Episode 346 - Sheila Wray Gregoire, "The Marriage You Want"

Welcome to another episode of Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick. Today, Michael sits down with returning guest Sheila Wray Gregoire to dive into her latest book, The Marriage You Want: Moving Beyond Stereotypes for a Relationship Built on Scripture, New Data, and Emotional Health.

Sheila, known for her groundbreaking research and no-nonsense approach to Christian marriage resources, unpacks the myths, harmful teachings, and outdated stereotypes that have often taken root in Christian culture. Together, she and Michael explore new, peer-reviewed data on what actually leads to thriving, satisfying marriages—and what doesn’t. They discuss topics ranging from cognitive load and mental labor in relationships to partnership, decision-making, friendship, equality, and sexual fulfillment, challenging traditional teachings and offering practical, research-backed advice for couples seeking genuine intimacy and unity.

Whether you’re struggling in your marriage, eager to move beyond unhelpful stereotypes, or just want to learn what healthy, scripturally grounded love can really look like, you’ll walk away from this rich conversation with hope, insight, and actionable wisdom.

Plus, Sheila shares the heart behind her platform BareMarriage.com, and Michael highlights the importance of curiosity, partnership, and looking for “good fruit” in all aspects of marriage. 

Transcript

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Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Restoring the Soul. I'm Michael and today we're speaking with Sheila Ray Gregoire and she's got a brand new book out. It's called the marriage you want. And Sheila has been on the podcast before around her now best selling book the great sex rescue and then a number of books since then, which I've highly recommended. But Sheila, welcome. Thank you. It's good to be here. And congratulations on the success with all of your books, but especially with this book because it's a little bit different. You still are calling out some of the toxic materials and Christian books that have actually caused harm and decreased happiness and satisfaction in marriage. But this, like some of your past work, it says the subtitle is the marriage you want. Moving beyond stereotypes for a relationship built on scripture, new data and emotional health. Can you just unpack what it means? New data in emotional health. Yeah. So we did our team at Bare Marriage, we're all about research. So I think this one was our fourth survey. I can't even remember now. I think it was our fourth big study and we had 7000 people answering 1300 matched pairs. So 1300 couples where we could match their answers. So it was really fun about marriage. But what we've been doing up until now is, is we've been saying, let's look at how Christians have just been harmed by the materials we've been given. There has been so many negative messages in a lot of our Christian resources. And we managed to measure how the teachings in so many evangelical books actually affect marital and sexual satisfaction. For this one, we did something different. We said, if you were going to create a healthy marriage from the ground up, what would it look like? And so we did this super long study survey asking people all kinds of questions. And then we were looking at what correlates with a good marriage, like what actually matters. And that's what. That's what the marriage you want turned into. And you talk a lot about this in the book as well as your website, that a lot of Christian books are not based on data but on opinion. And I just want to do a shout out. I can't remember the names of your team, but you have a statistician who works in epidemiology, your husband's a physician. Like there's scientifically trained people that were part of this study as well as your own helping to design it. Say a little bit about that. Yeah. So Joanna Sawatzki is our wonderful statistician and she was a big part of this team. She did all the charts, all the data for us, crunched all the numbers. And then my daughter, Rebecca Lindenbach, created the study along with Joanna, because Rebecca's got training in psychometrics. And then my husband, of course, is a physician. And we're actually. We had a peer reviewed paper out in the Sociology of Religion journal in November. We were working on five other ones and collaborating with a bunch of different university professors around the continent for those. So we really are trying to raise the bar on what counts as research because in the evangelical church, as you know, a lot of people have written stuff which they're not qualified to write. You know, they're not trained counselors, they're not trained psychologists. They are just often pastors or people who might be adjacent to, to the Christian field, but they just don't have any experience or expertise in this. And then what they write becomes bestsellers because they're charismatic and they get unfocused on the family and it ends up hurting people. Yeah. So one of the things that you talk