Episode 284: The Problems with the Book His Needs, Her Needs by Willard Harley

Let's take a close look at the book His Needs, Her Needs by Willard Harley! Bethany Jantzi and Ngina Otiende join me to look at some of the things that we find problematic about the book--and explain why evangelicalism needs better resources!

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LINKS

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• Download our rubric on how His Needs, Her Needs (and other books!) scored on sex

Transcript

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 in the studio, which is really our guest room, by my daughter, Rebecca Lindenbach.  

Rebecca: Hi there.

Sheila: And one of the things we’ve done, Becca, over the last few years is we have taken a look at some of the Christian marriage resources that are out there, and we’ve analyzed them.

Rebecca: Yeah.  That is a good way of summarizing what we’ve done.

Sheila: So when we wrote our book, The Great Sex Rescue, in 2021, we looked at the 15 bestselling sex and marriage books and analyzed them, put them through a healthy sexuality rubric, took a lot of quotes out of them just to see if they are containing healthy or unhealthy information.  And since then, we’ve analyzed a bunch of other books.  We kind of have this list where we work done—we look at Christian marriage books that people recommend.  And we also just simply look at the most popular ones, and we work down the list based on Amazon ranking.  So we’re trying to do the most popular ones first.

Rebecca: We’re trying to make it objective so that people can’t ever accuse us of just picking on specific people because—nope.  We’re just going after the ones that are most popular first.  

Sheila: Right.  And today we want to look at the book His Needs, Her Needs.  We did look at it for our book, The Great Sex Rescue.  But we’ve never done a one sheet on it before.  And so today I’m going to bring on some guests, who are going to help me.  So you’re going to go away for a minute and come back at the end.

Rebecca: Bye-bye.  

Sheila: And we’re going to look at it.  We also do have a one sheet that you can download.  We put it on the blog yesterday.  But it goes over the highlights, and it’s really good because you can print it out.  And then you can give it to your pastor, your women’s ministry leader, your counselor, whoever is recommending this book and passing it out and saying, “Hey, here’s why you really need to stop recommending it.”  I also want to say the money that helps us do these things—because writing up these one sheets actually takes quite a bit of research and time.

Rebecca: And it doesn’t make us any money.  Let’s be very clear.

Sheila: No.  It really doesn’t because we do it all for free.  So the money from that comes from the people who support us from our patrons, who give $5 a month—as little as $5 a month.  Some give much more.  And that gets them access to our Facebook group.  And, of course, to our people who donate through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation, a nonprofit within the United States, so you can get a tax deductible receipt if you’re in the U.S.  And that just helps us do what we do.  And so thank you to all of them.  And the links for those things are in the podcast notes if you want to join us and support the work we’re doing as well.  And so this was a really fun conversation.  It’s a long one, but it’s a super fun one.  And I am going to bring on, Ngina and Bethany now.  All right.  We are going to have an awesome conversation.  I have two awesome women joining me.  I have Bethany Jantzi, who was on our podcast a little while ago talking about coercive control.  She has a master’s in the psychology of coercive control and works in the mental health field right now to help people in recovery.  And she’s also from Ontario like me.

Bethany: Yes.

Sheila: Which is fun.  So how is it going, eh?

Bethany: Yeah.  It’s going good.  Happy to be here.  Thank you so much for having me.  And yeah.  Always nice to talk to another fellow Ontarian.  

Sheila: Elbows up.

Bethany: Elbows.  Yeah.

Sheila: And then we have a good friend of mine who I have known for a long time, Ngina Otiende.  Hello, Ngina.      

Ngina: Sheila, so good to be here.  I’m glad to be back again.  (inaudible) I’ve been here before and I actually met you and Keith in person when you were in Maryland.  And just so excited to be back.  Always fun to be here.  So I’m Ngina, and I am a writer and a marriage coach over at Intentional Today where I empower women to address relationship and individual problems with clarity and confidence so that they can thrive because that’s what it’s all about.  We are meant to flourish.  We are meant to thrive.

Sheila: I love it.  And you were on our podcast awhile ago because you actually have been on a similar journey to—as mine because we used to write stuff that we now are like no.  No.  No.  No.  No.  And you’re one of the few people, who—you took back your books too.  You’re like, “No.  I’m going to rewrite this.”  You took down a ton of blog posts, and I just—thank you.

Ngina: Yeah.  I did.  And it’s your work.  Your work with the first book, The Great Sex Rescue.  Before then, I was reading from other abuse and trauma advocates, and so—and then your book came out.  And I’m like—I’m reading the research, and I’m like, “Oh my god.”  (inaudible) I have other things that are going on.  And I’m like, “Cannot.  Cannot do this anymore.”  So I just took down all—over 300 blog posts, took down my books, stopped coaching for a couple of years, and—yeah.  Because we just have to do better as you—you say that too.  That once you know better we do better.  

Sheila: I love it.  And, Ngina, you’re originally from Kenya.  And it is still my dream.  We are going to do this one day.  (distorted audio) and you and your husband to get to Kenya.  Yeah.  And I have some other friends, who have some—who are also Kenyan.  Friends in Ontario who have some ministries there, and I would just love to get all of us together.  So that is our dream one day.  Yeah.  We’ll do it.  

Ngina: Yeah.  Yeah.  Looking forward to that.

Sheila: Yes.  Okay.  So now, first, some not so fun stuff that’s still going to be fun which is we took a look at the book His Needs, Her Needs.  And whenever I look at problematic books, I like to have other people read them too so that we can have a broader conversation so you all aren’t just listening to me.  So I made you guys read this.  Thank you for taking one for the team.  And I thought we could talk about it.  Okay.  I need to mention too.  We do have a one sheet that goes along with this conversation that we’re having.  So I published it on the blog yesterday, so it will be in the podcast notes.  So just go grab that one sheet and everything that we’re talking about is going to be right there.  So do either of you want to share just first reactions after reading it?

Ngina: Yeah.  Bethany, do you want to go first?  Or I—

Bethany: Sure.  I struggled with this book, I think, because I have a pretty high standard when someone is a clinical psychologist and has been spending decades, claims to have helped thousands of couples.  And so I think I just felt throughout the book that he wasn’t meeting really benchmarks that would make the book an appropriate and safe read for anybody who has experienced trauma or is in a relationship where there is some control or abuse.  So that was something that just kept coming up throughout the book for me that was just a reason why I felt like just overall I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending this book to other people and where it could actually be very destructive for people that are in—yeah.  These abusive relationships particularly if they don’t recognize that yet.  So that was something that I kept coming back to.

Sheila: Yeah.  And that’s important to be mindful of that.  I’ve said this before on the podcast.  We have to assume that for marriage books in the evangelical world at least one third of the women reading it will be in abusive relationships because we know that about a quarter of women are.  And women, who are in abusive relationships, are more likely to read marriage books, so you have to assume it’s at minimum a third, right?  So if it’s not safe for them— 

Bethany: Yeah.  And so often, it’s more common than not that victims don’t recognize that they’re being abused.  And that’s why if you write a marriage book I think it’s your due diligence to have at least a small section that describes what abuse can look like.  And when you don’t even devote a word or a paragraph or a page to it, I really think that falls below the standard of what I think makes a book safe for anybody who might want to pick it up and read it.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.    

Ngina: Yeah.  Yeah.  That was my—Bethany, that was the top thing on my mind as well as I read this book.  I was like this book is not trauma or abuse sensitive.  It just is not a safe book for anybody who is in a marriage that is betraying, that is neglectful, that is abusive, that is—has issues of control, has addictions because he makes no distinctions whatsoever in his books.  As Bethany pointed out that he does not even reserve a word or—so he’s describing all this illustrations, describing all these things, but he does not say, “This is too far.  Or this is what this is called.”  Does not use the right terms to describe something that just happened.  He just says a wife has aversion, for example, when really it’s trauma.  He says it’s an aversion for sex.  There’s so many things that just makes the book not safe.  And now riding on on that is the fact that the book is highly gendered.  It goes—

Sheila: Okay.  Hold on there because we’re going to get to that.  I want to get to that.        

Ngina: All right.

Sheila: I just looked it up.  So I have the Kindle version with me right here.  And I just did a search for the word abuse.  It only appears twice.  Once it’s talking about alcohol abuse—alcohol and substance abuse.  And the other time it’s talking about divorce where you might have to get a divorce in terms of severe insanity or domestic or child abuse, but that’s it.  That really is it.  Okay.  Well, let me tell you about my experience with this book.  So I have two copies of it.  I have this older version, which I think was from around 2010 of His Needs, Her Needs.  And this is the one that we used—that we analyzed when we were writing The Great Sex Rescue because we were trying to use the version which would have been current at the time where the majority of our survey respondents were married or getting married.  The one that we have now is from 2022.  And it is substantially changed, and I do want to acknowledge that this book, as it currently is, is changed.  He took out absolutely everything that we talked about in Great Sex Rescue, so we criticized quite a bit in Great Sex Rescue.  It’s all gone.  Okay.  Thank you.  Thank you.  I think that’s the bare minimum.  But thank you.  He also changed the subtitle.  So it used to be Building an Affair-Proof Marriage.  And now it’s about finding love.  It’s not as framed around affair proofing your marriage.  This book used to be totally framed around that.  It’s like he set this book up as these are the five needs of men, these are the five needs of women, and they—the chapters used to be called her need for this, his need for this.  And now he’s changed it so it’s supposedly more generic.  But it still—these are men’s five needs, and these are women’s five needs.  So before we start analyzing it, let’s just talk about what women’s—what he says the needs are.  So anyone remember off the top of their head, what are the five needs of men?

Bethany: An attractive partner, sexual fulfillment, domestic support, recreational companionship.  And I can’t remember the fifth one.

Sheila: It had something to do with affirmation or something.  Yeah.  Admiration.  Admiration.  He needs her to be proud of him.  Yeah.  Okay.  And then her needs—so I want everyone to hear that.  He needs domestic support meaning he needs her to do the housework.  And he needs a physically attractive wife.  That these are men’s big needs, right?  And then women’s big needs are—let me see.  Affection—

Ngina: She needs financial.  Yeah.  Financial support.

