.

Keith: And the solution to it is not have a power imbalance.

Sheila: Right.  And then they say this, “In this way, power imbalances may generate dynamics in which high-power partners are less responsive to their partners’ needs, while low-power partners tend to comply with partners, inhibiting their own needs.  Over time, this dynamic likely proves harmful for the low-power partner’s well-being, as manifested in greater levels of anxiety, depression, and fatigue.”  So you’re less likely to value what you need.  You’re more likely to go along with what the high-power partner needs, and it just results in all kinds of bad stuff, right?

Keith: This is what you’ve been saying for years, right?  

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  And this is what we found in The Marriage You Want like when one person is carrying the majority of the burden for the family, the majority of the mental load, the majority of the work, and the other person just gets to make all the decisions, that doesn’t end up in marital flourishing. 

Keith: No.

Sheila: It ends up in women especially since they tend to be the low priority one especially in evangelical marriages, it ends up with them feeling discouraged and distant and alone and that’s why we see this unfairness threshold that we talk about so much where you can put up with it for the first five years but by year ten you’re really bothered. By year 15, you’ve just about had it, and by year 20 you’re done.

Keith: Yeah, you can’t do this forever.

Sheila: Yeah, because this doesn’t result in flourishing. So anyway this is what they were studying. They were saying, “Hey, we know that power dynamics don’t work in relationships so how do they work when it comes to flirting and wanting to pursue extramarital relationships, etc. Across four studies we found that perceptions of power within a relationship significantly predicted a person’s inclination towards alternative partners encompassing thoughts, desires, and actual interactions. We also showed that the sense of having a higher mate value than one’s partner that power instilled helped explain this power extradyadic extra desire linkage. And you know, I just want to talk about that higher mate value. We’ve talked to so many women who started off super dynamic like when they got married they were go-getters. They were just alive and vibrant, and then you’re in this power imbalanced relationship, and they shrivel. I think we all know people like that. And there's men who shrivel too. It’s not always women, it's just that in evangelical churches, it’s more likely to lean one way.

Keith: Exactly. In an evangelical church, when a woman is overwhelming and shriveling a man, that gets noticed. Whereas when a woman is being overpowered and shriveled by a man, it’s either not noticed or it’s actively encouraged.

Sheila: Yeah, I know. It’s really—

Keith: Which is sad.

Sheila: It is sad. And I’ll tell you what we found too in our studies, and I asked Joanna to run this just as we were getting ready to record this—can you just run this for me? In our study for The Marriage You Want, we didn’t talk a lot in the book The Marriage You Want about our infidelity stats because quite frankly we just didn’t have a lot of people who had affairs. We did have a cohort like for our study that was happier than most I think. We veered on the better marriages scale. We can still make some really cool findings because we had enough people it was statistically significant, but we veered on the better marriages because to get both people in a couple likely to fill out a survey means they’re going to tend to be happier.

Keith: If you’re willing to put in the time to fill out that many questions and both spouses are willing to do that, (inaudible) selection. 

Sheila: Overall in terms of affairs, we did find that men were about twice as likely to commit affairs than women.

Keith: And the literature is like that’s pretty close to the literature.

Sheila: I don’t actually know.

Keith: I think it’s 21%, 22% of men and 13% or 14% of women in life report having—

Sheila: And it was way lower than that in our study, but it is—

Keith: Don’t quote me on those numbers, but they’re in that ballpark. 

Sheila: It just makes me think maybe Jesus meant it in Philippians 2 when he said that we are to have the same mindset as Christ or when Paul wrote that we are to have the same mindset of Christ who despite being equal with God gave up everything and took on human likeness. And He didn’t consider equality with God something to be grasped, and we’re supposed to have that mindset. It doesn’t matter what power you have, you are supposed to give it up and not just, “No, I have this power, but I’m going to become a servant leader.” No, you actually give up the power.

Keith: If you have the mindset that, “I won’t be the servant until I have the power,” you’re not on the right page.

Sheila: Yeah, you’re not following it.

Keith: If you think that people are the kind of people who will take their ball and go home if they don’t have the power, those are not followers of Jesus.

Sheila: You’re missing the point.

Keith: That’s not the Jesus way.

Sheila: And then in Matthew 20 verse 25 Jesus said that you know what? It’s the Gentiles who are worried about power and lording it over you, and it’s not supposed to be that way with you. Like the idea of someone having power, the idea of who’s going to be in charge that is not a discussion you’re supposed to be having as Christians. Instead you’re supposed to be saying, how can we serve? For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many. And that’s what we are supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to have the mind of Christ so Jesus meant it. So there was another study that came out by the Institute for Family Studies, and I talk about this a lot because it’s one of the few places where I’ve been able to find real numbers on this. And the Institute for Family Studies is a very conservative thinktank, and they put out this—what they call the World Map 2019 where they had 16,000 respondents from all over the world, and they divided them into six groups whether they were highly religious—so both people in the couple were highly religious—both people in the couple were not religious at all so they were secular or you had it mixed where maybe one was a religious and one wasn’t or like they attended church but not very often. So you had your highly religious, your mixed, and your secular. And then they divided everybody into two groups whether they were patriarchal—so believing in male headship, like where the man is in authority—or whether they were egalitarian. And then they looked at all kinds of stuff in the study. It’s a very, very long study, but the abuse questions are super interesting. And I want to read you the numbers. So when they asked women, “Hey, has your current partner ever abused you?” women who were in a couple that were patriarchal were always more likely to say yes than women who were in a couple that was egalitarian whether they were highly religious, secular, or mixed.

