Happily Never After: The Curious Case of Love and Respect (Deep Dive Part 1)

Part one of a three-part docuseries deep dive into the best-selling evangelical marriage book, Love & Respect.

THE LOVE & RESPECT DOCUSERIES:

This is a video series, so if you want to watch it in all its glory, head over to https://youtu.be/z3EEAkjwcXA!

To see episodes 2 & 3 when they launch next week, subscribe to the Good Fruit Faith Channel

This podcast delves into the broken logic of Love & Respect, why so many people bought into it, and the truly bizarre nature of what passes for evangelical marriage advice.

Copyright Disclaimer: - Under section 107 of the copyright Act 1976, allowance is mad for FAIR USE for purpose such a as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statues that might otherwise be infringing. Non- Profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of FAIR USE. All DVD clips and quotes from the book are used for criticism and teaching, and therefore fall under fair use.

BONUS CONTENT
Gain bonus content, full videos of the interviews and MORE if you become a patron! https://patreon.com/baremarriage

LINKS:

• Support Good Fruit Faith
• Our paper, Sanctified Sexism
• Our one sheet on the problems with Love & Respect

EXPERT INTERVIEWEES INFORMATION:

• Chuck DeGroat: https://www.chuckdegroat.net/
• Chuck's book, "When Narcissism Comes to Church"
• Andrew Bauman: https://andrewjbauman.com/
• Andrew's book, "The Sexually Healthy Man" 

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Music Attribution

“In the Dark” performed by BlockBeatz/stock.adobe.com
“Romantic Smooth Rock (O Mundo Gira)” performed by Yummy Tunes/stock.adobe.com
“Gentle Relaxed Smooth Jazz (Soul Power)” performed by Tasty Tunes/stock.adobe.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 3:55 Part 1: The Golden Ticket
• 15:24 Part 2: Let's Talk About Sex, Baby
• 35:20 Part 3: Wife--The Ultimate Mommy
• 42:00 Part 4: Disrespect All The Way Down
• 51:23 Part 5: The Rewarded Cycle
• 54:17 Part 6: The Psychology of a Bad Book
• 1:00:25 Part 7: Consistent Inconsistency
• 1:09:20 Part 8: Weaponizing Desire To Be Good

Transcript

Rebecca
Hello and welcome to the Bear Marriage Podcast, my name is Rebecca Lindenbach. 
And normally you'd be hearing from Sheila, but you're hearing from me this week because we are doing something different for the last couple of months,we've been planning, researching, writing, recording and now editing and releasing our three part series, Deep Diving into Love and Respect what it teaches, whether or not it holds up to scrutiny in the scientific or theological realm, and of course, how it impacts people and what our response as a Christian community should be.
Now, this was created as a YouTube deep dive series, so there might be a few things that don't translate quite as well over to the audio world. But because we know so many of you love to listen to our podcast while you're driving to work or on a commute.
We wanted to make sure you had an audio version available. So here you are.
Of course, if you'd rather watch this on YouTube, the link will be in the video description.
Now this is part one of a three part series.
The other two will be launching on our brand new Good Fruit Faith podcast channel, as well as on YouTube.
So make sure you don't miss those. And now enjoy part one of Happily Ever After The Curious Case of Love and Respect.

It's a tale as old as time. A couple gets married, madly in love. A few years in, though, they start to have problems. Because, of course, they each brought their own baggage into their relationship. So what do they do? Well, this couple is a Christian. They want to have a good Christian marriage. They want to make God happy and how they're treating each other.
So what they're going to do is go over to the Christian marriage section in their local bookstore, or ask their pastor for a book.
And statistically speaking, they are likely to be handed the bestselling evangelical marriage book that's out there: Love and respect.
So the question is what happens next? Does the book help them? Does it hurt them?
That's the question that our team of researchers has been trying to answer for the last six years.
Or more aptly, we've been trying to understand why things often go so badly when people follow books like Love and Respect. And we're going to talk about that today.
My name is Rebecca, and I'm part of good fruit. Faith. We are a group of researchers that are dedicated to studying the impact of common evangelical beliefs on women's marital and sexual satisfaction. And we do also study men as well. But let's be very honest. In evangelicalism, men usually get all of the attention. And, so we're trying to even out the balance a little bit.
We call ourselves good fruit faith because we believe that when Jesus said that we as Christians are supposed to test the fruit of the teachings that people are speaking to us, he actually meant what he said. He didn't mean just cover up the bad stuff or ignore the stuff that wasn't so perfect. He meant actually test the fruit.
There's a verse where he says that a good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad
tree cannot bear good fruit. And really we're just trying to figure out where's that bad fruit, where's that good fruit? And let's go out to the good fruit and let's frankly just chop down and burn the bad fruit.
Since we started this work six years ago, we have found which common teachings in the church, are now proven to actually lead to negative outcomes for women and men alike. And today we are looking at the book Love and Respect.
Now I do want to say, even though we had a claim at the beginning, I want to really make sure that I'm being very clear.
We will be using clips from conferences and quotes from the book Love and Respect. As we talk about this topic,
Everything that we are doing falls under fair use. We're using this for education, for critique and for commentary.
We have had an experience in the past where we had fair use of this particular author's materials, where he filed a false copyright strike on us.

00:03:37:34 - 00:03:43:01
Speaker 1
So I just want to be very clear that everything we're doing falls under fair use. And,
Quite frankly, you can try to copyright strike. It doesn't mean we're going to stop talking about it.
Now, a caveat before we go any further, I said that the best selling marriage book on for Christians was Love and Respect. This is true and it's not true. Technically the bestselling evangelical marriage book is actually The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman.
However, that book is written by a Christian, but it is not explicitly a Christian marriage book in the same way, it's not trying to teach how to have a godly marriage. It's more a Christian wrote a marriage book, and it's really popular in secular circles as well. And it doesn't tend to be used in this conversation about what a Christian marriage is. So when we're talking about a marriage book that isn't just written by a Christian, but is actually culturally and spiritually forming for the couples, Love and Respect is the bestselling evangelical marriage book explicitly, that is, for an evangelical audience.
So what actually is this book? Love and respect.

Mixed voices
Love and Respect.
Love and Respect.
Your wife needs love, your man needs respect.
The respect of a wife for her husband.
The Bible tells husbands to love their wives, but it tells wives to respect their husbands.
You will not, under any circumstance, have a happy, healthy marriage unless your husband feels respected,
Just as much as women need love. Your husband needs respect.
Wives respecting and following the leadership of their husbands.
Your husband craves respect.
Love and respect

Rebecca
Love and respect is written by Doctor Emerson Eggerichs. He is a pastor from Michigan. He received his doctorate in family ecology. And he's been doing his love and respect ministry since 1998.
Love and Respect is based on the verse in Ephesians five that says, each one of you also must love his wife, as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
And really, the book is summed up very well by the subtitle, which is the love she most desires, the respect he most desperately needs. And as an aside, you will note that in the subtitle women only desire love. They only desire their need. But the husband desperately needs his need. And I just I just want you to take that little tidbit tucked away in your brain and, keep that in mind as we keep going.
So our charitable summary of this of, as an argument in this book, and we're going to get into the details because I know not everyone has watched this, has read the book. I hope, actually, you haven't read the book, because we're about to explain why that I don't want you to read this book. But here's the thing.
I'm going to give you a charitable summary. What he is really saying is that most marital conflict is caused because wives are not respectful enough of their husbands and then as a result, husbands are not loving enough to their wives, or husbands are unloving to their wives. And so therefore the wife stops respecting her husband. And this causes the what he calls the crazy cycle.
If you meet your spouse's basic needs, it will motivate them to change and will therefore improve your marital satisfaction. However, even if this doesn't work, he does a great job of hedging his bets. He says if you fulfill your spouse's basic needs, you'll still get rewards in heaven.
So, any of you who've been raised in a religious context or who are familiar with evangelical subculture will understand. Oh, yeah. Okay. We're looking at gender dichotomy here. Women need love. Men need respect. This is pretty much your bread and butter of evangelicalism.
And that's one of the reasons why this book really took off, in our opinion. Because this book, first of all, it sounds familiar, right? This is the water that you've been swimming in your whole life is that men and women are different. Women need to submit and men need to lead. So now we're saying women need to be loved and men need to be respected.
Different words, same meaning. But on top of that, Eggerichs claim this book is highly efficacious.
At the beginning of one of his conferences, he's done more recently, he says this, Let's begin the inspired and inspirational message based on Ephesians 5:33. One well-known person who is a friend of mine refers to this message as “the Holy Grail of marriage.”
He's also said that it's comparable to discovering medicine that “cures the common cold.”
Those are pretty big claims there, right? Okay, this is the holy grail of marriage. It could cure the common cold. Kind of just perfect medicine that everyone needs. These are really big claims. This thing really, really works. However, what we found so funny in researching and and going over all of this material is that often he'll have these really big claims and then he'll just hedges bets a little bit over here.
So on page four of the actual book on the the actual book on page four, he claims that the love and respect model is not a magic bullet for your marriage, right? So you can't expect it to fix absolutely everything. But then 11 pages later, he says, and I quote the love and respect connection is the key to any problem in a marriage.
And so what ends up happening is he says, this works for everyone, except you can't expect it to work for everyone, except that it works for everyone.
For example, and page two of the book. So you're go back to that first couple the couple were talking about who had just gotten married at the very beginning of the video, who are now having problems, who are just like, I just I want my marriage to be better. I don't know what the problems are facing, but they're they're struggling.
They're feeling disconnected. They're hoping that this is the key and then they read this.
“Do you want some peace? Do you want to feel close to your spouse? Do you want to feel understood? Do you want to experience marriage the way God intended? Then try some love and respect. This book is for anyone. People in marital crisis, spouses headed for divorce, husbands and wives in the second marriage. People wanting to stay happily married. Spouses married unbelievers. Divorcees trying to heal lonely wives, browbeaten husbands, spouses in affairs, victims of affairs, engaged couples passage are counsels looking for married material that can save marriages.”
That is a big promise, eh?
And this isn't just him trying to kind of make a big promise at the beginning of the book. This is throughout his entire material.
He says this to women later about being respectful enough, if you're quietness is the right kind of quietness, respectful and dignified, not pouty and sour, he will move toward you. He will want to comfort you and take care of you. In essence, he will want to show you love for the good willed husband. The wife's quiet and respect of behavior will act as a magnet.
This book was presented as the answer to marital problems.