about in the book and that to me feels like a theme in all of your writing, you said that some people might ask the question, how can I feel less lonely in my marriage? Or how can I increase my libido? And you say the more important question is, why do I feel lonely in the marriage and what might be causing my low libido? And so talk about that. Why? A, it's more important to look at causation and how that played out in your book. Because we just need curiosity. You know, when something is going wrong in the marriage, we often say, well, I just need to fix it. I just need to fix the problem. But you can't fix a problem. You can't identify. Right. And we often look at symptoms as if the symptom is the problem, instead of realizing the symptom is trying to tell us something. And libido is a great example. I think people can understand this one. So let me talk about this one for a minute. If someone has a low libido, what is our answer? It's like, well, how can I get you to have more sex? How can I get you excited about sex? How can I get you to want to have sex? But what if the more important question is, is she even having the kind of sex that she wants? Or is he even having the kind of sex that he wants? Is there something that is stopping them from having the kind of sex that they want that makes them not want to have sex? Because they're very well could be. So we looked at, I think we identified 1200 women in our most in our latest study who said they had very low sexual desire. And then we just asked them three questions. Just three. Do you frequently orgasm when you have sex? Do you feel emotionally connected during sex? And do you experience sexual pain? And those three questions explained 85% of the low desire. You know, if we had also asked, does your husband watch porn? Do you feel like you do way too much housework and you're always exhausted, we probably could have figured out the other 15%. But the point I'm trying to make is that the problem is not that they have a low libido. The problem is they're not enjoying sex. They're not feeling emotionally connected, or they've got sexual pain. So if you don't want sex or if you're feeling lonely or any of these other things, let's start asking why instead of saying, that is the problem we've got to fix. Yeah. Thanks for explaining it that way, especially using that example, because I think that is a really concrete example that a lot of people will relate to. When you and I talked, we had lunch along with your colleague or assistant at Colorado Christian University. I think it was two and a half years ago, and it was really delightful to meet you. You used a phrase with me that I probably pretended like I knew what it was, but it was the first time I heard it from you. And it's this idea of cognitive load, which you come at indirectly in a couple of different chapters. And I'll let you explain this idea of cognitive load and then how that has played out against wives. And so I'll have you answer that. And then I want to come back and frame a question around that idea. Okay, well, I'm going to answer with the story because it's easier to explain it with the story. Sure. So let's imagine a couple. We'll call them Sandra and Mark. And Mark says to Sandra, honey, you know, I just. You've been so busy. You've been so tired. You take Saturday to yourself. Go do whatever you want. I got the kids. I've got this. And so Saturday morning, Sandra goes to the gym. Then she goes for a run. She goes and has coffee at her coffee shop. She's reading a book. She has a lovely time. And then she comes home and the kids are all excited. They've had a wonderful morning. The dishes are still in the sink because they had pancakes, but that's okay. And she goes to wash the dishes, and she notices that the Birthday present to the party that they have to leave for in about two hours is still on the counter, and it's not wrapped. And she's like, oh, that's all right, whatever. So she goes to get the wrapping paper, and as she goes into the living room, she sees that her son's science fair project is still laid out and nothing has happened to it. And this thing is due on Monday. And she's like, oh, man, did they not work on this? Like, when are we going to do that with the party this afternoon? And then she thinks, did Janie practice piano? Because the recital is on Tuesday. So she yells to her husband, she says, hey, what are we going to do about this? And he's like, well, you didn't tell me. And she says, the family calendar is right there on the wall. Everything is starred. Last night at dinner, we were talking about the fact that the science fair project is due, but why didn't you think that you need to look after this? But it just wasn't on his radar, and so he just didn't think of it. So he's thinking, I'm doing my wife this wonderful thing by giving her a Saturday morning off. But he doesn't realize there's all these other things that have to get done, and he doesn't know they have to get done unless she gives him a list, which means she is carrying all of these different facts, all of these different things, the