Keith: Okay, so in those three groups—

Sheila: Yeah, patriarchal most like made it abusive.

Keith: Made it worse.

Sheila: Egalitarian made it better. And then when they asked men have you ever committed interpersonal—have you ever committed violence against your current partner? Again those who were patriarchal were most likely to say yes. Those who were egalitarian were most likely to say no, but what I find really interesting about both of these is that the group that is the safest for women, the group that is the least likely to say, “Yes, I’ve abused,” or, “Yes, I’ve been abused,” is egalitarian religious people. So when you look at all these six groups, the safest group to be in is always the egalitarian religious.

Keith: Do you have the numbers? What’s the percentage?

Sheila: Yeah, so among men for instance, 29% of secular patriarchal and 27% of religious patriarchal say, “Yes, I have been abusive,” compared to 18% of secular egalitarian and 17% of religious egalitarian. So the best is religious egalitarian, and when it comes to women, the worst is actually the mixed religious for what women answered, but again you’re looking at—

Keith: All the way down to the ones who least likely to report having been abused were in Christian—

Sheila: Egalitarian.

Keith: Sorry, religious because these are not just Christians. These are other religious groups too.

Sheila: Yeah, religious egalitarians.

Keith: So religious, but egalitarian.

Sheila: Yes, and so like—so the idea that complementarianism protects you is just simply not true. Now this is sort of an interesting study—

Keith: What we’ve shown in other studies too—you’ve done other podcasts—is the people who believe in the more traditional views hitch that onto religiosity, and they say religious conservative people have better sex, less abuse, whatever, but they’re not actually talking about religious, conservative people. They’re talking about religious people.

Sheila: Overall, right.

Keith: Which includes the more egalitarians, right? They always—it’s a big sample, and then they take from that, therefore you should be like us.

Sheila: I don’t think people realize that because if you're in a Southern Baptist Church, you kind of assume that you are the majority of Christians but actually there’s way more Catholics. And Catholics are more likely to be egalitarian in marriage. There’s an awful lot of Orthodox. Even among Christians, there’s a lot of mainline. And so you’re actually a minority, you’re a sliver of Christians, let alone a sliver of religious people.

Keith: Exactly, and the studies show that being religious is good for you, and being egalitarian is good for you. So let’s put those together.

Sheila: Yes, but as soon as you become patriarchal, the benefits of religiosity tend to disappear.

Keith: They start to disappear. They don’t entirely disappear because the religiosity is such a powerful force for good that it overshadows it. And they point to studies and say, “See, people like us who believe like our church, do better,” and it’s like that’s not the group we’re sampling.

Sheila: I mean even this study they made a big deal out of the fact that there’s not a significant difference between religious versus nonreligious, but it’s like yeah, but you’re including the egalitarian and the conservatives together. When you tease them out, we see a really interesting thing. Anyway, I just found that was interesting. I wrote an article because Josh Howerton used these stats to claim that conservative Christians do better, and he misused them so I wrote an article about that, and I will include that in the podcast notes too. Okay, one more study that I just want to get through real quick.

Keith: Yeah, this was the sociology one that—it was a hard slug because it was like a lot of extradyadic, multi—

Sheila: This one isn’t about infidelity per se. I just found this one super interesting. So do you want to read the—

Keith: Yeah, pull it up here. Hold on a second. So this is called “Differences—differences in solitary and dyadic sexual desire and sexual satisfaction in heterosexual and non-heterosexual cisgender men and women.” Yes, so it’s a lot of sociology stuff.

Sheila: Okay, so here’s what they’re trying to figure out. What they’re saying is there are different types of desire and different types of ways that we approach sex and which of those when we measure them is actually predictive of high sexual satisfaction within your current relationship. Okay, and normally what people do is they divide it into like my desire for my partner which is your dyadic desire and your solo desire or your solitary desire which is like how hot I am, how interested I am in sex overall.

Keith: In general, yeah.

Sheila: So there's been other studies that we’ve talked about how on women who carry the majority of the mental load, they might have high solo desire, but they have very low dyadic desire. So they don’t actually desire sex within their relationship.

Keith: The idea of sex is really appealing to me. With you, not so much.