Sheila: Honesty and openness.  Honesty and open communication.  Family commitment, so she needs him to be a good father.  

Bethany: Conversation.

Sheila: And conversation.  Yeah.  So it’s like okay.  I have issues with that framing in general because—well, first o fall, we’ve talked about how this idea that everything is gendered doesn’t make any sense because everything is on a bell curve.  And you can’t say men need this and women need this because there’s so much overlap.  And that’s just not a helpful way of talking.  It’s much more helpful to say, “Look, here’s a bunch of things people need.  If you need this more than your spouse does, here’s how to find—here’s how to meet your spouse’s needs.  Here’s how to make sure you show up for your spouse in ways they understand.”  We can all do that.  But to say that men need this stuff and women need this stuff is really problematic.  But also she needs open and honest communication.  She needs intimate conversation.  She needs affection, and he needs a physically attractive spouse.  Okay.  And I think this is my bigger issue.  And I’ll see what you guys think of this.  But just because somebody says something is their greatest need doesn’t mean that it leads to health or flourishing.  And this is my problem is he is taking people’s—what people say at face value instead of using, “Oh, let’s think about it.  The Bible,” or a bigger standard like the Bible or what data says, a bigger standard for what is actually leading to flourishing.  If he says he needs a physically attractive wife, does that honestly mean that that is going to meet his need for intimacy?  Really?  And he doesn’t need open and honest communication.  We know from both Scripture and data that the ingredients to intimacy are open and honest communication, the ability to be emotionally vulnerable, the ability to be intimate.  These are the things that really build intimacy, not the fact that your wife does your dishes.  And if a guy is saying what I really need is for my wife to do the dishes, that should be an opportunity to tell the guy he has some growth work to do, not something to write a whole book around.

Bethany: Yeah.  I also felt too that if they stopped it with the pointless genderizing of it it would help protect against abusers who would weaponized this and be like, “This book by this clinical psychologist says that my need as a man is that you stay hot and that you always give me sex whenever I want it,” and I think that’s my concern where these books that put forward this system that’s supposed to—a formula that’s supposed to give you a good marriage is when it’s gendered.  It lends itself more easily to being weaponized as a form of control and to justify an abuser’s distorted mindset and prop up their justification.  So if you do away with that genderedness, it kind of takes away a little bit of that element of it.  But yeah.  It was jarring to go through that and see those needs for men.

Ngina: Yeah.  Yeah.  And the interesting—to your point, Bethany, and—the thing about—he was doing that thing, Sheila, of saying one thing and then say another thing kind of like speaking out of both sides of his mouth.  It’s like, “Oh, yeah, so men need this, but that doesn’t mean that your man need this or,”—it’s like, “Listen to your marriage.”  But then a couple of sentences later he says, “But this is what men need.  These are the top five needs of men.”  So he just kept doing that evangelical thing that people do.  They say this thing, and then they issue caveats against that thing.  And then they double down on the thing they’re saying it isn’t the thing.  I think that’s—I wrote about this last week.  And somebody wrote to me and say, “No.  But this book is not addressing unhealthy or controlling or emotionally—it’s for emotionally safe marriage.”  But I’m like, “Have you looked at the title?  The subtitle that used to be.  How to affair-proof marriage.”  That’s not going to attract—that’s literally targeting a specific audience that is feeling like how do I fix my marriage that—because probably safe marriages are not thinking, “Oh, my husband is going to have an affair.”  (inaudible) that’s going to happen.  But anyway, my point was that when he uses this gender things and issues caveat, it doesn’t help the person who is in an unsafe marriage because an unsafe spouse is always looking for something to justify their actions or inactions and irresponsibility.  So they’re not going to—excuse me.  So if the wife says, “Oh, but he say that not every man has this,” he will say, “No.  I am in that part that requires a sexually—that requires a hot wife, that requires you to provide me free labor.”  So he’s assuming that every person that’s going to read this book is filled with integrity and maturity and all that.  But literally, his entire book is targeting people who are in really problematic marriages and where spouses are going to go for the thing that justifies them staying exactly the way they are, unsafe, harmful.  The caveats do nothing.  Me and you keep saying this.  And other people keep saying it.  It doesn’t matter what you say if your entire preface is just not holding it up.  You can’t issue caveats.  It doesn’t help.

Sheila: Yeah.  And I think that’s really important what you’re saying.  Because when you look at the differences between the 2010 version and the 2022 version, he was much more overt that this is a man’s need.  But now it’s like he knows he can’t say that, so he does the caveat thing.  But it’s still all in there.  It’s like what he did with the chapters, I think, is he added in each chapter—if he was talking about it being a man’s need like physical attractive wife, for instance, right?  What he did now was he made it a physically attractive spouse, and he added some anecdotes about what women need too.  How women need men to have hygiene and stuff which weren’t in the earlier version.  So he tries to both sides it.  But the overall message is still this is really a man’s need.  And so it’s like he’s trying to make it both/and.  But you can’t fix it when the fundamental premise is wrong.  And his fundamental premise is men are like this.  Women are like this.  And we need to take people at face value that this is what is going to lead to an intimate marriage when no.  Because people can be wrong.  He says, “If your spouse feels disrespected, they’re disrespected,” or, “If your spouse feels like you’re not meeting their needs, then you’re not doing enough.”  It’s like, well, no.  Your spouse could just be being abusive and not reasonable.  We don’t take them at face value for that.  There is a standard.

Bethany: Yeah.  And that’s the thing—oh, sorry.  Go ahead.

Ngina: Yeah.  I felt like he took this cultural tropes and things that—because he say that he did this service in his office.  And he say that a lot of people came to him—throughout the book, he’ll describe stuff that comes through his office in terms of behavior.  And I’m like, “That is really bad if that has actually really happened.”  So he has all these problematic issues coming through his office.  And he’s like, “I’m taking a survey of all these people, and I have 40,000 gazillion questions.  And this is what I’ll base a whole book on.”  So it’s like people are telling him their problems, and he’s saying, “Okay.  This is a baseline for that.  So men say they want A, B, C, D, so I’m going to make a book about how men need this.  Women are complaining that men are not doing A, B, C, D, so I’m going to make a book about that,” as opposed to what, Sheila, you’re saying and Bethany is, no.  We all hold back and figure out what’s healthy, what leads to everybody flourishing, what’s safe, and then we invite people into that.  It’s not what you’re entitled to.  And Sheila has a saying.  How does a human being—God grant a human being an emotional need for somebody else to lose weight?  Because part of the attractiveness thing was you need to—it was weight, clothes, and—

Bethany: Make up.  Yeah.

Ngina: - make up.  How does God give—what kind of a God is that that gives a man a need for his wife to actually lose weight for—not a preference.  Because I get that couples—we all can have preferences.  I want this height.  Preferences.  That’s how we get married to the people or partner up with whoever we want to partner to because they have qualities that we admire and those include physical.  But to say that God has given a man an emotional need for a wife to either lose weight, wear makeup, this kind of clothes is literally—to me doesn’t make sense about the kind of God that you’re talking about because that is basically getting—having the need to control another person.  And the thing that got me about the weight thing—I was like people exist in different bodies.  Whether you’re a larger body, do you have more fat, it doesn’t matter.  For you to write a whole book and tell men that, “Hey, God wired you—He has given you an emotional need for your wife to look a certain way,” that is like a colonizing sort of mindset when it comes to I cannot be happy until I get yours.  I get your body the way exactly or I use it the way I want to.  It serves me.  You give me free labor the way I wanted to.  For an author to write a fat phobia field book and say that’s one of the needs of emotional—that men have emotional needs, it’s all other stuff.  But some of that stuff was sounding out to me, and I’m like, “Dude.  This is wrong.”

Bethany: Yeah.  Exactly what you just said because going back to, Sheila what you said, is that we can ‘t just take people with what they say because, for example, abusers have cognitive distortions and a distorted belief system that makes them entitled to control and to have their needs met first.  And, therefore, they feel justified acting in a way that will bring that about.  So then when he goes into so much detail about how the woman should look and that it’s the husband’s needs, my brain is just going red flag, red flag, red flag.  And these can be very basic parts of a woman’s autonomy that are reflective of her personhood.  So to say that she should surrender that to her husband because he has a need for her to look a certain way is just justifying a level of entitlement that can really undermine a woman’s autonomy.  And this is what I noted in it is that I wrote, “Entitlement especially sexual and emotional entitlement is a core driver of coercive control and abuse.”  So yeah.  Exactly like you guys.  Reading through all the words he devoted to the specifications, the ways that women can improve them, I was just like, Sheila, like what you said.  I don’t think—I think there’s a cognitive distortion going on that we see very often in abusers, and that’s so dangerous.

Sheila: Okay.  So here’s what he wrote in the earlier version.  Okay.  He refers to being married to a wife, who has gained 100 pounds as a prison sentence.  And then he says, ““She should try to look the way her husband likes her to look.  She should resemble the woman he married.  Does that mean a woman must stay eternally young? Of course not, but getting old is not an excuse for gaining weight and dressing like a bag lady.”  And I find this so interesting because men have just as much propensity to be obese in North American society as women do.  But women, at least, had kids, right?  Not all women.  But a large proportion of women have had children which does tend to make you gain weight.  Men haven’t.  So I just find this amazing that it’s like women who are being lambasted for gaining weight when, to be blunt as well, a man’s excess weight may make sex much more difficult than a woman’s excess weight.  So a man’s excess weight impacts their sex life more than a woman’s excess weight does.  And yet, these authors are always coming down on women’s excess weight.  So I had two commenters leave comments about this particular aspect.  And one said, “His Needs, Her Needs led me down a path of extreme dieting.  My now ex husband didn't seem attracted to me, so I figured I wasn't meeting his need of an attractive wife.”  And another woman said—

Bethany: So sad.

