Sheila: Welcome to the Bare Marriage podcast.  I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage.  And one of the things that I am so, so dedicated to is that idea of evidence based because what our team has been doing for the last few years is massive, massive studies and surveys looking at how does evangelical advice about sex and marriage actually affect sexual and marital satisfaction.  And how can we get to the marriages that we want?  How can we get to the sex lives that we want?  And our new book, The Marriage You Want, is out in just a few weeks on March 11, so we’re in the final push.  And I am so excited about this book.  Someone in our launch team recently called it this is like the safe marriage book I’ve always wanted.  It’s a marriage book that you’ll read, and you’re not going to feel guilty for having needs.  You’re not going to feel like, oh, every—if I have expectations, it means I’m not trusting God enough.  No.  It’s going to legitimize things.  It’s going to be like, yeah.  This is what a good marriage should look like, and then it gives super practical information on how you get there.  And that’s what we’ve been talking about for the last few weeks.  Before we jump in to today’s topic, I do want to thank our patron supporters and the people who gave, who donated money through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation.  That helped us do our study for this book, and we are just so appreciative.  We have some great news on the Spanish translation front that I want to tell you about soon because some of the money that you donated is going there as well.  So I’ve got some great things I’ll be announcing in the new few weeks.  But if you want to support us, if you want to help what we’re doing to get safe information out there, you can do that by joining our Patreon for just $5 a month.  You can do it by donating money.  You can even do it simply by liking this podcast wherever you’re listening and by sharing it right now and by subscribing.  That actually just makes a huge difference.  What we’ve been doing in the last few weeks is we’ve been going over some of the key findings in The Marriage You Want.  Keith has been on the podcast with me.  Rebecca has been on a little bit.  But it’s mostly Keith and me as well as our stats time with Joanna as we go over some of the key things.  Last week we talked about housework.  We talked about the unfairness threshold.  We talked about the marriage hierarchy of needs.  Lots of fun things in the last few weeks. But this week is a little different because we’ve got something personal going on in our family right now.  My father-in-law, Keith’s dad, was just moved into hospice care.  And we’re not really sure—yeah.  We’re not really sure how much longer he has, so Keith is spending a lot of time there.  Rebecca and I have been there as well and—yeah.  We’re just sort of in a waiting period right now.  So the stuff that I had planned for this week’s podcast I didn’t have time to prepare.  And Keith isn’t here to record with me.  So we don’t know how long he’s going to be away obviously.  But I had Joanna run some new stats that aren’t in the book, and I thought that this podcast we—you could just listen in on a convo with me and Joanna as we talk about some really cool stuff that she found about The Five Love Languages.  So here is Joanna.  So we have a different stats time with Joanna today.  Hi, Joanna.

Joanna: Hello, everybody.  

Sheila: As I was saying earlier, we had a different podcast planned for today.  But just with all the family stuff going on, we just couldn’t record it, so we thought we would do something fun.  It was your suggestion.  

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  I said, look, if you can’t record, it’s totally fine.  Everybody will understand.  But if you have a chance to record, allow me to just run some fun bonus stats that we can riff on for awhile, and then we’ll have a good time.  

Sheila: Yes.  And so that’s what you did.  So do you want to explain what you ran?

Joanna: I did.  So what I decided to do is—again, I was looking for fun, light.  And I thought, “What makes me think of fun and light is The Five Love Languages,” which is a book that I just—it sold really, really well.  Better than anything we’ve ever written.  So I mean, to some extent, far be it from us to critique.  But also it could have been a blog post.  It could have been an email.  It’s one of those—  

Sheila: Yes.  Yeah.  It’s just a really simple concept, and we share—there’s an article that came out in a journal last year.  I will put the link—I think we talked about this on a podcast before.  I certainly talked about it on the blog where basically there were saying, “Look.  They’re not harmful, but they’re also not scientifically based in anything.” 

Joanna: No.  There are other studies that show that if your spouse feels that you are meeting their love languages they will feel better.  To the shock of zero people.  

Sheila: Right.  Right.

Joanna: But the idea in the book, which this newer paper talked about, that you have a primary love language and then a secondary love language and then that means that that is the best way for you to be shown love, that’s not a thing.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Not a thing.  And the idea that there are only five is not a thing.  Other places have seven when you actually look at the psychology of it.  So it’s not really a thing.  But for people who have never talked about how to communicate or what they want, reading the book and thinking, “Oh, I should think about how I show love to my spouse,” you can actually improve your marriage, right?

