Debunking the Love & Respect Thesis Definitively, Once and For All

by | Jan 20, 2025 | Theology of Marriage and Sex | 39 comments

Debunking Ideas behind Emerson Eggerichs' love and respect

The idea that men want respect while women want love doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny.

We’ve studied it, as have others, and we can now definitively say that it’s bunk.

And I wanted a post that outlined some of it here on the blog–not just in our new book The Marriage You Want or in our podcast!

On Friday I wrote my very first Substack post on my journey through dismantling the bogus Love and Respect thesis! I wanted to share it here for everyone to get a chance to read it. And feel free to subscribe (for free!) if you would like to see more of what I post over there!

I’m going to keep cross-posting here on the blog, but I know that many of you like consuming media through Substack. So I’ll be in both places!

Sheila Wray Gregoire

So here’s how I started my very first post ever on Substack:

Usually when people start on a new platform, their first post is an introduction to who they are and what they care about.

I’m not going to do that, because most of you reading this already know me (and thank you for following me over here too! Excited to get started).

Instead, I’m going to dedicate my first ever post on Substack to the same topic that got me started on my current path: Quite simply, we’ve got to end the scourge that is the book Love & Respect, along with the whole thesis that men need respect while women need love.

And in this post, I’m going to do that—with all new data. It’s pretty awesome (and it’s coming in just a few paragraphs!)

Before that, though, I want to give some context.

Most of you know me because for the last six years we’ve been critiquing the evangelical take on marriage and sex

And conducting the biggest research projects into evangelical women’s marital and sexual satisfaction. In 2021, our book The Great Sex Rescue was published, based on our initial survey of 20,000 women. We followed that up with The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex and the totally revamped The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex. And then we followed it all up with She Deserves Better, based on our survey of 7000 women and their experiences in church as teens.

(Whoops. I guess I introduced myself after all!)

We wanted to know how the way the evangelical church talks about sex and marriage impacts women, men, and couples long-term. And it’s not pretty.

It’s our plea that the church gets well.

We are calling for the church to remember Jesus’ words that a bad tree can’t bear good fruit, and a good tree can’t bear bad fruit. He said that if you’re trying to figure out if a teacher is good, you look at the fruit.

We’re asking people to take Jesus at His word and look at the fruit. Let’s stick with healthy, evidence-based, and Jesus-centered.

Okay, that’s the background.

Now let’s go just a little bit further back, before we fast forward to the present (and to why we have this all-new data!).

Even though I became more widely known in 2021 when The Great Sex Rescue was published, I’ve actually been writing in the evangelical marriage space since 2008. I had several sex books published. I was friends with Gary Thomas and Shaunti Feldhahn. I was on my way up.

Orgasm Course

And then, one Friday afternoon in January of 2019, I read the book Love & Respect.

And a nuclear bomb went off in my living room.

Up until then I hadn’t read a lot of Christian marriage books because I was petrified of plagiarism. I figured “they love Jesus, I love Jesus, we’re all saying the same thing.”

That Friday afternoon I realized that was a crock.

I read Emerson Eggerichs’ words that “if your husband is typical, he has a need you don’t have.” That need was for physical release. If he didn’t get it, he’d come under satanic attack. The need is so great you women will never understand it. And you need to minister to your husband sexually as unto Jesus Christ.

Excuse me? And ICK!!!!!

At the time I read this, my daughter Rebecca Lindenbach was working for me, as was a family friend, Joanna Sawatsky, who had a Master’s in Epidemiology and was a statistician, but she was home with her baby and wanted something to do.

We realized how terrible this book was and wrote about it on the blog. I was inundated with messages about how the book had enabled abuse in women’s marriages, and so Joanna prepared a report to send to Focus on the Family, who co-publishes Love & Respect. We thought they would care (well, Rebecca knew they wouldn’t).

They didn’t.

So we wrote an Open Letter to Focus on the Family about Love & Respect which blew up.