Sheila: Yeah.  She said, “This book really ruined our marriage. I did not live up to his expectations of beauty, which Harley names as a need of men.  I also didn't share his hobbies and activity level.  And my ex beat me over the head with that book.  And he had an excuse handed to him for what he did to end our marriage.” So yeah.  And, again, I just want to reiterate.  He’s saying that men have this need for—and he does say these are the top five needs of men, so not all men have each of these needs.  And he does say that sex is the biggest need for men, and affection is the biggest need for women.  So he’s not saying a physical attractive wife is the biggest need, but he still names it.  But then he says women need open and honest communication, and women need intimate conversation.  And women need affection.  And it’s like do you not even realize that you are saying that women are actually more in touch with Jesus then—with the heart of Jesus.  And women are more in touch with what intimacy really means.  And women are more emotionally mature.  That is what you are saying, Willard Harley, but he doesn’t ever admit that.  He just frames it as, “No.  These are all equal.”  

Bethany: Yeah.  I think too another just jarring thing that—for me when I was reading this book and I—when he quotes the husband—I think the husband’s name is Josh—saying that his wife was just eating like mad and blew up like a balloon.  I’m thinking, “This warrants some curiosity about a potential eating disorder.”  So what he describes is what we would see potentially as binge eating disorder.  And eating disorders are very complex mental health conditions, and the fact that, as a psychologist, he didn’t have any curiosity about why.  Why was this behavior taking place in her life?  No.  He’s just condescending and tells her that she is not holding up her end of the bargain and then details this diet plan.  So I even just think, as a psychologist, he’s failing to really care for and have any kind of clinical curiosity about what’s driving this behavior.  

Sheila: And I don’t know if it’s the same anecdote.  But isn’t that the one where she took his advice and she lost 40 pounds in 6 weeks or something insane like that?  

Bethany: Yeah.  He details a diet plan.  And the other thing that really bothers me—and this is what you were saying, Ngina, is that he may give this caveats about mutuality and we all deserve this.  But if you just look at his anecdotes and his stories, it paints a very different picture.  And there is this pattern of him really vilifying women and painting them in horrible ways.  For Brittany and Josh, he really paints her that she’s like deceptive, and she tricked him and trapped him.  And now his marriage is a prison sentence and that she shouldn’t have lost that weight if she wasn’t going to keep it off.  So a very misogynistic, cruel way to frame these women’s voices and stories and these anecdotes.  And just over and over I couldn’t believe the way that he described these women and how his voice and framing seemed to generally side with the men and then leave out the context of women.

Sheila: I have an example of that exact thing.  Okay?  Because I found this story so funny.  And it was exactly this.  It was the framing.  It’s like there’s not any one sentence that is terrible.  It’s just there’s something seriously weird going on here.  So he has this story of John and Mary.  And I need to tell you about John and Mary from the earlier version.  We talked a lot about John and Mary—the story of John and Mary in Great Sex Rescue because he explains how the love bank works.  He uses John and Mary to explain how when you’re putting in deposits your love bank gets really high.  But then when you withdraw, it gets low, and that’s when you’re vulnerable to affairs is when the love bank gets low.  And in the original version that we read, Mary is really busy with the kids.  John ends up having an affair.  But when he has this affair because his sexual needs are being met, he’s able to be nicer to his wife.  It’s the most bizarre thing.  And then somehow the wife finds out, and this is terrible.  But it’s like he’s almost portraying their marriage as being better because of an affair.  So anyway, he took all that out.  So he stops their story much earlier now and just doesn’t include it.  But here’s how he frames this, okay?  So they’re married.  John and Mary are married.  And they have a little child named Tiffany.  But after Tiffany—I don't know how old she is like four or five, six, something like that.  Mary decides to go back to school.  Okay?  And he says this, “School consumes a lot of energy and what is left she devotes to housekeeping and caring for Tiffany.  And so now Mary seldom spends time with John and rarely plays tennis on Saturdays.  Instead on the weekends, she does housework and catches up on homework for her Monday classes.  And John’s account, in Mary’s love bank, holds steady because John is helping her meet a very special need in her life right now, completing her education.  But Mary’s account in John’s love bank is dropping slowly and steadily because John begins wondering what happened to the woman he married.  She seems lost in her books, and she’s always so busy.”  And it’s like okay.  So she’s gone back to school.  And now all  of her time—free time is spent on housework and caring for the kid, and he’s like, “Why aren’t you playing tennis with me?”  I’m just dying.  

Bethany: Yeah.  That story is rocky from the beginning too because there’s this part where they go on one date.  And then he asks her out on another date.  And she can’t go because she has some other commitment.  But she’s very clear that she still wants to go out on the date with him, but she can’t.  And his reaction to that is such a big red flag.  Can I just read this part, Sheila?

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.

Bethany: Yeah.  Yeah.  “But the next time John calls Mary for a date she has to turn him down.  She says she is truly sorry, but she has a commitment she set up many weeks ago.  She quickly adds that she is free the next night if John would be interested.  But what happens to Mary’s account in John’s love bank as a result of this slightly negative encounter?  ‘She definitely sounded sorry she can’t go out with me tonight,’ John muses.  ‘I can’t expect her to be available just anytime.  Besides she did suggest that we go out tomorrow night, I’m sure she really likes me.’  No matter how much John tried to reassure himself the experience leaves him feeling slightly uncomfortable.  Mary’s account in John’s love bank is debited one unit.”  So because she didn’t enthusiastically put everything aside, that’s a negative experience for him.  So her life?  It’s getting in that way of him having enthusiastically right away what he wants, and that’s a negative thing for him even though she’s so clear that she still wants to go out with him.  And I feel like this kind of sets the tone for when women are criticized is when other things like their child or their career or their own exhaustion disrupts the level of care that the husband is used to receiving and then she gets criticized for that.  And I just thought that was so telling how even early on in this account of John and Mary she’s penalized for just basically having another obligation.  That’s a very negative experience for him.  Very telling.

Ngina: Yeah.  And can I read something from the same story that I wrote—I marked up as super problematic?  So it’s  where he describes where Mary and John—actually, Mary—and it’s still the same illustration.  Where Mary ended the relationship.  So at some point.  So he writes that, “He begins—so John begins to criticize the way she does things which make love bank withdrawals.  He also starts to focus his attention on her in a way that makes her feel uncomfortable and frightened.  More love bank withdrawal.  So Mary abruptly tells John that she needs a little (inaudible).”  So here he is—the author is describing a textbook I am not feeling safe in this relationship.  He’s describing aggression.  He’s describing mistreatment all the way to I need to get a break from this guy.  I don’t think I’m safe.  I don’t think this is safe.  It even asks—(inaudible) saying, “Girl, I think you’re right.  This is not safe.”  

Sheila: Get out.  

Ngina: Right.  Get out.  But then you know what he’s doing?  This is just a love bank withdrawal from John.  He so impacted by what she’s doing that there’s a withdrawal.  He’s describing something that makes her uncomfortable.  He’s criticizing it, and he’s not calling it out for what it is.  It’s just like this is just an issue of love bank.  Withdrawing there, withdrawing there, and once they fix that it will be fine.  Basically, the whole thing—illustration he’s giving is problematic right from when they were dating to the relationship.  There is nothing healthy about anything, but he never really addresses it.  Just talks about withdrawals and all this bizarre thing they have to keep in balance.  And he’s very particular about that.  But never particular about the actually issues that are happening and inviting people to show up as grownups.  Okay, John. You’re being weird to Mary.  Not even weird.  You’re mistreating her.  She’s feeling unsafe, and she has every right to leave.  And then he describes—okay.  This is how John actually addressed his issues and how Mary was able to feel safe and her desire to just continue the relationship.  But no.  He does not go there.  He’s all like this is just usual relationship stuff that can be fixed very quickly with my methodology (cross talk).

Sheila: And he says that all the time. 

Ngina: All the time.  Yeah.  It’s always about my methods and framework and processes are 100% perfect.  Just you need to follow them.  I have the answers.  I have cracked the marriage code.  And you all just need to do what I’m telling you to do.  Once you do it, you’re good.  And I was like, “How is it,”—in fact, I was telling my husband the other day that any person who says—like say a doctor.  You’re a doctor.  You treat patients.  You’re maybe a general practitioner.  And then patients walk in, and maybe somebody has high blood pressure.  If three—five patients walk in that they have high blood pressure.  And you tell them, “This one thing should fix all of you all.  The five of you.”  People would be like, “But bodies are different.  Everybody is going through a different thing.  They have other underlying issues.”  It’s so different.  So you can’t have just one thing that you give everybody and say that will fix all of your issues, but that’s what he does.  That he has this code, and all marriages will be fixed if they just follow it.  He says almost—it’s his all over the place.  

Sheila: Oh yeah.  He says 100% guaranteed, doesn’t he?  It’s weird.  It’s weird.

Bethany: Yeah.  And there’s even a part—an anecdote where he describes a drug—an alcohol-addicted couple, and he puts them on a budget.  And that enables them to overcome their addictions.  And I’m just like—so he takes complex issues, and he just way oversimplifies them and turns it into this transactional nature of balancing out these love bank units when I’m like these are human beings with complex needs, issues, feelings.  It’s just not that way.  And even going back to John and Mary, he talks about how after she pushes pause because she was feeling, I think, a bit pressured and fearful it says that John feels devastated.  And this encounter registers as one of the all time painful experiences of his life.  And then it describes how he goes on to badger her and call her repeatedly trying to get her to come back to the relationship after she was so clear about asking for breathing room.  So he’s punishing her for simply establishing a boundary.  And that’s his anecdote to launch the book.  And yeah.  There’s no evaluation of his entitlement or why this is so problematic.  It’s just yeah.  Let’s look at these love bank withdrawals.  Cha-ching.  Cha-ching.  Cha-ching.  Like Ngina (cross talk).  It’s just very transactional.

