SHOW NOTES:

What have some of the most popular authors and speakers on Christian marriage had to say over the past 5 decades? We’ll talk what’s good, what’s bad, and what we’ve believed to be true—before questioning our assumptions about what we’ve been taught God wants for our marriage relationships.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back to the Brave Marriage Podcast, a podcast for couples who want to grow as individuals, do marriage with intention, and live mutually empowered, purposeful lives. I hope wherever you are, that you’re doing well, and enjoying this series on marriage, mutuality, and gender roles. And thank you to those of you who’ve recently left ratings of the podcast, I really appreciate it. 

On today’s episode, we’re picking up where my conversation with Steve and Twyla left off. They had talked about having few resources available to them in the ‘70s as they got married, and I’d like to share a little bit of my story and context as well because what I plan to do today is talk about Christian resources, and especially Christian books on marriage, to help us think wisely about what we’re inputting and how we’re internalizing what it means to be married and to do marriage well as Christ-followers.

So I started reading Christian relationship books in the early 2000s, and back then, the only way to access those resources was through my local Christian bookstore. I lived in a small town and our church had a library, but it wasn’t regularly updated, and I wasn’t sure if my local public library would have the resources I was looking for, so what I had to choose from was whatever my local bookstore sold as Christian. So I picked up a few Christian books on male-female relationships in high school, one by Joshua Harris, one by John Eldredge, and one by Emerson Eggerichs. I read their books, and apart from seeing what was modeled for me at church and at home, I really didn’t have any explicit teaching on marriage, so I thought what I was reading was gold! You know, I started dating early, I was interested in counseling, and so I wanted to know the right way, as a young Christian girl, to go about dating and I hoped, one day, marriage. 

What I did then was I assimilated this information on marriage and male-female relating into my pre-existing schema, into my Christian worldview. I didn’t question what these books were saying; I trusted what these books were saying because I grew up in a small town and apart from youth group and theological conversations with my mom and grandmother, I didn’t know any better. I assumed that if someone was published, then they must be credible and trustworthy, and that what they’re saying in their books must be true. What’s more is that I could see myself in the godly woman role these men were describing. So I never doubted or had any qualms about what I was reading; I just wanted to do what was best and honoring to God! 

So I lived by these teachings, I internalized these messages, not even realizing they ran counter to my church doctrine! Because these authors seemed so sure of themselves, and I thought that by following them, I would not only be pleasing God but also my future husband. That’s just a little part of my story, I’m sure I’ll share more in bits and pieces in the future, but it wasn’t until grad school, until seminary, that my professor of Couples Counseling, Toddy Holeman, had us read Jack and Judith Balswick’s, A Model for Marriage: Covenant, Grace, Empowerment, and Intimacy that I realized: 1) the model for marriage I was reading in grad school resonated with me so much more than anything I’d read before—it felt more true to God’s nature, it felt more intuitive 2) perhaps this Christian teaching on marriage is qualitatively and fundamentally more Christ-like than any of the rules or roles that I was taught through other books, were Christian. 

If you’ve been listening for a long time, you’ll recognize the Balswicks’ names, as I mentioned them and their work on differentiated unity all the way back in episode #004, I believe. For the longest time, I hoped that teaching marriage differently—by teaching healthy relationship dynamics that align with Scripture as a Christian and as a licensed professional—would be sufficient to give listeners a better foundation for their marriages. But the longer I’ve been in the field and immersed in the world of marriage education in the church, the more earnest and eager I’ve become about shedding light on things that need to be exposed, in order that we might live healthier, lighter, freer, fuller, and more loving lives in Christ, within our homes, and within the Christian communities.  

So here’s my plan for this episode. I want to walk you through a few books that I was able to get my hands on in paperback form that I’ve read or others have read over the past five decades in the church. Taking one example from each decade, we’ll talk about what’s good, what’s bad, and after taking a look at each one, I’ll draw out a few themes that I want us to think about as we continue our conversation on marriage, mutuality, and gender roles in upcoming episodes. 

Starting in 1975 with psychologist James Dobson’s “What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women.” Most of the book talks about low self-esteem, depression, fatigue, loneliness, isolation, and financial, sexual, menstrual, and parenting problems, as wives and mothers experience them—from the perspective of Dr. Dobson. What’s good about this book is that I think Dobson is genuinely trying to help husbands at this time better understand their wives. He’s addressing the most common complaints he hears in his office or on his broadcast, and attempts to give men advice on how to love their wives better and remedy problems at home. 