Sheila: Exactly. Exactly. And so what this study was trying to do was say but solo desire, there’s more to it than that. And so they divided it further between just solo and dyadic. They looked at solitary desire which they were kind of measuring by how much you masturbate and stuff like this. And then also attractive person desire. So when you see someone who is hot or who you think is hot, how likely are you to think about them to want to be with them? We would actually call this the every man’s battle or lust thing probably if they were to look at it in an evangelical way. This is how they explained their findings. “The main findings showed that men had significantly higher global, sexual desire, solitary sexual desire, and dyadic sexual desire for an attractive person when compared with women.” So men are more likely to like have that solitary, “I’m hot. I’m interested in sex, and wow, that woman is hot. I would love to be with her,” than women do. “Partner related dyadic sexual desire was a positive and significant predictor of sexual satisfaction whereas solitary sexual desire and dyadic sexual desire for an attractive partner were not.” So in other words—

Keith: That makes sense.

Sheila: —what matters is whether you want each other when it comes to sexual satisfaction. So this idea that you just have to be a super, super sexual person actually isn’t—

Keith: If I’m really sexual and you’re really sexual, then we’re going to have a great sex life.

Sheila: Yeah. No, it’s whether you want to be sexual with each other, and I think sometimes, we concentrate so much on like how do we make ourselves a sexual person individually, like as if I have a sexuality and you have a sexuality and they’re completely distinct from one another. And we have to get totally confident in ourselves and only then will we have a good sex life. And there is a point to that. Like I’m not saying that’s totally bonkers, but what really matters is whether you enjoy being together and whether you want each other. That’s actually the more important thing, and the more people feel like I have this need for sex versus I have a need for you or a desire for you, the worse their marriage is. And I think that matters so much because we talk about how great men’s need is for sex, how much men need sex, not how much men want their wives, but how much men need sex. Like think about the way we talk to women. Men have this need, this God-given need for sex, for physical release as Emerson Eggerichs says. Well, you know what? The greater that men feel that, the actual worse their sexual satisfaction is whereas the greater you both feel like you have a dyadic, sexual desire, the better your sexual satisfaction is.

Keith: Yeah, absolutely.

Sheila: Which totally makes sense, and especially when you think about how so often men especially—it’s not only men but because of the way we raise men in our culture to not be in touch with their feelings and to not express vulnerability, when they want to connect, which is naturally a vulnerable thing. You’ve got to talk about what you’re feeling. Well, when they want to do that instead they channel that need for connection into sex. And so they feel this greater felt need for sex, for release, where it’s actually absent connection, and it makes sex feel really shallow. And they also found that both men and women are just as likely to have partner related dyadic sexual desire.

Keith: Yeah.

Sheila: Yeah, so men—it’s not necessarily that men have the higher rate of that.

Keith: No, exactly, and the thing is if you teach men that sex should be something that flows out of the relationship as a natural consequence of your closeness with your wife, then you're going to make a better sex life and a better marriage. The problem is that doesn’t fit with the idea of what masculinity is in the evangelical world, and it’s sad because that’s a much healthier view. It’s holistic. It says that men are not just animals who have this base physical desire for release that has to happen or they’re going to explode, that they’re actually capable of intimate, knowing their spouse in every way, but that doesn’t fit with their agenda because it’s all about being the tough, powerful guy who’s in charge as opposed to just being two partners on a journey working together and being strong when the other is weak, and all the other good things, and being able to be vulnerable with each other because you know the other person is going to be there for you.

Sheila: Yeah, so anyway, we will put links to all these studies in the podcast notes if you want to take a look at them yourselves. That last one I just talked about Keith thought was just—couldn’t make head or tail out of it.

Keith: I finally understood it now that you just explained it.

Sheila: Yeah, I did find a lot of these interesting, and we will try to bring these podcasts periodically where we talk about some of the new studies that people have sent us. And a lot of these I did actually find because people sent them to me so thank you for doing that. When you find an interesting study in the journals that you think I would like certainly send it to me because yeah it always helps us too.

Keith: Absolutely.

Sheila: So really great. And if you want to get out of these power dynamic relationships, please check out our book The Marriage You Want. We’ve got over 200 reviews now on Amazon, which is awesome. It’s still rated 4.9 on Amazon so that’s great. And if you’ve been immersed in a church which has really let you down just like Aimee Byrd was, please check out Saving Face. It’s such a healing book. It’s so profound. Aimee writes so wonderfully and so thank you again to Zondervan for sponsoring this podcast. And please check out the book Saving Face because if you’ve been taught your whole life that what you really need is someone to be in power over you, and then those people in power don’t look anything like Jesus, that’s such a huge betrayal and we can do better, and this book points us on the road to healing and the road back to Jesus. So thank you for that, and thank you for joining us on the Bare Marriage podcast. Please remember to subscribe wherever you listen to us. Rate us five stars on your podcast app or remember to hit like—the like button if you're watching on YouTube, and we will see you again next week on the Bare Marriage podcast.

Keith: Bye.