Sheila: Yeah.  And that is a central point that he’s making is that we have these love banks.  And if you want your marriage to be successful, you just need to make sure that your spouse’s love bank is filled up.  And so you need to make—you need to figure out what fills up their love bank, and then you just need to do it.  And then the feelings of love will return.  Because when we get married, we have these feelings of love for each other, but then those feelings disappear.  And that’s when problems start, and that’s when people have affairs.  So instead we just need to figure out how to fill up each other’s love banks and how to not make withdrawals.  And it’s like okay.  But it isn’t just about that because, like we said, there are standards.  You aren’t supposed to badger someone.  If you are badgering someone, that isn’t safe, right?  And maybe Mary shouldn’t be filling up John’s love bank because maybe John isn’t safe for her, right?  And that’s what just never gets discussed.  And I find this so interesting because he does claim that—well, he is a clinical psychologist, which I think is—Bethany, this bugs you because you work in the mental health field.  So there are certain ways that we should be practicing.  And yet, he doesn’t use research in this book at all.  He only uses his own stuff.  He does not use any peer reviewed data at all.  And in fact, he makes outrageous claims like 60% of marriages are—have infidelity in them.  No.  They don’t.  Not anywhere near that.  I know people always talk like affairs are everywhere.  But I think most peer reviewed studies put it at 20 to 22%.  And in Christian circles, we might add porn to that, and that would certainly bring it up to 50% if you include porn.  But he wasn’t including porn.  He was talking about infidelity.  So how can you even trust someone who says something that off?

Bethany: Yeah.  And I expect a citation.  I expect the evidence to back that up when you make these statements like that.  For a book that purports to solve all these issues and is based on all of his work and is so helpful, show us the evidence that backs this up.  It just doesn’t come off as credible.

Ngina: Yeah.  Yeah.  Like there’s somewhere else where he says that the reason—I think it’s at the beginning.  He says that the reason there’s divorce rates—apparently, divorce—the rate kind of (inaudible) at some place.  But right now he say it’s climbing.  And the reason the divorce rate is climbing back up is because people are no longer willing to partner up with one person for life.  No.  Again, no citation.  Just his own opinion, which he presents as this is why people are not willing to stay with one partner for life, and that’s why the divorce rate is going up.  

Sheila: I have a fixed it for you that I’m going to put out on—I have that exact quote.  I’ll put it out sometime the week that this podcast comes out.  But yeah.  He says that marriage counselors before the 1970s had a much easier time because people were willing to commit for life.  It’s like no.  No.  No.  No.  There was no no-fault divorce.  There was no no-fault divorce, so people didn’t get divorced.  As soon as no-fault divorce came in, the divorce rate skyrocketed in the 1970s and has been coming down ever since with a slight uptick around COVID.  All these people who say divorce rates are increasing—they’re not.  They were increasing in the 70s and early 80s, but they’ve been coming down ever since.    

Ngina: Books like this.  Yeah.  (inaudible) a lot of Christians were like, “Wow.  We need to stop divorce.  We need to attack divorce.”  And it’s like—because you listen to your pastors and because you—and your pastors read you books like His Needs, Her Needs.  And they believe that author because he’s a clinical psychologist.  He knows things that we do not know.  But—yeah.

Sheila: Our friend, Gretchen Baskerville—Ngina and I talk to her a lot.  So she wrote The Life-Saving Divorce.  She was the one who alerted me to this stat, which I wasn’t aware of.  But the number of men who died from accidents fell after no-fault divorce came in.  There’s a whole lot of men, who fell into wells before no-fault divorce.  Women’s suicide rates went down after no-fault divorce came in because people were trapped.  You couldn’t get divorced unless you could prove that there was an affair or something, and that’s really hard to prove.  And so people were stuck in abusive, unhappy marriages.  And then when suddenly no-fault divorce came in, yeah, all these people got divorced because there was this major pent up demand.  So I think people look at the 60s—the 50s and 60s and go, “See how much more people were committed to marriage,” and it’s like all those women were on antidepressants.  

Bethany: They were trapped.  They were trapped.  Yeah.

Ngina: They were trapped.  Yeah.  And just because people stay married doesn’t mean that there’s anything—I’m not saying that everybody who is married is having a hard time.  But I’m just saying just because people are married we should just be saying, “Oh, yeah.  You see those days?  Our grandmas and my great-aunt, everybody stayed married.”  I’m like okay.  Look at your great-aunt.  Does she look happy?  It’s not just about upholding the institution or whatever they call.  It’s like let’s look at the quality.  Let’s look at the health of the people in that institution.  And then you know.  Okay.  That’s something we should not be telling people like just hang in there because the marriage is important.  Because we keep saying the marriage is not more—God did not create marriage as—and that was the first thing on earth.  Just be married.  It’s like no.  Human beings are the most important thing on—human beings are the important thing in that equation.  So just saying that people used to stay married and now we should stay married—and also it ignores the fact that a lot of—is it like almost half of marriages—of divorces are for very serious reasons.  So Harley saying that it’s just because people just don’t want to hang in there and be serious and stay with one partner—research says no.  That’s not why.  That’s the thing that I find so—it just kind of break my brain sometimes because we listen to pastors and we read these books.  And they’re talking about the sacredness of marriage, the—how God—it’s a sacred—it’s a commitment that you both made.  And you should hang in there.  We all have lifted marriage to this place.  And that’s Christians.  And then we, on the same note, say Christians just divorce for no reason whatsoever.  What is what?  We are either being taught to revere this and actually doing it, or we are not.  Therefore, we just end.  We just take off the moment we—(inaudible) or the moment she’s like, “I’m going to hang out with my friends.  I won’t hang out with you.”  But it’s not.  People actually—and I think there’s research.  Correct me if I’m wrong.  To show that Christians actually hang in—they hang in there longer than they should because their beliefs actually teach them to persevere, to love, to pray, to see God.  Not just the marriage but to see this as an act of obedience and service to God.  So they’re not running out.  So for him to say it’s because people don’t want to stay married or they don’t want to be with one partner and he’s addressing Christians, I’m like what actually you going to (inaudible) those kind of people.

Sheila: Yeah.  No.  Exactly.  Okay.  I want to talk about how the book is just sexist in general.  There’s so much sexist stuff in here.  We’ve already dealt with the attractive thing.  But even that episode with John and Mary, one thing that really got to me is that he praised this husband as being totally committed to his family.  And the only evidence that we have that this husband is totally committed to his family is that he let his wife go back to school because the wife is still doing all the housework.  The wife is still primarily responsible for the childcare.  The wife is doing all of these things, but he blames her for the marriage getting more distant because sex—because sex isn’t happening as much.  And that’s disappointing the husband even though he is still leaving the housework for the wife.  So it’s like he could be totally committed to his family, but she’s still picking up all the slack.  And then it’s her fault when he feels disappointed when sex isn’t happening.  Women are painted as being the ones in the wrong when it’s really men who aren’t—who are leaving the majority of the work to the women.

Ngina: Yeah.  Because he still paints it as a need he has regardless.  It’s a need he has for somebody to—he’s entitled to have free labor.  So no matter what it always comes back to—yeah.  Even though I’m saying that she might have a need for domestic support as well, but he has—you might have that—you might want.  But yours is just more like a want.  You’re actually wired to provide him free labor.  So it never is logic even though he issues caveats.  It never really balances.  His logic never pans out because he say—

Sheila: Well, he also said—I wonder if I took the—oh yeah.  Here it is.  He says that it is reasonable to assume that men don’t do housework because men aren’t naturally wired for it.  And they don’t have an instinct for it.  That’s wild.  So you know what?  Women are not naturally wired or have an instinct for this anyway.  You know what women have is practice because women didn’t have the luxury of saying no to a lot of this stuff.  It’s crazy.  

Bethany: Yeah.  The other thing too—going back to what you guys were saying is that woman’s struggles become the problem.  And they justify the husband stepping out on his marriage.  So the woman’s struggles aren’t context.  Valuable context.  So it’s not that she has a newborn baby or three children under the age of five in a tiny house.  No.  Yeah.  They become the reason and justification for him to go elsewhere.  And so this idea that her struggles are really moral failing or selfishness instead of being deserving of empathy and consideration and how can this husband come alongside and support his wife.  In one of the anecdotes, he talks about how once his wife went back to school.  It says, “Her drive for her degree is a booby trap.”  So, again, her autonomy, her wanting to go back for higher education, it’s what sabotaged their relationship and just like their relationship was bliss until their daughter, Tiffany, came along.  And so, again, it’s this idea that women, as long as they can meet men’s needs with their body, with their time, with their invisible, it’s all okay.  But should they want to do something for themselves or care for their children, it disrupts what the husband has come to expect.  And now that’s the problem, and he is justified in stepping out.  

Sheila: Yeah.  I love the way he framed a story later about a guy named Phil and Charlene.  So the problem was that Phil wasn’t making very much money, and they were in this really tiny house.  And Charlene was just—she’s stuck at home with the kids.  And she’s finding this really difficult.  And so she’s talking to him about it.  And she really needs her husband’s support.  And so she’s asking him to do more with the kids.  She’s asking him to help around the house when he’s home.  And then Willard Harley describes it this way.  “Life once so pleasant for Phil rapidly became intolerable.  He tried to escape by watching television, but that didn’t work well because Charlene continually asked him to get up and help.”  It’s like poor Phil.  His wife is just—keeping asking him to help with the children.  Yeah.  Because they’re your kids and the house is yours too.  And then he talks about how Phil starts spending more time away from home because how can you expect Charlene to—or how can you expect Phil to put with all this negative stuff Charlene is saying all the time.  And he never talks about how Charlene’s needs are totally, totally valid.  

Bethany: Yeah.  What’s important is that the children running around and him—and her asking him for help it cuts in on his relaxation time.  And that’s the issue.  Yeah.  Yeah.

Ngina: Yeah.  As I read the book and especially what you guys are bringing up, the question that comes to mind all the time is what were these guys doing before they got themselves a wife because they didn’t jump from mama’s house to wife.  Even in their mother’s house, not many men are coddled like that by their mothers.  They do stuff around the house.  But suddenly, it’s like okay.  God put an emotional need for men to have domestic support, right?  So at what point does that get activated?  Just when they are married.  How does this God thing work?

Sheila: Yeah.  Does a 14-year-old boy have a need for domestic support?

Ngina: Yeah.  And who is providing that?  And the 25-year-old bachelor—the single men who are plenty—who is providing that emotional—because he’s phrasing it as a need.  So what’s providing that?  They’re single.  They’re living their whole lives.  They’re living by themselves.  Who is providing that?  Such that when they finally get married suddenly—because then you say, oh, it’s a transfer.  You transfer from this, and then you transfer it to the wife.  There is literally nobody.  But now that there’s somebody it’s like, oh, no.  No.  No.  You are the one to meet that need that hasn’t had all this time.  But suddenly, now he has one.  Because if it’s a need, it literally should be there all—we have a need for a healthy partnership.  But some of these things just exist once the wife is there.

