Sheila: If your husband is having an affair, should you iron his clothes before he goes to his mistress?  How can you tell if your husband is a narcissist?

Rebecca: What?  I’m sorry.  Wait.  What?

Sheila: Wait.  I haven’t finished the intro.  And how do you make decisions in an egalitarian marriage if you disagree?  Hello.  I am Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about—

Rebecca: That was a wild cold launch.  

Sheila: – healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage.  And we’re going to be doing a bunch of reader questions plus Keith and I are going to respond to, yes, indeed, that ironing question that came up from a viral video last week.  Before we get to that, we were going to do an interview today, and the sound didn’t work.  So we’re recording this like last minute—Rebecca and me.  And we were up all night.

Rebecca: We were up until like a quarter to two in the morning because we had our federal election last night.  

Sheila: And we were all serving as scrutineers for different polls, and so we were up really late.  And yeah.  It’s been a night.  And so we’re tired.  And so we thought, “Hey, why don’t we just go on Instagram and—at the last minute since our plans fell through—and ask people for questions?”  So that’s what we’re going to do.  I’m actually looking forward to it.

Rebecca: And, again, I have to say.  That cold open was a wild one to not know what was coming because I didn’t know what they talked about already.  When I’m running on 3 hours of sleep—

Sheila: And a lot of caffeine.    

Rebecca: And a lot of caffeine.  That was—we’re still processing that.  Okay.  Talking about processing.  Instagram.

Sheila: Yes.  So we asked on Instagram, and so many of you sent some great questions, which we’re going to tackle.  We had such good feedback from our last ask me anything, so we thought this would be fun to do again.  And before we get to Keith and me and that irony thing, we want to say thank you to our sponsor for this podcast, Saving Face.  The book Saving Face by Aimee Byrd and Zondervan.  Just a lovely book.  I’ll be telling you more about it in a minute.  And thank you, again, to our patrons, who give us money every month, even just $5 a month, to support what we do and fund our research and to those who have donated through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation, which gives you tax deductible receipts within the United States.  So yes.  Helps us a ton.  And so thank you to them.  If you want to join our community and help us with what we’re doing, the links are in the podcast notes.  All right.  I brought my husband, Keith, onto the podcast with me.

Keith: Hey, everybody.

Sheila: And one of the problems with making a podcast is that sometimes you will have an episode all done and all recorded and then something will happen that is huge that is the perfect example of what you were talking about.

Keith: Yeah.  This happens to you all the time, right?

Sheila: It really does.  And last week Rebecca and I were talking about how typical evangelical marriage advice often has people or tells women just to pray more or to think differently about their marriage instead of actually telling women to do something.  And that that is the way that you fix the marriage, right?  And it lets women feel like I am getting something done without actually having to draw boundaries or doing any of the hard work of rocking the boat, right?    

Keith: Right.

Sheila: And there was a clip that dropped about—where a woman said that she felt God calling her to iron her husband’s clothes before he went away for the weekend with his mistress.  And I just want to let us listen to this clip for a minute.  It’s from the Dear Future Wifey podcast, I believe.  And I’m not trying to beat up on this woman.  It’s just that this thing went so viral, and I think there’s a number of things we need to say about it.  Okay?  So here we go.

Clip: So he will call me out by name.  It wouldn’t bother me because I allowed God’s voice to be louder than his.  And when I was going through transition of him not coming home on the weekends, not being there, telling me, “I hate you.  I’ll never love you.  I wish I never married you,” I knew that life and death is in the power of the tongue to the word of God.  So I would say, “You will love me one day.  We will have a good marriage one day.”  And although he would go out for weekends, I would literally help him get ready to go meet his side chick by ironing his clothes and getting him ready for the night.  And these are all things I was graced to do.  I would not encourage anybody to do that unless you are graced by God to do this.

Sheila: Well, that was a take.  

Keith: Yeah.  And the first thing I want to say is I don’t think she’s trying to do what she’s doing which is what evangelical advice does all the time which is to say, “I’m not saying this is for you, but God gave me this special vision to do this really immense thing.  And God used it to heal my marriage,” right?  That happens a lot.  So it’s this release valve where you can say, “I never told anybody to do that.”  But you’re kind of presenting yourself as this amazing spiritual person, who did this spiritual thing, and everything worked out fine.  And so I think a lot of women, historically, have heard those kind of messages and felt like if I was truly spiritual I would be like her and do that.  I don’t think she’s trying to do that.  But that was the first thing I was thinking of.  If I were a woman listening to this, I’d be like, “Here we go again.”  Maybe guilted into doing these horrible things.