Joanna: Exactly.  Yes.  When we take—so I took a lot of chemistry in my undergrad.  A lot of chemistry.  

Sheila: To no one’s surprise.  Yes.  Mm-hmm.  

Joanna: Yes.  No one is surprised.  And when you start taking chemistry, they’re like, “Hey, guys, this is how the atom works.”  And you’re like, “Awesome.  I understand how electrons work in orbitals.  Amazing.  Awesome.”  And then you take the next chemistry, and they’re like, “So we lied.  It’s more complicated than we originally told you.”  And you’re like, “Oh, okay.  Okay.”  And then they keep complicating it just a little bit, and it ends up—you’re doing all sorts of fun categorizations of how these atoms are put together.  But it isn’t that it was wrong for you to use the original model.  It was that you have to start bit by bit because it’s really complicated, and so they start you on the simplest model that turns out to be an oversimplification.  And then you move up to the next model, and you move up from there.  And the love languages is kind of like that.  It’s on oversimplified idea, but it gives us a colloquial way to talk about how do we get our needs met in relationships.  And the paper that came out with saying that instead of love languages we should talk about a balanced love diet, and I thought, “No one wants to do that.”

Sheila: Yes.  Yeah.  Their solution was like, okay.  I understand why your solution is better, but it’s not going to sell millions of copies because people were looking for a quick gimmick really.

Joanna: And also something that feels good to talk about.  It feels nice to talk about your love language.  Nobody wants to talk about whether or not they ate their vegetables.    

Sheila: Right.  Yes.  Yes.  This is very true.  Yes.  Although Gary Thomas did compare having sex with eating your vegetables.  

Joanna: It’s true.  

Sheila: In Married Sex.  Yeah.  Mm-hmm.  

Joanna: Yeah.  Decisions were made.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Okay.  So you ran some things.  

Joanna: I did two things for the stats because what we found—what we were sort of interested in were people who choose physical touch, especially men because men overwhelmingly picked physical touch as their top love language—like 43%. 

Sheila: Yes.  And we did talk about this.  This we did talk about in The Marriage You Want.

Joanna: Yes.  We did.  

Sheila: So it’s in chapter eight on emotional connection.  We took a look at the guys, who chose physical touch as their love language.  Yeah.

Joanna: Yes.  And we’ll get into some of those stats in a little bit.  And then I also was just curious to look at people but especially women who chose acts of service as their top love language.  And then I also took a look at the love languages book just to look at the advice that he gives.  At the end of each chapter with a love language, he says, “Okay.  If your spouse has X love language, you should do one of these various things.  Here are your action steps.”  And largely, they’re lovely.  But I want to talk about what he has for acts of service because I have thoughts.  

Sheila: And acts of service—we didn’t talk about this one in The Marriage You Want.  So what you’re about to hear, everybody, this is all new stuff.  Joanna only just ran it, so that’s kind of cool.  Because The Marriage You Want is really—we weren’t writing it to take on the huge books in the way that we wrote Great Sex Rescue.  It was really more to look at what actually does create a good marriage.  But one of the concerns we had—and that we had been talking about behind the scenes especially when we saw the housework stats that we shared on last week’s podcast was if not sharing the load has such a huge outcome on marital satisfaction then this idea that acts of service is a love language and women tend to choose it, is it that’s actually their love language?  Or are they just overwhelmed?  That was our suspicion.  Yes.

Joanna: Yes.  And so we had a lot of fun.  I was just—we had a long survey, and it was fun to put in a ranking question for how would you rank the five love languages for you.  How do you think your spouse would rank them?  Go.  And it’s been a fun thing to get to run.  So I decided to look at what percentage of the housework do women do today if they—based on where they chose acts of service in their ranking.  So this is ranking it from number one to ranking it number five.  So if women ranked acts of service at number five, on average, they do 57% of the housework.  

Sheila: Right.  So it’s pretty evenly split actually.    

Joanna: Fairly evenly split.  Yeah.  If they rank it at a three or a four, it goes up to 62%.  If they rank acts of service at number two, it goes up to 65%.  And if they rank it at number one, it’s 68%.  So that’s an 11-point shift in the percentage of housework that women report doing based on where they put acts of service.