calendar for the entire family in her head. And even if they're talking about the science fair project, even if they're talking about the piano recital, it doesn't register to him as something that he needs to be paying attention to. And so she has to pay attention to all these things, but he doesn't. And what often happens in a family is that she is carrying the load for everything. So we asked, for instance, we asked people, hey, who takes care of your mother's birthdays, anniversaries, et cetera? Who takes care of your mother? And what we found is that in about 50% of couples, they each take care of their own parents, their own family of origin. But in the other 50%, she takes care of it for both of them. There's very, very few where he takes care of it for both of them. Similarly, we asked about medical and dental appointments. We said, hey, who books your medical and dental appointments? 50% of couples, they each do their own. And 50%, she does it for both of them. Very few where he does it for both of them. And anytime she is doing stuff like that, for both of them, you see a substantial drop in marital satisfaction. And so in the book, over and over and over again, there's different topics like that around Unity, teamwork, friendship. I'm reading right from the table of contents. Partnership, dependability, understanding, closeness. And then a lot of, toward the end of the book, sex, which I think you talked about, the passion that you want. So each of these chapters, rather than it being some theoretical idea of here's what makes a good marriage, it's hard data that then here's the beautiful thing for me just very clearly exposes, oh my goodness, this is what's happening. And the huge thing is that the correlation with many of these shows that a high cognitive load on the wife leads to a decreased sense of satisfaction, happiness in the marriage, and a decreased sense of sexual satisfaction over and over again. Yep, you know, it absolutely does it very. And multiple studies have shown this. This isn't just our study, it's increasingly being studied in the literature what mental load does. And yeah, it's, it's like this really hurts her libido. There's one Australian study that found that when she carries most of the mental load, she starts to see her husband as a dependent. You know, you sort of picture him as another child you have to take care of. That's not sexy. Nobody wants that. Right, right. So, you know, in the book we talk about really practical ways where he can own some things and he can take on the mental load. And this is, this is really important. Even if she's a stay at home parent, this isn't something where, well, because she stays at home, she can, she can handle all of it. No, nobody can handle all of it. It's too much. And so, you know, even if you work and your spouse doesn't, it's like you need to take some of the mental load off. And the best way to figure out if you're taking mental load away is just to say, do we each have equal time to sit down and do nothing? You know, if, if, if I get to say, you know what, I think I'm gonna go out on Thursday with my friends, but my spouse doesn't, then there's an imbalance. And so do you each have equal time to sit down and do nothing and not have to worry that when you come home there's gonna be more work for you than when you left? So implicit in all of your research too, although this is not a book about gender roles, it really exposes the fact that there's a great deal of gender inequality. In Christian marriages, despite what even the most complementarian or arch conservative person might say, well, you know, we're equal, but then we have different roles. But the data doesn't say that. The data says that there's a lot of inequality. Talk about that. Yeah. The data says that when you don't function as a partner, marital satisfaction just isn't what you want. I mean, we measured so many areas of marital satisfaction. Things like we have shared hobbies. My spouse knows how to make me laugh when I'm sad. I want to go and talk to my spouse about it. I have a high libido. Like, these are all really good outcomes. This is what we want. You know, my spouse. My spouse knows what's going on in my heart. Like, that's what real intimacy is. And we're saying, okay, well, what's associated with that? And the things that are associated with that are a strong partnership where you can rely on each other, where you know that they're working hard for this marriage, where there's not entitlement that is highly related, highly correlated with great marriages. But the idea that she has to do all of this work to make his life easier, that's not correlated with great marriages. Even though that is often what we're taught in Christian circles is God's design for marriage is that the wife is there as a support for the husband. Well, when that happens, marriage, marital satisfaction falls. Yeah. Talk about decision making. I thought that was fascinating. Yeah. So. So when you ask people what they mean when they say they're complementarian. Okay. Because this. And this is a common belief in the evangelical