What’s bad is that he tells men in chapter 5 that as husband, he is her sole reflector of self-esteem due to her being isolated at home; thus, he needs to take his job as head of the household seriously to save his wife from mental illness and to fulfill her emotional needs. He also encourages husbands to understand that wives need romance and emotional connection in the same way that husbands, as it was thought at that time, need their biologically-driven sexual appetites fulfilled—sooner rather than later. So I wonder, what parts of this teaching have you heard in the church and believed to be true? What of this do you not believe is true, but are still influenced by nonetheless in the way you relate in marriage or in what’s taught to you in your circles? 

It’s important to remember that Dobson’s teachings are coming out of a time where teachings on marriage were already “bad for women,” (as Steve Lee stated on episode 132), so rather than placing all the blame and responsibility for the husband’s attitude at home on the wife, Dobson seems to be trying to help wives by getting their husbands to take on some responsibility as well. As he wrote in his book, Straight Talk to Men and Their Wives in 1980: “For the man who appreciates the willingness of his wife to stand against the tide of public opinion—staying at home in her empty neighborhood in the exclusive company of jelly-faced toddlers and strong-willed adolescents—it is about time you gave her some help.” So he’s seeing the plight of wives in his work, those who’ve chosen to stay home, going against the cultural tide of change, who are sacrificing their own personhood and self-esteem, as evidenced by their mental health issues, for the sake of the family. But his solution is to try to get men to take better care of their wives. Believing that husbands are biblically called to be the head of the household, he encourages husbands to steward their household rule with benevolence, and loving leadership, rather than ruling their households with cruelty and abuse on the one hand, or passivity and disengagement on the other. 

So I can see where people thought at the time that this advice was helpful, healthy, and loving. Wives at this time probably appreciated Dobson’s advice, encouraging their husbands to do something different in order to relieve their pressure and depression at home. But time, distance, and research in social science shows us the deficiencies in this line of reasoning: 

1) Biological, psychological, and environmental factors all play into mental illness, so in the first line of chapter 2, to state that depression and apathy are merely a fact of life for women that needs to be dealt with and normalized in marriage is not only based on availability bias, but proven to be untrue. Furthermore, if a person’s depression is linked to environmental factors, the solution is not to prescribe more of the same that’s not working (in this case, hulling up in the house, relying on one’s partner to take care of them) but to help a client change environmental factors with the differentiated support of a spouse. 

2) To suggest that a husband is solely responsible for his wife’s sense of self-worth and self-esteem is an immense amount of pressure to place on a husband. If in the ‘50s, the advice of the day was for a woman to play a certain part so prop up her husband’s ego and to make sure he was happy at home, and if that contributed in part to a housewife’s mental health during those decades, then it’s illogical to reverse those roles, changing the advice in Christian spaces to get a husband to play a certain part to ensure his wife’s happiness. All we’re doing there is creating a system of relating in which both husbands and wives feel unhappy to some degree, overly responsible for their partners, and codependent on each other to now meet expectations that have been created through teachings such as this, that neither partner was ever meant to fulfill! 

I was just having a conversation yesterday with a former professor of mine and now colleague and she was saying how worried she is about the low self-esteem she sees among women and the purposelessness and lack of direction she sees among men; I can’t help but think that as a church, we’ve done this to ourselves! The loudest evangelical Christian teachings since the development of the love-based marriage have not led to our mutual flourishing, but instead, for many couples who buy into these teachings, to mutual discouragement with themselves, and their subsequent blame, shame, guilt, lack of freedom, lack of love, and misgivings with each other. (Somebody research that please.) 