Sheila: Right.  So the question is is acts of service a love language or is acts of service a cry for help.

Joanna: And not always, right?  There are people—my husband would say that his love language is acts of service if forced to pick which we all agree—you don’t need to be forced to pick.  You can like it when people spend time with you and when they do nice things for you and when they get you a present and when they say nice things to you and when they’re cuddly.  These are all good things.  But if forced to pick, he would pick acts of service.  Okay.  It’s not a problem.  He just likes it if I decided to—I don’t know.  Paint a room or unexpectedly do a deep clean.  That’s great.  But it’s not an expectation that I’m drowning in housework.  I need someone to help.  If he would just do the dishes that would actually make me feel like I could sleep tonight.  That’s a very different vibe.  And I do want to note that I found a similar numeric trend for men, but it was not statistically significant.  So men, who put acts of service at number one, did have—do slightly more of the housework numerically than men who put it at five but that it wasn’t statistically significant.

Sheila: And do you want to explain to people why that probably wasn’t—because they may not understand.  You just didn’t have enough people.

Joanna: Oh sorry.  So it was a smaller effect size.  So I think the shift was like five percentage points.  I think that’s probably the big thing.  It just wasn’t enough of an effect to get picked up.  It might be a power issue.  We might not have enough people in the sample.  I don’t think that’s the problem.  I think it’s just that it isn’t as big of a deal for men because they’re doing less of the housework anyway.  Is there a huge difference between 43 and 48%?  I don’t know.  But I just wanted to report that we did run it for dudes.  It doesn’t seem to be a thing in the same way as it is for women.  I think there are just fewer men who bear all of the mental load and the housework stuff because it’s not that every woman who puts acts of service as number one is doing 68% of the housework.  A lot of them are doing 50% and are just a person who really likes it if you deep clean the garage or whatever—insert your act of service here.  But then there are lots of women who are choosing it who are doing 100% of the housework.  And I think those people just aren’t present in the male side of the sample.  But then I also looked at how does choosing acts of service affect how much free time you have.  And if women put acts of service at number five, they have, on average, 5.3 hours of free time during the day.  If they put acts of service at number one, they only have 4.6 hours of free time during the day.  So we also see a decrease in the amount of—so they’re doing more housework, and they have less leisure time on average.  The guys showed the totally opposite.  If guys put acts of service at number one, they have more free time than guys who put it at number five.  

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s just not picking up the same dynamic.  Yeah.

Joanna: It’s just not the same dynamic.  So we’re just going to say this is a trend that’s true for women.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Not true for men.  Okay.  So here’s the situation, right?  So when women choose acts of service, they are more likely to be doing more of the housework and having less free time.  So the question is is this an acts of service or, like we talked about, that marriage hierarchy of needs that we talked about.  I don’t know if it was two weeks ago or three weeks ago where—and the unfairness threshold.  If she is doing—if she’s on that bottom tier where she’s barely surviving when she’s doing all of this stuff, then is acts of service really that extra that she needs to feel loved.  Or is this just still meeting the bare minimum to get her up to that next tier in that marriage hierarchy of needs that we talked about from The Marriage You Want chapter two?  

Joanna: Exactly.

Sheila: Because here’s the thing, right?  For those of you who didn’t hear it, the point that we were making is marriage—there’s a hierarchy of needs, okay?  Kind of like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in psychology where you have these basic needs.  Food, shelter, safety, air, water, et cetera, right?  Those are your basic needs.  And then you go up to your next needs like for friendship, for fun, and then to self actualization, et cetera.  But nobody is worried about having sex when you’re getting chased by a bear, right?  Because you have to meet those basic needs first.  And the same thing is true in marriage.  So we have this base pyramid where you’re just worried about making sure the rent is paid, making sure the laundry is done, making sure the groceries are there, making sure the kids’ homework is done.  You’re just getting those basic things met.  And you can’t really work on things like friendship with my spouse and enjoying my spouse and having quality time together when those base things aren’t met.  You’ve got to meet those base things first.  And the whole concept of the five love languages is really a second or third tier thing.  It’s like, hey, here’s how we can show love to one another, just improve our marriage.  We’re not even at the improve our marriage part if we’re still just trying to survive, right?  

