The Marriage Book You Want

Today I welcome Sheila Gregoire to talk about her new book that you definitely want! Also I will be talking with Sheila and Karen Swallow Prior in a free webinar next week, so make sure you register!

By

Sheila Wray Gregoire

They think it’s a mic drop moment.

Whenever I’m debating someone about complementarianism in marriage–the idea that God put the husband in authority over the wife–they inevitably pull out what they think is the trump card: “Well, if he doesn’t have the tie breaking vote, then how will you ever make a decision when you disagree?”

And I always wonder, “do they realize they’re telling on themselves?” Because our research shows that 78.9% of evangelical couples make decisions together. They don’t need a tie-breaker. But as soon as you believe that God has ordained the husband to break the ties, it becomes much more likely that you’ll need one.

My husband and I have been married for thirty-three years. We’ve had to decide on what city to move to, when to retire, whether to homeschool, whether to adopt, whether to have another child.

We even had to decide whether to put our son on a heart transplant list.

These were big decisions, and we didn’t always agree at first. But we worked it out–because that’s what healthy couples do.

The narrative that complementarians tell us about marriage is simply wrong, and we now have the data to prove it.

We started researching how evangelical teachings affect marital and sexual satisfaction in our book The Great Sex Rescue. And now, four books, and four surveys later, we’re taking a bird’s eye view and looking at marriage overall, for our new book The Marriage You Want.

We surveyed 7000 people (including 1300 matched pairs) to find out the ingredients of a healthy marriage.

And those ingredients are not what your pastor told you.

It’s not about hierarchy. It’s not about unilateral submission. It’s not about him being the spiritual leader.

Instead, it’s about teamwork–two people serving God together and walking through life together as partners, growing in vulnerability and trust with one another. It’s about two people holding each other up, where one can be strong where the other is weak. It’s about teamwork.

That’s harder to cross-stitch on a pillow than “wives, submit to your husbands”, but it works.

Take the tie-breaking vote belief, for instance. When women get married thinking that he has the tie-breaking vote, they’re:

● 44% more likely to say “my spouse isn’t a cheerful person”

● 71% more likely to say “my spouse doesn’t know how to make me laugh”

● 37% more likely to say “my spouse is easily overwhelmed by anger”

Basically, everything goes worse.

So why was this the central teaching around marriage in the church for decades?

Because it was never about teaching people to have good marriages. It was about keeping people in bad ones, as long as the husband had the power.

Little in our survey results surprised us, except for one thing.

It wasn’t the finding per se, but the magnitude of it–which again shows how the evangelical church has ignored women’s lived experience of marriage.

What are the two biggest things that people say cause fights in marriage? I’ve asked this to about 15 podcast hosts as I’ve sat for interviews over the last few weeks, and they all say the same thing: sex and money.

Well, we found something that craters marital satisfaction SIX TIMES faster than money problems, and THREE TIMES faster than sex.

We measured marital satisfaction on a scale of 1-100, and most people fall in the 60-90 range, so small changes matter a lot.

● When a couple has money stress, it lowers marital satisfaction by about 5 points.

● When a couple goes from having sex several times a week to once a month, it lowers marital satisfaction by 10 points.

● But when a spouse goes from doing 50% of the housework to doing 90% or more, it lowers marital satisfaction by over 30 points.

That’s huge. And that applies whether or not a woman works outside the home. (It also applies even if the husband does 90% of the housework; we just didn’t find very many instances of that).

Yet what have previous evangelical marriage books said about housework? Most don’t mention it, but when they do, they’ve tended to call it a man’s need that a wife has to fulfill. Jimmy Evans, in Marriage on the Rock, said that one of men’s four core God-given needs is for “domestic support.” Apparently God made men to need a wife to do the vacuuming! Willard Harley, in His Needs, Her Needs, says the same thing. God made men to need women to look after the home. Stormie Omartian, in Power of a Praying Wife, insists that even if she works outside the home, a wife’s primary area of responsibility is keeping up with the housework and cooking.

Well, turns out women didn’t get the memo. When things are unfair, the marriage suffers.

We identified something that we called the “unfairness threshold”--women can often put up with unfairness in the first five years of marriage, but by year 10 it’s starting to bother her; by year 15 she’s really bothered; and by year 20 she’s had it.

You can’t put up with unfairness forever, whether it’s unfair distribution of housework; unsatisfying sex where she doesn’t reach orgasm; having to always be the one to look after both sets of relatives; or even tending to be the one to initiate repair when we’ve had a fight in marriage.

Partnership and teamwork matter.

And in The Marriage You Want, we point you to how to get there.

For too long, women’s experience has been missing from evangelical marriage books, and the advice has been given largely by people with no credentials other than an M.Div. It hasn’t resulted in marital flourishing, but rather couples trying to contort themselves into boxes that don’t fit.

We don’t want people to just stay in a marriage they hate; we want to help them create a marriage they love.

Because it’s time that we start talking about what actually works!

Get Sheila’s new book wherever books are sold!

And join us for a free webinar next week discussing our new books!