And then we decided to go big or go home, and we started our survey for The Great Sex Rescue. We wanted to see how messages like those in Love & Respect affected people long-term, and we wanted to do it to academic standards.

(and we’ve since had our data peer-reviewed in the Sociology of Religion journal!)

Since then, every January I’ve addressed a different problematic aspect of Love & Respect, and will continue to do so until that blasted book is out of print, or until people stop buying it.

We’ve talked about how he distorted Scripture; how he ignores marital rape; how he thinks women just shouldn’t talk. It’s truly bizarre.

And, of course, how he gaslights emotional abuse victims.

And that brings us up to date, to 2025.

While we’ve been able to definitively show that his teachings harm women, increasing rates of sexual pain, decreasing orgasm rates, lowering marital satisfaction, and increasing abuse (see The Great Sex Rescue for all of that!)—

what we haven’t been able to do definitively—until now—is demolish his central tenet, that men need respect and women need love.

Let me explain what he based that claim on.

Biblically, it comes from Ephesians 5:33, which tells men to love their wives and women to respect their husbands (many biblical scholars think a better translation is “Men, love your wives in order that women may respect their husbands”, but let’s leave that for a moment. Eggerichs ignores all the other times in Scripture that we are all told to love others, and that men are told to respect their wives, but let’s leave that for a moment too.

He also claims that respect must be unconditional (which makes no sense; you can have unconditional love, but not unconditional respect).

But, again, let’s leave that for a moment.

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Eggerichs also claims there’s a scientific basis for the claim, which he attributes to Shaunti Feldhahn’s research.

Feldhahn’s book For Women Only was published two months before Eggerichs’ book in 2004, and they obviously collaborated a bit so that her research made it into his book.

Let me explain how she decided that men needed unconditional respect.

She asked about 400 men this question:

The pilot survey takers said the question was unclear; the survey expert she hired said it was a bad question (she admits this in the book). But she says this proves her thesis—that men feel loved by being respected.

So because 74% of men said they’d rather feel alone and unloved than inadequate and disrespected, that means men prefer respect to love!

Several problems pop up here, and let’s take them one by one.

1. Shaunti Feldhahn never asked women.

Eggerichs and Feldhahn decided that men want respect and women want love without ever checking in with women. When a psychologist decided to put the same question, worded the same way, to women, 68% of women also chose alone and unloved. No significant gender difference.

Eggerichs and Feldhahn were so wedded to the idea that men and women were polar opposites that when they got men answering the way they wanted, they made the assumption that women would choose the other answer, without ever checking with them.

You can’t do that and call it research—yet they did, and together their books have sold 6,000,000 copies.

And countless pastors have used this idea, that men want respect an women want love, to tell women that they must let their husbands lead, must never correct their husbands, and must defer to their husbands in everything.

2. Shaunti Feldhahn’s survey question was worded wrong

There’s another huge, glaring error in the way that Shaunti Feldhahn worded this question. She used a double barrelled question set, which means people are reacting to two things in each of the two answers. And those two things are not synonyms.

Being alone is not the same as being unloved, and feeling inadequate is not the same as feeling disrespected. When you combine two things that are not synonyms and ask people to choose between two sets of two, you can’t know if they’re reacting to the “unloved” or the “alone”; to the “inadequate” or “disrespected.”

This year, we finally had a chance to put the Love & Respect thesis to the test.

We conducted yet another survey for our new book, The Marriage You Want, which launches March 11. Surveying 1300 matched pair couples, plus over 5000 other married individuals, we wanted to use a data driven approach to find what actually creates marriages that thrive.
The Marriage You Want book

And in that survey, we presented people with the four words—alone, unloved, inadequate, and disrespected—and asked them to rank them in order from worst to least bad.

Are you ready?

Drumroll please.

Here are some of the charts from our chapter 1 sidebar in The Marriage You Want:

Got that?

BOTH men and women said it is worst to be unloved.

