Keith: It’s here. 

Sheila: The Marriage You Want is out. It is launched. 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 I am joined in this special launch week by my husband and coauthor, Keith.

Keith: Hey, everybody.

Sheila: And it’s Thursday, which means the book has been out for two days although we’re recording this last week. So I’m hoping everything—I’m assuming everything—

Keith: Podcast timing is weird.

Sheila: Yes, and hopefully the reviews are starting to come in on Amazon. We had a whole bunch of Goodreads last week, and yeah, this is exciting.

Keith: It’s exciting. It’s exciting, and a lot of people are saying really good things already so it’s nice to see.

Sheila: Yeah, we are going to change the evangelical conversation about marriage. So I thought on this podcast we could take a bit of a bird’s eye view of what it is that we wanted to do with this book, a little bit of the story of the book, why we wrote it, etc., and this was one of those books that I wasn’t actually planning on writing. I wasn’t even originally that excited about writing it because we were writing about sex so much, and then we went to Zondervan with our idea for The Great Sex Rescue. And they didn’t like the idea. They thought that it wouldn’t sell.

Keith: Well, they thought there wasn’t really a market for it. They thought there was enough books about sex I think is what they thought right?

Sheila: Well, yeah, but they wanted The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex so they gave us a contract for The Good Guy’s Guide, and for an unknown marriage book that we were going to write at a future date, and I’m glad they gave us a contract for The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex. It’s a great book, and they let me rewrite The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex because I really wanted to, which is great, but then we ended up deciding to part ways and put our marriage book with Baker which is what we did. And we had been writing a book about sex, and we were like, “Do we even have anything to say about marriage?”  I remember writing the chapter in this about affection going—

Keith: Well, before you started writing it, you were like what are we going to say?

Sheila: Like, yeah, it’s just kind of obvious isn’t it? But then oh no, we had so much to say once we saw the data from our survey.

Keith: Absolutely.

Sheila: And I’m just really, really excited about what this book can do.

Keith: Yeah, absolutely.

Sheila: If you were to say the theme of our book in one word—

Keith: It’s what we’ve been talking about.

Sheila: —what would it be?

Keith: Teamwork.

Sheila: Teamwork, exactly. And before we get into our book, I actually want to do something that I haven’t done before on the podcast. I want to do a devotion. Could we do that?

Keith: Yeah, of course. It’s your podcast.

Sheila: Yeah, so I have my Bible here in this lovely Bible case from Ever, AJ Bible cases. They were one of our sponsors a while back, and they sent me this Bible case which is just lovely. And I want to read to you from Isaiah 40. Okay, got to get my reading glasses. Here we go. Now Isaiah 40 is one of those beautiful chapters. It’s really heavily quoted—one of the most quoted chapters from Isaiah. It ends with those beautiful verses, “Whoever waits upon the Lord will renew their strength. They shall rise up on wings like eagles. They shall run and not grow weary. They shall walk and not grow faint.” But it opens—that chapter opens with this idea of comfort for God’s people and what God wants to do for Israel. And it says this, “A voice of one calling in the desert, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord. Make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up. Every mountain and hill made low. The rough ground shall become level, and the rugged places a plain, and the glory of the Lord will be revealed. And all humankind together will see it for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’” And I love that image of how when God comes and does something, one of the big things He does is He brings the mountains down, and He brings the valleys up, and He gives us straight ground. And that picture of bringing what is high down and bringing what is low up is really the theme of our book—

Keith: Right.

Sheila: —in a lot of ways because what we’re saying in The Marriage You Want is that we need to be on a level playing field. We need to be approaching this marriage as a partnership. My concern is that in the evangelical church and the Christian world as a whole, I think when it comes to advice we are giving the right advice to the wrong people because God’s plan is that the mountains be made low and the valleys be made high. So the things that are high need to be brought down. The things that are low need to be brought up. But I fear that what we do is we give advice to those who are high that helps them get higher, and we give advice to those who are low that makes them go lower.

Keith: I see what you mean.

Sheila: And that’s what we’ve done for marriage because the Bible has advice for both things. Okay, I’m going to put you on the spot. You do not have to give me an exhaustive list. 

Keith: Okay, and I’m not prepped for this.

Sheila: But what kinds of advice—if you think about phrases or verses or words or advice from the Bible, commands in the Bible, that would be about going lower? What would you say?

Keith: Going lower—oh. Well, the story Jesus says when you’re invited to a feast, take the low spot so someone can tell you to go higher. Or like greater love has no one than this that someone lay down their life for their friends, that sort of thing. Putting yourself behind others and letting others be more—giving your life for other people.

Sheila: Yeah.

Keith: Does that make sense? Is that what you’re thinking about?

Sheila: Yeah, and even verses like be gentle and humble, submit—

Keith: Yeah, have the same mind as Christ who even though He—who didn’t consider equality with God something to be grasped but emptied Himself that sort of things.

Sheila: Yeah, from Philippians 2. And all of those verse are really important, and they’re all great, and we need to hold them with reverence and honor them, right?

Keith: Yes.

Sheila: But then there are also other verses about lifting up. You know, things like telling people to fight for justice, telling people to speak up, to say what—to say what God has given you to say. Like there’s lots of people in the Old Testament who fought for their rights. I think of Tamar in the Old Testament.

Keith: Right, yep.

Sheila: Ruth, Esther, all of them fought and spoke up for what they were owed and what was right.

Keith: Sure, there’s a lot—there’s a lot of militant take the ground kind of stuff in the Bible, and there’s a lot of stuff like lay your life down in the Bible. There’s both messages.