Joanna: Yes.  And the problem is that the other love languages like spending time together—I went through the list of—what are the action steps?  And the one for gifts were really actually lovely which was interesting because nobody picked gifts.

Sheila: Yes.  Yes.  No one has gifts as their love language.  Yeah.   Mm-hmm.  Very, very few.

Joanna: No.  No.  Very, very few.  But he had some actually really lovely ideas like go for a walk and find a pretty flower or a rock and ask permission first if it’s on someone’s property, which was great.  We love the aside.  Amazing.  Or plant a tree so that you have something to look back on or donate to a charity in their name.  They were genuinely lovely ideas.  Really good, good stuff.  It wasn’t just buy her chocolate.  So we loved those.  And those are all, again as you were saying, the second tier needs, right?  Nobody needs to be brought flowers.  It’s lovely, but you don’t need— 

Sheila: But you’re not going to be going for a walk looking for a flower when the rent isn’t paid and the laundry is not done and the kids aren’t at the door for school.  So when you’re worried about that survival tier where that’s where all your energy is going, you’re not going to be going for a walk to find a rock.  Yeah.

Joanna: Yeah.  And similarly actually, I really liked the stuff he had for physical touch because Chapman makes a really big deal of the fact that physical touch is about being a cuddly person, not a person who wants sex all the time.  That is not how colloquially that gets understood.  

Sheila: Yes.  And we will talk about that in a minute.  Yes.

Joanna: We will talk about that in a minute.  But his ideas for that were lovely.  They were sweet little action items.  It was all good.  But then I turned to the acts of service, and I read the action items.  And I would like to share a few of them with you, Sheila, for you to react to.  

Sheila: Yes.  Please do.  Please do.  Uh-huh.

Joanna: Okay.  So this is number one.  “Make a list of all the requests your spouse has made of you over the past few weeks.  Select one of these each week and do it as an expression of love.”  

Sheila: Okay.  So your spouse is making you a list because your spouse is the manager, and you’re not carrying any mental load.  So your spouse is carrying all of the mental load, so they have to make the lists of all the things that you need to do.  And he’s saying just pick one.  Just pick one.  And that one is an act of love, not like—okay.  So what if that one thing is, hey, you get to do all of the bathing of the kids this week.  Or you’re supposed to be doing—you’re supposed to be picking up Johnny from soccer.  And that’s supposed to be an act of love to her.  No.  If you pick up Johnny from soccer, Johnny is your kid.  That is not an act of love to your spouse.  That is you being a partner.  That is just the bare—that is less than the bare minimum.  He’s saying if your spouse has made you a big list do one.  

Joanna: And the thing that’s crazy is that if it’s a big list and she’s adding more than one item per week which is perfectly acceptable if you’re trying to run a household together and you’re only doing one you’re presumably falling further behind.  It’s not an act of love.

Sheila: Yes.  Exactly.  Yeah.

Joanna: So this next one.  “What one act of service has your spouse nagged about consistently?  Why not decide to see the nag as a tag.  Your spouse is tagging this as really important to him or her.  If you choose to do it as an expression of love, it is worth more than a thousand roses.”  

Sheila: Okay.  Let’s think about that.  So if your spouse is nagging you that means that you have promised to do something, and you have not fulfilled that promise, right?  So you gave your word that you would do something or you that just should be assumed that you will do some of the partner things that go into running a house.  And you haven’t been doing it.  And so now if you do it that is better than buying her a thousand roses.  So if you do the bare minimum, which you have not already done even though you should have been doing it—if you do just the bare minimum because if she’s nagging you, we’re talking about bare minimum stuff here.  Okay?  And I hate the phrase nagging.  I like that he changed it to tagging.  That’s cool.  But nobody should have to nag because you should be doing your own stuff.  If she’s having to nag, that means you have fallen behind.  And so if you have fallen behind and you have failed her and now you do what you were supposed to do in the first place, that is not worth more than a thousand roses.  So he’s just—he’s giving these guys credit for doing less than the bare minimum.