3) While Dobson tries to convey the importance of emotional intimacy in marriage for women, in doing so, he diminishes the importance of emotional intimacy in marriage for men—when we know through attachment research that both men and women require a secure emotional attachment to relate in healthy ways with one another. Furthermore, on page 64, he says that men need respect for self-esteem purposes, while women need love for self-worth purposes. Again, both are true, but so is the other side of the coin, that men need love for self-worth purposes, and women need respect for self-esteem purposes. Sixteen years later, we’ll see this treatment of men and women needing love and respect differently in the handbook of complementarianism (which we’ll talk about next episode). And thirteen years after that, we’ll see a Christian psychologist and pastor write a NYT best-seller based on this treatment of a divergence of love and respect based on gender, encouraging couples to heal their marriages based on giving a woman the love she most desires and giving a man the respect he desperately needs. And what’s so wild to me is that when Dobson writes about love and respect, he acknowledges that he’s writing in gender stereotypes and overgeneralizations, and yet, the conventional wisdom for relating in conversative Christian circles holds these virtues as diametrically opposed—even though Paul’s instructions to couples in Ephesus were an outpouring of his instructions for those in the church to mutually submit to one another; not rigid rules for relating between men and women. 

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Next, we’ll look at the book, For Women Only, a book of essays by different authors, written in 1988. What’s good about it is, there are many essays written by many different people with different perspectives. For example, there’s an essay by Mary Lou Lacy encouraging women to grow up into spiritual maturity in Christ, seeking Him first daily, above all else, above husband, about children, above all, until women grow up into the fullness of Him, who is the Head, Christ, and learn to love God and others as Christ has called them to. 

However, there’s also an essay by televangelist Robert Schuller called What Does a Man Really Want in a Wife? Five things, he says: 1) a confidante, 2) a companion, 3) a creative climate-controller, and by that he means, his very own source of positivity and possibility-thinking at home—for “No man” he writes on page 116, “will ever leave, or stop loving, a positive-thinking wife who feeds his enthusiasm and self-confidence.” 4) for her to be his conscience, and 5) wait for it—that she be his “consecrated concubine.” He supports his desire for a consecrated concubine to fulfill his biological needs by saying, “we must never forget that God is responsible for this thing called sex” and “many counselors agree that sex is a primary cause of problems in marriage.” 

Now, this is where we see the breakdown between the knowledge of a mental health practitioner, and a Christian person or pastor with a platform disseminating pop psychology and using the Bible to back it up. At least in Dobson’s work, he understands that sexual problems more often expose relational problems in a marriage, rather than causing them, as Schuller misinterprets. But the difference is, Dobson is a parachurch professional, whereas Schuller is a televised pastor to whom evangelicals looked for spiritual guidance and spiritual wisdom on how to relate in marriage. On top of that, there’s a world of difference in what these teachings lead to. When a Christian psychologist understands sexual problems as exposing underlying relational ones, they’re at least a step closer to helping a couple get to the root of their issues. But if Christians are taught by pastors to believe that there’s a causal effect between a lack of sex and relational issues, then what happens in practice is that wives feel pressure to provide sex and husbands feel anxious about not getting it. So they end up doing this dance of pressuring, avoiding, and trying to create desire out of thin air, to solve their relational woes. But what they don’t see is that it’s the teaching itself, rather than the insufficiency of the wife or the enduring need of the husband, that’s perpetuating the problem rather than solving it. Sex and couples therapists will tell you that that type of pressure and perceived insufficiency leads to more problems, relationally, sexually, and psychologically, not less. But it’s hard to know that or to be convinced of that, when Christian leaders and shepherds use God to command their points, which prove unhelpful and harmful when applied to the Christian marriage. 

But again, I want you to ask yourself: Is this something you’ve heard in the church, or been taught in some way, or believed?

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Okay, now we’re getting into the ‘90s and what I want to point out is that by this time, research in the field of marriage and family therapy had advanced like never before. Both John Gottman and Sue Johnson had done years of research specifically on couples in marriage and intimate relationships. But when Dobson started writing his books to couples in the ‘70s, the study of marriage relationships was still in its infancy; the pioneers of my field were actually Dobson’s contemporaries because remember, the love-based marriage was extremely new in history, and how to do it well was still unknown. Dobson was a child psychologist who worked with Paul Popenoe, the father of marriage counseling, but Popenoe was a former eugenicist who wrote popular marriage advice—the same advice that Steve Lee said on last episode, was bad for women in the ‘40s-50s. So throughout the 20th century, we have the emergence of the field and study of intimacy in love-based marriage relationships, which paralleled teachings on marriage in the church, some of which was based on Scripture, but some of which was based on pop psychology and pseudoscience before there was actually empirically-validated scientific studies and evidence-based models for working effectively with couples. I just want you to keep that in mind. 