church that men are in authority over women in the marriage. And when you ask people practically, what does that mean? What it usually comes down to is if we can't decide, he gets to make the final decision because he's the one in authority. And I. I've been talking to people who follow that, and they'll say they. I think they think it's a mic drop moment or something. Because we'll be talking about why that really isn't necessary. And then he'll say, oh, but if you disagree, what if you have to make a decision super quickly, you obviously need someone to break the tie. And I'm thinking, you know, I've been married for 33 years. We've never met. Needed that. And in fact, 78.9% of couples in our survey of 20,000 women for the original survey, they make decisions together. They don't use a tiebreaker either. But when you do use a tiebreaker you can start to feel like there's no other way to do this because you've taken a shortcut and you've never actually worked at how to make decisions together. And so you've. And taking that shortcut is highly correlated with emotional immaturity. We found that complementarianism is highly correlated with a lot of markers of emotional immaturity, emotional dysregulation, having frequent anger outbursts, being passive aggressive. All of these things are much more common in marriages where they do have the husband as the final decision maker. And so when people teach you need him to make the final decision, what they're actually teaching is something which hurts marriages. Because when couples follow that, their marriage gets worse. I like to explain it this way. You know, we looked at all kinds of different markers of marital satisfaction. And what we found is that when one thing gets better, maybe you have more shared hobbies, or maybe her libido goes up. When one thing gets better, chances are everything else gets a little bit better too. Some things might get a lot better, and some things might only get a little bit better, but they all go in that direction. And likewise, when something gets a little bit worse, everything else is more likely to get worse too, by varying degrees, but it's more likely to go in that direction. And what I want people to understand is that the idea that he makes the final decision that travels with the bad outcomes, it doesn't travel with the good ones. And most people who teach that the husband gets to make the final decision don't practice it. And so my plea is everybody just, just preach what you practice. If you are practicing rituality, then let's start preaching that, because that is what actually works. In the book, you talk about in the decision making data that if somebody gets to do the tiebreaker, then the other person feels like my opinion doesn't matter. And so we could look at all the theology all day. But when a person's feeling in the relationship like their opinion doesn't matter, that comes back to this idea that you bring up in the book and on your website about fruit. And I just want to read this phrase from your website. What if Jesus meant what he said when he told us to judge a tree by its fruit? So the fruit of my opinions don't matter is not really good fruit. And there's actually another way that a people function and a way that most of the time it can be done. And I just thought that was another good thing. So there's all the data, but then there's our sensibilities And I joked before we started the podcast that several times in the book you use the word ick, and one time it was in parentheses, I, C, K. And it's that sense of that when we hear a teaching from the pulpit or in a Christian book and something about it doesn't sit well inside of us, it somehow offends our sensibilities. Like, that just doesn't feel right. Ick is an appropriate response and we should actually pay attention to that. Like the fruit of a husband who might believe that it's his authority that he has the right to exercise. Why would he do that if it leaves his wife feeling like she doesn't matter? Or vice versa in other situations? So thank you for that, for the fact that in addition to the hardcore data, you speak to the sensibility of it and to look to the fruit. Yeah. And you know Jesus in Matthew 7 when he was talking about that, if you look at the context of the passage, he's saying, okay, there's, how do we tell if there's a false teacher? So you've got people who are teaching something and people are teaching all different things. How do you tell which one is right? And he says that you got to look at the fruit because a good tree can't bear bad fruit and a bad tree can't bear good fruit. So buy the fruits, you will know them. And that's what we try to do with all of our studies, is we're showing, look which is the good fruit and which is the bad fruit. And this should matter. We need to take Jesus at his word. And I think a lot of people, good, like, well meaning people who truly want to follow Jesus have been in a church culture which have told them that he has to make the final decision that the, that the responsibility for the whole family lies on the husband. And ultimately