BOTH men and women said it isn’t so bad to be alone.

In fact, alone really isn’t that bad at all, and if you’re alone, feeling unloved doesn’t really register. So that’s why most people choose “alone and unloved.” It has nothing to do with not wanting to be disrespected; it’s because being alone means it really doesn’t matter how other people treat you.

It’s the rest of the answers that are interesting, though, because this is where you see gender differences.

Women actually hate being disrespected more than they hate feeling inadequate, but for men it’s reversed.

If we were to sum up the results, we’d say: Both men and women need love, but when it comes to respect, women value it a little bit more than men do.

Oof.

On last week’s Bare Marriage podcast (episode 266), we also talked about a few more findings—like what happens to your marriage when you believe when you get married that “men want respect in a way that women will never understand.” So listen in to that—and pre-order The Marriage You Want so you’ll see it all, in lovely charts! (there are more than just those that I’ve put here).

(and when you pre-order, just forward me your receipt and you’ll IMMEDIATELY get access to our ALTERNATE ending, which we cut at the last moment, and you’ll get an invite to join our launch team—so you can get access to an early copy of the book as early as January 27!)

But this brings us to one final question.

If most men really don’t want to be unloved, then why do pastors and authors keep teaching that men want respect more than love?

I mean, just listen to this by Paul Washer (start around 25 seconds in):

He’s pretty sure he doesn’t want love!

What’s going on?

I think men are clinging to the idea that they need respect and don’t need love for two reasons:

  1. Telling men they deserve unconditional respect is intoxicating. It means that men get to escape accountability for their actions, because their wives can’t challenge them. It means they get to make all the decisions and call the shots. Many men want that.
  2. Looking to power rather than connection for what you want in marriage is a way to enable privilege while escaping vulnerability and intimacy. Admitting you need love means admitting you need to become vulnerable and emotionally open with your wife. Many men aren’t comfortable with emotional language and don’t want to do that (hence Emerson Eggerichs saying that men don’t want their wives to talk to them.) So it’s much more comfortable to say that men need respect.

And this whole thesis allows men to stay in power without having to be worthy of respect, while allowing men to escape accountability and the need to become vulnerable.

It’s a recipe for relational disaster—but it’s also a pretty good gig for many men who aren’t comfortable with intimacy.

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Let’s sum up:

  1. The supposed “scientific” backing for the idea that men need respect and women need love was bogus. It was based on a poorly worded survey question which was only asked of one half of the population of interest.
  2. When a properly worded survey question was asked to both men and women, love was overwhelmingly chosen as the most important attribute, with women then preferring respect more than men did.
  3. The idea behind the love & respect dichotomy has filtered throughout evangelicalism, and is taken as a given, despite the fact that there is no scientific backing for it, and the biblical support is extremely flimsy.
  4. This idea has enabled abuse to flourish, by promoting the idea that men are in authority over women, and that to challenge a husband is somehow sinful.
  5. This idea has silenced women’s voices, since it is seen as disrespectful to challenge a man or have an opinion different from his.
  6. This entire thesis needs to go. It’s not based on data. It’s invalid. It’s unbiblical. And it’s harmful.
  7. And if you know anyone who is still on the fence about Love & Respect, send them to our Open Letter to Focus on the Family, and to our summary of the issues with the book (with a download). Tons of my other posts are linked at the bottom of each of these posts.

And pick up The Marriage You Want (and its study guide you can use with small groups, your spouse, or even for premarital curriculum)! It’s a refreshing, validating, and inspiring marriage book. 

We’re not trying to guilt you into staying in a marriage you hate. We’re helping you create a marriage you love—which involves ditching ideas like love & respect!