Sheila: Yeah.  I find it so interesting that people think that—yeah.  If you just become a total doormat, that’s going to convince him to treat you well.  Because we know that whatever behavior gets rewarded tends to be repeated, and so he is right now being rewarded for having a mistress, right?  And I know that her marriage ended up great, and that’s fine.  But think about how many women did that same thing and their marriage did not end up great.  And this is the problem with the word of faith idea.  See?  I prayed for 40 years, and my husband stopped being an alcoholic.  And now he’s a Christian, and he leads Bible studies.  And everything is hunky dory.  And that keeps other people thinking, “Well, I just need to keep praying for 40 years too,” doesn’t matter if my kids never want to talk to me again because they grew up in a toxic house or I’m miserable and my health is ruined.

Keith: And it also doesn’t prove that if you put your foot down and set some boundaries he wouldn’t have come back sooner.

Sheila: I know.  I know.  Exactly.  This is the problem.  It’s kind of like you can’t nullify—what is it?  What is the word?  You can’t disprove that hypothesis.

Keith: Oh yeah.  It’s a null hypothesis or whatever.  Yeah.  Yeah.

Sheila: That’s what I was thinking of.  Null hypothesis.  Yes.  But the other thing is it totally ignores this whole idea that we just need to pray more and everything will be fine.  Ignores that God doesn’t override free will.  And we talked about this on our podcast of Power of a Praying Wife, right?  You can pray all you want, and it’s wonderful to pray.  But let’s remember that God did bake free will into the universe, and people can still choose to do the wrong thing even if God changes their circumstances, even if God talks to them or leads them or whatever.  People can still reject Him.  And so whether or not your husband starts treating you well is not based on whether or not you pray hard enough or believe hard enough, right?  And that’s often—yeah.  What I get from messages like this.  But I also think we have two daughters, okay?  They’re both married.  And if either of them came to us saying, “My husband is telling me he hates me all the time, and he’s going away for a weekend to spend it with his mistress,” we would not say, “Oh, honey.  You just need to pretend like nothing is happening and just pour and lavish all this goodness and love on him and iron his clothes.”

Keith: This is the exact opposite of the advice we would give, right?  Jesus said, “You, who are evil, if you know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will God give—reward you,” right?  So it’s like if we, as human parents, would say, “Honey, no.  That’s not the right thing for you,” why would God say that’s the right thing for you?

Sheila: Yeah.  And I think people discount how important that is.  But Jesus actually says this I think—well, it appears several times in the gospels.  If you know how to give good gifts to your children, then why would you think God would act differently?  Right?    

Keith: And if anyone told my daughter to abase herself before some man, I would be the first one to go and correct her and say, “You don’t have to be like because you deserve better than that.”  And that’s the kind of God we should be—that’s the voice of God that women should be hearing.

Sheila: I know.  And what does this say of our view of God?  And I think we think that it’s extra spiritual if you think, “Oh, I’m going to debase myself and all this.”  But this whole word of faith idea like God gave me this word and I just need to believe enough so that this word will come to pass, that puts people in a terrible position because you have to fold yourself into a pretzel, right?  To convince God that you believe enough and that you don’t doubt so that this thing that you desperately will come about.  What kind of a God is that?  That reminds me more of the pagan gods that you have to keep sacrificing to to appease in order to get what you want rather than a relationship God, who honestly has our best interests at heart and who cares and who knows how messy relationships are.  And you shouldn’t have to twist yourself into a pretzel to show God that you believe that your marriage is going to be restored no matter how bad your marriage is in order for God to stop your husband from messing—from screwing around on you.  I’m sorry.

Keith: Yeah.  And all the while just racked with fear that God is not going to come through for you because you don’t believe enough, right?  You’re just paralyzed with that fear that if I don’t have enough faith this is not going to work out for me, but I’m going to try really, really hard.  And it’s like that’s the exact opposite of what the Bible tells us God is like.  God is love, and perfect love casts out fear, right?  If our lives are based upon fear and what God is going to do if we don’t believe right or if we don’t say the right things, what’s God going to do if I actually keep my husband accountable for his sin?  If I arrange to let him reap what he sows that God is going to be mad at me?  How did we, in the evangelical world, get to the idea that that’s what women were thinking?  It’s just crazy.  What is our view of God?  Does God not love women?  Does God not love His daughters?  This is crazy.  It just drives me insane.