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  I would like to read one more to you.  Some of the rest of them are like, eh, if you have money, you can always throw money at the problem, which I don’t—that’s fine.  Hire house help if you can.  There’s some that are not terrible.  But then there’s this one.  “If your spouse’s request for acts of service come across as nags or put down, try writing them in words that would be less offensive to you.  Share this revised wording with your spouse.  For example, ‘Honey, I love you so much.  You are a hard working man, and I really appreciate you.  I’d love to thank you in advance for mowing the lawn this week before Thursday when Mary and Bob come over for dinner.’  Your husband might even respond, ‘Where is the lawnmower?  I can’t wait.’  Try it and see.”  

Sheila: See?  This is the thing.  If you are partners, you should be able to just simply say, “Hey, Mary and whatever his name is are coming over for dinner on Thursday.  So we need to get the lawn mowed.  We need to figure out what we’re making for dinner.  What do you want to take on?”  If you have to couch it like that, you’re not partner.  If you have to couch it the way that he said.

Joanna: Yeah.  It’s super passive aggressive.  And you’re actually supposed to—this is not a way to show love to your spouse.  You’re supposed to if you are the spouse whose spouse has acts of service.  So you’re supposed to then say, “Okay.  Well, you asked for this.  And here’s actually how you should ask me to give you this act of service in a way that isn’t offensive to me.”  So it’s not actually even about showing love to your spouse which is such an interesting change because all the other ones are like, “Okay.  Your spouse loves gifts.  Here’s how to give them a nice presy.”  Great.  Awesome.  This is like, “No.  No.   No.  Your spouse says they like acts of service.  Well, they’re doing it wrong.  You need to educate them on how to butter you up before they ask you to do a thing.”  

Sheila: Wow.  This is one of the things that we were talking about last week on the podcast is that when we did—when we ran the numbers or when you ran the numbers about how important housework was and we found out that it was so much more important than even sex or money even though everybody says that sex and money are the two biggest things couples fight about—the two biggest things that end marriages.  And we found that housework was three times as important as sex, and I think six times as important as money in terms of marital satisfaction.  This is huge.  And male Christian authors don’t ever talk about it except to say that he has a need for domestic support, so she has to do all the housework.  When they address housework, they address it to put it all on her shoulders because this is a need he has.  They don’t address it as in this will kill your marriage if you are not an involved partner.  And the way that Gary Chapman has framed acts of service is just so wrong.  And it’s so—it’s like you guys don’t understand what is going on on the ground with actual couples.

Joanna: We’ve put the bar—Connor pointed this out.  That we put the bar lovingly on the floor and then celebrate when we step over it.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  So yeah.  Super interesting.  But this is, again, when we wrote The Great Sex Rescue our big plea to Christian authors was to start talking about obligation sex and realizing that obligation sex is bad.  And I think our big plea in The Marriage You Want really is to start recognizing mental load in housework.  These are huge deals.  And when the Christian church, when the evangelical church, consistently talks about housework as if this is a woman’s domain and a man has a need like Jimmy Evans and Willard Harley—so in His Needs, Her Needs, in Marriage on the Rock, they actually both say that the man has the need for domestic support.  He has a need for the wife to do the housework.  This is a God-given need, which is crazy.  So God made men to need their dishes done.  That’s crazy.  And yet, that is the way that it has been portrayed.  And we need to stop it because that’s seriously hurting marriages.

Joanna: Yep.  Yep.  It’s just a bad idea.  

Sheila: Yeah.  So when you hear the things about acts of service, just remember that if there is a woman who chooses acts of service it might be a cry for help.  And this is what’s always—this is—and I’m glad that you ran these stats because it does verify something that I’ve thought for a long time which is acts of service is the bare minimum.  You don’t get to talk about showing love to your spouse until you each are doing—you each are caring equal mental load.  That needs to be done before you then figure out what your love languages are, or else she’s simply going to say it’s acts of service because she’s drowning.  And she just doesn’t want to drown anymore.

Joanna: Yeah.  And I do want to point out that there can be legitimate acts of service that one spouse does for the other.  My husband is really good at doing these because he worked construction for many years before getting his current job.  And so he will—we renovated our basement.  And he figured out how to frame it out and what—and what were we going to do ourselves and what were we going to get professionals in for.  And it saved us tons of money.  And he worked really hard at it.  That was a legitimate act of service for both of us.  And we both benefit from the basement reno that we did.  He now has a really great office that he can use to work from home.  But that is an act of service because it goes above and beyond.  You don’t necessarily—it’s not doing the dishes.  That’s just household maintenance.  Is it stuff that’s required for the household to run?  That’s not an act of service.  Building me a hydroponic garden so that I can have lettuce all year that is an act of service.  