Other Posts about the Issues in Love & Respect by Emerson Eggerichs

Must Read Overall Synopsis:

Our Resources:

Basic Issues with Love & Respect:

Problems with How Emerson Eggerichs Handles Abuse:

Podcasts Discussing these Issues:

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Sheila Wray Gregoire

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Sheila Wray Gregoire

Author at Bare Marriage

Sheila is determined to help Christians find biblical, healthy, evidence-based help for their marriages. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8

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39 Comments

  1. Phil

    This post made me smile. Many years in the making and I got to watch and be part of it from afar. Congratulations team. Wow way to go. What an accomplishment. Look at that Fruit! Jesus is coming. Jesus is happy. Jesus is smiling. Can I say this without scaring you? I can’t wait to see what happens next! 🤣

    Reply
    • Sheila Wray Gregoire

      Me, too! I’m so excited.

      Reply
  2. Jo R

    The terrible survey question is bad enough, but the whole basis even for that terrible survey question is what is arguably a badly translated Ephesians 5:33 that Eggy used as his thesis. If that verse had been translated better (in English, at least) for the last five centuries, maybe we wouldn’t have had the bad survey question in the first place. Maybe we would have avoided five centuries of church-sanctioned spiritual, physical, emotional, and mental abuse of women as a whole and wives in particular.

    There is near the bottom of the link list a link to the Nijay Gupta podcast that touches on this subject, “How Emerson Eggerichs Misuses Scripture in Love & Respect,” so I’d like to give it a boost by mentioning it here in the comments.

    Reply
    • Sheila Wray Gregoire

      Thank you, Jo R!

      Reply
  3. GS-z-14-1

    ‘… a double barrelled question set …’

    When I went to school [more years ago than I’ll admit], ’Introduction to logic’ [Irving Copi] was part of the curriculum.

    Asked to explain the complex question fallacy, I once observed that it combines multiple presuppositions into a single statement, and allowing you but one answer.

    Copi notes that such questions are framed in a way that limits the respondent’s ability to reply freely.

    Remember the ’can God make a rock do big he can’t lift it’ type questions? Or, have you stopped … yet.’

    I’m also old enough to recall when congregations expected pastors to be able to use Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and to proclaim the text, rather than proffer third-rate social theory, interspersed with a few biblical texts that supposedly had something to do with their screeds.

    Reply
  4. M

    Sheila, I was curious if your peer-reviewed article will be available to read for the general public? I tried following the link in last week’s podcast, but since I don’t have an account with that publication or a school, I can’t access it.

    Reply
    • Sheila Wray Gregoire

      We were able to give the pdf to those in our patron group, but we can’t post it publicly anywhere because it is behind an academic paywall. If you email me I can get you a copy!

      Reply
  5. CMT

    You know, I’m sure some people would read this and say Sheila and team just have an axe to grind, they have it in for L&R/EE, they’re unforgiving, etc etc. But I read this and thought, wow, what an great example of taking (justified) anger and doing something productive with it. This is how we’re supposed to respond if people are being misled and harmed.

    Reply
    • Sheila Wray Gregoire

      Exactly! When we see people being harmed we have to do something about it.

      Reply
  6. Perfect Number

    I feel like, from an evangelical perspective, it was never really *about* the data. It wasn’t like “let’s do a survey to find out if men/women want love or respect” and then simply reporting the results. It’s more like, “here’s a bible verse that says men need respect and women need love, so that’s the way it is, and as a related anecdote, here’s a survey we did.” But no matter what the survey result was, it would be interpreted in light of the “fact” that men need respect and women need love. (Even if the survey found the opposite, people could just interpret it as “well these survey respondents don’t even understand their internal needs” and still claim that men need respect and women need love.) Like it starts with something we know is “true” from the bible, and then if possible, try to match it up with things from our experiences.

    I once read a blog post on an atheist blog, talking about a pastor who was giving advice about how to improve one’s ministry or something like that, and the blogger asked “where is the evidence that this advice works?” Which was really surprising to me, because I had never thought about it that way- it was always “here’s what the bible says, so this must be the right way to do it” and nobody ever looked for real-world evidence. Even if someone did do a survey and found that the advice didn’t work, it could be explained away by saying the people who were surveyed must have done it wrong, maybe when they prayed they didn’t have the right motives or something.