Bethany: That’s such a good point.  Such a good point.

Sheila: He also says this really funny bit.  Okay.  So he’s talking about—he admits this.  And this is something that’s new in the new version is he admits that there’s been this revolution in male attitudes towards housework that was supposed to have taken place, right?  So he says, “This revolution was supposed to have happen.  Just as women are working more in the workforce, men were supposed to work more in the home.  But that really hasn’t taken place, and men need domestic support as much as ever.”  And so he’s not challenging—he’s not saying, “Hey, men, you really should have stepped up to the plate.”  He’s saying, “No.  Everyone said that men were going to embrace housework, but men haven’t.  And so women need to understand that,” right?  And then he goes through this big, long section on how to negotiate who does what in marriage.  And basically—and he has this—it’s really formulaic.  And some of it isn’t terrible.  I have to admit.  But the end result is that when you’re dividing up tasks if someone really—if the husband really, really, really doesn’t want to do it, then it defaults to the wife.  And so he could theoretically just default to, “No.  I don’t want to do anything,” and then she would still have to do it because there’s all these ways that she can try to show him that he could be more involved.  But ultimately, if he doesn’t want to, it defaults to her.    

Ngina: Yeah.  It was just exhausting reading that part and other things that he goes into this incredible, laborious detail.  And you are like, “Where are we going with this?”  And you’re like, “Okay.  Maybe at the end of it he will wrap this up with some really good impact point.”  And it’s like no.  It’s literally just how he started this chapter that he is entitled to free labor, so I conclude with that part that he’s entitled to free labor.  That really didn’t help.  He’s just literally painting it now in even more minute details about how no matter what you are still entitled—you are still entitled to her time, her body, her mind, her resources.  Everything is about the man.  No matter what else he says it’s about can you please the man.  Can you meet his needs?  Yeah.  I can meet your needs, but you don’t have a need for this like he does.  And these are the things that she actually, completely, totally needs as well.  It’s a partnership.   He keeps saying, “Year.  You also have a need for partnership,” but it’s like literally partnership is everything.  But you’re putting up hierarchies and saying, “Actually, romantic love,”—so things like—I’m like that is not partnership if it’s just he only has that need, and she has this need.  So how is that mutual?  There’s a lot of language that doesn’t—yeah.

Bethany: Yeah.  Just that domestic bliss fantasy that he lays out in the book.  It just really hammers home this idea that—yeah.  He cannot be negatively impacted by the way his wife is meeting other people’s needs or meeting other duties.  He can’t be aware of that.  The children need to be quiet.  I was just thinking—so I don’t have children.  But when I was reading that, I was thinking, “What do parents think when they read his description of this domestic fantasy?”  Do either one of you guys want to explain what he’s talking about here.

Ngina: I don’t have kids too.  (cross talk), but I have nephews and nieces.  And I have friends with little babies and kids.  And there is—that place is a fantasy.  This is what he wants.  And I got a sense that this is a lot of what he wants himself.  I don't know.  Sheila would have to—

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s completely unreasonable.  And what I find so interesting too is that he says that women, on the other hand, have a need for a husband to be a good father.  They have a need for a husband to be involved in the family.  And it’s like how is that a female need.  Don’t we both want our spouses to be involved in the family?  And, again, it paints the woman as the default.  So she’s the default parent.  He doesn’t actually need her to be a good parent because she’s just the default.  But she needs him to step up to the plate.  So in all cases, she ends up being the default for all of this labor and for the kids, and he keeps repeatedly in multiple anecdotes paints men as being jealous of their kids or resentful of their kids because now their wives aren’t any fun because the wives are involved with the kids.

Bethany: Yeah.  Or their bodies have changed or they’re not getting very much sleep.  So yeah.  Anything that takes away from his experience of his wife meeting all these needs for him.

Ngina: Yeah.  There’s a place where he actually identifies—I can’t remember the name of the actual illustration.  But he talks about how a husband isn’t getting involved with the kids.  And then he actually identifies it.  He says the husband, his name, is being an absentee father.  He literally says it.  He’s an absentee father, and the wife is not—won’t stop talking about that.  But then instead of saying, “Okay, dude, what you need to do is become engaged and involved as a father,” no.  She gets a list of what to do to get this guy engaged as a father.  He literally says the guy is an absentee dad but doesn’t tell him he needs to roll back in and become engaged and present with his children.  He goes back to the love thing—love bank thing that she needs to do this.  She gets a list of the things that she can do to encourage the husband to become involved with his—as a parent.  I’m like how is it that over and over again he describes problems, even sometimes calls them out by name, and then just leaves it there.

Sheila: Yeah.  And then it’s still up to the woman to fix it.  Yeah.   

Ngina: There you go.  Yeah.  It’s still a woman to fix it.  And then you’re (inaudible), and then people love this book.  I mean the feedback that I get from people is like, “No.  This is the best book.  This is,”—I’m like no.  This is, like what you’re calling, Sheila, is seeing the societal expectations, tropes, and he just bundled all of them in a book. (cross talk).  Yeah.

Sheila: Yeah.  He really did.  Let’s talk about how he says women need financial provision, so women need their husband to provide.  I found this chapter actually the most out of date, the most crazy.  I mean there’s a lot of the things that are crazy.  I was really offended by the sex chapter.  We’ll get to that in a minute.  But this one I just found the most bizarre.  Because he said even if a woman makes a lot of money, she still needs—the husband still has to be the one to earn the money for the family’s needs.  And it’s okay if the woman earns the money for the family’s wants, but women will be upset if the husband doesn’t work whereas husbands won’t be upset if the wife doesn’t work.  And I’m like do you know any Millennial or Gen Zed couples.  My husband is a pediatrician.  And most of his colleagues are female.  I have female doctors in my extended family.  A lot of them have stay-at-home dads as spouses, and it works great.   The men just can’t make as much as money.  She can make a lot of money working not as many hours, and so he’s the stay-at-home parent.  And it’s fine.  This is the thing.  People get to choose what works best for them.  And the idea that no matter what even if she’s the family—even if she’s a family physician, he has to earn enough money to meet the family’s needs.  And her money is just the extra.  That’s weird.  

Ngina: Yeah.  It’s really weird.

Bethany: Yeah.  And it’s hurting everyone.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And I want to say.  I have no problem with stay-at-home moms.  I was a stay-at-home mom.  One of my daughters is a stay-at-home mom.  One of my daughters is a work-from-home mom.  But my kids are both homeschooling.  Joanna Sawatsky is homeschooling.  She’s also a work-at-home mom.  We are all for moms being the primary one to raise their kids if that’s what works for your family and that’s what you choose.  So I’m not against that.  I love the idea of parents being home with their kids.  But the idea that it has to be the woman and that everybody wants this is just simply untrue.  It’s just not true.

Ngina: Yeah.  That particular quote I have highlighted.  And he says—can I read it?

Sheila: Yeah.  

Ngina: How he phrased it.  He phrases like, “In truth, most women do marry a man expecting his partnership in financial support.  They want their husbands to partner with them in supporting their family together.”  Again, that thing of, you know—“supporting their family together and managing their finances together.  Most men do not have that same need.”  To say that women marry—have—which women are you speaking to?  They may want financial stability.  So what they do is go out and get a job or start a business.  They don’t say, “Oh, I’ll wait until I’m married, and then I’ll have—suddenly, I’ll have this need for a husband to support me.”  Especially where I come from in Kenya, everybody is real—it’s a developing country.  So it’s not like people have the option—unless you live in the rural areas, but you’re both working.  You can’t say I’ll—we are going to survive on one salary.  Or we are going to live on one salary.  Or I’ll stay at home with the kids, and he’ll go and work the farm because that’s the way distribution of labor works.   It’s like no.  Both people want to show up and take care of themselves, so that they can take care of their family, so they can take care of both of them.  So the idea that women have a need and men do not have—he’s saying men do not have a need of—do not have a need for financial support.  So here’s how I thought about it.  So maybe he’s talking about how men have been socialized to think like, “I’m the king of the castle.  And whatever I bring at home is sufficient, and she has to live with that.”  It’s not like an actual need like—he has this idea of what masculinity or being a man looks like.  And maybe he’s describing part of that.  It’s like—because I think he was talking about a survey that—some of the proof that he has that men say they don’t have this need.  It’s like yeah.  Because they can just show up or not show up any time, but if it’s her, she has to think about who is going to feed the baby, who is going to take care of myself.  I have to provide.  So from an early age, you’re taught to be responsible and to think about yourself because you just have to show up for yourself.  Women are human beings, and they have a brain.  And they think and they function.  So I don't know.  It’s just that rationale that’s kind of breaking the brain thing.  Women have a need for the man to provide for them.  But women are also showing up and working.   How is that a need that he provides for you and you don’t?  Anyway, it’s just (inaudible).

Bethany: Yeah.  It reminds me of when someone is sort of just so—I was going to say high on their own supply.  He creates this system.  It has all of the answers, all of the solutions.  And he’s so committed to it that he pigeon holes people into it even when it just doesn’t even make logical sense, and it’s harming the man and the woman.  I just would expect some flexibility, but he’s just very rigid with his system.  And yeah.  It sometimes just comes across flatly as this is illogical.  It doesn’t make any sense to me.  But yet, he’s just very committed to this is the way it is, and this is how it will work.  And if you don’t do it this way, then your marriage is headed for disaster.