So in 1996, Gary Smalley wrote a book for Christian couples called Making Love Last Forever. What’s good about his book is a lot, compared to what I’ve shared thus far, and that’s because he combines Scripture and evidence-based principles found in marriage and family therapy. In part I, Smalley gives instructions on how to fall in love with life, the idea being taking personal responsibility before trying to make change in your relationship. And in part II, Smalley gives instructions for how to stay in love with your spouse, getting at the fact that love is a personal choice and decision. Both of these overarching principles are good. 

What’s bad though, is the perpetuation of gender-based stereotypes which don’t fit all couples. For example, in Ch. 11, entitled “How to Bring Out the Best in Your Maddening Mate,” he highlights how men love to share facts, while women love to share feelings. On p. 192, he says, “there’s one particular thing we men wish we could control about our wives—sex whenever we want it! But as we’ll see in chapter 14, that’s not how good sex works.” So I’ll give him credit for saying that’s not how good sex works. But I get so frustrated with the perpetuation of stereotypes, because in my practice, thanks to Olsen’s premarital research in the ‘80s, I have premarital reports that directly express the opposite—both in regard to sexual desire and the communication of fact versus feeling. So when couples are taught that these traits are gender-normative, how are they supposed to feel about themselves when they’re wired differently than what these books they’re reading are purporting? I hear these questions time and again from husbands and wives in my own practice who feel, in some way, deficient because their personality or desires don’t line up not only with what our society calls masculine or feminine, but what the church and Christian authors like this, have set out as normative and typical! 

Smalley makes a few points about gender differences that I would call conditioning, such as men tend to be independent, while women tend to be interdependent, and men tend to compete and be controlling, while women tend to cooperate and be agreeable. Twenty years earlier, Dobson observed that women could also be competitive with one another, and in 1991, the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was sure to point out that it’s women who tend to be controlling of men and therefore, need to heed the advice of remaining agreeable and cooperative. 

So how, as the church, are we to make sense of gender differences when all of these authors are saying different things about men and women in their books, based on what they’re seeing in their own work with couples? Well, there are a few things that are important to remember: 

1) Men and women are biologically different in some ways, yes, but they are also culturally conditioned to behave differently over time. The traits that are labelled masculine or feminine in a given time and place don’t stay the same over time; rather, they change and reflect their culture.

2) Men and women are no more prone, disposition-wise, to certain personality traits than the opposite gender. Men and women can both exhibit independence, competitiveness, cooperation, a desire to control, or a desire to be agreeable. Again, I have many research-based premarital reports which say that each of these traits can and do exist in both genders. So what service are we doing to couples when we speak in broad strokes without looking at each individual person and relationship?

3) We are all prone to cognitive biases and attribution errors. The problem is, when we aren’t aware of our bias or blind spots, we teach solutions to problems as we see them—not as they actually are. In the case of these authors, they see the issues as gender-based rather than culturally-based, and so they apply a medical model to treating couples, linear logic that might alleviate symptoms in the short term, but do nothing to actually help couples long-term, especially when systemic issues are at play. What’s worse, is that they call this truth God’s truth, and at that point, couples not only have relational injuries to address, but emotional and psychological injuries as a result of Scriptural misuse.
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Let’s take a look at another example of this, moving into the 21st century: Emerson Eggerichs’ best-selling Christian book, Love and Respect, written in 2004. Starting with what’s good about the book, Eggerichs does use the family systems principle of feedback loops in his book. And I think this book had such huge success because for the first time in Christian literature, a psychologically trained Christian minister is saying, hey, these issues you’re facing are cyclical—and he names this dynamic “the crazy cycle.” 

What’s bad about this book is that it virtually names every couple’s dynamic as the same in conflict, while research shows that couples tend to have 1 of 3 different dynamics in conflict. But according to Eggerichs, when couples get into conflict, the problem is that conflict makes most men feel disrespected, while women tend to feel unloved. In contrast, eight years earlier, Gary Smalley quoted Deborah Tannen in his chapter on what drives one’s mate mad, quote: “Many women could learn from men to accept some conflict and difference without seeing it as a threat to intimacy; and any men could learn from women to accept interdependence without seeing it as a threat to their freedom.” 