Emerson Eggerichs
One well-known person who is a friend of mine refers to this message as
the Holy Grail of marriage.
It is not an overstatement to say that this information has revolutionized many marriages around the world.
it's comparable to discovering medicine that cures the common cold.
It's just that simple.

Rebecca
But every book claims to have the answer, right? So what was it about this particular book that caused it to pop off so much? Well Eggerichs would say that it's because of the novel idea that he had in his book about how it doesn't just focus on how men have to love their wives, but also really emphasizes the wife's need to respect her husband.
Eggerichs says in his book that the unique feature about this book is the concept of wives showing unconditional respect towards husbands. And that's a really important word there. 


Emerson Eggerichs, clips from various videos
Unconditional, unconditional respect Unconditional respect. Unconditional respect, unconditional respect. Unconditional respect. Unconditional respect, unconditional respect. Unconditional respect. Unconditional respect, unconditional respect.

Rebecca 
We're going to get into more about what that means in a little bit. Now I will say all of us who have virtually any knowledge of history or sociology or anything will definitely agree that women have never been told to unconditionally respect and listen to men ever in history. Right? That's totally unique and totally new. But do  remember that idea of unconditional respect. Because this is going to be an important point later.
So love and respect. The book is kind of built on acronyms and cycles. We're going to talk about the cycles first. There are three cycles in this book.
The crazy cycle. The energizing cycle and the reward cycle.
The crazy cycle is pretty much this idea that you get into a negative spiral, right?
He starts behaving unloving. And so she starts treating him with contempt and disrespect, or she starts treating it to contempt and disrespect. That leads to him being unloving, which leads to more contempt and disrespect. And you end up in the cycle. And he really wants to make sure that you realize that this is truly something crazy.

Emerson Eggerichs, clips from various videos 
They'll sit and rock and do this or they'll keep repeating the same thing.
This is crazy. This is crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. 
I just keep flipping the monitor, you'd say I'm, what? Crazy.

Rebecca
The energizing cycle is, of course, the inverse of that. The idea that if you start meeting your spouse's needs, they will begin to meet your needs, and then you'll be in a happy cycle where now you're both going up instead of down.
The energizing cycle is explained in two sets of acronyms.
The first one is about women's needs. So this is what men have to do for their wives in order for them to get their wives to treat them the way that they want. And he calls it COUPLE
Okay? 
So “C is for closeness. She wants to be close. O is for openness. She wants you to open up to her. U is for understanding. Don't try to fix her. Just listen. P is for peacemaking. She wants you to say I'm sorry. L is for loyalty. She needs to know you're committed and E is for esteem.
She wants you to honor and cherish her.” Okay, now, these all seem pretty good when you're looking at it like those are just basic relational needs, right?
And the action steps are also similarly very banal. They're things like, you hold your hand, you hug her, you are affectionate without sexual intentions, which we'll get to that.
You are with her alone so you can focus on each other and laugh together.
You make it a priority to spend time with her. You go out of your way to do something for her, like run an errand. You are aware of her as a person with a mind and opinions. You let her know you enjoy discussing things with her and getting her insights.
You share your feelings telling her about your day in difficulties. You say, let's talk and ask her what she's feeling and ask for her opinions. Your face shows you want to talk relaxed body language, good eye contact. See, all this stuff is really just basic relationship skills and basic people skills that you also need with friends as well. It really is just How to People 101. 
But let's talk about the flip side of that, which is the stuff that women need to understand about men's needs.
So women on the other hand they're energizing cycle is CHAIRS. Chairs. 
How to spell respect to your husband. Okay? 
“C is for conquest. Appreciate his desire to work and achieve H is for hierarchy. Appreciate his desire to protect and provide A is for authority. Appreciate his desire to serve and to lead.”
Just note that the first three have all been about being in charge.
I is for insight, appreciate his desire to analyze and counsel, which is once again a form of control. This isn't this isn't communication. This is analyzing and counseling. All R is for relationship. I appreciate his desire for shoulder to shoulder friendship and S is for sexuality. Appreciate his desire for sexual intimacy.
So there's a couple of things to note there.
First of all, you'll notice that women's, little acronym spells couple. And he says that it's because women want to like, have reciprocal relationship. They want you to be in it with them.
But when I was looking at this like why chairs. Chairs isjust a random thing. But he says this, “Men in general see themselves as the one who should chair the relationship. In most case, men see themselves in the driver's seat.”
So in essence, you have women's needs, which are for relationships and men's needs, which are for domination. And you might think, well, no, like leadership doesn't always mean domination. That's not fair. But let's look at the action steps and how they compared to the women's.
She is told to “see yourself as his helpmate and counterpart and talk with him about this whenever possible.
You don't dishonor or subtly criticize his work in the field to get him to show more love in the family.”
And in the book, that's really just about not criticizing whether or not he's got good work, life boundaries.
“You verbalize your admiration of him for protecting you, being willing to die for you. You praise his commitment to provide for you and protect you in the family.” 
“You tell him verbally or in writing that you value his work efforts. You express your faith in him, related to his chosen field. You tell him you are thankful for his strength and enjoy being able to lean on him at all times. You support his self-image as a leader.”
Now you might be saying, okay, but a lot of this like if he is doing well and you're just kind of greedy, like you shouldn't be complain about how much he makes. But here's the thing in Love and Respect, Emerson, which actually says this “The point is this look at his desires and not his performance.”
Women are trained in this book to follow the CHAIRS acronyms not based on reality, but based on what he feels like. He wants to theoretically be. And this is also reflected in every single chapter subtitle.
Also, remember, this is not advice for couples who want to make a good marriage better. He's using this energizing cycle as the way for women to get out of what he calls the crazy cycle, which is horrific, like unloving behavior from a husband towards his wife. So a wife who is experiencing unloving behavior is supposed to do all these things.
But the one that's the craziest about the energizing cycle, which I know is ironic because he has a crazy cycle, but the energizing cycle is actually the crazy one, is sexuality.
So for the S in CHAIRS is sexuality, here are the action steps for women:
“You respond to him sexually more often and initiate sex periodically. You understand he needs sexual release just as you need emotional release”  Which can we just take a pause? We all know what sexual releases, right? That's just an orgasm. We know what that is. What on earth is emotional release? When we as a group talk about this, one of the members of our team always can only picture that scene from the proposal where Sandra Bullock and Betty White are dancing around the campfire singing.