God is going to hold him accountable for what the whole family does. That's an incredible burden to put on someone. And we can ask, does that bear good fruit? Because that is one interpretation of how you do marriage. But it isn't the only one, and it isn't even the best one. I'd say most Greek scholars would say that that is not actually what the Bible is saying today. And so if there are other interpretations and you're feeling really weighed down by what you've been taught, you know, that's a horrible burden to feel like if my kid, you know, rebels, God's going to hold me accountable for that. That's an awful place to be in. And yet we've put that on so many men and it doesn't do anyone any good long term. Yeah, and it's almost axiomatic, like you, you hear that at men's retreats in other places. So that, that's just the gospel, that's truth, as opposed to someone going, wait just a minute. So another chapter you have was on friendship, the friendship you want. And I thought there were some very, you know, all of the data was, was fascinating. And you talked about affection as it's related to friendship, but you talked about shared bedtimes. And I've talked with many, many couples in counseling intensives and work over the years where this becomes an issue. And one's a night owl and one's not. And yet the data says that shared bedtime is important. Unpack that. Okay, well, I just want to remind everybody that correlation isn't causation. And so we're not saying that a shared bedtime will fix everything, but here's what we do know is that people who go to bed mother. Do tend to have far better sex lives. They have sex more often, she is more likely to enjoy sex, she's more likely to reach orgasm, and they have much higher levels of marital satisfaction. So the question is, why, you know, is it just that happier couples go to bed at the same time? And it could be partly that, but I think it's also that in the act of going to bed at the same time, you do things to build your marriage. So, you know, you're getting changed together, you're debriefing about your day, you're talking about any concerns you might have for the next day. You know, you're just chatting and that chatting, that low key, low tension chatting does help, you know, Then you climb into bed together and you know, maybe you're just touching feet or you're holding hands as you chat, you continue to chat, maybe you're hugging, you're just able to have again, low key affection. And sometimes sex happens when you didn't even plan it, and sometimes sex doesn't, but you still touch more. And when I was a kid, and you probably experienced this too, Michael, because, because we're about the same age, I think, but you know, everybody went to bed either at 10, 20 or 11, like it was either after the local news or after Johnny Carson's monologue on the Tonight Show. Right. You know, and, and then, and then you go to bed because there's nothing else to do, like there's nothing keeping you up. Whereas today we've got the Internet We've got video games, like there's nothing telling you it's time to go to bed. And so we just don't have shared bedtimes in the same way. And I think that we do suffer from that. But what I will say is, look, one of you might be a night owl and one of you might need to get to bed at 9 o'clock because of work. And that's okay, you don't have to go to bed at the same time. But remember the things that you get from going to bed at the same time and be intentional about putting those in your day in other ways. Like maybe you get ready for bed together, even if you don't go to sleep now. Maybe you lie in bed together and just chat for a couple of minutes, even if one of you gets up and leaves afterwards. You know, see if you can put some of those practices in place regardless. Yeah, and your phrase low tension affection is important because if couples don't have that in a way that's a fixed point, like shared bedtime, then they've got to find a way to create that in some other way. So I know couples that they have to get up at the same time and so they'll sit for half an hour. And I'm jealous of some people that say, oh, we do that for like two hours in the morning, but having coffee together. And that's that time where I like to say that it's simply where goodwill can be built. But, you know, not having to go on a vacation and get on a plane or something like that. Talk about entitlement. You know, we typically think of that word clinically as some kind of pathology. And you unpacked it back in relation to equality between one another. And I think you said that nothing kills a marriage faster than entitlement. Yeah, entitlement is anytime you think that you deserve something in marriage without really having to put in work for it. And we can feel entitled for all kinds of different reasons. You know, maybe you had a super bad childhood and so you're like, I deserve someone to take care of me now. Or maybe you feel called by God to foster eight kids. You know, you're. And so you're like, I deserve someone to make this easy for me and to make enough money so that I can do