Sheila: Yeah.  And so many women have internalized this.  I’ve known a lot of women, who are like, “God has told me that He is going to restore the marriage, and so I’m going to believe.”  And I always think, “Okay.  But do you believe even if your relationship isn’t restored?  Is your belief in God just about what He can do for you, and that you have to contort yourself to get these things?  Or is your belief in God, ‘No.  I know things are messy.  I know things may not go my way, but I’m going to follow Jesus anyway.’  And it’s not about what I’m going to get”?  And I’m not saying that’s what this woman is thinking.  I don’t mean that.  But when someone is seriously hurting you, when you’re about to lose the relationship that is the primary thing in your life, and then someone holds out this thought, “Well, God—if you just believe, God will restore your relationship,” then I think a lot of people really put their trust in that word of faith.  And then what happens if it doesn’t come to pass?

Keith: Yeah.  Well, and that’s the really terrible part of it, right?  Is that if it doesn’t come true then it doesn’t teach them I should never have said that.  I was mistaken.  God wasn’t speaking to me.  I was just taking in a bunch of evangelical culture and thinking that’s what God was telling me.  They don’t come to that realization.  They go, “I must not have had enough faith.”  And even worse, other people will point to them and say, “You just didn’t have enough faith,” rather than realizing, “I told you a word from God that was wrong because I had stuff I had to work through in my brain.  And I refused to work through it because I wanted to have the comfort of feeling I was right.  And so even know when it’s destroyed your life, I’m not going to reckon with that.  I’m just going to tell you you didn’t have enough faith.”  It’s just hideous.  It’s horrifying.  I think of the times with our son.  And we had people saying this, “He’ll be healed.  God has told me he’ll be healed.  You just need to have enough faith.”  And then they walk away, right?  It’s like, oh, that’s so easy for you, right?   You’re awkward.  You feel uncomfortable because we’re dealing with something horrible.  But rather than sit with us in that grief and that hard place, rather than be like Jesus, be the hands and feet of Jesus and walk through that dark time with us.  You give us a quick word so you can feel self righteous, and then you walk away and drop it.  And if it doesn’t work out well, you don’t have to think about it again because it was obviously my fault that we didn’t have enough faith.  It’s just crazy.  And it’s not of God.  That’s not what God is like.

Sheila: And this one was saying, “Now, this—I’m not telling other women they should necessarily do this.”  So I am glad that she put that disclaimer in for sure.  But when we keep sharing stories like this, we make this into the narrative that this is what faith looks like.  Okay.  Wasn’t that in Marriage on the Rock too?  

Keith: Yeah.  Jimmy Evans in Marriage on the Rock had a very similar story.  Basically, he said—and he did the same caveat too, right?  

Sheila: Yeah.  That’s what made me think of it.  Yeah.  

Keith: He says, basically, a woman came to him, and her husband was cheating on her.  And she wanted to keep the marriage together.  And he said, “You have every right to divorce him.  But because you’ve said you want to keep the marriage together, I’m going to tell you how to do that.”  And basically, he told her to abase herself completely and just take care of him and do whatever he needed to do.  Cook his dinners for him.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Cook his dinner before he goes to see his mistress.  It was all the same thing.  Yeah.

Keith: The exact same stuff.  Which makes me wonder if that’s where she got this, right?  So you can say as much as you want.  I’m not prescribing this for you.  But when that idea gets floating around out there, people pick it up, right?  Anyway, but he says the exact same thing.  And my thought was, “Dude, you are a pastor.  At what point does your pastor’s heart not tell you that is the worst possible advice you could give?”  A woman comes to you—let’s imagine that he’s right, quote unquote, and that’s the only way to get this husband back.  I mean, first of all, what a hideous view of men.  He thinks that’s the only—that men do not respond to being called out and being held accountable and being told to be better men.  Men will reject that and get rid of you.  The only way you can get him back is to prostrate yourself before him.  Let’s imagine he’s right which I think is hideous and awful.  Why does your pastor’s heart not say, “But you deserve better than that?  You shouldn’t have to put up with that?”  It’s just crazy.  Where is the concern for this woman?  Where is the concern for what she is going through, right?  It just drives me crazy.  It’s terrible.