Sheila: Right, yeah, be strong and courageous. Yeah, like go and fight the battle. There’s lots of messages about—that tell you to lift higher, and there’s lots of messages that tell you to go lower. And I fear what’s happened when it comes to marriage is that we have told those who are already high, be strong and courageous. Speak up. Go and take what the Lord has given for you, and be a leader. So the people who are already high we’re telling hey be a leader, do all these great things, but then the people who are already low, we’re saying submit. Be gentle and humble. Watch your tone of voice. Remember that you’re not to be served but to serve.

Keith: Yeah, and the fact that some people—the way society has structured things some people are higher or have more power or have more authority or more abilities in society. We sort of baptize that and say well then, God must want it to be that way. So that’s the way God made the world so you need to learn to submit you people who are low. And we miss the fact that through the entire Bible—like for instance, the idea that the firstborn is the preeminent child is constantly overturned. Like it’s always the underdog. David is the king, and he was like—

Sheila: The youngest son.

Keith: —the youngest son. They didn’t even think of him until the end. That’s what God is doing through the whole Bible so we as Christians we ought to be finding the low and raising them up instead of trying to make sure that the people who are up stay up which it seems a lot of energy is being spent in the church to make sure the people who are up stay up because that’s the way God wanted it to be. And it’s like you’re missing the whole point of the Bible then because God makes the low high and the high—brings the high low.

Sheila: Right, and that’s what God wants to do when He—the way that we know that God is coming in Isaiah 40—

Keith: Yeah, this is a prophecy of the arrival of Christ.

Sheila: Yeah, is that the low are brought up and the high are brought down so there’s a level playing field. And that’s what our marriage book does is it says hey if you’ve been high up, if you’ve gotten, if you’ve been a little bit entitled, you need to be brought down. And if you haven’t had your needs met—

Keith: If you have disappeared, if you’ve disappeared, and you’ve made yourself nothing, God wants you to show up in your marriage and be who He created you to be.

Sheila: Yeah, you get to use your voice. You get to show up with everything that you are. And yes, often that is a gendered thing.

Keith: Yeah, well, I mean—

Sheila: Often. Not always, but often, it is a gendered thing.

Keith: Well, the way that we’ve taught marriage in the Christian church predisposes us to that because we’ve taught specifically the role—like first of all as soon as you start talking about roles, like divided by gender, then it’s like the role of the man is to be preeminent and the role of the woman is to fade into the background, and it’s like that’s not healthy.

Sheila: No, it really isn’t.

Keith: But that’s what we’re teaching.

Sheila: It is. It absolutely is.

Keith: That’s not what we’re teaching. That’s what the church has been teaching.

Sheila: That’s what the church has been teaching, and what it’s done is it’s hurt people, and that’s what we found over and over again in our data is that when somebody is entitled by which we mean that they get things, they get more than what—that they get things—they get more than their spouse does without having to do the work for those things.

Keith: Yeah, and we teach people to be entitled without realizing they’re entitled. Like I was very entitled as a husband because I internalized a lot of ideas about what it means to be the husband in a marriage, and I would never have thought I was entitled. I would have thought I’m just living out my godly role.

Sheila: Right.

Keith: Like even though that was something that it never really was a big part of who I was, just it was so in the water that I was—I was very entitled early on in our marriage, and it really caused a lot of harm. And I had to learn to see that and step out of that.

Sheila: Right, and we’ve been talking about this for years on the podcast about entitlement when it comes to sex. Like how after the postpartum phase, how many books talk about how the biggest thing she needs to worry about is to make sure that he still gets the same number of orgasms he did before? Like it’s crazy stuff.

Keith: So then when that’s the norm, like men are naturally going to think about sex in a certain way which is unhealthy.

Sheila: Which is unhealthy.

Keith: As opposed to thinking that hey this is something for both of us. It’s not an entitlement for me. Now that I’m married this is something I have a right to. That’s—you think very differently about marriage when you don’t think in those sort of terms.

Sheila: Yeah, but it’s not just sex. It’s also—we saw it in our data. We saw it tremendously. Some of the things that surprised me was even the idea of kin keeping. Okay, I had—Joanna insisted we put this in the survey, and I’m like does it matter? 

Keith: Oh, yeah.

Sheila: Is it that big a deal? And I couldn’t believe how much it mattered. So here’s what we measured. We were looking—we asked people who takes care of your mother’s birthday. Like if something needs to be tended to in your family of origin, anniversary party, birthday card, Christmas gift, etc., who does it? You or your spouse? And then who takes care of your spouse’s? You or your spouse? And I think—I don’t remember the exact percentages, but it was like in about half of families, everyone took care of their own family of origin so everyone bought their own mom a birthday card. But in the other half, she did it for both of them. There were very, very, very few families where he did it for both of them. And we saw that with medical and dental appointments too. Like in about half of marriages—I’m—it might have been 60%. I can’t remember—they did it each themselves, but then in the rest of them, she did it for both of them.

Keith: The vast majority of time it was the woman that was in charge of those things, not the man.

Sheila: Yeah, if so—if one person alone was going to do it, it was her.

Keith: Yeah, typically.

Sheila: And it really affects marital satisfaction. It causes it to really plummet for both people.

Keith: And people don’t realize that’s what causing their satisfaction to plummet because they don’t even realize they’re doing it because it’s so internalized.

Sheila: And we’re not trying to say that like looking after your spouse’s—like if she’s looking after—if I buy your mom her birthday present and our marriage is bad, it’s not because I’m buying your mom her birthday present. It’s because there’s a way that we are doing marriage that includes me buying your mom her birthday present.