Sheila: Yeah.  He does say too that women resent having to work whereas men don’t resent having to work.  And I read that.  And I’m like I don’t think that—I mean some women probably really do want to stay at home with their kids probably more than men do.  And it can be a disappointment if the finances just don’t allow it, right?  I completely get that.  I would have been disappointed if I couldn’t as well, so I completely get that.  But as a Canadian, I wonder how much of this—because I was reading this is the maternity leave aspect.  If I were in a country where I had to return to work at six weeks postpartum or even earlier—I remember talking to our editor of one of our books, and she went on maternity leave.  And so she told us, “I won’t be available for three months, but our publisher has a really generous maternity leave policy.  I’ll be gone for three months, but then I’ll be back.”  And I’m like holy cow.  Three months?  That’s ridiculous.  That is so ridiculous.  We take 12 months, and you can take up to 18 in Canada.  You just only get paid for the 12.  It’s just spread out over 18.  And that’s the norm for developing countries—for developed countries.  Sorry.  Like the EU, Australia, New Zealand, everybody has got close to a year pretty much.  And then in the U.S., there’s just no maternity leave.  And so I wonder how  much of this women resent having to work also has to do with maternity leave aspects.  I don't know.  As a Canadian, I just thought about that.  But anyway, I was—yes.  I mean I couldn’t even walk at six weeks, so I just don’t even know how women go back to work.  So strange.

Ngina: Yeah.  Harley is probably just thinking that what you’re saying.  Women resent not having the support they need in order to have families and to work.  And so he’s taking that as, no.  Women want to be supported financially by their husbands.  They don’t like to work without going deep into what’s the actual problem that women have.  And let’s address that.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  So anyway, okay.  Let’s talk the sex chapter.  I’ve saved this one until last.  Again, this is another one where he made major, major changes.  And it’s still a hot mess.  It is still a total, hot mess.  Ngina, you mentioned the sexual aversion thing.  Do you have that quote?  Or do you want me to find it?  Did you by any chance highlight it because it was so good?

Ngina: Let me see if I highlighted it.

Sheila: This isn’t the main part or anything, but I just found this paragraph so funny because one of the things that we said in The Great Sex Rescue is that none of the books even mentioned the idea of marital rape, right?  And didn’t even talk about consent.  And so in the middle of him—he highlights this section.  He calls it sexual aversion, so he’s talking about the sexual problems that people can have.  And one of them is aversion to sex.  And he says, “A tragic consequence of a spouse forcing sex on an unwilling spouse, marital rape, is sexual aversion.  It is a very real physical and emotional reaction that is usually very painful and can cause the victim to experience intense pain, nausea, and vomiting.  All of us have a negative reaction to being forced to do what we choose not to do.  But when it comes to sex, the negative reaction is often disabling.  When a couple comes to my office for help with their sexual relationship, I often find the wife experiencing a sexual aversion.  It is a very negative reaction.  While sometimes the reaction is purely physical, it is often emotional, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”  He doesn’t say a—so he says, “Look, some people are victims of marital rape.  And then when they come to my office, I treat it, and I say, ‘Hey, how can we get over your aversion,’ as opposed to, ‘Holy cow.  You’ve been raping your wife?  Let me tell you about some domestic violence resources.  Let me make sure that you’re safe.  Do we need to call the authorities?’”  So you said the words marital rape because you had to because I called it out in Great Sex Rescue.  But then you just left it there.  You didn’t say, “Hey, guys, don’t do this.”  

Ngina: Yeah.  I found that super strange how he will bring up a really big subject and then just leave it there.  And I still get a sense of because he’s not really—he hasn’t dived deep into the trauma and abuse and betrayal space also he doesn’t have that.  But he still feels like I need to talk about it to look—because people are now—Sheila is talking about it, and they called me out.  So let me just throw some stuff in here.  He did not invest time to actually learn about what it is that I’m handling which I found really sad because he boasts about how he has sold over two million copies of this book worldwide.  At least, man, take a bit of that money and invest in learning how to become trauma and abuse sensitive lens.  But he doesn’t.  And that’s why he would treat something like that—something like marital rape like that and then say—(inaudible) I’m trying to see where he says that then you go back to enjoying sex quite quickly.   I just have to fix them version and then—this is good.  They usually go back to enjoying sex quite quickly.  Now we have to remember that he’s the one who says that sex is a need that husband have.  So she’ll go back to giving him what he needs.  It’s all about—let’s go back to this thing that he needs very quickly.  He doesn’t even know—does not call out the trauma, does not address all the things that needs to be addressed.  What have you been doing, dude?  She is (cross talk) with you.  But he’s like, “No.  She just needs to fix her aversion.”  I’m like what is aversion.  Let’s talk about trauma because she’s traumatized.

Sheila: Yeah.  Because even the framing of it is pro husband, right?  The framing of it is, oh, no, she has a sexual aversion.  So he’s not getting the sex he needs as opposed to she has sexual trauma that you caused that she now needs to heal from.  And she now needs to be safe.  

Bethany: Yeah.  There really is this coercive element that underlines the system.  So when we look at coercion, there’s this between the lines framing of do this or else.  So overall he treats affairs as kind of inevitability if you don’t follow this and meet each other’s needs.  And then for the husband, one of their most biggest needs that he’s seen is this sexual satisfaction.  So I’m not sure how there’s not this coercive underpinning to that when the stakes are so high, and he needs this so much.  And if he gets this, maybe he’ll meet your needs.  There’s just no critical examination of the power—if there’s a power imbalance in this relationship.  There’s just so much of entitlement that’s really being framed as a need, but it’s just sexual entitlement with this coercive underpinning.  And my heart just breaks for women that really drank all of this in and men as well.  But it was horrifying reading those parts about sex and how he just breezed right past this.  And I feel like it speaks to how little he cares about these issues around trauma and abuse and power and control that it’s not even really on his radar.  That’s why this book is, I think, kind of reckless and dangerous and irresponsible.

Sheila: Well, let’s even go into how he frames sex.  So he starts off by talking about the problems that people can have with sex, right?  So he says that this is a real need that men have.  But then he goes into why it—sex often doesn’t work.  And he talks about how a woman’s first experience often isn’t very good.  And he blames her for it.  I find this so incredible.  He says that a woman’s first sexual experiences are disappointments is that (a) women don’t have as much of a sex drive and (b) they don’t have as much sexual awareness whereas men have all this sexual awareness.  And men know what feels good, and so men have an easier time having fun with sex as opposed to—okay.  First of all, a study out of University of Toronto, 2022, found that women have just as much of a likelihood as having a high libido as men do if they orgasm on their first consensual experience.  So the idea that women have a lower libido or that don’t—want sex as much is simply untrue.  It’s that women don’t have as much to want, right?  We talked about that.  There was a podcast where we do is sex like Chef Boyardee ravioli or like Nona’s ravioli that your grandma makes.  For men, ravioli is Nona’s ravioli.  And for women, it’s like Chef Boyardee straight out of a can.  And then you wonder why women say they don’t like ravioli, right?  They’re not experiencing the same thing.  But he blames women for not enjoying sex.  He says that men can’t—here.  I’ll read the exact quote.  “Unless a woman joins her husband in the sexual experience,”—meaning unless she enjoys it, “his needs for sex remain unmet,” rather than saying her needs.  So unless she enjoys it, her needs for sex remain unmet.  No.  Unless she enjoys it, his needs for sex remain unmet.  I find that mind boggling.  She’s not enjoying it.  And whose needs aren’t being met?  His.  Dude.

Ngina: Yeah.  Men are centered.  He centers the needs of men throughout the book.   Even when there is a clear problem like she is not enjoying it, instead of like, “Okay.  So what,”—and your book is so good.  The Great Sex Rescue is so good at that.  If she’s not enjoying it, how can we figure that out so that she enjoys it?  Whose job?  We can’t just say she needs to figure it out because of this orgasm gap and all that.  So let’s figure out.  It’s not like you’re not enjoying it.  You figure it out.  And you figuring out not just for yourself, by the way—you’re not figuring out how to enjoy it for yourself.  You are figuring it out so that he can have fun because if you don’t like it, you don’t enjoy it, it’s not a good experience for him because men like their wives to enjoy it.  So you’re enjoying it for his pleasure.  And so you can more want—you can want more of it.  So a lot of this is so male centered.  And the thing is he doesn’t see it.  It doesn’t seem like he sees it because he will say the same things over here.

Bethany: Yeah.  What you’re describing and the way that he handles this idea around sex and frames it with such big stakes and how important it is for men and that women should not even just participate but they should be enthusiastic and they should know how to bring about pleasure in their body so that it can please their husband when they’re a part of it, it just is so objectifying of women’s bodies.  Women, in this—for this need, it’s so clear that they aren’t full people with autonomy and personhood.  They are just a way for him to have this outlet of his sexual need being met.  And the framing of it—where like you said even when women have a problem, a glaring problem, it’s not addressed.  So to put this as a top need, it’s just—it really strips women of their personhood, and it’s so objectifying.  Add in that physical attractiveness part.  And it’s so harmful.  Yeah.  It’s very harmful and objectifying.  It doesn’t reflect the dignity of woman as a person.

Sheila: Let me read a sentence, which is one of, I think, my favorite/least favorite sentences in the whole book.  But it just sums up—because I tend to analyze the sex stuff more.  But this just sums up everything that’s wrong to me.  So he says, “Women with less energy or women who feel tired after a long, hard day often choose not to climax.”  And I swear.  I’m going to do a fixed it for you on this one too.  I asked this on our Facebook page.  I said, “Hey, do you want to fix this?”  And I think about 200 people fixed it.  They did different things to it.  But it’s like, dude, a woman who is letting you have sex when she is tired and she has no energy and isn’t climaxing isn’t choosing not to climax.  She’s being coerced into sex, or she’s having obligation sex because she feels like, well, this is just something I have to do even if he’s not coercing her.  She is not choosing not to climax.  Her choice has been taken away.  

Ngina: Exactly.  Exactly.  I mean yeah.  Some things I was reading on—I get so angry and sad at the same time because how can a clinical person be this clueless.  How is it that you can’t see this?  And you have a whole book that has sold 2 million copies about it.  The reason she isn’t climaxing is—but I guess it’s that whole thing of cluelessness in terms of how women’s bodies work.  I don't know how to—academic understanding of things.  Even the way he describes some things, and it’s like okay.  I’m good there.  There isn’t a deep dive of what is actually going on for her not to be able—because I am so sure that if it was—their roles were switched and it was the dude who couldn’t ejaculate, who couldn’t—his penis couldn’t do its thing he would have the answers for that.  But not for her.