Sheila: Right.  Mm-hmm.  Exactly.  So yeah.  So if you do think that your love language is acts of service, I would just challenge you to ask yourself is our mental load currently shared.  Am I feeling like I’m barely surviving?  Because it could be that that is a sign that you need to have a bigger conversation with your spouse about how to share mental load.  And we help walk you through that in chapter five of The Marriage You Want where we go over what mental load is and great practical solutions on how to split it up.  So please check out The Marriage You Want.  You can preorder it now.  It launches on March 11.  But would you like to talk about physical touch now?

Joanna: Oh, yes, I would.  I would love to talk about physical touch.  So, again, there are people in this world who are just cuddly.  And we love this for them.  I am not a cuddly person.  But I appreciate that there are cuddly people in the world, and we are happy that they exist.  However, despite Gary Chapman’s genuine warnings in the book that having physical touch as your number one love language is not about sex 43% of men in our survey chose physical touch as their top love language.  

Sheila: Right.

Joanna: And when we looked at this, we checked—this is in the book—to see what are the effects of men choosing physical touch as their top love language.  And we found that they were 1.8 times more likely than other men to be dissatisfied with their sex life, 1.6 times more likely to be satisfied with—dissatisfied with the amount of closeness that they share with their wives during sex, and 2.1 times more likely to feel that their wife is not sexually enough for them.  And we pointed out in the book that not all of these guys who say that they have a high felt need for physical touch have channeled their emotional needs into sex.  But it seems that there are a lot of them who have.  And we found that women, in contrast, have their physical touch ranking as much more evenly spread.  If anything, they are less likely to choose it as their top love language.  It tends to be between number two and number five.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Now what I also thought was so interesting is that men, who choose physical touch as their highest love language, were 1.44 times more likely to use porn.  Right?  So it’s like is this really—because you could argue, well, maybe they’re choosing physical touch because their sex life is so bad, right?  They’re dissatisfied with their sex life.  They’re dissatisfied with the amount of closeness, et cetera.  Maybe their sex life is just really bad, and so they’re crying out for.  But what we found is that there were other things really wrong in their relationship.  

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  A lot of them.  And, again, there are cuddly dudes.  And this is not an indictment of cuddly men just as there are legitimately women, who just really appreciate it if you paint the house.  That’s perfectly benign and fine.  But there is an undercurrent for a lot of men where it’s—there’s not an ability to talk through or to emotionally process in a healthy way.  And so we’re channeling all of our emotional needs into sex.  But I was really—

Sheila: And that is something that we found is that men who chose physical touch were—ranked lower on a lot of these other key metrics for the emotional closeness and emotional intimacy in their marriage.  And that’s what we do talk about in chapter eight on emotional closeness in marriage.  Yeah.  Mm-hmm.

Joanna: Yes.  And so I was just curious as we were prepping for this podcast to look a little bit more at the physical touch guys.  What’s actually going on?  So first of all, I checked to see do guys who choose physical touch as their top love language—are they having more sex?  They’re not having a different amount of sex.  It’s just the same.  Men’s ranking of physical touch does not affect how much sex they have.  However—and I cannot emphasize enough how strong this correlation is.  There is an incredibly strong correlation between men’s ranking of their love language regarding physical touch and how much they rate their level of sexual desire. 

Sheila: You should explain the 5 versus the 200.

Joanna: Sorry.  Okay.  So yeah.  So for something to be statistically significant, the test statistic, depending on how many levels there are, for this one has to be somewhere between 2, 5, maybe 10 to be statistically significant.  And statistically significant typically we use 0.05 as our cut off point.  This statistic is 207.  It’s real big.

Sheila: Yeah.  So it’s huge.  Yeah.

Joanna: It’s huge.  It’s very strong.  If guys chose physical touch as their highest love language, 37% of them say that their sex drive is very high compared with only 1.8% of guys who put physical touch as their fifth love language.  So it’s huge.  Makes a very big difference.  Now interestingly, as I said, that was a 207.8—so actually, I should say 208 rounding.  For women, same trend.  And their test statistic is actually even higher.  It’s 256.  So it seems that physical touch love language idea really does, despite what the book says, map onto perceived libido.  Very, very strongly.  And actually, for women, there is also an association between the—having a high physical touch love language and sex frequency.  Now I want to be clear.  We did this in chapter of the book that when there is a disconnect between how much sex they’re having the guys—if they’re having a low amount of sex, guys tend to still report that they have very high sex drives.  And women tend to report they have very low sex drives.