    But then of course there’s the additional problem that the “men need respect and women need love” teaching isn’t really what the bible teaches… so the motives are considerably more shady than “we just follow the bible.”

    Reply
    • Erica Tate

      I’d like to pick up on this part: “the blogger asked “where is the evidence that this advice works?” Which was really surprising to me, because I had never thought about it that way- it was always “here’s what the bible says, so this must be the right way to do it” and nobody ever looked for real-world evidence” —

      It really gets to me how some Christians switch their brains off. Let’s be logical: if the same God who created the world also inspired the Scriptures, then the Scriptures WILL align with the real world, and vice versa. We shouldn’t be afraid of this happening. We should be happy to recalibrate every time we discover that the real world doesn’t bear out our beliefs. If an ideology seems to be supported by Scripture, but the real-world outcomes are disastrous, then those who hold the ideology should have the humility to acknowledge that they’re wrong…. but I won’t hold my breath waiting for that!

      I’ll stop now before I get ranty. 🙂

      Reply
      • Sheila Wray Gregoire

        This is what I’m like too. How do we get people to start seeing that the advice should work in the real world if it’s true? People cling so hard to “but it’s biblical” so it doesn’t matter if it works, and in fact, if it doesn’t work, that’s a bonus because we’re not supposed to be like the world or something. It’s crazy making, but I can’t get people to see it.

        Reply
      • Nessie

        I think that’s why it is so vital to many of them to home school, make the kids be at the church every time the door is open, keep their wives isolated in the home or only with approved friends, etc. There’s an “indoctrination” that occurs: a brain washing if you will. If they are trained to not use logical thinking and reasoning skills, they forget it is there. Keeping wives isolated as adults maintains this brainwashing. I didn’t grow up as indoctrinated as many, but I was gaslit from toddlerhood and taught to not trust myself which has many similarities- and many of the same struggles of trusting oneself enough to try reasoning the Bible out.

        Reply
    • Sheila Wray Gregoire

      Absolutely! When you read Shaunti’s justification in her book for why she kept the question in, even though the pilot survey takers and her survey expert told her it wasn’t a good question, it’s a master lesson in obfuscation. She knew it was a bad question, but it didn’t matter because she already had her answer.

      Reply
    • JoB

      I think Perfect Number has it exactly. It’s more important to be obedient to God (whatever that is understood to mean) than to enjoy health, happiness or other in-this-life benefit. The idea that holiness is much more important to God than happiness or wellbeing pervades the thinking of most Christians I know, particularly the very dedicated ones. It’s a faith founded on martyrdom and self-sacrifice. If you are given the choice between mumbling an insincere prayer to Caesar and saving your life, or refusing and suffering a gruesome death, you’re supposed to choose the latter. It doesn’t matter how your death would affect your family, you’re supposed to embrace it and entrust your family to God. You’re supposed to consider suffering “light and momentary troubles.” You’re supposed to be like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who knew they were going into the furnace, and weren’t sure if God would deliver them or not, but still did the right thing. And it’s not just in instances of persecution- Abram who gave Lot the choice of the better land, the widow who gave her last meal to Elijah, the poor boy who gave up his lunch to feed the 5000, Jesus telling Peter to walk on water, early Christians who died of plague because they stayed behind to minister to others because they weren’t as afraid of death as nonchristians. None of these are the “common sense” decision. Coming from a fertility perspective, I’ve been party to conversations with many Christians who had reservations about discarding embryos and put restrictions on themselves that greatly reduced their chances of getting pregnant in order to avoid creating excess embryos; their IVF doctors often acted like they were religious nuts who were setting themselves up for failure. In the recent discussion over abortion over the last few years, I’ve seen lots of studies cited as well as anecdotal reports that women who have an abortion when faced with an unwanted pregnancy have better long term life outcomes than women who choose to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. I’m not sure how accurate those analyses are, but it’s an example of the dichotomy “make life easier by following the world’s way” vs “suffer more now but please God by being obedient.” The admonition that “broad and smooth is the path that leads to destruction,” seems like support for the idea that the right way is narrow, difficult and unpopular in the world.