Sandra Bullock and Betty White, a clip from The Proposal 
E o o e.
Yes. The window.
Yes. Window. Yeah. Oh, wow! The sweat dripped down my balls.
What you doing?
Oh. Your granny,  you wanted me to, you know, a chant. Chant from the heart

Rebecca 
There's also you let him acknowledge his sexual temptations without fearing he'll be unfaithful and without shaming him.
And you don't try to make him open up to you verbally by depriving him of sex. So here's the thing, if you read the whole sex chapter in Love and Respect, you know, it's never mentioned the fact that women can and do enjoy sex too.
There's a lot of discussion about how women need emotional release, right. Like it says there, he needs physical release, like how you need emotional release. But women also need physical release. Like this is a thing women also can have orgasms. And by the way, if she's not having orgasms, that might be why she doesn't want sex. Well, there's no mention that women can also enjoy sex. He does say things like this. The point here is that your husband's anatomy and design is much different from yours. He needs sexual release as you need emotional release. This is why he loves the act of sex in and of itself. It is a pleasurable act that brings some satisfaction.
The implication here, the implication here, is that it is not a pleasurable act in and of itself for women, because he is explaining to women that sex feels good for him. That's why he likes it. It is so funny to me when people do this, when they write marriage books and they're trying to convince women that, well, sex feels good for men, did you know that it feels good for men.
It's like you're telling on yourself bud. But but it gets even worse.
Because he tells a bizarre story where he says that: “A mother and daughter are talking,
And the daughter says that her husband's in a bad mood. Her mum asks why? And then she says, I suppose because we have not been sexually intimate for seven days. Mom did not hesitate gently but firmly. She let her daughter have it. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Why would you deprive him of something that takes such a short amount of time, and makes him sooooo happy: and all the Os? That's from the book. That's not me. Sooooo happy.
My friends, if you believe that the best thing about sex for a woman is that it takes a very, very short amount of time, I am afraid that there is a reason that woman does not want to sleep with you.

Flight of the Concords, clip 
You say something like this, that’s it? I know what you're trying to say. It's time to say, Yeah. That's it.

Rebecca
But if you are someone who does not believe that women want sex, that has not experienced women enjoying sex in the act in and of itself, and does not have any evidence that women might actually want sex for physical release, because obviously I'm just this is obviously not in the realm of what this population is experiencing, because no one who has seen a woman who enjoys sex would think that she had to be cajoled into sex.
So we're just going to acknowledge that this is funny for that reason. It's also sad for that reason. How do you get women who don't want to have sex to have sex? Well, Love and Respect threatens them. 
Here's what these wives are told. Husbands particularly can come under satanic attack when deprived of sexual release. Wives might be able to better understand this? If they think about how they would feel if their husbands didn't want to talk or listen to them.
We also hear from Sarah Eggerichs , Emerson’s wife as well in their conference series talking about this.

Sarah Eggerichs, clip
A man feels respected when he knows you appreciate his passions and his pleasure, namely his sexual desires, and therefore feels respected. When you initiate periodically. And you might add, they love it. Remember how we want them to have eyes for only us and then we push them away? I'm deeply concerned about the growing number of women that know that men are visually oriented before marriage, but somehow forget that after marriage and and don't do their part in making it easy for men. My concern is how many men don't feel the freedom to share these struggles with their wives for fear of being put down, because we don't struggle in this area.

Rebecca
And to really hit it home on the guilt and the obligation. And Emerson says this in the book, the cold, hard truth is that men are often lured into affairs because they are sexually deprived at home. So I want you to take a minute and put yourself in the shoes of a woman who got married, without having a lot of sexual education, which is common in evangelical circles.
She gets married, she doesn't really know what female orgasm is, and they're having sex. And, like, she likes feeling close, but she's not getting the physical aspect in the same way because she hasn't discovered what they just don't know how to make her orgasm.
It's very common. We've done research on this. We have a 47 point orgasm gap in evangelicalism, where only 48% of women almost always are always reach orgasm in a sexual encounter, whereas 95% of men do.
And so this is like half of marriages would fall in this category. Okay. So you have this woman who is not getting positive feedback from sex in a physical sense, in a hormonal sense.
And after years and years of this, sex starts to feel like a chore, right? And so then she stops having as much of it. She starts saying she doesn't really want it. She stops initiating because it's been years at this point, it hasn't gotten better. And quite frankly, she's starting to feel used.
So then she reads a book like Love and Respect, which tells her, actually, you were never meant to enjoy sex. You will never be able to understand this because he likes the physical act and love itself. And you just like talking. And if you don't do this, your husband's gonna have an affair and it's going to be your fault.
What do we call it when we cajole someone into sex through threats and the like? We call it coercion. Right? And that is what this is. But then on top of all the coercion, the threats about affairs, about how he'll come under satanic attack. And aren't you such a horrible person for not doing the simple thing that takes *funny voice* “such a short amount of time?” 
We end up with the final strategy, which is minimization. Now we're showing contempt for women. 

Sarah Eggerichs, clip
I was grieved one day when a friend came to me and this woman in the group just said, you know, I just told my husband, I don't have the time, I don't have the energy, and I don't have the desire so there. I thought, what? I didn't always feel like fixing my kids lunch every day, especially when I wasn't hungry. But I did it because I knew they needed it.

Rebecca
So there's two things that are happening here. First of all, just like in that earlier story about the mum saying it takes such a short amount of time and it makes him so happy. We're minimizing what this experience is for the woman. We all know that having sex is not the same thing as packing lunch boxes. Okay?
If you forced someone to pack lunch boxes that they did not want to pack, that is not rape. If you for someone to have sex they do not want to have, that is rape.
I know that sounds silly, and I know that it feels more like a nuanced conversation when we're talking about married couples, especially if you're someone who comes from an evangelical background, where there's been a lot of this idea that wives ought to and owe their husbands sex on demand.
But the reality is, sex is profoundly different than other care tasks. Sex is not a care task like flat out sex is not a care task. Sex is a relational activity that you do for mutual pleasure.
Just flat out, if it's not mutually pleasurable, it's not really sex. You're just letting someone use you as a masturbatory aid.
But Love and Respect doesn't seem to give any thought or care in the entire chapter about sex, about the woman's experience in bed.
In fact, in our research where we studied how a lot of these teachings affect women's sexualities, we found that women who only have sex because they feel that they must have sex, have far higher rates of sexual pain, have lower orgasm rates, and have generally, as we would expect, far lower sexual satisfaction. They also are very likely to say that the primary emotion that they have after sex is feeling used. This was the section of the book that when our team first started looking over the materials of Love and Respect, that we were most shocked by. We already knew that we disagreed with the premise that, like, men need respect in a way that women don't, and women need love in a way that men don't. We already knew that we disagreed with that premise, but what we weren't expecting was for the chapter on sex to be so profoundly dehumanizing to women, and so profoundly ignoring the fact that women are also sexual beings. And the ramifications of doing that are so dire that it was like an atomic bomb went off in their living room when we first read this chapter together.
The amount of manipulation around sex that the Love and Respect of brand like just pushes on women is truly mind boggling.
For example, here's a clip from the conference:

Emerson Eggerichs, clip
You have a need. And your anatomy demonstrates it in a way that she doesn't.
You have a need that she doesn't have. And I'm going to share with her. Is that okay that he has a need that you don't have?

Rebecca
Now here, here's the thing.
No one's arguing that a marriage is healthy if it's sexless, no one's arguing that.
Our research has found that healthy marriages tend to have sex at least once a week. Okay? Like it's pretty common. Healthy marriages tend to have sex if your marriage is not having sex, if you're not wanting sex, it's probably a red flag that something else is going on. But that's the key. The key is understanding that senselessness is, yes, a problem. But it's a problem because it points to a larger reason behind the problem. It is not the problem in and of itself. Simply having sex that is terrible for the sake of having intercourse is not going to fix your marriage. In fact, it may make it worse. So let's talk about that idea. But what if you didn't talk to you for three months?
Conversations, talking and sex are not the same thing.
Communication is the foundation of a marriage, and good communication is one of the things that leads to good sex. Talking and communicating is not nearly as intimate as sex is. It can be like there can be conversations that are super intimate and super. You can feel super close. Absolutely. But again, we know that sex is a profoundly different experience because of the physical vulnerability that it brings. And conflating the two is incredibly unhealthy.
Especially when we know that marital rape does occur, that people have sexual trauma, that if you're in a dysfunctional relationship, forcing yourself to have sex with someone that you are not connected with is just dooming that marriage further.
And also a lot of these men, what I don't understand about love and respect, and what I really don't understand, is men want more than this, right?
Like, seriously, if you're a dude and you're married and you're on your wedding day and you're standing up there making vows to the love of your life, you aren't thinking, man, I hope she feels that she has to have sex with me, even if she doesn't want it, and just closes her eyes and gets through it because I'm so quick. No one thinks like that. These dudes are like, I'm going to rock her world, right? Like, that's what we want when we get married. That no dude is like, man, I hope I'm a mediocre lover who can control her into getting into bed with me. No one thinks like that. And so why is this book all focused on this? Why is this book presenting an idea of married sex that is just depressing?