Keith: Yeah, and that’s where I was going. It’s so internalized because it flows from our assumptions of masculinity and femininity so like men are not relational. Women are so therefore it’s natural you would take care of my family’s and you would know everything that’s going on in my family, but I wouldn’t know what’s going on in your family. It’s totally normal because of the way that we see that. And the problem is that is not healthy. Like that creates unhealthy men because if you’re not relational, like that’s part of being a human being. Like you’re a more fulfilled human if you’re more relational. So instead we should be challenging those stereotypes so finding that unbalanced kin keeping causes less marital satisfaction. I hope this book will motivate people whether it’s the man or the woman to be more involved, to be more relational with the people who are close to them because we’ll all be healthier.

Sheila: Yeah, exactly. And so yes what we saw over and over again like with housework—we’ve talked about this on a few podcasts now—is that when things are imbalanced they tend to be imbalanced against her and for him. So she tends to be taking on more of the load, but that isn’t always true. Right? There are some marriages where she’s the one who’s really entitled, and that’s why in our book, we don’t make things gendered. Like we do draw attention to certain areas that are just kind of like yeah, when housework is imbalanced, it does tend to be in her direction and guys, you got to pick up the slack. Where things like emotional intelligence, emotional maturity, etc., like women do tend to have an easier time talking about their emotions than men. That is not biological. That is a social construct.

Keith: Exactly, it’s the same as the multitasking thing. It’s just practice.

Sheila: It’s just practice. Guys can learn it too. Obviously we mention gender, but more importantly, we talk about hey this is what—this is what an even playing field looks like, and make sure you’re on that even playing field because that’s what God wants for us. He wants the mountains brought down, and he wants the valleys lifted high. The only way we’re going to have a good marriage is if we can truly embrace the idea of an even playing field. Yeah, and that’s not the message of other marriage books.

Keith: No, no, well, I mean a lot of these books that we’ve talked about over the last year or two like The Marriage on the Rock with Jimmy Evans, and that sort of stuff. You know a lot of these things, all of the personal growth and development stuff in terms of like relationship oriented, in terms of being psychologically healthy, all that stuff, those are all woman traits. And so basically what they teach is the man gets to do whatever he wants, and the woman has to fill in the gaps for his undeveloped psychology. And it’s just sad because I think men are better than that. And I think men can be relationship oriented. Men can be good at a lot of these things. They can manage a household. They can multitask. They can do these things if they put the energy into it. But we just have to be courageous and do it and not be afraid of looking silly for a little bit because we’re not used to it.

Sheila: Yeah, and the good news—

Keith: That’s the problem.

Sheila: —is that when you do do it, marriage really gets a lot better.

Keith: Yeah, absolutely.

Sheila: And that’s what we found.

Keith: And it’s just justice.

Sheila: It is.

Keith: It’s not a male female thing. If one person is doing more than their fair share of the housework, that’s not fair—whoever it is. If one person has to be the one to make things right when you have a conflict every time, that’s not fair. And that’s going to wear on a marriage over time, and we just need to say it. We haven’t said it in the past. The church hasn’t said it in the past, but it needs to be said.

Sheila: And so that’s what we did in this book is we just went where the data took us.

Keith: Yeah, that was the whole point of writing this book is we want to see what actually works.

Sheila: Yeah, so our theme of the book was teamwork, but our value I think was data. Like we’re going to do everything about data.

Keith: Yeah, so it takes me back to a thing a long time ago when we were speaking to one of my colleagues. We had been at a marriage conference, and we’d spoken at a marriage conference. And then we just kind of mentioned that to her, and her first question was, “Well, what evidence do you have that what you teach actually works?” Which I found really fascinating because you know—well, we’re just teaching what’s from the Bible so it’s got to be right, right? But she said, “But how do you know it works?” And it was like yeah actually that’s a good question. To be honest, we hadn’t thought about that. We just—we’re teaching what we’ve been taught. It’s from the Bible. It’s got to be right. 

Sheila: And at the time, we were fairly young, and we had this manual that we were following along from this big organization, and it was like well obviously they must know what they’re talking about because they’ve been doing this forever. So even though a lot of what we were teaching we were like eh, this isn’t really how marriage works for us. It—we felt like we had to talk about it because they must know better than we did.

Keith: Well, and that’s normal. I think in most fields people traditionally have looked to experts. So people who have experience in an area, people who’ve done things for decades, we sort of think they must know the material and therefore what they say must be truthful. A lot of the times that is the case, but it’s not always the case.

Sheila: Not always, especially in the Christian church. Especially in the evangelical church.

Keith: Yeah, I mean like—I’m a physician, and the colleague who asked me that question was a physician as well too. And one of the big things in medicine is we do something that’s called evidence-based medicine these days. And evidence-based medicine means that you need to, you know, weigh the strength of the evidence behind what you’re doing. So if—there is a category in evidence-based medicine for expert opinion, right? So expert opinion is that you should do this, and that has some weight. But a trial where they actually run the drug, and they give half the people a placebo and half the people the drug, and they see who got better. That has a lot more weight because personal experience can be biased, and you can think something is working because you really want it to work. But it’s not actually working or you might not notice the effect of something because it doesn’t help everybody, but it helps a majority but not everybody. And so you think maybe it’s not working or you’re not sure if it’s working. So in medicine we have a lot of levels of evidence, and we weigh them, and we do what actually works based on the data because that’s much more objective than our subjective feeling of whether it’s working or not. Does that make sense?

Sheila: Right, yeah, and medicine of course can actually do experiments. We can’t do experiments when it comes to marriage because you can’t assign some people to act a certain way and some people to act another.

Keith: That’s right, yeah.

Sheila: So the closest that we can get is these kinds of surveys.