Sheila: Yeah.  And I think, too, we have such a tendency of seeing the most extreme as being the most spiritual.

Keith: Yeah.  Because it’s not only for women.  A lot of it’s for women.  But there’s also men who are taught to be overflowing not matter what, just—

Sheila: Well, okay.  It even goes back—remember the monks that used to sit on the platform for 20 years or something.  The ascetics.  And that was considered the most spiritual or—when I Kissed Dating Goodbye came out, and everybody embraced that.  And it’s like, oh, look at—Josh Harris must really love Jesus because he’s not going to kiss until the altar.

Keith: We’re not kissing.  We’re not holding hands.

Sheila: And that was so much more extreme.  As we showed in She Deserves Better, there were no prior generations that did that.  That was a totally new thing.  This wasn’t coming back to Christianity that we had never known before.  This was a totally new thing.  And yet, they made it into a sign of faith and Christianity and sign of devotion to Jesus that you wouldn’t kiss until the altar, and now we know the results of that.  He is divorced.  And just lots and lots of terrible things.  

Rebecca: But you’re right.  That kind of extreme stuff gets picked up, right?    

Sheila: I remember when I started on the Internet back in 2008 and I Kissed Dating Goodbye was all the rage.  And I even wrote some posts praising it back then.  And then once Becca got to be 16 we realized this is absolutely crazy because you can’t—anyway, but there is a tendency where you think, “Oh, they must really love Jesus because they’re going to the extreme.”  And so she tells this story, and it’s like, oh, she really has a lot of faith because she went to the extreme.  Whereas if a woman drew boundaries and said, “You are not treating me that way, and I love—I have enough self respect.  I know that God loves me.  I know that God loves our children, and I will not tolerate this.  And so you can leave the house, and you can only come back once you have made this right,” we would not see that as following Jesus in the same way we see this woman following Jesus by saying, “I’m going to iron his clothes even before he goes to see his mistress.”  Easter just happened.  And at Easter, we remember Jesus’ death and resurrection, and we think—we read passages like, “Like a lamb before his shearers is silent so He did not open his mouth,” and how Jesus didn’t open His mouth when He went to the cross.  And so we shouldn’t either.  We should allow ourselves to be mistreated.  Jesus never called for His rights.  But we forget that there’s a—there’s a why.  We’re not supposed to worship the means.  We’re supposed to look at the ends.  I’m not trying to say the means aren’t important.  But Jesus’ aim, Jesus’ end was to reconcile us to God.  And the way that He did that at the cross was He gave up His rights and He was silent before His accusers and He allowed them to take Him.  At other times in His life when He was also trying to reconcile us with God, He picked up a whip, and He cast out the moneychangers.  So what Jesus was trying to do was to bring us closer to God, but He didn’t always use the same means to do that.  And we have a habit of only looking at the cross and saying, “Oh, that’s how I need to act in all circumstances,” even though Jesus did not act like that in all circumstances.  And Paul, himself, said, “I’m a Roman citizen.  You can’t treat me like this,” or he would protest when people were treating him unjustly, right?  So it’s not that we’re always supposed to abase ourselves.  It’s that you need to look at this situation and say, “What is going to bring people closer to God?”  And allowing someone to get away with horrendous sin is not bringing them closer to God, and it certainly isn’t bringing your children closer to God.  And it’s allowing yourself to be mistreated to which doesn’t please God’s heart.

Keith: Right.  Yeah.  We all have a natural tendency to think that we’re right and other people are wrong.  Human beings tend to be self centered.  That’s just the way we all are.  So the extreme version of that is I will, therefore, never assert my rights ever in any shape whatsoever, and that will be hyper spiritual, right?  That’s such a—it’s just the opposite thing.  It’s just a 180, but it’s the same problem.  The Bible is full of talking about justice and making sure things are just and righteous even righteousness means making things right, right?

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s actually the same Hebrew word.  Righteousness and justice is the same Hebrew word.  Yeah.