Sheila: Yeah.  He’s treating it like her climax is optional.  His is compulsory, but hers is optional.  And if a woman is tired after a long, hard day, often having sex and orgasming can help her sleep more.  You can still have great sex when you’re tired.  Okay?  But if she’s having sex and choosing not to orgasm, so to speak—which, again, I don’t think that’s what’s really happening.  What’s really happening is she is choosing to go through the motions so that he won’t bug her and she can get to sleep faster, right?  Like I said, there’s lots of times where I’m just super exhausted, and I’m like, “Come put me to sleep, baby,” because sex helps you sleep.  But I’m not going to have sex without an orgasm because that’s not going to help you do anything.  And I understand that people have issues with orgasm, and I don’t mean—and I’m not trying to shame anyone.  We have a course on how to reach orgasm if that’s a struggle for you.  But this idea that, oh yeah, women just choose not to orgasm is like, buddy, no, they don’t.

Ngina: Yeah.  They’re telling on themselves.  

Sheila: And if they do, if women are choosing not to orgasm, it’s probably because we have given women such a shallow view of sex where this is something men so much.  And you don’t really need it.  All you need is the closeness.  And it’s like can we please get back to the idea that women deserve pleasure too.  And women’s pleasure shouldn’t be optional.  And women’s pleasure exists for her own sake, not just for his.  

Ngina: Exactly.  And she gets to choose.  She gets to choose whether she wants to have sex or not.  If you are tired, you’re not feeling like it, that’s it.  You have autonomy and agency over your body.  It’s a mutual relationship.  If you don’t want to have sex, that’s it.  And if you want to have sex and you don’t want to orgasm because that’s going to take me long—we have all these capacities to choose what we want even within the sexual act itself.  For that to be like she’s choosing it and that’s bad, that’s always bad because she’s denying him something.  Or it’s wrong.  There’s a little bit of even of nuance where it comes to okay.  I don’t want it and how much.  Is this going to be quick?  Is it going to be long?  People have that choice in how—what to do and how to do it.  But, again, that won’t work with the time—with how he frames things in this book.

Bethany: No.  In this book, it’s—the amount of pressure he places on women’s shoulders that you’ve got to be sexually available.  You’ve got to be enthusiastic.  And don’t you dare try and half ass it if you’re tired.  That’s not good enough.  He’ll know that because it’s all about quality, quantity, and mutuality.  So it’s just this unbelievable pressure to put on women.  Yeah.  That she should always be sexually available.  And then with adding this fear of if you don’t meet this top five need of men, your marriage is headed off the edge of a cliff.  It’s going to be your fault.  It’s so coercive and objectifying.

Sheila: Yeah.  And we did a podcast a couple of weeks ago on what the study says about why men cheat.  And men do not cheat because of lack of sex.  That’s been shown in peer reviewed research.  So he’s just simply wrong.

Bethany: Not according to Willard.

Sheila: Yep.  He is just simply wrong.  Okay.  Great conversation.  Any last words?  Anyone have anything that they just want to say?

Ngina: Yeah.  Can I say two last words?

Sheila: Yes.  Please do.  Oh, and I was going to ask you to—yes.  Because before we started recording, you wanted to talk about the impact of this book on non developed nations.

Ngina: Yeah.  In developing nations, global.  But before I do that, it’s something to do with (inaudible) just ending on something that you say.  He talks about how when an affair has been outed how he advises couples to approach that.  So you have an unrepentant partner, who has been outed as having an affair.  And they have refused to end the affair.  So he says he has a way that he advises—it’s horrible.  The way he advises partners to address that.  So he says—let me read.  He says that—he writes, “the exposure doesn’t end the affair immediately.  My advice regarding what you do next is different for husbands and wives.”  So he says, “I encourage most husbands to try to stick to avoiding arguments to meet their unfaithful wives’ emotional needs (inaudible) as long as possible.  Six months to a year.”  So he says that he advises women to stick it out for three weeks, then separate.  For men, he advises them to stay up to a year.  So this is the unrepentant, serial betrayer.  And he’s saying for chicks, women, three weeks.  Separate.  And I was like do you know how separation works, dude.  You just don’t up and leave.  That’s another point.  But he say that for men to stick it out for a year.  So you are over here.  Your wife is having an affair.  At this point, you’ve outed her to your family, to everybody knows that she’s having an affair.  But you, as a husband, are not to focus on that.  You’re to focus on meeting her emotional needs and avoiding arguments.  So it’s like what are you talking about.  And for me, I looked at it as like I think it’s that my opinion the way the difference between how men and women are supposed to—his advice for men and women.  So he’s put men on this (inaudible).  We created hierarchies, and we put men up here.  We decided the men can take anything.  Men are the leaders.  Men are the rulers.  So with that entitlement, it comes in a cage.  So men, you can take anything.  You’re no longer human.  You can take the beating.  You can take the betrayal like a man.  Just hang in there.  So they’re no longer—we’re no longer thinking about what is safe for him.  Because I’m not a betrayal expert or professional, but I know—and I think you guys also know that the first thing with this betrayal especially as hardcore as this the first step to be advising the victim is consider what safety looks like for you.  You don’t go back and tell them, “Don’t upset your betraying partner.  Meet their emotional needs.  That’s the most important thing for a year.”  It’s like what man—so this book not only hurts women, but it also hurts men because they’re put into this place where they have to bear these burdens of weight.  And it’s not only—yes, it’s entitlement, and women are supposed to comply.  But this entitlement is hurting men because now they are no longer human beings.  We can’t treat them like normal human beings because they are men.  I just had to bring that up.  The other thing about this book is just how it affects people outside the global North America and Europe.  I’m Kenyan.  Born and raised.  So I’m former developing country.  And this book are there.  This book are found in Kenya.  They are found in—around Africa in other places.  But sometimes because the books are also pretty expensive, so you don’t find the book, book, book.  You find the concepts.  The concepts are being taught by pastors, by marriage people.  They go Google stuff up, buy a book, and photocopy it and give people around.  And so it’s a popular concept.  You find these concepts everywhere.  A few months ago there was a seminar traveling around east Africa, and they were literally had concepts from His Needs, Her Needs, Love and Respect.  And they were teaching them as these are the standard for Christian.  So we have these books out there.  And Kenya right now is struggling.  We have an issue of femicide.  Women are being killed every 18 hours a woman is martyred just for existing as a woman.  Every 18 hours.  And churches just don’t know what to do with that.  Pastors don’t know what to do with that.  There’s research.  It’s an older research that says that 40% of married women in Kenya have experienced sexual abuse and domestic violence.  40%.  I think the average in the world is about 30.  Something like that.  But Kenya is 40.  And that’s sexual and physical.  Domestic violence.  So we’re not talking about emotional, psychological, financial, all that.  So the numbers are probably way higher than that.  Then we have this books coming through, and they cement hierarchies.  They say men need this.  Women need this.  And they have massive conferences about these concepts.  And a pastor—one of the pastors of a leading church in Kenya had a post on Facebook the other day.  And he was saying, “You know what?”  He was advising men.  “You know, men, if you hit your wife, you have to understand that you’re affecting your children 50 times more.”  So his advice was like, “Men, if you hit your wife, just know you’re affecting your children.”  So a lot of comments around okay.  How about, well, man, if you hit your wife, that’s assault and that’s criminal.  And that’s an assault.  And then the pastor is like, “You know what?  The reason I’m appealing to men about the children is because men don’t listen.  I have to find ways to find out if I can soften the hearts of abusive men using the children.”  But that’s why the pastor is like—there is no resourcing.  There is no—pastors just don’t know what to deal—how to deal with it.  But then you have these books from the west and a lot of us are using resources from the west cementing things that are found in our country but we don’t have the resources.  Sometimes we don’t have the language yet for some of these things.   But they are still being there.  So here in America we have book like yours, and people are speaking up.  And there’s pushback on the evangelical bad teachings.  But before that gets back to where we come from, we are trying, but we get lambasted like nobody’s business.  And there’s a new generation.  Gen Zs and Alphas.  They are like, “No.  We don’t want to do the things our parents did.”  I just want to bring that conversation because it’s often missing about the harm that these books cause overseas.  It’s not just here.  They get into other cultures because, again, western Christianity is everywhere.  And they go and just mess—they mix up with local issues.  And they just make everything so much worse.  And it’s so hard to get people to see because the resources—I mean—I just—that’s why I’m going to die on this hill of like we need to do better.  We need to do better.

Sheila: That’s a good hill to die on.  And I want people to understand—really understand what Ngina is saying.  It’s because you have these cultures that were patriarchal, right?  So these are more or less patriarchal cultures.  And then the missionaries who go out from Europe, from North America, from some of the Asian countries, they tend to be more conservative than average.  So if you’re someone on a mission field, you tend to like Love and Respect even more than most Christians do.  So you’re very much on that side.  And so they go into these patriarchal cultures, and they say, “Hey, your patriarchy, that’s exactly what God wants.”  And so instead of setting women free, the Gospel actually solidifies the bonds they already were under.  And it’s really heart breaking.  And we have to do better.  

Ngina: Yeah.  We have to do better.

Bethany: It spiritualizes it.

Sheila: Yeah.  I want to do a whole podcast on this.  So anyone listening, if you have any stories about the mission field and you want to send them to me, please do because—yeah.  I want to do a whole podcast on this because I am very concerned about it.

Ngina: To that point, I spent 14 years in an evangelical church in Kenya founded and led by an American couple.  When I say this, the impact of this, it’s because I was steeped in that culture.  I was in Kenya.  And the Kenyan church was filled with black bodies, African bodies just like me, but our pastors were white.  And they were teaching white evangelicalism in our country.  And you were just Kenyans.  But our habits, our how we understood Christianity, a lot of that was being shaped by an American couple, who were super evangelical, (inaudible), actually more fundamentalist than evangelical.  So yeah.  So the harm is real.

Sheila: Yeah.  All right.  Bethany, any last thoughts?   