Keith: And there’s even levels in these kind of surveys, right? So there’s like—we’ve talked about this on the podcast before where like the studies that you did for The Great Sex Rescue and the study we did for our book The Marriage You Want are very different than just questions of what are people’s experience in marriage, right? So we did questions where we said, “What do you believe about X, Y, Z?” But we also had questions about marital satisfaction and how to manage conflict and that sort of thing so we could compare how people answer the question to how they actually handled conflict or how they—what they believed about something and to how strong their marriage was.

Sheila: And I need to jump in here because one of the criticisms we often get—which isn’t even true—but like when people discount our stuff, they said, “Oh, she just surveyed people who agreed with her,” which is so funny. It just proves they don’t know what they’re talking about because almost all the stats in our books are odds ratios. By which I mean, we are measuring people who do believe one thing with people who don’t believe it and then seeing how they compare. Or people who do act this way and people who don’t act this way and see how they compare. So if everyone that we surveyed believed or acted exactly the same way as we did, we would have no findings.

Keith: Or if they believed and acted exactly the opposite of us, right?

Sheila: Yeah.

Keith: It’s like you have to have to have two groups of people, right? People who believe something and people who don’t.

Sheila: Yes, so it’s just a really dumb critique that we get.

Keith: Yeah, again—

Sheila: That ignorant people throw at us.

Keith: Yeah, it’s a way of discounting because they don’t want to go where the data leads because that’s the issue is that in Christian marriage, it’s—it’s like my mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts is kind of the mentality. I know that God’s view for marriage is this way. Therefore that is good. Therefore that’s the way we will do it, and then we say well this evidence shows that’s not good. Maybe you should rethink your marriage. Maybe you should rethink your view of what God thinks marriage should look like. There’s no way I’m doing that so I will ignore reality to preserve my idea of what God wants marriage to be because I will not allow myself to be persuaded that it should be different. It’s like that’s the exact opposite of what the Bible teaches. I mean the Bereans studied the word themselves so if John MacArthur is telling you that a husband does this and a wife does that, and that doesn’t work out, you should just go back to the Bible and not listen to John MacArthur anymore, right? That’s what the Bible tells us to do. I mean Jesus said, “You will know them by their fruit,” so if the fruit that’s being produced is a marriage that’s not as flourishing as it could be, that should tell you something.

Sheila: It should, and what we did in this book is we went where the data went, and we didn’t hide behind anything.

Keith: Yeah, because well Jesus Christ said, “I am the truth,” so if we find something in the world, if we find something in our surveys that kind of goes like, “I didn’t think that was the way that things were,” we shouldn’t be afraid of that. We should go, “Oh, why is that?” Like we should—we shouldn’t be afraid because Jesus is the truth. We should not be afraid of looking for truth.

Sheila: Yeah, and what we found so funny, and I know Rebecca has mentioned this on the podcast a couple times before, but like when Shanti Feldhahn did her original survey of women for her book For Men Only and she asked about libidos, she actually found that the majority of women either had the same or higher libido than their husbands. And she makes such a big deal about how her surveys are accurate because they’re nationally representative which again only matters if you’re talking to the general population which she wasn’t. She was trying to talk to Christians so actually having a national representative survey is not helpful. You need to have a survey—

Keith: Again, it’s—

Sheila: —of your audience.

Keith: —it’s a bunch of words that sound impressive, but they actually don’t really relate to what you’re talking about.

Sheila: Right, but anyway she makes such a big deal of this, but then what she did was she puts in a footnote on her book that she discounted all of the people—all of the women—who said they had higher libidos because that’s not what the men said.

Keith: Well, she said that we couldn’t verify with their husbands if that was the case so women said they had a higher or the same libido as their husbands, but we couldn’t check with their husbands so we’re going to assume they had a lower libido because we all know that women have low libidos.

Sheila: Yeah, and I just can’t believe that she got away with that because that’s just so—

Keith: And this is exactly what I said. My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts, right? We know that women have lower libidos, and we know that women are not having enough sex. We know what we need to tell women to have more sex in the church because that’s what we need to do.

Sheila: Now I need to jump in—I need to jump in for a minute here because I am not saying that I believe that the majority of Christian women have the same or higher libidos. And we did find I think it was 56% of men have the higher libido, and then the rest it’s either shared or she has the higher libido. But we also know that teachings in the evangelical church artificially lower women’s libidos.

Keith: Exactly.

Sheila: And so you would expect that women in the secular world would have higher libidos so I think both of us were correct. I think her nationally representative survey was correct in that in the general population women do have higher libidos. I also think that ours was correct because we found evidence that a lot of messages do lower women’s libidos like the idea that all men struggle with lust. It’s every man’s battle, etc. etc.

Keith: But in 2006 when For Men Only was written, the prevailing mindset was in Christian marriages, like it was the devil wants you to have as much sex before you get married and as little sex after. Like that was the—

Sheila: I think I used to quote that. Yeah.

Keith: That was what was being taught, right? And the concept was that women needed to realize that they didn’t want sex, but their husbands did. And so they needed to give it to them. That was what was being taught. Then Shaunti does this survey that shows lo and behold the difference in libido between men and women is not astronomical like we thought. And this was a teachable moment because if at that point people had said, “Wait, a minute. If the libido of women is not that much lower than men, why is it that we feel there’s this crisis in Christian marriages where men aren’t getting the sex they want, and women don’t seem to want it. Why is that happening then?” Well, we know it’s because women just don’t want it so we’ll just say that, but our studies show that’s not the reason. Well, we’re just going to ignore the data of our study because we know that’s the case, and this is the amazing thing is 15 years later in 2021 you wrote—you wrote The Great Sex Rescue which answered the question which is that basically in Christian marriages sex is not as good as it could be because the pleasure and the enjoyment of the woman and mutuality and all those things that make a good sexual experience for women is largely ignored in our Christian teaching. And things that are distinctly harmful to women and their sexuality is actively taught.