Audio clip
Give me, give me, give me. I need, I need,

Rebecca
In our six years of hyper fixating on this book out of pure horror and existential dread, what we have come to as a group is that the problem is this concept of the energizing cycle with COUPLES  and CHAIRS, what men are said to need in love and respect is not relationship. It's coddling. And I want to be very clear this is not how men are.  This is not how men all are. This is not some indictment of the male sex. I am married to a man who does not need to be coddled. I have many friends who do not need to be coddled. But there is this subculture within evangelicalism where many times men are raised from very young childhood in a culture that believes that they are entitled to people's deference simply because they have a penis.
And often when you're swimming in the waters and you're living in this Christian bubble where it's very normal to talk about female submission and male leadership and and all of this is very conceptual. And you aren't actually asked to do the hard work of actually following through on what you claim your desires are. What ends up happening is you expect to be praised for things you didn't do And we see this repeatedly in evangelicalism.
We talked to Chuck DeGroat, who talks a lot about emotional health and, narcissism. Actually, in the evangelical context. And he has some really interesting insights on this concept of female unconditional respect being a core need for men and what that looks like.
Chuck DeGroat has been involved in pastoral ministry. He's been a therapist, a professor for about 30 years now. He's an expert in narcissism and emotional health and healing from trauma. And he speaks primarily to narcissism in the evangelical context and he's currently a professor of counseling and Christian spirituality, and also is the founding executive director of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Western Theological Seminary.
So let's see what Chuck has to say.
Here's what he says:

Rebecca speak to Chuck
“That women need in order to to be happy in a relationship, a closeness, openness, understanding, peacemaking. And what that means is you need to be able to apologize.
Loyalty and esteem.
And she wants you to honor and cherish her. So those are the ones for women and for men.
It spells CHAIRS. So it's conquest, hierarchy, authority, insight. And by insight, that means appreciate his desire to analyze and counsel, not your insightt into your relationship. So appreciate his desire for shoulder to shoulder friendship where the woman doesn't speak by the way, that's the goal.
And sexuality is his desire for sexual intimacy. So her things she needs? 
That's just kind of what people in relationships need. And his is? You got to do the heavy lifting for me to feel good about myself.

Chuck DeGoat
What breaks my heart about that is, for men who have experienced abuse that's safe. You know, they, my my experience is they don't love the things that you listed for women. Right. They. Because they're afraid of connection. They're afraid of really being known, really being seen. And, so they resist their own sensitivity. They resist their own heart. Right. And and so but it's safer to, to sort of hide behind power, control, authority, hierarchy and things like that, because that gives me some perceived sense of power. I'm always one up. Right?  But again, it's it's because they've not metabolized and not digested processed their, their own shame and so they're afraid of going there. I think in some ways, respect is code for dissociation,
disconnection, you know, it's the Stockholm syndrome of, Christian spirituality, Christian marriage.
And I think men in pain, men who've experienced their own pain, like, of course they're going to be drawn to that because there's just no require for vulnerability at that point. Right?

Rebecca
And I do wonder how much of this book success is because a lot of the women who are married to these men, because, you know, the majority of people who buy marriage books are women, women who are married has been know that they're not going to address it. And so love and respect gives them an easy way, gives them an easy way to think. Well, it's okay that he can't address this. It's okay we to change because this is just how men are.

Chuck DeGroat
Yeah. And and respect means you, wife, woman. You have to shut down your heart. You have to shut down your desires, your your your desires to be really loved, really seeing your desire for mutuality.

Rebecca
In our summary and research of the Love and Respect, multiverse, as we're calling it, with the book and the conference and the podcasts and all the stuff 

Chuck DeGoat
The Brand 

Rebeca
Yes, exactly. What we see so often with this stuff is that, it's almost encouraging people to keep going with the bad behavior and to keep it. Keep enabling it because you're a prideful, bad person for thinking this person is doing something wrong.
Chuck DeGoat
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, you're prideful, bad person for thinking some of the things that why you shouldn't judge. Right? But I also I there's this sense of,

Rebecca
Yes

Chuck DeGoat
The gospel is going out and people are being saved. And so, you know, sure, he's rough around the edges. I mean, we're seeing this in, like, presidential politics, the United States right now, we're seeing it in the church. And so it's like he's a little rough around the edges. But, you know, God uses people like that in the Bible all the time who are a little rough around the edges. And so, you know, sure, he gets a little bit moody at times. He bullies people, you know, all the number of things that, I, I spell the narcissism book that. But, compared to the impact that he's had or they've had or the good things that they do or the money that they give away, I hear that all the time. They give so much money. How could they be that bad? Right? So this is how we justify this.

Rebecca
There's a lot of this contrast between what someone does and what he, he talks about is who you are in the depths of your soul or who you really are.
It's not what you do it to. You really are. That matters. Yeah. In general, minimization versus true accountability?
What's the difference?

Chuck DeGoat
Well, yeah. Well, first of all, going back to what you just described in terms of the patterns, right. Like, yeah, of course it shows up in in your behaviors, in your habits. Right? And so I just got done writing a book on character formation. And when we talk about like narcissistic personality disorder, we call it character logical because it shows up in the patterns of your life.
So if I spend two weeks at your house, I'm going to see it. And it might not reflect like the depths of your heart in the sense that, like from a Christian point of view, everyone's an image bearer, right? But like, it certainly is reflective of the character that has been shaped from your life, your story over time. Right?

Rebecca
We also spoke to Andrew Bauman, an expert in male emotional growth, about his experience working with men who have bought into this love and respect. The mentality.
Let's head over to Andrew.

Andrew Bauman
I am Doctor Andrew Bauman and I run the Christian Counseling Center for Sexual Health and Trauma, therapist and author, and have been doing this work, private practice, about 15 years.

Rebecca
in our review of Love and Respects what we call the Multiverse of Love and Respect.
There is this constant theme of how in order for women to respect men and to give them the respect they most desperately need. What needs to happen is that women need to make sure that they are praising what a man could be, or what a man wants to be, or focusing on the desires of his heart, not the quote unquote snapshot of his actions. And I'm wondering, as someone who works a lot with men who have been, let's say, problematic in their relationships or just in in their personal life in general, what do you think about a version of respect that requires the woman to praise potential rather than practical examples?

Andrew Bauman
I think that is absolutely abhorrent and ridiculous. And here's here's what again, sounds good. Sounds grace based and all that stuff. It's not because you're actually and in that sense, supporting entitlement. Right? I want to call me to more. I believe in men and their ability to change. I believe in men. I believe in the power of Christ to actually help them transform.
But it's not going to be if my wife praises me or not. So many times we misconstrue it because, men are acting like 12 year old little boys. And so if I can get my wife to be my mommy and praise me into wholeness, then I'll be okay. Rather than will you do the hard emotional lifting, the hard emotional work to address your wounds rather than writing books from places of woundedness that is unhealed and then creating an entire, you know, fear based, control based, shame based theology around it.

Rebecca
What we see with how respect is defined as being in charge and not having what you do questioned being praised even if you haven't performed yet. All of these things and what we're seeing is that women are being asked to permissive parent their husbands.
Again, think about what Sarah Eggerichs said about sex. Who packs your lunch when you're a kid? Your mommy does.
The problem with the energizing cycle, I mean, there's a lot of problems, but one of the overarching problems of the energizing cycle is that couples and chairs are in conflict. You simply cannot have both.
Like you cannot have her core needs being met where she needs to feel close, like you understand her, like you esteem her, like she is a full person in your eyes. Like her needs matter to you as much as your own needs do. You cannot have that with the dissociative version of unconditional respect that is required of women. Because Chuck is absolutely right. What they're asking of women is ignore reality. Remember, she's being asked to praise his perception and his desire, not his performance. That is just self gaslighting.
They're being asked to to ignore their own bodies experience during sex and just get it over with because it takes *funny voice* “such a short amount of time”. 
I'm just not over that. I'm never going to be over that. It's still one of the accidentally funniest things that I've ever read in the book.
She's even told to never say you're responsible, but we're still equal. So don't make a decision that I don't agree with. She's literally told you are not allowed to tell him to not do things you don't agree with. That is profoundly in opposition to the idea of being a couple. What this ends up being is this weird dynamic where her entire job is just to pave the road ahead of him.
So the whatever mistakes he's bulldozing through, he doesn't actually meet any resistance. Now, I do not believe that that was the intent of the author of Love and Respect.
I actually think Chuck's idea of how this comes from a deep brokenness of not realizing, how much ego there is tied up in this, and not being able and willing to do the deep work is what's happening here.
The issue is of course the couple acronym for wives In essence, what he's saying is she wants to be seen as an equal. She wants to have a partner. She wants someone she can communicate with. She can be close with. But what his needs are all about is hierarchy in control. You cannot have both of those.
While she wants to feel known and seen, his needs are all about her keeping her mouth shut.
And so one of them has to fold.
And this weird dynamic is also found in a variety of other places.
For example, in the chapter about hierarchy, his desire to protect and provide. This is what he says about what women want versus what men want.
“The problem many women have today, including Christian wives, is that they want to be treated like a princess, but deep down, they resist treating their husbands like the king. They aren't willing to recognize. Then the depth of his very soul. A husband wants to be the one who provides and protects. He wants to be an umbrella of protection. Who would willingly die for his wife if need be.”
There's a lot of problems with this, right? So first of all, if she's the princess and he's the king, he missed the accidental incest vibes that he had going on there because she wants to be a princess. Why isn't he like the prince who's wooing her? Why isn't he her courtier?
But also in the context of everything that we've already learned about how she needs to make sure that he's feeling okay makes me feel strong, make sure that all of his needs are met, and his job is just to, like, kind of spend time with her and treat her well and be nice.
Who's the one who's acting like a parent in the role?
There's a famous sociologist named Sally Gallagher who did a lot of work in the 1990s, and the very early 2000, looking at the dynamics among evangelical Christian marriages. And what she described in her findings was something called Symbolic Traditionalism with Pragmatic Egalitarianism. What that meant is these couples would say that the husband is in charge, the husband is the head, but in practicality, how they acted out their marriage, they were really not actually acting that way at all. It was much more like the My Big Fat Greek wedding scene,