this. Or, you know, or. Or you could just simply think, well, I'm a guy, so I'm entitled to sex. Or you could think, we live in the richest country in the world, so I'm entitled to a big house like we, we might not even put words to it, but we just have this feeling like this is something I deserve. And so then we get upset and we don't get it. And the thing is that when we measure entitlement in our survey, we found that people who are entitled are more likely to also say their spouse is entitled. So is it that two entitled people marry each other or is there something else going on? And I think there's often something else going on because people who are entitled and who aren't getting their needs met will often blame their spouse. And we'll say that my spouse isn't being selfless. So, you know, I, to explain this, let me, let me talk about the marriage hierarchy of needs because I think, I think this is a good picture. So Maslow was a psychologist and some of what he said is a little bit wonky. So I don't want to totally say that he's brilliant in all ways, but he did come up with this thing which I think is kind of cool, called the hierarchy of needs. Which goes, if you think of needs in a pyramid, the ones in the bottom are, are just basic things that you can't live without, you know, food, shelter, safety, water, etc. And you need these things first. And then you move up and you get into things that just make life better, you know, a good whatever it might be. And then at the top is your self actualization feeling like you have purpose in life. And the point is that you can't move up the pyramid until the bottom ones are met. So no one's worrying about sex when they're getting chased by a bear, right? Like you got to escape the bear. And there's a similar thing that goes on in marriage. I think we have a marriage hierarchy of needs where at the bottom you're just putting all of your energy into surviving, into just getting through the day. We got to get the kids out the door for the school bus, we've got to make sure they have lunches packed, we've got to get the laundry done, we've got to get dinner made, we've got to get the rent in on time. We've got to figure out how to make some money. So all of your emotional energy is going there. And then once that's done, like once you have some breathing room, you can work on making life good. You can work on actually living. So finding a church you like, finding friend group you like, maybe looking into a job that you're actually enjoying. And then after that you get into thriving and living Out God's calling for your life. And it's all beautiful. But what can happen in a marriage is that one person is living in that top tier, fulfilling their calling, but in so doing, they're pushing their spouse down to the bottom tier where their spouse is barely surviving. And that doesn't work in a marriage because your marriage exists at the lowest tier that one of you is at. And so if you're able to pursue your calling, if you're out there working mega long hours and you're super enjoying your life, but your spouse is barely getting by because life is just so untenable for them, your marriage is in trouble, and you need to deal with that. Yeah. It was a powerful quote that you inserted into the book where you talked about A.W. tozer's wife. And you know, A.W. tozer is beloved for all of his writing and this is all public in biographies and I've heard actually talks given about it, but that he would spend hours and hours every day on his face in prayer and Bible study and helping others. And finally they divorced and his wife remarried. And the words were, I think that you wrote his. Aw. His first name was apparently Aiden, which I didn't know. Aiden loved Jesus, but the new husband loved me. And then you wrote in parentheses, ouch, exclamation point. And I think there is this free pass that people get sometimes because, you know, God is the priority and that that somehow supersedes friendship and dependability and involvement and partnership and teamwork in a way where it was really clearly where she was carrying everything and he got a pass. Yep. Yeah. And is that really what we want with marriage? Like, are we getting married just so that somebody will be your mate and look after you? Or are you getting married because you want an intimate relationship? Yes. Because you want someone to truly know you and still love you and accept you. And because you want to truly know someone else and still love them and accept them. And because you want that the two of you together can do more than any one of you can do alone. And so you're going to support each other as you go through life together. You know, fill fulfilling God's calling in your own unique way. Like, that's what's exciting. That's why we get married. Yeah. And yet too often, once we are married, we start thinking about, well, this is what I deserve, and we don't realize how much we're hurting our spouse. Yeah. And so instead of asking what do I need in the marriage, I think a better. A better tact is to take A step back and say, what does the marriage