Sheila: Yeah.

Keith: So if we’d asked the question 15 years earlier in 2006 when we saw the data wasn’t lining up with our preconceived notions, we could have saved a lot of heartache. But even today, four years after GSR is out, nobody has like admitted you were right.

Sheila: I know.

Keith: They’ve all started to slowly shift their positions like, “Oh yeah, people used to teach these things.” Like you’re the person that used to teach those things. But nobody has acknowledged that yeah, we should have—

Sheila: We should have.

Keith: In 2006 when Shaunti was finding this data that women’s sex drives are not as low as men’s, we should have said, “Well, why is it they’re not enjoying it then?” It would have been so much better.

Sheila: It would have been, but they didn’t.

Keith: But we’re scared because we didn’t want to challenge the status quo and the preconceived notions of what marriage should look like. And the idea that a woman with a vibrant sex drive and a man with a vibrant sex drive can both use that in a holy way toward—in a healthy marriage. That was just not on the table because that sounds too much like equality, and that’s from the devil because we know that men being in charge is from God. That was—I mean I know it’s ridiculous, but that’s kind of the way it seems to me.

Sheila: I know. It really is crazy, and so we wanted to go where the data leads and being led to partnership.

Keith: This is the funny thing because you were like this with GSR, but you’re also like with this book The Marriage You Want as well. You were like, “Well, what if it doesn’t show what we think it shows?”

Sheila: Yeah, what if it doesn’t show it.

Keith: And I just said, “Then we’ll tell people what it showed,” because we don’t care. We just want the truth.

Sheila: And we just want people to be happy and healthy.

Keith: Yeah, so if it turns out the things we thought were going to be groundbreaking, amazing things aren’t, we’ll tell that. And what happened is there’s a lot of things that we didn’t realize how big a deal it was, and it’s a huge deal, and so we had sections of the book which were going to be small, a couple paragraphs, which we basically made into a whole chapter because this is huge.

Sheila: Oh my gosh, we have to talk about this. So here let’s show everyone the book.

Keith: Oh, yeah.

Sheila: If you’re watching on YouTube, here’s the book. There’s a study guide that goes along with it too.

Keith: Oh, the study guide is amazing.

Sheila: Yeah, it’s so good, and it has premarital curriculum. It has discussions for small groups. It has personal journaling questions. It has a way that you can work through it with your spouse. So if you just want an easier way to have these conversations with your spouse, it also has some great info on how to build emotional regulation and just how you can connect emotionally.

Keith: Psychological health, right, because a lot of times we don’t teach—there are hard conversations in marriage. We don’t know how to do them well, and this book kind of goes through that step-by-step and teaches you how to be the psychologically centered kind of person that can have discussions about what you feel your needs are in marriage where you’re able to express yourself without stomping on the other person.

Sheila: Right, so anyway, it’s really wonderful. If you haven’t bought it yet, please buy it because we would love to get on some bestseller lists this month. If you don’t want to buy it from Amazon—I know that there’s some people boycotting Amazon right now—you can get it from Baker Books if you’re in the United States for 30% off and free shipping right now. So go get them from Baker Books. Or there’s lots of other places you can buy it. We have all of the links including to Amazon if you want to do that, but we have all the links in the podcast notes. There’s a post where it takes you everywhere you can buy it. It is also available on Audible or on audio wherever you buy your audio books. And Keith and I are also narrating it too which is kind of fun.

Keith: Yeah, yeah, and the other thing too is that we’re obviously very open about our egalitarian views, but this book is not preachy in that way. It just talks about the data. It doesn’t make—it doesn’t try to railroad people into any particular theological position. It just says what the data shows.

Sheila: And that’s actually something that we really do is we didn’t go into the theology. We had an original version of the book where we did go into the theology of egalitarianism, and we’re like you know, we’re not the experts in this. And one of our big values is staying in your lane so we have a footnote pointing to some great—you know Marg Mowczko’s website, Terran Williams’ book, Philip Payne’s book, Beth Allison Barr’s book, etc. But we just—we really wanted to see where the data went, and the data said that having a husband as a tie breaker doesn’t work.

Keith: Yeah, and people can just do with that what they want.

Sheila: Yeah, but we’re not preachy about it. We’re just saying hey, it doesn’t work. Here’s the fruit.

Keith: Yeah, so you don’t need to worry about sending it to your more conservative family members as a gift. It’s still very Christian. It talks about—it’s biblical. It’s centered on Christian principles. It’s not going to feel uncomfortable. Similarly I actually think too that we talk about spiritual things in a way that even a person who is more of a seeker or even a person who is not sure if they even believe any more would still feel comfortable reading this book and would not feel attacked. So I think this book will work for anybody.

Sheila: I think it resonates with Catholics as well. It really is, and I remember we were in a discussion with a big marriage organization about working with them a couple of years ago. And they were just reluctant to get too involved with us because we were so heavily associated with egalitarianism, and I remember saying to them you know, I know that you want to appeal to everyone in the church so you don’t want to alienate the churches that are heavily complementarian, and you want to help those people build their marriage. But what if the main thing that is hurting evangelical marriages is this idea of authority that men have over women? Like what if you can’t actually help couples unless you deal with that head on, and that’s what we found because we were actually wondering can we write a book that doesn’t address egalitarianism, that just is healthy overall, but doesn’t take this on head-on because we do just want to replace those harmful books that are out there. We don’t want people reading Love and Respect anymore. So can we write a book that isn’t going to tick off or scare all your super conservative people, and we just realized yeah, we could, but it wouldn’t help.