My Big Fat Greek Wedding, clip
The man is the head. But the woman is the neck. And she can turn the head any way she wants.

Rebeccea
Our research however, found that Sally Gallagher's theory does not extend to the bedroom in evangelical marriages. We were published in Sociology of Religion. And we found that while many couples may practice pragmatic egalitarianism outside of the bedroom, within the bedroom the man is king and his needs come first. And this is to the great detriment of these marriages. So while Sally Gallagher conceptualized the evangelical marriage dynamic as one where it is a marriage of equals, where one is the head, really what we end up is something much more akin to Animal Farm, where all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. And if any of you read that in grade 10 or 11, you know where that ends. And it's not good.
You cannot have a relationship of equals where one person has more caveats or more allowances than the other, than you're not actually equal. You might be thinking, you're reading too much into it, but if you keep reading the book, this promise only gets stronger. There are some bizarre double standards in how Emerson talks about his own marriage in the book.
And so you end up with this really uncomfortable reality where two people are presented to have had these needs that he says are both very important.
But they're not compatible. You cannot meet both needs. And so who's the one who has to bend? Let's go back to that subtitle. I told you it was coming back.
“The loove she most desires, the respect he desperately needs.”
Which one sounds more important? And yeah, it turns out. Who would have thunk? Get this, woman is the one who has to give up her needs.
And let's show you what I mean by that.
In his conference, Emerson, which talks about what happens when a wife says, I don't respect you versus what happens when a man says, I don't love you.
Here's the example where he says, what would happen if a wife says, I don't respect you?

Emerson Eggerichs, clip
What do you think he feels? If he needs respect? In the same way you need to feel love when you. Say to him, I love you, ton, but I respect you right now. I know if I ever respected you and I don't know if I ever can respect you. You have devastated him and he will never get over it. Apart from you hearing from me how to correct that mistake.

Rebecca 
Okay, so that's what he says, right? So he's never going to get over it. This is devastating. You need the love and respect here. Now what happens if the husband says I don't love you?

Emerson Eggerichs, clip
So you're in this huge fight with your husband and he says, I. Don't know if and have two hours after this comes. I don't even know. I don't know if I know what love is. I don't know if I've ever loved you. Would need her further witnesses crucify him. Right.
But that's not what he meant by what he said. What he meant is, I don't know if I know what love is. I don't know if I've ever loved you in the way you need to be loved. He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't say fully what he meant.

Rebecca
So when she says I don't respect you, he's devastated and there's nothing that can fix it except for Love and Respect. When he says I don't love you, she just doesn't understand because that's not really what he meant. This is what we mean when we say he addresses both of them, but one of them always has more weight. Someone needs to give and it's not the man. 
And we see this throughout the examples in the book. when she does something wrong as disrespect and when he does something wrong is because of disrespect.
Here are some examples I'll show.

There are multiple examples in the book Love and Respect and given in.
The conference of what Emerson calls bad habits that he and Sarah had that bothered each other. And invariably all of these examples that are in the book are of Sarah performing a care task in a way that Emerson doesn't like, but she's still the one doing it. So for example, he gives an example of how she, she often forgets not to pepper his eggs when she makes eggs for the family in the morning, which, as someone who hates pepper on her eggs, like I understand that is annoying. I hated when my dad did that when I was a kid too.
But this is framed as Sarah being disrespectful and Emerson being very gracious about how he doesn't blame her for her disrespect.
When the other option is also just he could say, you know what? You're obviously like, why don't I just take over breakfast in the morning since I'm the picky one? But that's beside the point. That's never going to happen.
But then also there's examples of Emerson doing things that are wrong to Sarah. And it's once again him doing things that are making the care tasks that she's doing harder.
For example, he had a habit of leaving wet towels on the bed, which, by the way, is not like a small oversight. Wet towels on the floor is one thing, but wet towels on the bed where you could get mold and grow stuff in the mattress, and then you had to put the whole bedding in the wash.
It's that actually is a big that actually is a big no no. It's like as someone who's also naturally kind of messy, I'm not here saying, like, if your house looks like anything other than the Martha Stewart magazine, you're a bad person. But wet towels on the bed. It's so unnecessary and it's so entitled.
And he didn't live in Phoenix, where it's like super, super dry and hot. He lived in Michigan, where it's like wet, rainy, cold, but also he had other examples, like crumbs on the counter. He and his sons would just leave candy wrappers and garbage beside the garbage can. Not in the garbage can. And then Sarah tells a story in the conference about she, how she and Emerson were having a conversation where he said, you know, I know you love me, but I just don't feel like you like me. And she had this light bulb moment where she was like, well, I don't like you because you make my life so much harder.

Sarah Eggerichs, clip 
One day we were talking and he looked at me and he said, Sarah, I know you love me, but I do not think you like me. And I thought, oh no, take your arrow. He was right. I didn't like him. I didn't like my kids. I was just becoming a very negative person in my home.
I was out to change everyone because I thought if they all change to be like me, we'd all be happy. And nobody was happy. I was being negative about everything, whether it was every shoe from the front door to the back door, every crumb on the counter, every candy wrapper on the floor, every wet towel on the floor. And I was out to make a difference. And I was making a really bad difference.

Rebecca
I just want to make this clear when he's doing things that make her life harder, that's her being too negative. And so then she tells this wild story about how she goes away for a week. She gets off the airplane. She's so excited to see her family. She asks Emerson, did you like how was your week? And he says, honestly, we had a great week. We ate what we wanted to eat. When we wanted to eat, we made our beds. When we wanted to make our beds, we played games, we made forts. It was really fun. 
And then she asked, what did you miss me? And he says, nothing.

Sarah Eggerichs, clip 
I know you noticed that when I said, did you miss me? He didn't say yes and he didn't say no. But that was the confirmation, the last confirmation that I needed.