need? You know, if we know that marriage needs two people to feel truly known and still accepted, then is one of us not feeling known and accepted? If we know that marriage needs two people to be involved in carrying mental load, then is one of us not carrying mental load? You know, so step back and say, what does marriage need? And do we have that? As opposed to what do I need? Yeah. We would be remiss to not talk about the chapter about sex. I know we already alluded to that, but I've got to share this quote. This was, this was really great. You said opening sentence, you shouldn't prioritize sex in your marriage, you know, period. Then new paragraph. Instead, prioritize the ingredients that make for good sex, not frequency. And I thought that was brilliant. Yeah. Do you know how hard it was to write that chapter? Like, I think this is our fifth book, we've written four books only on sex. And to have to write, have to write one chapter. So it's like everything about sex I've ever written consolidated into one chapter. But that really is the point, is that we think the measure of a good sex life is how often you have sex. And it's not. And you know, what we found is that if we look at women, when women frequently reach orgasm, when they feel emotionally connected during sex, when there's high marital satisfaction, when there's no porn use in the marriage, and when there's no sexual dysfunction, frequency isn't a problem. And so instead of worrying about frequency, let's start asking which of those five things isn't happening for us? Or maybe there's multiple. And what can we do to work on those five things? So say those ingredients again for listeners. Yeah. So if she frequently reaches orgasm. Okay, we have a 47 point orgasm gap among evangelical couples where 95% of men almost always or always reach orgasm, compared to just 48% of women. If his orgasm is compulsory and hers is only optional, then you're doing something wrong. So if she, if she frequency frequently reaches orgasm, if she feels emotionally connected during sex. So 16% of our respondents said that their primary emotion after sex was feeling used. So for them, they would be closer to their spouse if they didn't have sex than if they did. Wow. So, you know, if that's you, that's a problem. Like what is it about sex that makes her feel used? You know, is it porn use? Is it a pornified style of relating whatever it might be, and it might not even be something that he is doing. It might be trauma from her past. It might be a lot of the negative messages about sex that she's internalized, whatever it might be. If there's high marital satisfaction. So, you know, if people are in that highest quintile of marital satisfaction, so they're dividing mental load, they've got good partnership going. She feels like she can talk about her needs, he feels like he can talk about his needs, et cetera. If there's no porn use in the marriage, and if there's no sexual dysfunction, so no sexual pain disorders, no rectal dysfunction, etc. Then frequency takes care of itself. Wow, that's amazing. And of course, there's a lot of variables there, but that also just kind of reframes things to. Oh, and I think that's what good therapists do, is they try to get down to what are the ingredients that we can create here so that that can thrive. So, Sheila, you ended the book with a conclusion, and I loved the conversation. You talked about how so many people talk about, oh, marriage is so hard. And I'm guilty of saying that. But then you said, wait a minute, we would not say that as a couple. Yes, there have been hard moments, but it's actually satisfying and it's fun and it's good, and you've raised a family together. And. And then you said, what about saying this life is hard, but marriage is meant to make it easier? And I just kind of exhaled when I read that because it's like, oh, there's the focus. It came into focus and it brought all the data together. That this data actually points us to how marriage can be. This partnership and this friendship and this teamwork that actually makes life easier, as you said. So will you comment on why you felt like that was important to close the book with? Yeah, because I think that there's a common teaching in the church that marriage is so hard and you just have to slug it out. And I think one of the reasons that we teach that is because we're so afraid of people getting divorced. And so we want to tell people, look, it's not supposed to be easy. If it's hard, you just keep going. And we don't want people to think that because it's hard, it's okay to give up. And so we normalize it being hard. And I wish we wouldn't do that, because by doing it, then when people are having a difficult time, they don't think, oh, maybe this is something I can fix. They just think, oh, this is just the way marriage is. And it isn't. You know, I like to say life is hard, but marriage should make it easier. And marriage should help you carry burdens. It shouldn't be the reason for the burden. When you get married, there's going to be more complications. You know, you've got a whole other set of