Keith: Well, but what we did was we just said this is what the data shows, and we let people make their own conclusions as opposed to so therefore take that complementarians. There’s none of that in the book. It’s just this is what the data showed so—

Sheila: Yeah, and the charts are so pretty.

Keith: Well, and that’s the cool thing because the charts do two things. The first thing the charts do is the charts show you why we say what we say in the book. So we talk about what we think the principles are to make marriage healthy, but you can see why because we just show you our work. The charts are our work.

Sheila: And there’s so much in them.

Keith: But the other thing is we couldn’t possibly talk about everything that’s in those charts because it would be like a library, not a book. So you can look at these charts and find relations between things that we aren’t—we never even mention in the book, like you can mine these charts for like weeks after you read the book I’m sure.

Sheila: It’s super fun, super fun conversation starters. You know, I was talking about how we just wanted to replace the harmful books, and that actually was my motivation in writing this book. It’s not like I felt some deep need to write a marriage book for my own sake. I have felt deep needs to write sex books because it was just so bad the information that was out there, but I didn’t feel the same calling to a marriage book. But after writing Great Sex Rescue and reading all of these terrible marriage books, I just realized we have a crisis in the church in that there are not healthy marriage books out there. Every week I get emails from pastors saying, “I need a book for premarital curriculum. I don’t know what to use.” And for years, I’ve just been telling them, “Well, it’s secular, but John Gottman’s good.”

Keith: And the reason you like John Gottman is because it’s evidence based.

Sheila: It’s evidence based.

Keith: It’s based upon actual studies.

Sheila: But we didn’t have—I didn’t have anything really healthy to recommend, and I prepared a report for a publishing company a couple years ago. I think it was about two years ago. So some of these numbers might be a little bit off now, but I want to share it with people because I think it was really interesting. So here’s the thing all right? The bestselling Christian marriage books, the top 10 Christian marriage books, have not changed—

Keith: Right.

Sheila: —like which are the top ten bestselling. They have not changed in almost 20 years significantly.

Keith: So they’re from 20 years ago, and what they’re basically doing is telling you to have a marriage that looked like 20 years before that.

Sheila: Exactly. So here’s the top 10, and I’ll read you the titles and the year they were published. And again this may not be exactly accurate today, but this—

Keith: Because they do change a little bit.

Sheila: They do change a little bit, but in general, these are the ones that if you look over the last decade, this is what’s sold. So Five Love Languages from 1992. The Love Dare, 2008. Love and Respect, 2004. The Meaning of Marriage, 2011. Boundaries in Marriage, 1999. Power of a Praying Wife, 1997. Sacred Marriage, 2000. Cherish, 2017. How We Love, 2006. And For Women Only, 2004. Okay, so they’re all pretty old. Like they’re not new books, and a new marriage book has not broken in in a long time which means there’s room, people. There is room for The Marriage You Want to break in with your help. Okay, now here’s what else is interesting about that list. Only one of them was published in the last decade. That’s Cherish by Gary Thomas. Everything else is older than that. Three of the top 10 were published in the last century. Only two were written by women, and another two were co-authored by a couple. Okay so Meaning of Marriage and How We Love was a couple. For Women Only and Power of a Praying Wife were written by women. None was written by anyone of color. So none was written by any kind of minority of any kind. Only two of these books advise following best practice, evidence-based things, only two. And even then—even those two have a few issues, but I still recommend them and that would be How We Love which talks about attachment theory. They also like Steve Arterburn, and they follow Steve Arterburn about lust so just warning you there. But what they do say about attachment theory is good. And Boundaries in Marriage. You know, so those two, which are fairly healthy, are—yeah, they’re fairly healthy. But the other ones, don’t. Now I dug a little bit—

Keith: Because the other ones start with an I know what works for marriage, and I’m just going to teach you that, and we won’t look at whether or not it actually works.

Sheila: Right, and we did a podcast just as we were starting to talk about The Marriage You Want about that five-point plan that unites almost all marriage books. Right, they start with a faulty premise, and then four things follow from that. And we—I’ll put a link to that podcast, but basically all evangelical marriage books start with the premise that husband is in authority over his wife, and then these four things follow from that. So therefore the genders are totally different because there has to be a reason that men are in authority so men and women are totally different and do not understand each other and will never understand each other.

Keith: And therefore you can still be equals even though you’re not really equals.

Sheila: Right, and then they tell you that your expectations are the problem so if you don’t—if you’re not having a good marriage, if you’re not enjoying your marriage it’s because you’re expecting too much from your spouse. And when that doesn’t work, they’ll tell you well marriage is hard. What do you expect?

Keith: It’s meant to be hard.

Sheila: Yeah, it’s meant to make it holy, not happy. This is how God refines you, and when that doesn’t work, they tell you, you can never get divorced and your reward is in heaven.

Keith: Yes.

Sheila: And that tends to be the message of a lot of these books, the underlying message is it’s really aimed at reminding you don’t expect anything. Marriage is hard. You need to remember to submit. The high stuff gets higher. The low stuff gets lower. And that’s what we see. Okay, now here’s the thing, and this is what I am holding onto. And this is what I want people to hear very clearly. I don’t think that these books that are being sold in such huge numbers still are actually being read.

Keith: I was going to say are being read.

Sheila: I think that there’s a real demand for healthy marriage books that isn’t being met, and here’s why. I have some evidence.

Keith: The Christian—this young Christian couple is getting married. I need to give them a book on marriage based on Christian principles so this is what we got. So I’m going to send it to them.

Sheila: Right, so and here’s my evidence for that, okay?

Keith: Okay.