Rebecca
So I want you to picture this. We have a woman whose husband and kids are leaving crap everywhere, who can't even bother to put their garbage in the garbage can, who are leaving their shoes all over the house from the front to the back door, who are leaving crumbs, places who are leaving dirty towels on the bed and on the floor. She goes away for a week and they say, man, we had the best week ever, mom. And her conclusion was, I need to be more respectful. I am the problem.
It is perfectly normal for children and teenagers to like to let loose for a week while the parents are gone. What's not normal is for the other parent to also be one of those teenagers.
And so what's so sad to me, though, is that Sarah's conclusion from this is that her problem is she was too negative. She was being disrespectful to her husband and her kids, and now that she just ignores it, now that she's just positive, everything's all better, but everything is not better because Sarah is still doing all of the work.
What is it teaching her sons that you are allowed to treat a woman like that, like your living maid and cook, and just not even consider how you could take a modicum of time and make her life so much easier. Again, I am someone who is naturally messy. I also do not close cupboard doors. I also probably do not wipe off the counter as often as I should.
But it is so easy to put your trash in the trash like there's no excuse for that. It is so easy to not trekmuddy boots all over the floor. This isn't someone being stuffy and unrealistic? This is the basics of human decency and respect towards someone. And so now you might be thinking, okay, but that's like one example. Surely there's another. Surely there's an example how Emerson had to repent of being unloving towards his wife. Right?
Well, I'll read you one. That's a that's a sure fire. Easy lay up for unloving. Okay. Are you ready?
“Sarah's birthday was coming up. She was thinking about how I would respond,
What I even remember. She always remembered birthdays. But birthdays weren't big on my radar screen. She knew she would never forget my birthday because she loved me dearly. She wondered, however, if I would celebrate her birthday. She was thinking, does he hold me in his heart the way I hold him in mine? So what she did was not done in the mean spirit. She was simply trying to discover things about me and men in general. She knew that forgetfulness was a common problem and she was just being curious as an experiment, she hid all the birthday cards that had arrived before her birthday. No hints of her birthday existed anywhere, and I was going along in my usual fog, studying and thinking. On her birthday. I had lunch with a friend.
That evening, as Sarah and I had dinner, she softly asked, so did you and Ray celebrate my birthday today?
I can't describe exactly what goes on inside the human body at a moment like that, but it felt as if my blood went out from my heart, down to my feet, and then shot full force into my face. How would I ever explain this one? I hemmed, and I hawed, but I couldn't explain. Forgetting Sarah's birthday, my forgetfulness had been unloving and I could see that she was hurt.
But at the same time I had these strange feelings. Yes, I had been wrong to forget, but I hadn't ignored her birthday intentionally. I had felt judged, put down, and rightly so. At the time, I couldn't describe my feelings with a word like disrespected. During those years, when the feminists were going full blast, men didn't talk about being disrespected by women.
That would have been arrogant, and in church circles. It would have been considered a terrible lack of humility.” 
Sp he forgets her birthday. He forgets her birthday. He spends money on a friend. He goes to lunch with a friend on her birthday, forgets her birthday, acknowledges he was unloving, but he didn't mean to. And so the problem was that he felt disrespected on the day where he forgot his wife's birthday. And this is what is so baffling to me. And this is the true double standard of love and respect. That is a clear cut case. He was unloving. He did not love her. He did not hold her in her, in his heart, the same way that she held him in hers. He did not care enough to put a notification on his calendar or his agenda. I don't know what decade this was. His Palm Pilot? I don't know, but he didn't care enough to make sure he didn't forget the one day a year that is specifically about the love of his life, and he gets mad at her for bringing it up in a calm, respectful manner where she wasn't doing a whole theatrical thing. She was just trying to see if  he even cares about me. And she is disrespectful. What would it take for Emerson to see a man as unloving? Because a wife is disrespectful? If she tells him that he forgot her birthday? A wife is disrespectful if she's frustrated about him leaving trash on the ground. A wife is disrespectful. If she asks him not to leave wet towels on the bed. A wife is disrespectful. If she forgets that he doesn't like pepper in his eggs, But the fact that he forgot her birthday, even though it is unloving, is not nearly as important as the disrespect that he feels at being confronted with his lack of love.
Consistently throughout Love and Respect. What we end up seeing because of these mismatched, incompatible needs that are presented in this book. Women have to jump through hoops and do everything exactly right to make sure that they don't step on the egos of men because their need for respect is just like Chuck said, it's really a need for psychological soothing to be to be placated by their wives.
So we end up having is this super complicated, algorithm that the wives have to follow while the man is being presented by Emerson Eggerichs, as some sort of caveman.

Emerson Eggerichs, clip 
And when blue words come out of a pink megaphone. Meet your mother tongue. It's been said she once knew how to speak this she did in courtship.

Rebecca
Like, we're not kidding. He actually presents men as cavemen. And what we're talking about. Women just can't win. Here's an example of where women just can't win okay.
He says “Many husbands interpret criticism as contempt. And contempt is something men do not handle well. Talking to women about how  you need to be careful not to be contemptuous.” Okay? You can tell that to women. Now we're going to see the corollary. He says to men, “Wiives virtually ask to be unloved when they look down on their husbands.”
So men don't handle disrespect well. So women have to make sure not to be contemptuous and women are asking to be unloved and their contemporaries. So women better not be contemptuous. Do you see what I mean?
How he's. He makes it sound like it's so balanced because they both have needs. They both of things they have to do. But when it comes down to brass tacks, it's always the woman who needs to go first. So you might be thinking, okay, if this is objectively not even working in the marriage of the author of this book, why do people do this? Why do they listen to it? Well, Emerson has made his own theory unfalsifiable by definition because of the rewarded cycle.
So remember that Emerson, which I like in multiple places, claims that this is the holy grail of marriage. This will fix any marriage problem. Doesn't matter what you're going through, the Love and Respect connection is the key. However, he has a massive caveat. He's like, but if it doesn't work, God shall reward.
The rewarded cycle should be unnecessary given the efficacy claims earlier in the book and in the conferences. But because this doesn't actually work, he has what we call the cover your butt cycle.
Not only does Eggerichs acknowledge that this sometimes doesn't work for you, he actually hedges his bets and shows examples of when this actually the Love and Respect concept made things worse for people.
So in the section that he titles, It Simply Doesn't Work, What Then?
He says this:
“As Jesus spoke of the trials and tribulations believers might have to go through for him, he mentioned that a man's enemies will be the members of his household in Matthew 10:36, for you it may feel just this way. So should you. Simply say, this love and respect thing doesn't work? When you love and respect unconditionally, you are following God and His will for you.
Ultimately, your spouse in your marriage have nothing to do with it. You are simply demonstrating your obedience and trust in the face of an unlovable wife or a disrespecting husband. Unconditional love and unconditional respect will be rewarded. I call this the rewarded cycle. Jesus said, for if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Jesus could have had your troubled marriage in mind when he said that.
And I believe Paul also had your marriage in mind when he penned Ephesians six 7 to 8. Serve wholeheartedly as if you are serving the Lord, not men, because you know the Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does, whether he is slave or free.”

And I find this just wild. So for the first like majority of the book, it's this WILL work. This will work. You will see fruits in your marriage and then the ends like and if you don't it's not a problem because you're doing what God wants. But the biggest thing I want you to notice is aggregate conflates following his theory of love and respect with following God's orders for you as a Christian.
I think there's a commandment about that. Hmm…

So we've talked about a lot of the stuff that happens in Love and Respect. The idea that women have needs and men have needs, but these needs really don't actually even mesh. You are not physically. You are not able to meet both needs simultaneously until someone has to break and it's always the woman in love and respect who is the one who has to give up her need to feel loved, to make sure that he feels placated and soothed. I refuse to call it respect,
But we also hear about this horrifying view of sexuality where she doesn't enjoy it. It takes like, hardly any time there's no mention of female pleasure. In fact, there's active mentions about how she probably doesn't even find it pleasurable. Because you have to explain that men like this. So there's this really bizarre sexual element where it's a coercive and non orgasmic sex life, which, quite frankly, scratched me off that list. Like no one wants that.
And it's also just chock full of double standards and doesn't even follow its own logical consistency. So why is it that this book took off so well?

I think the first thing is that there are aspects to this book that do make sense, and they they connect with us to a deep part of our core, right. The idea that you have to meet each other's needs, like no one's arguing that you shouldn't try to understand where your spouse is coming from. There's all this stuff that's just in every single marriage book, and it's just kind of the cornerstone of marriage advice that is also present in Love and Respect.
But also, this book is built on this idea of cycles, and the idea of cycles is not unique to love and respect the idea of a negative cycle. We've all talked about something starting to snowball, like the snowball rolling down the hill. There are multiple versions of therapeutic approaches that are evidence based that that talk about this idea of breaking cycles and like, okay, you need to be the first one to make the right choice because you can't just keep waiting for someone else to make the right choice.
This all makes total sense. Like this is a known, a lived experience for many people.The thing is, it's not specifically his cycles. That work is just the concept of the idea of not continuing to contribute to a negative cycle that's so beneficial. And to be clear, when we talk about needing to be the bigger person, we're never talking about giving up your bodily autonomy or your dignity or truth. We're talking about. If you're both in a bit of a snit in your marriage, maybe you be the first one who stops being snippy.
That's very different than saying force yourself to have sex that is an orgasmic and that you don't like with the man who is acting unloving towards you so that he doesn't have an affair.
The first easy answer with this is that people just want easy answers.
We really like shortcuts as human beings. We really do. We are always looking for this one quick trick that will fix your marriage, or that one easy weight loss tip, or this quick way that this man got a promotion at work. Or the one key to your productivity. We're always looking for an easy answer. And this one's incredibly flashy and marketable and easy to understand.
Three cycles, two acronyms, one terrible idea: it's Love and Respect.
And I want to make it clear, it's not some huge moral failing to be looking for an easy answer. You have to remember the majority of people who are buying marriage books because they're in distress are at the end of their rope. A lot of these people have been carrying emotional burdens and are dealing with trauma from their past or from their marriage. They're dealing with the stressors of life. There's probably reasons that their marriage is also suffering that are both about their relationship, but also external to their relationship. These are not people who are coming to the table with all of their spoons to put it in, like the spoon theory kind of language.
it makes sense that if you're someone who is struggling and who's in a bad situation, what you don't want to be told is it's going to take a lot of work. It's going to be really freaking hard, and it might not even work. You want to have the guy who says: “THIS IS THE ANSWER”
And about Love and Respect to what he does is because he talks about how this is God designed things and this is just how the world is. The locus of control is outside of yourself. And so if you do the things and it doesn't work, it's not your fault. There's even this really nice little psychological cushioning there where it's not that you, you're doing something wrong.
It's not that, your marriage is doomed. It's that you just don't understand the great mysteries of how God designed this, and you're going to get rewarded eventually. You don't even need to face the idea that your marriage might be doomed. Because even if your marriage is still terrible, you've still got an answer here about how you're still doing the right thing. And again, I just want to make it clear. I know we probably have a lot of people watching this who were harmed by Love and Respect. I know we've interviewed some people for that for episode three of this. But if you're one of those people who was looking for an easy answer and you fell for this, please have compassion for yourself because that's just a really human thing to do.
So the second reason we found why people really bought this message is that he convinced people of problems that they didn't have, and then presented them with the solution.
A huge premise of Love and Respect is that men and women are fundamentally different and cannot be understood by one another. He talked about pink and blue megaphones and air hoses and all sorts of things. How women are pink and men are blue, right?