Keith: Making things right.  So the calls to abase yourself, if you read the Bible, they’re—the lofty are to abase themselves, right?  And the humble are to be lifted up.  It’s like the podcast you had a little while ago talking about making the high places low and the low places—raising them up, right?  This is what it’s talking about.  It’s not saying that to be a good Christian you abase yourself always no matter how bad it is.  That’s such a terrible reading of the Scriptures.  I mean it’s just wrong.  And it allows evil to increase.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  So anyway, people were asking me what I thought about that clip, and I thought it would be fun to take it apart.  I just want people to know.  You are worth more than this.  You are worth more than this.  And God does not expect you to iron your husband’s clothes when he’s about to see his mistress.  God says, “You know what?  It’s okay to take care of yourself and your children.  And you do not have to put up with being treated like you’re nothing.”

Keith: Yeah.  And can we imagine a world?  And I’m not just talking about in your brain.  I’m like can we make it happen that the idea that the only way they get a man back is like that—I mean I know it’s got to be hard for women—these messages everywhere, right?  But at some point, we have to just go, “No.”  As a man, I need to say, “That’s not what men are like.”  And as women, you need to say, “If that’s what men are like, I’m done.  I’m done.”  We can’t accept that anymore that the only way to get a man back is to abase yourself.

Sheila: Yeah.  It doesn’t work, and it’s not right.  And it’s not in line with the heart of God.  

Keith: Absolutely.

Sheila: Yeah.  So that was a thing that happened, Becca.  She actually said that, and it makes me sad, honestly, that people believe that God is asking them to do something so degrading really and not draw boundaries.  So we’re going to be getting to that because that’s actually one of the questions about boundaries that is coming up in a minute.  But let’s do our ask me anything.

Rebecca: Sounds great. 

Sheila: So some of these are going to be super fast.  I’m just going to fire them off at you.  And some of them we’re going to take a little bit longer.  The first one is it okay for a Christian woman to report abuse.

Rebecca: Yes.  

Sheila: Yes.

Rebecca: And if you are in a church space that is asking if it is appropriate or okay for a Christian woman to report abuse, you need to run even if they say, “After careful prayer and deliberation and after very careful reading of Scripture, we think that in many cases it is acceptable,” run.  

Sheila: Run.

Rebecca: This is an easy, slam dunk answer, friends.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Easy, slam dunk.  And also remember that reporting abuse does not mean reporting it to the pastor.  Reporting abuse means reporting it to the authorities.  And you should also notify the church to let them know that there is an abuser.  But if you notify the church and the church doesn’t do anything, remember that you don’t owe them your silence.  You might want to talk to a lawyer before you go blasting it everywhere.  But I do think that that is your right.  Yeah.  So okay.  So that was an easy one.  Next one, I get asked to endorse a lot of books.  And you know what?  I often say no.  But when I got contacted about Aimee Byrd’s latest book, I looked at it immediately because I knew it was going to be amazing.  And I want to read you my endorsement, which is actually on the cover of the book.  “In this beautiful work, Byrd gets vulnerable reminding us that we can never truly know God until we can face the truth about ourselves.”  And in Saving Face, Aimee Byrd, who has gone through so much abuse in the Christian community and has come out the other side—she just weaves in stories of her own life and what she has learned to show us how understanding our stories helps us understand God, helps us understand each other.  And she invites us on this journey of discovery.  It is a beautiful book.  It is a challenging book.  It is a book that is going to stay with you, and I don’t say that about a lot of other books.  So please check out Saving Face.  And thank you to Zondervan and Saving Face for sponsoring this podcast.  Okay.  So the next one, I teased this in the opener.  How do you make decisions if you’re at an impasse in an egalitarian marriage?   Do you just go with the person who knows more?  I think this came up because I’ve been talking about this a ton on Instagram and Facebook with a bunch of my graphics about how people think it’s a mic drop moment when I’m explaining how couples are supposed to mutually submit to one another, how having the husband serve as a tie breaking vote actually bears a lot of bad fruit as we showed in our book, The Marriage You Want, in our latest research, but people often say, “Ah, but when you have a disagreement, how else are you going to come to—how else are you going to solve the problem?”  And they think it’s mic drop.  But what they don’t realize is that this actually reveals a lot about them because, as we’ve said on this podcast before, 78.9% of evangelical couples never need a tie breaker.  And when you do need a tie breaker, it usually means that you’re taking short cuts and you haven’t learned proper conflict resolution.  But when you grow up feeling like you need a tie breaker and when you’ve always operated that way and now you’re trying to come out of that, it can be like, “Okay.  We’ve never actually done this.  We don’t know what to do.”