So, who’s more right? Smalley, in his suggestion that men can better tolerate conflict than women, but that men don’t like feeling like their freedom is threatened? Or Eggerichs’, when he suggests that what men fear most is disrespect, and conflict makes most men feel disrespected? Well, I would say that no human likes feeling disrespected or like their freedom is threatened. So to me, their differing emphases seem more like matters of personal experience than matters of universal truth. For example, Eggerichs’ confesses his own intolerance of being disrespected when on p. 68, he writes, “There are many wives who tell me, ‘Respect and love are the same thing.’ I respond, ‘No, they aren’t, and you know they aren’t.’” “The bottom line is that husbands and wives have needs that are truly equal. She needs unconditional love, and he needs unconditional respect.” 

So from there, the author spends the book outlining his solution, what he’s named “the energizing cycle,” assuring readers that the cycle will be broken if wives and husbands could just learn to spell love and respect, respectively. To spell love to women, Eggerichs tells men that a wife wants her husband to be close, open, understanding, peacemaking, loyal, and in agreement with Dobson, to provide her with self-esteem. On the other hand, he tells women that a husband wants his wife to appreciate his conquest, hierarchy, authority, insight, sex drive, and desire for friendship. On page 252, he uses a case study of a woman who calls her mom to tell her they won’t make it to visit her parents that day because her husband is upset. The mother asks why and the daughter responds, “I suppose because we have not been sexually intimate for seven days.” Eggerichs goes on to say that the mom “let her daughter have it,” replying, “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 soooooo happy?” 

Again I ask, have you believed this to be true. This shame-based motivation for marital change is a common pattern I’ve seen in Christian teachings on marriage throughout the past few decades. Certainly not all books lead with shame, but it occurs to me that some of the best-selling Christian marriage books do. I’d love to know what’s going on there, that we’d prefer to have shots fired at us, borrowing a phrase from Dobson, than to have someone teach on love in marriage in a way that leads to life and grace and the truth spoken in love.

The last book in my literature review through the past five decades is, A Model for Marriage by Jack and Judith Balswick. The premise of their book is that by looking at the way the Trinity relates, we can take a few different principles and apply them universally to our relationships in a way that will lead all couples, through all times, in all places, toward life, love, and health relationally, and those are the principles of covenant love, grace-filled love, mutual empowerment and servanthood, and the intimacy of knowing and being known. 

In Romans 1:16-25, Paul talks about the power of Gospel and how as humans, we are without excuse when we exchange truth for lies and choose to worship created things rather than the Creator because he says, “for what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.” And I tend to think that when human-made principles are applied universally, the fruit of such teachings are exposed, as I believe we’re seeing more clearly today in the evangelical church. But when the power of the Gospel is taught correctly, it brings life and health in its transformation of individuals and couples, not death and dysfunction. So I think we have to look at what we’ve been taught, for better or worse, about Christian marriage, and evaluate it accordingly. Does a teaching lead couples closer to Christ and toward freedom and intimacy with each other, or does a teaching lead couples away from Christ or from true intimacy with each other?

To contrast the Balswicks’ teaching on sexuality with the previous books we’ve looked at, they make no mention of gender differences except to say that it's in our being created male and female that we move toward knowing and being known through emotional and sexual intimacy, and that by communing together in sexual union, we reflect the full image of God. On p. 165, they affirm that the erotic expression between the lovers in Song of Solomon goes beyond sexual desire to a longing for the lover, him or herself, making sex a person-centered experience rather than a husband-centered experience that wives are shamed to participate in. Imagine how much difference teachings like these could make if they were the ones primarily taught to couples in the church! 

My main hope for this episode is that you feel caught up to speed on where we are today in the church as it relates to teachings on marriage. This series so far has been in no way exhaustive and there’s so much more I could share, but I think this will give you a good foundation for thinking about what you’ve been taught and why, and how these messages have impacted couples in the church. The most interesting thing to me the more I’ve learned and studied this topic is being able to see how conventional wisdom morphs and changes over time, but how influenced we still are by many of these messages, not really realizing or understanding where they come from. 

Stay tuned for the next two episodes where we’ll dive into Egalitarianism and Complementarianism, to find out what those mean and why it matters to your marriage. Thank you so much for listening to the Brave Marriage Podcast. I’m your host, Kensi Duszynski. Podcast editing is by Evan Duszynski. Music is by John Tibbs. Have a great week and I’ll talk to you again soon.