Sheila: I think most of these books are being bought as gifts. They’re not being bought to read. So for example, Love and Respect at the point that I wrote this was ranked about 1,000 in physical books and 32,000 on Kindle on Amazon. And on Amazon like your Kindle is always going to be way lower because there’s so many books that are only e-books so your ranking in physical books is always going to be higher than your ranking in Kindle so that’s what Love and Respect was. But if you look at the books on either side of them so they’re ranking 1,000 in physical copies too. They’re ranking 4,500 on Kindle or 15,000 on Kindle. So a lot higher on Kindle. So it looks like people are buying physical copies, but they’re not buying Kindle which means I think they’re buying them as gifts and not to read.

Keith: And then it—you’ve actually come out and said that we’ve recommended Love and Respect in the past.

Sheila: Yeah.

Keith: Because we hadn’t read it, but other people told us it was good so we assumed they’re Christians, and it’s a Christian author so it must be good, and we’ve recommended it. And then what happens is it just ends up on people’s shelves, and they go, “Oh, that’s the book you buy when someone gets married,” and no on has ever read the thing.

Sheila: Thank goodness. Hopefully not.

Keith: But then a person reads it and feels guilty that they’re not doing the stuff which is ridiculous.

Sheila: Yeah, because when I talk to people—when I talk to Christians who get married who say, “Oh, yeah, I got a ton of books for my weeding. I got His Needs, Her Needs. I got Love and Respect. I got The Power of a Praying Wife. I never read them. They’re just on my shelf.” And I hear that all the time.

Keith: Yeah, whereas I’m not the kind of person to typically write in books, but one of the first times I read Love and Respect like I—it’s full of pen marks. It’s like excuse me? Evidence? This is the opposite of what is reality. Like it’s crazy. I was just going insane. But I’ve recommended this book because people said it was good, and I just assumed they were right. So I think that people are just doing that.

Sheila: Yeah, Love Dare, okay, which was also ranking at about 1,000 in physical copies. Ranked also around 32,000 on Kindle, but the books on either side of it were ranked 13,000 and 16,000 on Kindle. So again you’re seeing a big discrepancy. So I think a lot of these books, they’re being bought as gifts. They’re being bought to do in Bible studies maybe. They’re being bought whatever, but they’re not necessarily being bought to read. So there’s not a lot of demand for people who are like saying, “You know what I need? I need to read a marriage book.” And I don’t think there’s anything wrong—if you want to read a book and you want a physical copy, that is awesome. But I’m just saying that usually there’s a ratio of physical to Kindle.

Keith: It’s an interesting phenomenon going on.

Sheila: Yeah, yeah, and our book—all of our books—Great Sex Rescue, She Deserves Better, etc., they actually meet the ratio properly. Like they meet the ratio where people are actually reading.

Keith: They seem to be books that people are reading for themselves.

Sheila: And so do Boundaries in Marriage and How We Love. 

Keith: Interesting.

Sheila: The healthy books tend to have proper ratios, but the unhealthy books don’t. And I think they’re being bought by boomers primarily as wedding gifts because they don’t know what else to buy, and my prayer is that okay when the boomers stop buying gifts, when they sort of age out of that, and I’m not trying to say I want the boomers to die. That’s not what I mean. But when they age out of that, then maybe people will stop buying the unhealthy stuff, and now we have something healthy to recommend. There’s such room for a new book to break in because these books have been selling like hotcakes for 20, 30 years.

Keith: Yeah, and a lot of people read—do end up picking them up and reading them. And they just blow past the stuff that’s ridiculous, and they’re like—they’re basically saying, “Okay, boomer,” and they go on. “Yeah, this was my great-aunt who gave this to me. This makes sense that she would recommend this. I’m not going to do this in my marriage,” and so the book doesn’t really harm them or whatever. But some people do pick up the books and read them, and they really get hurt because they start thinking, “I’m not a good enough husband or a good enough wife or whatever because I’m not meeting these ridiculous ideas of what things are supposed to be.” So our goal is just to have a book that people—if they do eventually after they’ve been married for 10 years pick it up and go, “Maybe we should read that book we actually got on our wedding day,” it would go, hey, we could do even better for the next 10 years because this book is helping us so much.

Sheila: This is awesome, and it’s fun, and there’s charts. And it’s evidence-based, and like think about that. So the majority of books on marriage were written before the porn-pocalypse.

Keith: Oh, yeah.

Sheila: Right? The porn-pocalypse was around 2008. That’s when everyone got high speed internet. So our bestselling books on marriage don’t even account for something which is hugely affecting marriages today. Like just—it really is time for a change, and there’s been such demand for a change. Like the number of emails I get—I need to use something for premarital counseling. I want to do a marriage study in our church. What do I use when all of the stuff is terrible? And so it is time, people, and the time is here. The time is now. The book has been out for two days.

Keith: Yes.

Sheila: And we can make a real difference, but we’re going to need your help. We are going to need your help because we cannot do this alone. If we are going to get this book selling and if we are going to make it an evangelical Christian publishing bestseller, if we’re going to break into the market so that when people are looking for marriage books, they think of ours, it’s going to be because you guys say something. It’s going to be because you guys speak up. Because we’re not on the huge Christian media anymore. We’ve largely been blacklisted from a lot of those places because we talk about taking the mountains lower and taking the valleys higher.

Keith: Yeah.

Sheila: And we talk about what actually works.

Keith: And because we say if someone is teaching something that doesn’t work, we say that doesn’t work. It reminds me of that verse from Paul, “Have I become your enemy by telling you the truth?” That’s what it feels like a lot of the time. So we don’t have those kinds of resources. We don’t have like plugs from big name organizations. So this needs to be a grassroots thing. So, Sheila, tell them what can they do to be part of this grassroots movement? What can I do to make this book go really big?

