“What evidence do you have that it works?”

A colleague at work asked me that question decades ago. Sheila and I had just started speaking at marriage conferences and I mentioned that we had spoken at one the weekend before. “What evidence do you have, “she asked me candidly, “that the program you are teaching is effective in improving marriage?”

Her question really grabbed me. I think in my insecurity, I had expected an attitude of “Who the heck are you to think you could teach others?” Or, on the other hand, since I had said we teach based on Christian principles, I suspected she might focus her questioning on that. I was surprised that those were not even thoughts in her mind; her only concern was: “Does it actually work?”

My colleague was a fellow physician, so her question came from a natural place where modern physicians live: the world of data. Of course, medicine hasn’t always been like this. A quick read through any book on the history of medicine will produce equal parts shock, horror and bewilderment. Antiquity produced some truly wild treatments for disease. Bloodletting seemed to be the cure for everything in the past. Then there are all the weird concoctions, not to mention treating people with arsenic, mercury and other poisons. Some doctors even recommended smoking as recently as the 1930s! (I had no idea about this last one until I watched “The King’s Speech”, but it’s true!)

Then back in the 1980s, “Evidence Based Medicine” (EBM) swept through medical schools and the field of medicine in general. Nowadays doctors are specifically trained to read journal articles and weigh the evidence for various treatments before prescribing. We know about “statistical significance” and “p-values” and the like. We understand the dangers of treating based on anecdotal evidence and look for the most reliable evidence to guide our treatments. We are taught in medical school about how to mitigate against bias. (We are even taught to recognize and to mitigate the biases inherent in the EBM-system itself.)

Since 2000, the same phenomenon has spread, first into other areas of healthcare and then beyond that into management techniques, public policy formulation, even architecture and law. Today the term you are more likely to hear is “evidence-based practice” In all these areas of study, tradition and the opinions of experts had previously been the primary guide. But people have grasped the concept that since we have innate personal biases that colour our interpretations of the world, we should look beyond our own subjective experience to find what objectively works best for the majority of people.

Not all evidence is equal

Tradition and personal experience do have some merit and so are not discarded entirely, but we must weigh the strength of the evidence when we have competing points of data.

Just because one particular Victorian doctor may have had great success treating headaches with tobacco enemas (yes, that was a thing), doesn’t prove it works. Your personal experience might be an outlier. Overall, this evidence based approach has had a tremendously beneficial effect on progress in the various fields it has touched and in my view is a big part of the incredibly rapid advancements we have been making in the past decades.

So Sheila and I took my colleague’s question seriously.

We decided that if we were going to teach about marriage, we had to look at the evidence rather than just teach from our own personal experience or spout back what we had been taught by others. Sheila found Dr John Gottman, who has been doing high quality research about marriage for decades.

But in the Christian world, we didn’t see much in the way of actual research. And what we saw was filled with bias, disturbingly flawed or seemingly intentionally misinterpreted. Why was that? As Christians, we should have no problem with looking at the evidence and seeing where it leads. Jesus Christ said he was “the Truth” so we should not be afraid to look for truth in God’s creation. 

But many Christians are afraid of evidence because it might take them places they have already decided they don’t want to go.

For example, consider this post I saw on-line:

Now this is not about marriage specifically, but it makes my point nonetheless.

Having already decided that women cannot be pastors, he is now going to the Bible to prove that. He’s looking for help, but people who disagree with his preconceived conclusion need not apply. Is this what “seeking truth” looks like in the church these days? 

We all have biases, I just as much as this guy.

one well-known form of bias is called “confirmation bias”.

Without realizing it, we humans tend to give more weight to evidence that supports what we already believe and tend to downplay evidence that contradicts it. Biases like this one are just a part of the human psychological make-up, they usually are not intentional. But knowing that we are prone to such bias should cause us to consciously ensure that we fight against it. Too much of the church, like the fellow above, seems to be leaning into it. And that will only get us to a place where we think “My mind is made up; don’t confuse me with the facts” is wisdom rather than folly. Sometimes I fear we are already there.

For instance, consider Shaunti Feldhahn’s work.