Emerson Eggerichs, clip
So we have this huge male female difference. We have a pink and blue issue.
Because you project on him pink. Everything is interpreted through pink. Now and I'm going to tell you that report is sincere. It's not insincere, but it's video taped in pink. Men don't get pink. Women don't get blue. But when a woman feels wounded, she'll break down and cry. Men get angry and go off by themselves in silence. A lot of times she's just a woman. He's a male. We have different issues. We have different metabolisms. We look at the world differently. Is that okay? There's a metabolism in you that we can't relate with. Calm down woman.

Rebecca
We're all used to this kind of imagery.
I just love that they have different metabolisms line like are women facultative anaerobes like E coli or something like I know what he's trying to say. I know what he means, but it's just it's just a silly thing to bring in terms of relational differences.
Because even if we have different metabolisms, like different women have different metabolisms from each other to in terms of their like energy output. We don't think that women can't be friends with people who are different BMI of them. And you also notice, like with that clip that we showed, he also does this in a very joking manner, which, really puts down the audience is pretentious, like, this is okay. Is this okay? He doesn't want to. He wants to be this anti-political correct kind of guy. A little bit edgy, right? He's talking about how men and women are different. “Am I allowed to say that?”
And when you do stuff like that, it kind of makes everyone feel like they're in on a joke. And it makes people a lot more willing to buy into it.
But in convincing people that there is this massive difference between men and women where women and men can never truly fully understand each other, he makes it seem incredibly dire because he compares their needs to air hoses.
He talks a lot about stepping on each other's air hose. That's a pretty big deal, right?
Now I want you to take that imagery of air hoses to tuck it in the back of your head. We are going to come back to that later. It is incredibly important. And it's just remember for later.
But after he says this whole thing about how there's this massive answer to all the problems you've ever faced, and the problem is so much bigger than you possibly could have imagined, because you're so different than you could possibly imagine, and you'll never be able to understand each other.
And if you don't, you're stepping on each other's air hoses. And I have the answer.
Emerson claims that he can bridge the gap between men and women like no other. Because of this Love and Respect, connection
But as he's presenting these big problems with his version of a solution. throughout the book love and respect. We end up with very spongy definitions.
So for example, he says in the book that men also need love and that women also need respect. But the way that he defines respect that men need in chairs is fundamentally, you are not able to do it to both people in the relationship.
Like he says that women need to feel respect too, obviously. But do women need to feel like they are the protector and they would die for their husbands? Do women need to feel that they are the provider for their home in Emerson's world? Do women need to feel like, they also have sexual needs that need to be filled?
Well, apparently not, because they're never mentioned.
What Emerson means by respect for women is very different than what he means for respect for men. There was an amazing quote, the one I think it just started on, like Tumblr or Reddit or something like that. So I'm so sorry if this actually is someone's quote.
But there's that quote that says,
“Some people say you need to respect me before I respect you, what they mean is you need to defer to me before I treat you like a human being”
Respect can mean either of those things. And this is very much what we see in Love and Respect. Respect that women offer men is deference is the erasure of yourself, whereas respect that women theoretically also need for men is simply being treated like a human being with dignity. Additionally, what happens in this book, and this is one of the reasons why people bought into it, because a lot of times you don't notice the tricky aspects if you aren't looking for it with a very critical eye, because Emerson offers a lot of caveats.
For example here's a caveat that Emerson Eggerichs gives in his book about abuse.
“Another wife who has suffered physical and verbal abuse from her husband, which I absolutely condemn as wicked and urge a wife to seek protection and help for, and had gone back to him after he repented, realized she had not completely forgiven him, and certainly wasn't showing him respect. After coming across our material, she began showing him respect, mostly by remaining quiet and dignified instead of arguing, their relationship improved considerably.”
He also speaks positively of a woman who went back to a husband who was imprisoned for domestic violence. And he also talks about women whose husbands have fits of rage and doesn't talk about how they need to get to safety. He talks about how they need to respect them better.
Now, I want you to take a second. And sure, the guy says that he condemns physical and verbal abuse and that you should figure out how to get safe. He does say that, but the problem is that the examples he give are praising women who figured out how to go back to previously physically abusive husbands. We know that the recidivism rate for domestic violence is incredibly high. We know that very few abusers actually change.
And then he does talk a lot about women who say, well, I'm concerned about the idea of unconditional respect. Isn't that a red flag like this is scary to me. Isn't he going to become abusive? And Emersons response is always this. Pretty much, well, he's good willed. If he's good willed, he will not be abusive. If this man is good willed, he won't take the respect and the deference you give him and use it against you. A good willed man would never use the power that his wife gives him against her.
And that might seem like, oh, okay, so he's teaching women that if they don't respond well, then it is abuse and they should get out, right? Well, what's his definition of good willed?
Well, in this conference, when he's talking to those women who are saying my husband is an evil willed man, this is what he says.

Emerson Eggerichs, clip
Unless there's downright evil confirmed. By 2 or 3 witnesses. And there's a series of facts, and the eldership and the spiritual people around you would all confirm that this is an evil willed man. Or an evil willed woman. You are way out of line. And the sad thing about this is Malachi says, in some ways you won't get it in the throat. Your children will, and some of you need to come to a point as a woman of love and a man of honor.
That you do the right and righteous thing for the sake of your children, because there are consequences. That are so serious that some of you are completely blind to them.

Rebecca
And on top of that, when he talks about goodwill of men, he says that evil men always mistreat their families. He uses a lot of always words or they will never.
Additionally, even though he says that he strongly condemns abuse and that people should obviously seek safety, he also says this in the conference:

Emerson Eggerichs, clip
And don't just take a snapshot of something that happened that was evil. That doesn't necessarily mean that they were evil willed. Adultery may have happened, but that is necessarily mean. That person is an evil person because they've done evil things. You know, you. You've got to be very cautious. Before you conclude that your spouse is Hitler's distant cousin. And remember, that is the mommy or daddy of your child.

Rebecca
So imagine that you are a woman who's married to a man who has really good days and really bad days, and on the bad days he rages at her and he's punched holes in the wall and she's scared. And she tiptoes around him and they go to a Love and Respect conference. And he says that he doesn't think that abuse is good and that she should seek safety. And so she says, well, maybe I should start to seek safety. And then she hears stuff like this. You've got to be really careful before you figure out that your spouse is Hitler's distant cousin.
And you can't just take a snapshot. You can't just take a snapshot of what they've done. That doesn't mean they're an evil willed person. You've got to have 2 or 3 witnesses. Everyone in your church has got to agree. You've got to have constant evidence that this man is evil willed. Is that woman going to feel empowered to leave her husband, who's punching walls while their toddlers in the room?
Eggerichs himself has been made aware that the dynamics that he teaches couples do cause very, very strange dynamics between men and women where the woman is very uncomfortable and, and not at ease. He says in the confrence he says this.

Emerson Eggerichs
Some women are very nervous. Your father's coming home. They personalize things. I've seen women through the years just like they talked about being on eggshells. I've never received any email from any man. I received thousands of emails from him. I'm on eggshells.
I've never had one from a man, I'm on eggshells.