Sheila: Okay, well, let me tell you, Keith, thank you for asking me. So buy it. First of all, buy it as a gift. Buy it for your friends. Buy it for your sister, your mom. Buy it for yourself obviously. Listen to it. If your spouse likes listening more than reading, get them the audio version. It’s so good. And even if you’re boycotting Amazon, which is perfectly logical, you can still put it on your wish list. You can put it on your wish list without actually buying it from Amazon, and that just—the more people put it on their wish list, the more it’s going to be seen and shown to people. You can leave a review—

Keith: How about reviews?

Sheila: Reviews are gold so you can leave a review—

Keith: If I write a review on Goodreads and Amazon and—would that be helpful?

Sheila: Yes, it would. It would be so helpful. We would love to see 200 reviews in the first two weeks. We’re really praying for that. So you can write a review on Goodreads which is really influential and important. If you buy it, you can write a review on Amazon, and it will be a verified purchaser, but you can also write a review on Amazon even if you haven’t bought it from Amazon. So if you bought it somewhere else, you can still write a review on Amazon. They just won’t necessarily highlight it quite as high, but it still counts, and people will still see it. You can write a review on ChristianBook.com if you’re in Australia and Koorong, etc. etc. And so please leave reviews. That helps us immensely. Share on social media. If you follow me on Instagram or Threads or Blue Sky or Facebook, share our posts and just let other people know about it.

Keith: Like, comment, subscribe. All the things.

Sheila: Yeah, just do anything you can. Do anything you can to drive our engagement.

Keith: Sheila, what if I recommend it to my counselor or my pastor so that they can use it for other couples? What do you think? Would that be helpful?

Sheila: One of the women on our launch team sent a note to her pastor about The Marriage You Want and just said, “We’ve been looking for a good marriage book as a church for a long time, and I think this is it. It’s got a ton of charts. It’s really evidence-based. It’s really focused on Scripture. Will you take a look at it?” And he bought a copy because she wrote that letter. And so, people are speaking up, and it makes a difference because there is no reason that we should have eight books in the top 10 marriage books that are not based on evidence-based practices. There is no reason that our biggest marriage books should be so old and so out of touch. We can do better. This next generation can do better, and I’m just—I’m really excited to see what The Marriage You Want does. I’m really excited to see the conversations that start especially around mental load and housework. It’s about time we had a Christian marriage book that talked about the one thing that matters most when it comes to marital satisfaction. So please pick it up. It would mean so much to us, and we’re just looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say about the book. And speaking of that, can I read a review off Goodreads? Here’s one that came in last week on Goodreads. It says, “I’ve been following Sheila Gregoire for a couple of years now. When I saw she had a book on marriage, I could not have gotten my hands on the book faster.” I love people like that. “I love how this book breaks down different aspects of marriage and how to have a more balanced approach a.k.a. teamwork. This book is stockpiled with research, data, and Scripture. I had so many ah-ha moments throughout this book. It helped me to have the language to better articulate my frustration moments, but it’s also shown me practical ways I can better love and support my spouse. This is not your typical Christian marriage book leaving you felling less than and in need to just do more. It gets to the root of issues and practical steps to better love, support, and connect with your spouse.”

Keith: That’s great.

Sheila: Isn’t that lovely?

Keith: It’s so good. Yeah, we were really trying to make this book not a big, giant to-do list but actually evidence-based things that could actually help your marriage get back.

Sheila: Yeah, lots and lots of practical tips in it. Lots and lots of little things that you can put into your life that can make the biggest difference. And so, yeah, yeah.

Keith: That’s great.

Sheila: And I want to say thank you to the people who are—who were on our launch team. Our launch team is going to keep going for a couple weeks as we get all the reviews in, but they were just such an encouragement to us, and then, of course, our Patreon people who help support us on a monthly basis even with just as little as $5 a month. And we have an exclusive Facebook group, and they helped us fund our research which is so important. And then our donors too through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative with the Bosko Foundation. So if you want to join our patron, if you want to donate money—it’s tax deductible within the United States and more—the links for that are in the podcast notes too. So thank you. Enjoy this launch week for The Marriage You Want, and get ready for next week on the podcast, which is going to be awesome, because there is another book launching.

Keith: Right.

Sheila: Another book, and it is by Beth Allison Barr who wrote The Making of Biblical Womanhood, and she now has Becoming the Pastor’s Wife. And Beth is going to be joining us next week, and then the week after that we are doing a big free webinar, Beth and me, so there’s a link in the podcast notes where you can sign up for that. So she’ll be on the podcast next week, but then Karen Swallow Prior is going to host a webinar for Beth and me as we go over what we think of each other’s books and answer questions and so much more. I don’t know what we’re going to call it yet. We are having a debate on Threads about what we’re going to call it. I came up with like Burning our Umbrellas.

Keith: Oh, as the Gothard umbrella of authority kind of stuff.

Sheila: Yeah, people came up with a bunch of other things so we’re still working that out. But by the time this podcast airs, I’m sure we will have figured it out, and the link to sign up for that webinar is in the podcast notes. And join us next week when Beth will be here so thank you, everybody. When you go—if you want to buy The Marriage You Want from the Baker website, you can also buy Beth’s book at the same time because they’re by the same publisher so you can get Becoming a Pastor’s Wife and The Marriage You Want and The Marriage You Want study guide all at the Baker site or you can get it wherever you buy books. Koorang, Indigo, Amazon, Bookshop.org, anywhere. So thank you for supporting us. Thank you for writing reviews, and thank you for showing up every week. We appreciate you. You keep us going, and we’ll see you again next week. Bye-bye.

Keith: Bye-bye.