When we were looking for evidence-based material about marriage, Sheila and I were initially drawn to her books because she was producing actual numbers and we thought there may be some actual data here. But we quickly saw that there was an agenda behind the research: to propagate the same stereotypes and pat teachings that have been in the evangelical world for decades.

A particularly blatant example was the point where she taught in For Men Only that men had higher sex drives than women and when her own survey found that wasn’t the case, she dismissed all the women who reported higher sex drives than their husbands. At the time, the classic teaching was that men weren’t getting enough sex because women had low libidos so women needed to prioritize doing something they didn’t like for the good of their husband. The raw data in Feldhahn’s study suggested that women’s libidos are not that much lower than that of their husbands. It was a teachable moment for the evangelical church.

We had a chance to listen to the data.

We had a chance to ask, “If women’s libidos are not that much lower, why do men seem to want sex more than their wives?”.  But that would have required us questioning our assumptions about gender roles, so instead it was swept under the rug. And we had to wait 15 years for Sheila and her co-authours to finally answer that question in “The Great Sex Rescue”. In the meantime, women’s lived experience continued to be ignored since “unacceptable” data were dismissed in order to preserve the prevailing stereotypical views about sex in marriage.

“The Marriage You Want” is the exact opposite of all that.

We were very intentional from the beginning to follow the data wherever it led. We put it this way in the introduction:

We were not interested in pat answers that protect the status quo, we wanted to find effective ways to tackle marriage’s challenges and effective ways to amplify marriage’s joys – whatever they were.

And there was SO MUCH DATA!!!! The book is full of charts and graphs. So not only can you see why we came to the conclusions we did, but you can dive in and find further correlations on your own. There was simply too much for us to talk about in one book, so the graphs are full of extra information you can mine for a long time after reading the book. Seriously, our charts are so full of information, I really think some of them could each fuel a two-hour small group meeting by themselves.

What kind of data and charts are you going to find?

First, there are the simple comparison charts. We compared how people scored on tests of marital satisfaction with how they answered certain questions. For instance, here is the comparison of people’s Relationship Flourishing Score based on how they answered the question “Do you believe men need respect in a way women will never understand?”

This is a pretty picture that shows the effect that believing men have a desperate need for respect has on a marriage (which, ironically, is not a pretty picture, LOL). But if line graphs aren’t your thing, don’t worry! We also have lots of bar graphs that show the frequency of certain habits and behaviours in marriage and what effect that has on their marriage and sex life. For example, this chart shows the power of having a shared bedtime as a couple:

We also have more complex bar graphs where we used the Couples Satisfaction Index to show you how often people use positive words to rate their marriage based on behaviours in or beliefs about marriage. For instance, here is a graph we use in chapter 5:

This graph showcases the amazing power of doing a matched-pair study. Since we were able to anonymously link husbands and wives together we were able to see the effects that a spouse’s answers had on them. For example, in this graph consider the marriages where the wife feels the husband does his fair share of the housework. You can see that not only is she 4.14x more likely to describe the marriage as “enjoyable”, but he also is 2.31x more likely to say the marriage is enjoyable, too!

But the piece de resistance was our massive matched-pair data-overload megacharts

(okay, not their official name; I just call them that). There are plenty of these throughout the book. In the first pass, some were so big they went onto several pages, and we had to trim them down! These graphs use the power of the matched-pair nature of our survey to pack huge amounts of data into a single space. For instance, here is one from near the end of the book that shows the effects when one spouse does more of the relationship repair work after conflict:

There is so much information here that we had to include a legend on how to read the graph! When you follow that legend, though, each line in the chart unpacks a huge amount of information. We only reported results that had been shown to be statistically significant, which is why some areas are left blank. In other words, there may have been a trend in some places, but if we couldn’t prove it wasn’t just due to random chance, we didn’t report it. We argue our interpretation of the data in each chapter, but we couldn’t possibly cover all the information present in the charts. So we left the full charts for you to go back and see why we said what we said. Chances are you will also find many interesting and sometimes unexpected correlations held there that we never even commented on!

Finally, we have a whole series of “heat maps” at the end of the chapter 5 displaying how household tasks tend to be distributed among couples. They are also very pretty, but I am not going to show them to you in hopes it will motivate you to go buy the book! (LOL)

Plus, I’ve already talked for a long time.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy “The Marriage You Want”.