      When you’re facing this mentality, the only thing you can do is convince people to take a second look at their understanding of the Bible. Pointing to evidence or bringing up the effectiveness of the outcome is not going to sway them otherwise.

      Reply
  7. Cari Su

    I was absolutely horrified to find out by chance that there are plans to make a movie: “The farmer and the belle 2” about love & respect in marriage and that the creators are partnering with Emerson Eggerichs for this. I just hope this movie never comes out.

    Reply
    • Sheila Wray Gregoire

      Seriously? That’s awful!

      Reply
    • Lisa Johns

      There’s a 1? I’ve never heard of that one! The whole idea sounds awful!

      Reply
      • Lisa Johns

        Follow up: I just looked it up. Nauseating.

        Reply
    • Nessie

      Because the first one wasn’t bad enough. (Watched because quarantine and insomnia makes for a desperate combo, ha.) IIRC it kept humiliating the woman (literally having her fall in a pig sty), making her out to be stuck up and incompetent, and she had to rely upon his competency. It was pathetic.

      Reply
  8. Lisa Johns

    I spent years trying to internalized the love/respect paradigm, and it never did sit in there comfortably. I never could get past the felt need for respect from my husband, or the feeling of despair that I didn’t seem to be able to do ANYTHING well enough to earn his love.
    I also felt very dismissed in my need for sexual affection (because that was supposed to be my husband’s desire), and very discombobulated because I couldn’t figure out how to “fill my husband’s cup” by giving him plenty of sex when he was CLEARLY not willing to have a sexual relationship with me. The whole teaching left me very confused because NOTHING in my marriage was working the say they said it would!
    Fast forward to now, and I finally feel validated. It is a NORMAL thing for a woman to want sex, it is a NORMAL thing for a woman to want respect; in short, I am a NORMAL human being. There is NOTHING WRONG WITH ME.

    Reply
    • Sheila Wray Gregoire

      There absolutely is not anything wrong with you! Totally normal!

      Reply
      • Lisa M Johns

        Thank you! 😀

        Reply
  9. Sue

    All I can say is Thank You. I swallowed Love and Respect and Shaunti’s book hook line and sinker. I even passed Shaunti’s book on to my children which I now regret. Fortunately they didn’t totally buy into those philosophies, and appear to have healthy marriages.
    I tried and tried to show respect my husband. When he displayed anger, I apologized for not being respectful as Emerson says to do.
    Many years later I learned that his anger was secondary to his sexual addiction and had nothing to do with me. Sex was his greatest need alright, but I could never meet that need. Being a good people pleaser, I tried too long and too hard. The love I needed was never returned to me.
    On another note, I heard recently that the men of our church are going to be studying marriage, but they also want the women to be studying also. I nearly exploded. We have been at this church a short time, so I don’t know their history, but at every other church I have been connected with, it’s the women who have a class on marriage over and over, while the men study Acts again. This is the kind of thing that kept me blind to my husband’s problems- being taught that I was to submit, be sexy, and be responsible for his happiness

    Reply
    • J

      The interesting thing is your husband’s greatest need can’t be sex. I don’t believe that’s true of any man or woman. Otherwise none of us would be able to enjoy or endure single life, or live a pure single life.
      I think the idea a man’s greatest need is sex is a lie.
      ‘Needs’ and ‘wants’ are also very different. Some men and women may want sex a lot, but I want chocolate a lot, more often than is healthy for me, so when something is characterised as a ‘want’ rather than a ‘need’ I think we are quicker to admit that we don’t need all the things we want all the time.

      Reply
    • Sheila Wray Gregoire

      Oh, wow! I’m glad you saw through the fog!