Rebecca: Yeah.  And I think there’s some misconceptions from people who have been raised in that mentality about egalitarian marriages as well because saying you don’t need a tie breaker doesn’t mean that it’s always a family meeting where you have long drawn out discussions about something.  We had a situation in our family where we needed a new toilet.  And I don’t know anything about plumbing.  I couldn’t care less about plumbing except for how expensive it is.  When the toilet overflows, I am not the one who fixes it.  My husband is.  And so he was like, “Hey, so Rebecca, here’s the different quotes for the different kinds of toilets.”  I was like, “You know our finances.  You know the situation.  You just get what you think is the best one.”  That’s actually an egalitarian decision making branching of the tree, of the flow chart.  If one person just doesn’t care and the other person knows a lot of it, they get to make the decision.  This is the thing is a lot of egalitarianism is just actual common sense.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And I think the other misconception is that in an egalitarian marriage you guys always—this is what you were getting at.  You guys always will eventually agree on something.  You will come to the same conclusion.  You will completely agree.  You will talk it through, et cetera.  And that’s not actually what happens.  The thing about not needing a tie breaker is that one person is not always assigned that role.  That role might go back and forth.  I may have an opinion on what kind of car to buy or where we’re going to go for a vacation this year.  And your dad might have another opinion, but your dad’s is like really researched.  And he really cares whereas I don’t actually care that much.  And so it’s not that we necessarily agree on it.  It’s just that I realize this matters way more to him than it does to me.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  You want a vacation.  He wants to find a very specific kind of sapsucker that is only in one part of the rainforest.  

Sheila: Yes.  Exactly.  Yes.  And I’d be perfectly happy there as long as I can bring my knitting.  So yes.  Hopefully, they have alpaca and I can get—but anyway—

Rebecca: But the other thing to in egalitarian marriages is sometimes there are some—there is one person who tends to self sabotage in the marriage.  And there are other times where the equally yoked, the good thing that iron sharpens iron thing to do is for the person who doesn’t self sabotage to kind of be like, “Hey, you’re doing the thing.  This is good for us.  We should do it.”  That’s actually what Connor did when we moved to Belleville because I get petrified.  And I freeze when there’s really big decisions to be made.  I don’t like anything where I feel like we’re taking risk.  I’m not actually very good at even if it’s not a risk and even if it’s a thing that we’ve been saving up for for 7 years like a down payment on a house.  I still started to panic.  And I was like, “What if we don’t do it?  What if we just take the easy route out, and we don’t?”  And he was like, “Oh no.  You’re self sabotaging.  And our family will suffer as a result.  And so I’m going to be right here and be like, ‘Hey, stop it.  We’re buying a house,’” right?  That wasn’t him pulling a veto card because he’s a man.  It could very easily have gone the other way.  And in other times, I just don’t like airing Connor’s dirty laundry on the podcast, so I won’t talk about the times where he’s done stuff like that where I’ve stepped in.  But the same thing has happened in other areas where it’s not about financial risk, which he’s much more reasonable and logical about and I’m much more anxiety focused on.  There’s other areas where I then say, “No.  Snap out of it.  We’re not doing that.  That’s not good for us, so we’re not doing that.”  That’s the thing about egalitarianism is it’s about what’s the best decision.  And you’re able to be objective together about it.  I can say, “Yeah.  This is causing me to break out into hives.  And also, objectively, I know that you are right,” and vice versa.  He’s saying, “Yeah.  That’s going to be a lot of extra work, and we’re already very over extended.  But I can also see that you’re correct that a little bit of work now will lead us to having a much more balanced life later.”  There are times where you can disagree in terms of I would prefer to do something different, but I understand this is the best for the family.  And that’s what I actually think submission is about is both of you are doing this thing where you’re not just doing what’s comfortable for you.  You’re doing what’s good for both, right?  It’s not, well, he has this dream that I don’t want to do.  And we’ll pile everything onto my shoulders, but I guess I’ll just suffer and bear it because I’m the woman.  No.  It’s we’re stronger together.  We’re making better decisions together because we each have our areas of expertise.  And we can just use common sense.      

Sheila: Yeah.  So those are a couple of ideas to give you.  So yeah.  The person who knows more about it—you might decide that they get to make the decision.  The person who cares more.  The person who is able to take a more objective stance.  We’ve got a bunch of other ideas in The Marriage You Want from the surveys that we took.  But here’s just a couple more.  The person that it affects more.  So if you’re deciding where to move, who is the one who is going to be affected most by jobs, by leaving family, whatever it might be?   