Bethany: Yeah.  I just think that overall the framing of this book—it really—I think it can create this climate of fear and obligation with this driving message of if you don’t meet my needs I will find someone who will meet my needs.  It’s kind of threatening, coercive environment that is not going to support the flourishing of people and the flourishing of this relationship.  It’s not going to create safety.  And then I also just think that it can be seen as validating men’s entitlement in placing such a huge burden on women’s shoulders.  And we know that the home is the most dangerous place for a woman.  And so I just think that it is dangerous and reckless for a book devoted to healthy marriage and flourishing couples to never, ever address this and to have anecdotes that describe male entitlement and to never call it out.  So I think that it’s harmful and that even—and like we said, the people that seek out these resources are desperate for answers.  They’re trying to figure out what’s going on in their relationship.  And so they are so vulnerable.  And so I just was left with this idea that we need to put this message out there and warn people that there are so many better resources.  But yeah.  And also I’ll just say too that this book got in my head.  It got in my head.  And for a couple of days when I was in the depths of reading it, I started to wonder what if my husband actually isn’t being totally honest with me.  This clinical psychologist says that physical attractiveness and having his sexual needs met are the most top needs.  And what if the fact that I’m still wearing my comfy pants when he gets home—what if he’s just not being honest with me?  So I couldn’t believe that it just even got in my head too.  It was wild.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Well, one thing I found interesting is he does this throwaway line at one point where he says that his wife broke up with him multiple times before they married.  And I’m just wondering was John and Mary about them.  I don't know.  But I just thought that was like (cross talk).    

Ngina: Isn’t it weird how he say—the part where he say that him and his wife have an argument every hour they are together?  Me and my husband and other people are happily married.  When you say that me and my wife have—you have an argument every hour you’re together or almost every time—almost every hour you are together, you’re having an argument, I’m like there’s a lot of conflict.  That’s a lot of conflict.  

Sheila: That’s weird.    

Ngina: (cross talk) because I mean marriage for me feels easy.  Let me put it as—like now—because sometimes you may have seasons when you’re working through stuff.  But overall my marriage is just so—I feel so calm and peaceful and rested and at home.  We are not (inaudible) about stuff every hour.  It’s just you are with your friend.

Sheila: Yeah.  This is weird.  It’s weird.  The book is weird.  Okay.  So Bethany, where can people find you?

Bethany: So my website is www.freefromcontrol.ca.  That’s also my Instagram as well.  But yeah.   If people want to learn more about recovery from coercive control and high control groups, they can find me there.

Sheila: Yes.  And I will put a link to those things in the podcast notes too.  And, Ngina, tell us about Intentional Today.  Where can we find you?  

Ngina: Yeah.  You can find me at intentionaltoday.com where I talk more about (inaudible) messages and how we can do better and also empower wise with a clarity and deserving they need to live to thrive and to have flourishing marriages.  To flourish as individuals and also in marriage.  And I have a free book, if you all—if somebody wants to pick it up.  It’s called 16 Things That You Will Find In a Healthy Marriage.  And you can pick that up.  It’s a free eBook at intentionaltoday.com.  

Sheila: Perfect.  I will leave that link.  Well, thank you, ladies, for joining me.  I really appreciate it.  Thank you for taking one for the team and reading the book.  

Ngina: Sure.  This was fun.  Thank you for having us.

Bethany: Thank you for having us.

Sheila: All right.  So that was our discussion.  And as we’re wrapping up, Rebecca, I want to talk about something, which we touched on with Ngina and Bethany, but I thought this was something that you and I should really discuss which is what do you do when someone has made some changes.  Because Willard Harley—everything we said that was bad about his book in Great Sex Rescue—so in Great Sex Rescue, we had a bunch of quotes of his.  He took them all out.  The subtitle for it used to be Building an Affair-Proof Marriage.  He took out that subtitle.  And it used to be—all of his chapters used to be his need for this, her need for this, and now it’s more gender neutral although he makes it very clear still that—     

Rebecca: There’s a boy need, and there’s a girl need.  But girls can have boys’ needs and boy can have girl needs sometimes.  Yeah.  

Sheila: Yes.  Yes.  But much the rest of it is still there.

Rebecca: Yeah.  The thing that I’m struggling with with watching how His Needs, Her Needs have changed over the years and now since Great Sex Rescue came out is that at no point has the foundation been questioned it seems.  And it does seem more like—this is my personal opinion looking at it.  It does feel more like liability proofing rather than actually digging deep.  So, for example, at the beginning of His Needs, Her Needs, there used to be this just truly terrible example of John and Mary and how John was not getting his sexual needs met.  And then he had an affair, and that was really the thing that helped them fix their marriage because now Mary understands the need to meet John’s sexual needs.

Sheila: Well, it wasn’t that.  It was like because he was getting his needs met with Noreen he was able to be nicer to Mary.  And then Mary found out about the affair, and everything blew up.  And so it was like their marriage was okay before Mary knew.  It was awful.  It was really bad.  

Rebecca: Exactly.  No.  It was just a bad example.  So he takes out that specific anecdote from John and Mary’s marriage.  But he doesn’t take out John and Mary from his book.

Sheila: Yeah.  They’re all still there.

Rebecca: They’re still used as an example of a marriage that improved.  And so that’s the kind of thing that I’m talking about where you have this truly horrific marriage that’s clearly, incredibly dysfunctional and very unhealthy and he’s like, “Okay.  Well, I’ll just take out all the things that make people realize they’re dysfunctional and unhealthy and still talk about them like a good couple.”  That doesn’t feel like we’re actually analyzing, “Wait.  Why did I hold these people up in the first place,” and more feels like, “Oh, people don’t like.  I will remove it.” Now I hoped hat I’m wrong.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Mm-hmm.

Rebecca: I hope that it’s that he is trying.  But the other question is if trying our best still means that we’re missing the point by 100 yards, then should we be writing this book still?  Or does, at some point, you realize, “There’s a lot of criticism of this book, and I’ve realized that a lot of it is very valid.  And maybe I just retire the book.  Maybe I tried my best.  I’m proud of myself for having accepted criticism and trying to change, but also I just—maybe there’s not a future with this book.  And it did what it was supposed to do, and I can rest easy knowing that I’ve let it go”?  Maybe that’s the answer.  

Sheila: That’s what I wish people would do.  Your dad had an interesting take actually.  I talked to your dad about this when I was on a walk with him yesterday.  And I was explaining the things that Willard Harley had changed.  And his take was this.  He said, “That means you’ve taken the hill.”  And I said, “What do you mean by that?”  And he said, “Well, he used to have this book where it was talking about his needs and her needs.  I mean that’s the very title of the book, right?  And now he’s had to fudge it, right?  It’s like the need for affection, which is still obviously a female need, but it’s no longer her need for affection.  It’s like the need for affection, which women still tend to have more.  He gave up the hill that there are needs that are only male and there are needs that are only female,” which means we’re having an impact which I liked.  I think that’s great.

Rebecca: And, again, I want to be very careful.  The reason that this is so awkward is because I want to encourage people to do what Harley is doing and really edit and change things.  But what do you do? 

Sheila: But here is the problem though.  Can you do that if the fundamental underlying preface—

Rebecca: Premise.

Sheila: - premise.  That’s the word.  Premise of the book is wrong, okay?  And that’s why I don’t think His Needs, Her Needs is salvageable.    

Rebecca: I don’t think Love and Respect is salvageable.

Sheila: I don’t think For Women Only is salvageable.  Any of these books which put men and women in these big dichotomies instead of acknowledging that intimacy actually looks the same.  There is healthy forms of intimacy.  It’s Tolstoy, right?  Happy families are all alike.  Unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.  Healthy families all do the same thing.  And that’s what intimacy is.  Instead of extolling what intimacy is and what are the best practices to get there, they just say, “Hey, here’s what men need, so, women, you need to do it.”  And it doesn’t work. 

Rebecca: Yeah.  I’m curious to know what our listeners think because how do we both hold the tension of wanting people to change but also realizing that if you had a grade of a 17 and then you brought up your grade to a 32 that’s still not a passing grade.  How do we encourage people to keep going and to eventually just ditch the whole assignment and start afresh without it just becoming this impossible task, right?  And maybe the answer is that it is an impossible task, and we just need to accept that some people can’t do it because they’re not willing to deal with the underlying affect.  I don't know.  But I’m curious to know what other people thing because I know there’s a lot of people who listen who have had their mind changed in transformative and foundational ways in a way that, frankly, I haven’t because I’ve always believed in women’s equality.  I have always had many of these values that I have now have not changed.  The window dressing may have, but I haven’t fundamentally changed.

Sheila: But I even think about our book, The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex.  My book.  Sorry.  

Rebecca: No.  I wasn’t.  I was a literal child.

Sheila: Yes.  You were a literal child when I wrote that for the first time.  I believed in women’s equality.  I believed that women’s pleasure mattered.  I believed that marital sex was—if you were to score the original book on my rubric, it still would have scored like in the high 40s.  Like a 48, okay?

Rebecca: A good grade.  Yeah.  

Sheila: I still completely rewrote that in 2022.  I was planning on just putting in a chapter about women’s orgasm and taking out the chapters on men are like this, women are like this because I thought I could just swap out chapters.  And as I went to do it, I’m like, “No.  This whole thing needs to be rewritten.  The whole thing,” because I had learned so much about obligation sex that I hadn’t realized before.  I had learned enough that I needed to completely rewrite it, and so that’s what I did.  

Rebecca: And that was a book that did already not give complementarianism and not believe that men should be in charge of women.  Yeah.

Sheila: It already had a good premise.  It already had a good foundation.  It’s just that some of the approached I didn’t like.  And I realized even to fix that—which already would have scored well.  

Rebecca: Would have already scored better than Harley’s book currently does.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Well, it would have—yeah.  I mean because his was 11 out of 48.  Yeah.  You have to completely rewrite it.  And I just wish that people would realize if your fundamental premise is wrong, everything else—if you try to change it, it’s just window dressing.  But that’s all it is.  Yeah.  And we need to do better.

Rebecca: Yeah.  But do.  Let us know.  What do you think an appropriate standard of judging when something is good is?  When do we give people props, right?  I’d like to know what you think.  

Sheila: Yeah.  So leave us a comment.  Like and subscribe to our channel on YouTube, wherever you listen to podcasts, and remember that you can get the one sheet for this so that you can give it to your pastor, your women’s leader, your friend, your sister, or your mom, whoever is giving you this book.  The link to that is in the podcast notes, and we will see you again next week on the Bare Marriage podcast.  Bye-bye.