      Reply
  10. Esteban

    Humanism derives truth from surveys (what people think). The Bible teaches what the creator wants (what God thinks). Ephesians 5 is a good example of teaching about two people (men and women) getting what they should, not because they deserve it, but because God commands it. Wives are no more deserving of love than because their husbands love them, then we are of God’s love and sacrifice other than because He first loved us. People need to stop manipulating scripture to fit their humanistic narrative.

    Reply
    • Sheila Wray Gregoire

      You’ve missed the whole point! Jesus said to judge by the fruit. You make it sound like your interpretation of Scripture is equal to God Himself, when Jesus told us, “hey, you’re going to disagree on how to interpret things. So judge the fruit!” He actually cares about your life. He cares whether you’re doing well or not. Just think about how many of His miracles helped people in the here and now–giving them food, healing them. He cares about you! He doesn’t delight when you’re miserable.

      Reply
    • Erica Tate

      Esteban, to your comment “People need to stop manipulating scripture to fit their humanistic narrative” — you do realise that’s a sword that cuts both ways, right?

      The Pharisees nullified the word of God for the sake of their traditions. So do Christians who insist that, contrary to what Jesus expressly commanded and Paul clearly taught, there must be a hierarchy within the church and within marriage.

      Ephesians 5 is not a good example of people getting what they should at all; it is a description of what it looks like when people are led by the Holy Spirit rather than by their own selfish impulses. On top of that, the final verse in Ephesians 5 is usually mistranslated. In Greek, it contains a ‘hina’ clause. I highly recommend you look that up on a website such as biblehub.com, which gives interlinear translations.

      The word ‘hina’ (number 2443 in the Strong’s concordance) indicates a conditional clause. Whatever follows the word ‘hina’ depends upon what preceded it.

      “So every one of you must love his wife as he loves himself, SO THAT the wife may respect her husband.”

      It’s exactly the same structure as John 3:16:

      “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, SO THAT whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” Without the first part (God loved… He gave) it is impossible to have the second part (belief, everlasting life).

      It is Eggerichs and others of his ilk who are manipulating scripture to fit their humanistic narrative. They are nullifying the word of God for the sake of their traditions, and they are hurting people.

      Reply
      • Erica Tate

        Whoops, I forgot to add this in: back in Paul’s day, wives were the legal property of their husbands. Obedience from wives was expected.

        Paul turns this on its head by commanding Christian husbands to love their wives, so that they might win their respect. Paul also encourages Christian wives to voluntarily submit to their husbands as they would to Christ.

        The whole point of the passages about wives & husbands, children & parents, slaves & masters in Ephesians 5:22 onwards is simply to elaborate on what was said in the preceding verses: a Spirit-filled person behaves differently, because he or she is reflecting Christ to those around. What Eggerichs et al are doing is to try to impose man-made (and bogus) rules onto something that doesn’t need rules. It’s old wineskins trying to handle new wine. It doesn’t work, and the wine gets lost in the process.

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        • Sheila Wray Gregoire

          Perfectly said!

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      • Sheila Wray Gregoire

        Well said, Erica!

        Reply
  11. J

    Lots of good stuff here. I love the stuff about why it’s so problematic for men to get unconditional respect. It should be obvious but sadly it’s so often not to many. And I liked the stuff about why men may settle for looking for power in a relationship rather than having the courage to go for vulnerability and intimacy. It’s good to point out that most women also struggle with the idea of being completely vulnerable with another person, we are not polar opposites in this area. Vulnerability is hard for everybody.
    I did think the stuff about ‘alone’ could be improved a little. When you write ‘In fact, alone really isn’t that bad at all, and if you’re alone, feeling unloved doesn’t really register. So that’s why most people choose “alone and unloved.” It has nothing to do with not wanting to be disrespected; it’s because being alone means it really doesn’t matter how other people treat you.’
    A couple of things jarred with me a little. I think it all comes down to what do you mean by ‘alone’. Do you mean simply not in an emotional and sexual relationship? Or do you mean someone inhabiting the world completely isolated from every other human being? And which of these scenarios do you think the survey respondents were responding to?
    ‘Alone’ may simply be single – not in a one on one relationship. Many people love being single, and as you imply being ‘alone’ as far as a relationship does not mean being ‘lonely’ – the two are very different things. But I wouldn’t say for someone who is ‘alone’ by being single that feeling unloved doesn’t really register. Single people, men and women, will still typically all feel hurt when their friends or family members show a lack of love towards them, or a forgetfulness etc, or do something unloving, that hurts them. I just don’t think it follows that when one is alone, it doesn’t matter how other people treat you, as single people have all the same reactions to other peoples treatment of them as do people in relationships.