extended family that can get sick or need you. You often have children that are going to add a lot of complications to your life, or you're going to suffer from infertility, which is also going to add a lot of complications and heartache. You've got two people who can have job problems. You've got two people who can have health problems. You know, it brings a lot of complications, but you also have someone to go through life with so that you're not bearing these burdens alone. And that's what marriage should be, is something that makes your life easier, not harder. And so if marriage is something which makes your life hard, then let's get curious as to why and let's do something about it. Because God doesn't want you stuck. God doesn't want you just putting up with a marriage you hate. God wants you to create a marriage you love. And I hope that this book points people to that. And I hope it also tells people, hey, if you're in a marriage to someone who is not ever going to. Who is going to be that burden to you, that you're able to recognize that and know this isn't a safe place for you, too, because that's important as well. You know, the books help people realize, no, I'm not safe, this isn't good, and I can't fix it. Yeah. And safety certainly includes physical safety, but also emotional safety, sexual safety, psychological and spiritual safety. So a great place to end with those comments, but I do want to come back and talk about your website. For years, you had a blog, I think since 2008, where you have a lot of content, and that was called To Love, Honor, and Vacuum. Yes. And through that, you wrote your blog and communicated about your books, but you changed it to Bare Marriage. B A R E marriage dot com. Talk about why you did that shift. Yeah, we did that. I don't even know how long ago it was now. I think it was like 20, 21 or 2. But when the blog started, I was really writing a mommy blog about housework and organizing. And so it was to Love, Honor, and Vacuum when you feel more like a maid than a wife and a mother. And it fit. But then I started talking more and more about sex and and more and more about some of the bad teachings and evangelical churches and how we can flourish and didn't fit anymore. But we liked BEAR for two reasons. One, it has this nice connotation about sex, which works for us. But the other that I think is more fundamental is we're saying let's strip all of the advice away that is hurting us and that is taking us away from the thriving that Jesus wants for us, and let's get to the heart of it. And so that's what BARE Marriage is, is let's strip away things that we don't need and get to what God wants. And so the acronym for BEAR forms the, the structure for the marriage you want. We look at balance, affection, responsibility and emotional connection in a marriage. And so I want to direct people to bear marriage dot com. There are many courses on marriage and sexuality that I highly recommend. You're not just somebody who, who I've talked to on a podcast twice now, but we've met face to face. I've heard your heart. I understand your great passion for helping marriages, but also you're really bright and have a team that is bright and just great, great material. So courses, research, driven books, and then you have your own podcast called Bare Marriage that I'm really encouraging people to check out. Yes, thank you. Yeah. And if you go to baremarriage.com and click on courses, we've got a course to talk to your kids about sex and puberty. That one's super fun. We've got an orgasm course, a libido course, a honeymoon course, and of course all of our books are linked there as well. And take a minute and talk about. Because I did this literally an hour ago. I went to your website, which I hadn't visited in a while, put in my email and I downloaded the how toxic are the Christian books that you're reading? And so you put together a pretty fascinating scale there. Talk about that. Yes. So for when we wrote the Great Sex Rescue, we looked at the top 15 sex and marriage books and evangelicalism and we applied a rubric of 48. Well, a 12 point rubric to these books on healthy sexuality and you could get a score of 0 to 4 on each element. So maximum score of 48. And some of the books scored quite well. Boundaries in Marriage scored, I think 42. So scored pretty darn well. The Gift of Sex by The Penners scored 47. John Gottman's book, which We Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, which was our secular control book, it also scored 47 out of 48. So it was very possible to score well. But then there were a number of best selling evangelical books that scored terribly. So Love and respect scored 0 out of 48. Every man's battle scored 9. For women only I think scored 11. So a lot of our books are just not teaching about sex in a healthy way whatsoever. Yeah. If you go to bear marriage.com, you can fill out that thing right on the front page and you can get that download too. Well, Sheila, thank you for talking to us all the way from Ontario, Canada. Blessings to you and to your ministry and your team. Thanks, Michael.