Rebecca
I'm just saying, if you're telling one half of the couple to give up personal autonomy, to make sure that all of their feelings and their thoughts about the relationship are presented either not at all, or in an incredibly soft, soothing way to the person who is supposed to have ultimate power over the family. And you're getting emails from one sex saying, I'm walking on eggshells.
I don't feel like we're safe. Maybe we consider that what we're teaching is a really toxic gender dynamic that is removing autonomy and power from women and giving men far too much leeway so that the ones who are immature or abusive or dysfunctional are just getting to wallow in their own muck.
And this is the fundamental issue with these spongy definitions. He gives these caveats, saying, if you are married to an evil willed man, make sure that you're safe. Sure. But you cannot be evil willed by his own definitions. That is impossible other than the man being a literal serial killer. For a man to be considered evil willed into.
In Emerson Eggrichs’ world.
Because remember, you're not allowed to take a snapshot. You're not allowed to just focus on the evil things he did. You have to ask if the desires of his heart are evil. And also remember that women are told that if a man is acting unloving and he's straying, he's drinking, he's having affairs, they give examples of men who are rageful and angry that she's supposed to react with respect, not getting herself to safety. And then also remember that in this example with Emerson just forgetting Sarah's birthday, she brought it up to him in a quiet, gentle, respectful way. Didn't accuse him or say, you're such a horrible husband, anything like that. And she was still the one who was disrespectful and she was blamed for his negative affect.
That is how abusers train their victims. That is abusive grooming. It's no matter what happens, no matter how I respond, no matter what you do, you are always the one who's in the wrong. Because by definition, if I have a bad emotion, it means that you didn't respect me enough.
The problem is that respect is never properly defined in the book Love and Respect. But the examples and the stories that are told show that respect in the world of what we call the Multiverse of Love and Respect to the conferences, the podcast, the books, everything in the Multiverse of Love and Respect. Respect for men simply means never having to experience a negative emotion or accountability for their actions.
I do not think that Emerson would think that that is his definition, but that is what we get when we read the book and we watch the conferences.
And more importantly, that is the story that we get from the hundreds of people who have reached out to us about the negative impacts that love and respect has had on their marriage.
Both men and women.

Various clips from interviews
Oh, so many women bear the brunt.
It it was abusive from the morning of our honeymoon.
It taught me to enable, a mindset of selfishness
We read it together, had some conversations, we really didn't dig deeper or think more about it.
And I didn't realize how much it had impacted me until we were married.
I think one of the major things that has kept recurring is that anger is a sign that you've been disrespectful and that  still messes with me to this day.
It's an artificial fix where I get a shot of power that's not actually real power because it's not coming from a healed center. It's coming out of a deep, insecure core wound that I'm projecting.
The word respect and disrespect were weaponized against me.
it was my fault that he was not loving me because I was not doing respect correctly. That is exactly what love and respect taught me,

Rebecca
Here's where I find that I get really, really sad because this is where we see why women who are married to, quite frankly, either emotionally immature or even dangerous men really latched on to this book. Emmerson, throughout his book and his conference weaponizes our desire to be good.
And I also want to be very clear. I do not believe that I reached the author of Love and Respect is meaning to do any of this. I do not believe that this is some story of a narcissistic mastermind who's like, ooh, how can I make sure that women end up an abusive relationships? I really don't think that's what's happening. And we're going to talk about that more in in episode three. But I want to I want to be clear about that. I don't believe this is a malicious attempt. I think that this is done out of ignorance. I think that this is done out of just not really understanding how abuse dynamics work. We know from research that abusive people tend to seek out submissive people who are people pleasing, who want people to be happy with them, who aren't going to raise a fuss. And so what happens are the Love and Respect Multiverse, is often what's happened is the people in the pews and what's often going to be is the women, because women are more likely to read marriage books than men and especially women and complicated relationships. We hear from many of them who have done this.
They read the book and they hear things like this
“Don't play the percentages game with your spouse. It's an easy way to get yourself off the hook and once off the hook, you can't mature spiritually. In fact, a typical result is that you feel like a victim. You get the victim mindset. You want to be rescued. You want Paradise on Earth.
You begin to resent your spouse and other people because they haven't healed your hurts or comforted you. Get rid of the victim mindset. Realize that the only real healing and comfort you're going to get is by looking to the Lord and trusting him with your situation. Painful as it is to do otherwise is to sin.”
He uses this mocking tone quite often about, like, you're just making yourself feel like a victim and you just want Paradise, and it's very minimizing of what people's actual core desires are they want to help their marriage, they're in a hard relationship. It's not that women who are married to problematic and abusive men want Paradise on earth… They just want to stop being abused.
That is a very, very low bar for Paradise. But he does this repeatedly throughout the conference two, where he used a very playful, mocking tone

Emerson Eggerichs
Now some of you women are suddenly going, oh no, oh no, you're only two points in and I'm already feeling like I'm a miserable. We've got four more after this. Oh no. Oh! It's me. Oh, no. I've been blaming him. It is me. It's me.
And is that okay that our spouse would have a need that we don't have, and particularly toward men? Is it okay that a man has a need to feel respected for who he is, apart from his performance in the same way, you need to feel love for who you are apart from your performance? Is that okay? And if it feels strange, is it strange? If it feels foreign, is it really foreign? If it feels marginal, is it really marginal?

Rebecca
But you tie this with all of his repeated assertions that he's a good willed man and you just don't understand him. And this is just how men are. And so after he's told people not to play the percentages game and not get into a victim mindset and frankly, ignore who's more wrong, just do your part. And for women, that just means submit. And make sure that you don't say things that your husband finds frustrating and don't make him have bad feelings. Because even if he's being unloving, if you made him feel disrespected in bringing up, he's being unloving.
Now you're the one who's actually the problem because that was disrespectful. And that's worse than being unloving. Because again, competing needs both can't get met. And so one of them has to bend. And it's always the the wife. Now we have this doozy of a quote.
So after we've told wives in particular to stop playing the percentage game and to stop trying to figure out who's more wrong and don't get into that victim mentality, because you just want Paradise on Earth and all of this ridiculous stuff that's minimizing the heart cry of people who are in truly destructive marriages, which, remember, he's also said is all women in his emails.
He only gets messages from women saying they're walking on eggshells and they're scared. Okay? So this is women he's talking to. He's just making it two genders to cover his butt. So he's talking to women who are in terrible marriages, who he says that his Love and Respect Cure is going to fix it. And then he says this:
“Some wives may be a bit cynical, but what I am saying from all your past history, you just know your spouse intended evil at least a little. But do you really think that your husband's mission is to treat you unlovingly out of an evil heart? Your husband doesn't get up in the morning thinking, what can I do to upset her today? Nor do you awaken with the goal of offending him. Yet we do step in each other's air hoses. Yes. Your husband's unloving actions or reactions hurt you, but as Paul put it, bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. Surely forgive includes your husband, so why not move first and be the mature one?”
So Emerson is talking about a woman who says that from all her past history with this man, she's like, nah, this man is evil.
And he's like, but forgive as the Lord forgave you.
it's weaponizing people's desire to be good. It's weaponizing people's own religion against them. It's using Christian language that we have been taught is salvation language, and tying it to their lack of desire to move forward with potentially an abusive partner.
And even though this seems very obvious, this is one of the reasons why this book took off. Because in Christian spaces in particular, people want to be good. They want to follow the rules. They want to be, and God's good books. Right? They want to be a good Christian wife.
And they also tend to have a much more higher trust in authority figures. Love and Respect tries to take a complex issue of marriage problems as a whole. Just all the marriage problems, every single one. And they tried to offer a cookie cutter solution.
We all know cookie cutter solutions do not work for very complex issues like relationship problems. But the thing about Love and Respect that was so different than the others is that it had a great hook, had easy to implement strategies, and it echoed conservative Christian talking points already while using a lot of manipulation tactics such as weaponizing our desire to be good. Using mocking tones and talking about people's dissensions with the topic.
Not providing clear definition so people couldn't even really tell if they were agreeing or disagreeing because something would sound reasonable, but then the same word would say something unreasonable 4 pages later. All while providing the readers with a problem that he was the only one who had the solution for.
At the end of the day, Irish may claim that this is the Holy Grail of marriage advice, and that this is some brand new novel concept that will fix everyone's problems.
But by his own admission, in his own book, it's a train wreck for many couples.
It's riddled with logical inconsistencies, and it leaves people vulnerable to abuse and also just deepens the dysfunction and otherwise. What could have been maybe okay, marriage is,
So objectively speaking, in 2025, this book is a train wreck. But why did it take off in 2004?
And for that, we have to thank this man. We'll see you in the next video.