Sheila: Right.  So the culprit seems to be, just to go over this—and we have this amazing little chart in chapter four talking about this.  So if couples aren’t having sex, the culprit seems to be, well, women just don’t want it.  Because if they’re not having sex, men still want it, so it must be all women’s fault.  

Joanna: Yes.  And this is the thing that has been written about ad nauseam in all of these other books.  But what we actually found is that we were able to explain why women weren’t wanting sex.  It was either she’s not orgasming or they don’t feel intimate during sex or she’s in pain, and those three things explain the vast majority.

Sheila: 87%.  Explain 87%.  And that was before we asked about porn.  That was before—

Joanna: Yeah.  Or housework.  Or overall relational quality or anything else.  There is a reason.  So just that caveat in there, I thought that was really interesting.  And then I thought, “Okay, well, let me just look for”—okay.  This is really interesting that there are these women.  There seems to be a correlation between how much sex you’re having and your libido and physical touch as a love language.  For guys, there seems to be this disconnect.  I thought, “Well, we have a matched pair survey now.  So this is a matched pair.”  So I thought, “All right.  Well, I can take a peek at what the women whose husbands say based on—sorry.  What women say based on their husband’s love language about their sexual satisfaction.”  And interestingly, what we found is that women were less likely to report that they are always turned on during sex if he puts physical touch as his highest love language.  

Sheila: Okay.  Okay.   So that’s interesting.  And, again, one of the things—the theses that we had—and which is why we talked about this in chapter eight is that for many men sex becomes the way to connect.  So instead of connecting emotionally, they try to connect sexually because it’s easier.  And it doesn’t require vulnerability in the same way.  But when you’re doing that, you’re actually harming your spouse’s sexuality too.  And that’s what this stat is showing.  Yeah.

Joanna: Yes.  And, again, this is—I want to just say it again louder for the people in the back.  This is not saying that having physical touch as your highest love language is always indicative of channeling all of your emotional needs into sex and not having a spouse who is aroused.  But it’s associated with it.  And so if there are other red flags, then look into it.  If you are just a cuddly teddy bear, continue on being a cuddly teddy bear.  

Sheila: Yes.  You’re allowed to be a cuddly teddy bear.  Exactly.  Yeah.  So really interesting stuff.  This is one of the things that I love about these studies that we run is that we don’t ever—we can mine the data forever.  There’s so many questions that we can ask that we haven’t asked yet.  And when we write these books, sometimes the thing that holds us up is trying to figure out what questions to ask of the data.  And we go round and around and said, “Well, what about this?  And what about this?”  And then it’s like, oh, that’s the reason.  That explains it.  And so here we just asked different things that we hadn’t looked at before.  But even though this stuff wasn’t in the book, there is a lot that is in the book.  So the physical touch stuff—a lot of that is in chapter eight.  The acts of service stuff really isn’t there because we just ran that today.  But all of the stuff about uneven division of labor and uneven mental load, there’s so many great charts on that.  There’s so many great charts on sexual desire, so many great charts on orgasm rates.  If you thought Great Sex Rescue and She Deserves Better have charts, this thing has charts to the nth degree.

Joanna: Yeah.  And so many great action steps too.  So we have the data, and then there’s also how to apply it so that we can, again, have the marriage you want.  Not a marriage that is ho hum or a marriage that is scraping by.  But a marriage that you actually want to have.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  And we did let the data drive us.  We wrote chapters differently because we saw how huge the effect was about mental load.  And we wrote the sex chapter differently because we saw—yeah.  We can explain away the low frequency so easily.  And these are two areas where evangelical books on marriage have gotten it totally backwards because they’ve all said, “Hey, when there’s no sex frequency, women just have to have sex more,” instead of saying, “Huh, why does she not want sex when it’s great for her?  Well, maybe it’s not great for her.  Maybe we need to figure out why it’s not great for her,” because people tend to like to do things that are good.