Rebecca: By social supports being gone.

Sheila: Yeah.  Whatever it might be.  When it’s a situation of do we do something or not and there’s an option to just keep doing what we are doing, which is working, or at least is acceptable, you sort of stay with the status quo if you both are a no.  So if it’s like do we move, which would require a huge upheaval, you sort of stay with the status quo until you decide—same with do you have another child, et cetera, et cetera, right?  You don’t bring a child into the world that one of you didn’t want.  The decision of whether or not to have children at all is a bigger one, I think, because it’s a lot to ask someone to never have a child.  And that’s hopefully something that you talked about before marriage.  And if you really can’t come to an agreement on that, I really suggest licensed counselor.

Rebecca: I just don’t know how—yeah.  That’s the kind of thing where it’s like this should be talked about and decided before you get married because I don’t know how a relationship survives disagreeing on that.  I’m going to be really honest.

Sheila: Yes.  But the point we’re trying to make I think is that in an egalitarian marriage you—it’s not like you use one strategy.  It’s just you see—it’s common sense of you each thinking, “What does this relationship need?  And how do we honor each other in each unique situation?”  And the more you do it the more your muscles just grow to keep doing it because you aren’t taking short cuts anymore.  So I hope that helps.  

Rebecca: It’s just fair.

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s just fair.  And it works really, really well.  And if you want to find out more, the charts at the end of chapter 1 in The Marriage You Want show how much better it is when you function as a team and you don’t use a tie breaker.  

Rebecca: But I think the biggest thing—I just have one more thing before we go to the next question because I think people who are saying you need a tie breaker—what you have to understand is there is a level of self selection of people who go into very patriarchal role heavy marriages versus people who go into very team based marriages.  I have a theory that people who are just generally more compatible in terms of the things they want from life, their personalities, the things that bring them joy, the things they like to spend their time on, all these—if there’s—more similar people are likely to be just more likely to fall into a team based thing versus if there’s two people who got married who are just kind of always butting heads you may gravitate more towards a patriarchal kind of one person has the authority, one person doesn’t because it would actually be a lot harder because you actually see eye to eye all the time.  So that doesn’t mean that it’s actually healthy for you to do the thing where men have the power simply because you’re very different people.  It might just mean really working on how can you connect more so that you can be more on the same page because I’m giving some examples of disagreements that we’ve had.  But they’re so far and in between.  That’s pretty much of them in my marriage that we just laid out in this podcast.  Most of the time we’re not even disagreeing.  We’re more talking about it.  Then we come to the conclusion together.  And so that’s what I would—that’s my theory.  I don’t have stats to prove that.  But that’s my theory is that it’s a little bit of a self selection bias, and that’s why people are saying, “Well, it’s easy.  Well, it’s impossible.”  Well, maybe you need to work on connecting more and getting more on the same page and building up that friendship like what you had when you were dating when you could talk about anything.  And you all wanted the same things.  I don’t know.  That’s my theory.

Sheila: Well, and of course, I think in some patriarchal circles though people get married who never really talked and never really—because they were told that you were so—the whole For Women Only, For Men Only idea where men and women are so totally opposite that there was never an expectation that they’d be able to communicate.  And that’s a hard place to be.  Okay.  Next question.  How can you tell if your kids’ ministry at church is safe?  And I would just say a couple of nonnegotiables.  They have to do police background checks.  Absolutely.  They should have a Plan to Protect policy.  I don’t know—

Rebecca: Not necessarily—there’s a lot of different ones.  Plan to Protect is a specific brand.  But there’s a lot of ones.  Plan to Protect is the big one in our area.