    Reply
  12. Mark Patterson

    I’m glad you are taking this topic up. I haven’t read Eggerichs book, but I have listened to a lot of Shaunti Feldhahn and generally appreciate what she says. The survey question you ask is better than hers, but still I think that the case you make here is not as strong as it is presented.

    Sociology is a dog of a thing. Fully 3/4 of sociology papers fail when another researcher tries to replicate them. One weakness in what you have done is that men and women will have, I’m sure, different perceptions for the words love and respect. Men and women are different in important ways but it is often subtle. Men have a 15 times higher concentration of testosterone (which produces optimism), and women a 3 times higher concentration of oxytocin (which makes people feel relationships more intensely), but both sexes move in the same circles and speak the same language.

    I think it is fair to say that overall men are more about making things work and women about making people feel good. Men are about things more than women, women are about relationships more than men. Notice the largest gaps in your results were with the word “inadequate”. Men were far less happy to be labelled with that word than women. Men get their identity from their competencies more than women.

    I would guess that a better survey would try to test the hypothesis that men want more to be appreciated and relied on as competent, women want more to be seen as nice and fun to spend time with. Both sexes want both, but in different intensities.

    Reply
    • Sheila Wray Gregoire

      But Mark, that’s the point we’re making. That’s exactly it. We’re not saying men and women are the same. We’re not even saying the four attributes are the important ones. We simply tested her thesis, and found it wrong. That’s all.

      Reply
  13. Bonnie

    To make a huge “ministry” out of 1 verse is problematic to start with.
    As biblical Christian we can’t deny Paul’s admonition for husb to love and wives to respect. One has to reflect on WHY he chose that emphasis: was there a context? YES. Are there historical and cultural reasons that drive Paul’s statement? YES. (With some reflection and study the answers become apparent…)
    Does it preclude the notion that men don’t need love and women don’t need respect? NO
    A modicum of critical thinking would answer this.

    Reply
  14. MarkH

    Curious… I think I understand what you mean about the love & respect.
    But one other concept Emerson has is the PINK and BLUE glasses.

    Do you think it’s true that men and women likely see things differently?
    I have used this analogy way too many times… and it seems to fit, in my life anyway.

    Reply
    • Nessie

      I can’t speak for the Bare Marriage team but when I broadened my friend/acquaintance base, I found much more variety in how people see things. I think a lot of what seems to be gendered actually has more to do with how we were raised and encouraged to think on things.

      If a little girl has mostly dolls to play with, she’s going to learn to play mostly how a caregiver models with dolls. Same for boys with monster trucks. If the caregivers push “gentle” behaviors on the girl but allow the boy to run roughshod (‘boys will be boys!”), that will affect how they learn to think on things.

      If as a developing child/adolescant you are told you are weird because you like gendered things of the “other” sex, then you feel like an outcast and may start making efforts to do things differently which often affects your thoughts. I think the BLUE and PINK are more nurture than nature.

      Reply
      • Sheila Wray Gregoire

        They definitely are. John Gottman has done a lot of work on this–it’s socialization, and he says the next big thing that has to happen for marriages to become healthy is that men have to get more emotionally aware.

        Reply

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