Joanna: Yeah.  Yeah.  It’s really frustrating because they just needed to ask why one more time.

Sheila: Yeah.  Just ask why.  And then with housework and mental load that they just never even addressed it.  Never even addressed it.  And this is such a huge, huge, huge determinant of marital satisfaction.

Joanna: Yeah.  Or if they do address it, I just read Let Me Be a Woman by Elisabeth Elliot yesterday, and, of course, I’ve been prereading Love and Respect.  Both of them talk about how he’s a guy.  Elisabeth Elliot talks about how he’s probably going to leave his towels on the floor.  Eggerichs ups it to now they are on the bed.  But that’s the way they talk about housework is you are going to be looking after—you marry a man.  You are going to be looking after this man, who is going to need you to tidy up after him.  This is your expectation as opposed to—this is a partnership, and you get to figure out how that works for you and your unique situation.

Sheila: Yeah.  And you get to choose.  What kind of a marriage do you want?  Do you want a marriage where you are taking care of him like he’s a child?  Or do you want a marriage where you’re partners?  And you’re going through life together?  You’re each putting in your all, but then you each get all of the rewards.  Isn’t that so much better?  And marriage is something which gives you energy to be able to go out in the world and fulfill the callings that God gave you because marriage isn’t something that drains you.  It’s something that energizes you.  That’s the kind of marriage that God wants for us, and so—yeah.  I hope that the people will get that vision and pick up The Marriage You Want.  I hope that this will change the conversation that we’re having about marriage.  I’m just parachuting in here because I want to read one of the reviews that’s come in on Goodreads.  So a bunch of our people for a launch team have been reading early copies of The Marriage You Want.  And I just want to read to you what one person said.  Hannah writes, “This is the marriage book that you want.  The Marriage You Want is the kind of marriage self-help book people are desperately looking for.  Rather than giving pat answers and relying on strict gender roles the Gregoires dig deep into what it means to be a good spouse, what behaviors lead to failure or flourishing, and how to honor Christ in your marriage.  Plus the surveys and data lend credibility to their claims.  While they use anecdotes to make a point, everything they say is statistically proven with the charts right there for your perusal.  Such scholarship in Christian resources is rare, and it’s refreshing to see.  The book is organized thoughtfully around the acronym BARE, balance, affection, responsibility, emotional connection, as the four pillars of a healthy relationships.  While this is a Christian marriage book, the Gregoires’ approach is that a Christian marriage should be a good marriage and give healthy advice that would lead to flourishing no matter what your faith background.  This book has given simple, practical advice that has already made a difference in our marriage, and it was worth every minute spent reading and discussing it.”  I love that so much.  And Beth Allison Barr just sent me an endorsement too.  She’s the author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood.  And she says, “This is the best Christian marriage book I have ever read.  It has the power to make your marriage better which means it has the power to make the church a better place too.”  I love that.  And Beth’s new book, Becoming a Pastor’s Wife, is out just a week after The Marriage You Want is.  And we’re going to have Beth on the podcast and do a special webinar with her later in March too.  Yeah.  Thanks, Joanna.  

Joanna: Thank you.

Sheila: Thanks for pitch hitting today as our family is just going through a lot.  And yeah.  Hopefully, we will be back next week for another edition of the Bare Marriage podcast.  We’re planning on it.  It might be you and me again.  We’ll see.  But yeah.  Thank you for joining us, and we’ll—

Joanna: I will be here, and we will be praying for you and your family as you navigate the next couples weeks.   

Sheila: Yes.  Thank you.  And for those of you who have not preordered, just remember that preordering The Marriage You Want helps us immensely.  Our launch team is now closed, so you can’t get into our launch team anymore.  But you still can get our preorder bonus.  So if you have ordered—preordered the book, please send in your receipt to preorder@marriageyouwantbook.com.  And the link is also in the podcast notes, and you will get our alternate conclusion, which is really—it’s a much longer conclusion than is actually in the book.  It’s really fun.  I hated to cut it.  When you read it, you’ll understand why I did.  

Joanna: Uh-huh.  But it’s a spicy meatball.

Sheila: It’s a spicy meatball that everybody wants to read.  So yeah.  Get that.  And yeah.  And we will see you again next week.  So take care.  Bye-bye.

Joanna: Bye.