Sheila: Yes.  I don’t know what they’re called in the States or England or Australia.  But some sort of a plan that they teach the volunteers.  And so when I was in children and youth ministry in church, we had to go to a seminar every year.  You had to renew it every year where you had to sit there and learn why it is that you have to always be in pairs and what you can and can’t do.  And it goes a little bit—you feel like okay.  We’ve heard this so many times.  But it’s important that churches do this because abuse happens in churches.  So you should see—and you should be able to ask the church when is the last time they did training sessions for volunteers on abuse prevention within the church.  And you should also be able to see this happening in real time with your kids.  Are there sign in sheets?  Really simple things.  When you drop your kids off, is there a sign in sheet?  Is it obvious who is going to pick your kid up?  That they won’t just hand your kid over to someone else.  Are there multiple teachers in each class?  Or if there’s only 1 teacher is there someone—a floater who is looking at what’s going on?  Do they have policies about bathroom breaks, et cetera, et cetera?  But, of course, the area where abuse is most likely to happen in churches is actually with teenagers.  It’s not with little kids.  Not that little kids are—we shouldn’t worry about that.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  No.  And don’t feel invalidated if you are someone who was harmed as a child in church.  There are many.  But statistically speaking, we worry a lot about the 4, 5, 6 year olds, but—and we don’t actually worry as much about the 16 year olds.  But statistically speaking, the 16 year olds actually at much higher risk.  

Sheila: Yes.  Much higher risk.  And so that’s where you need to see does—are there rules around the youth pastor and transporting kids?

Rebecca: I’m going to be honest.  This is a really unpopular opinion.  I would be automatically suspect if the youth pastor is young, and there is not a lot of other leaders and volunteers because that’s—I’ve seen that happen so often where all the volunteers are within a 4-year age group.  And the youth pastor is only 4 years older than the grade 12s.  Someone who just got out of Bible college.  That’s pretty much every single time that I’ve seen something bad happen.    

Sheila: And they’re really trying to be cool.  And yeah.

Rebecca: We’ve also known—I’ve also known a couple really fantastic youth pastors, who are 21.  So I’m not saying you can’t be young and be a youth pastor.  I am saying that there is a bit of a red flag though.  There’s a specific type.  There just is where they’re still the same maturity level as the teenagers, and they see the teenagers as peers too much.

Sheila: Yeah.  And that’s what you don’t want to have happen.  The other thing that happened—and let me give 1 example is there was a time where you were at youth group.  And it was an older youth volunteer.  He was my age actually.  And he had a bunch of different youth that he had sort of—what’s the word?  Christened or knighted.  They were his youth leaders.  He had appointed them as his leaders, and they patrolled the doors.  And I came downstairs because I wanted to see what you guys were doing because I was early to pick you up.  And they slammed the door in my face and wouldn’t let me come in.  And it’s like if they don’t let parents in I think that’s a red flag.  Now there may be a time where they want to have a conversation about parents, and so they don’t necessarily want the—but then they should be communicating that to the parents. 

Rebecca: Or if there’s issues where it’s like, “Oh, hey, actually, we have safety precautions in place where the only people allowed in here are people who have had their background checks in with the church and have signed in.  And so we don’t let parents in.  But if you want, I can bring your kid, and you can talk to them.”  That’s also something that’s acceptable.  That’s a big rule.  In our church, you’re not allowed to go downstairs as a parent because—unless you have your police check done and you are signed in as (cross talk).  

Sheila: But I did.  I did at that time.    

Rebecca: I know.  But I’m saying as an example, right?  So it’s like (inaudible).  We all know there’s always that one family where the—one of the parents is super creepy.  And you don’t want them walking around downstairs with your kids when you’re not there.  It’s not always bad to be like, “Hey, this is actually a teacher-only zone.”  But there has to be a reason for it.  And the reason for this was very much like we’re keeping parents out as someone who was in that youth group.  It was not a safety (cross talk).

Sheila: Yeah.  And so that was strange.  So I just think a lot of it is common sense.  And the best way to know if it’s safe is just to really get to know the youth leaders and the kids’ leader.  Volunteer.    

Rebecca: I will say the number 1 thing you can do is volunteer.  

Sheila: Volunteer as much as you can.  Even if you don’t want to volunteer in the age group that your kids are in, volunteer around your kids so that you know the other parents, so that you know some of the other kids.  And just show up as much as you can.  So when you guys were little, we were just involved in the kids’ ministry even though we never taught your Sunday School class.  But we led drama groups.  We led quizzing groups.  We did all kinds of stuff, and so we just knew everybody.  And can I also say—and this one really—this is really important to me is that we often say, “How can I make sure my kids are safe?”  But the kids that are actually the most at risk at church are the marginalized kids that nobody is looking out for.  In every church that we went to, there were kids that were abused by youth pastors pretty much.

Rebecca: Not every church that I’ve been to that I know of.

Sheila: Since.  But when you guys were teenagers.

Rebecca: When I was a teen.  Yeah.  When I was a kid.

Sheila: And you guys were never at risk because—

Rebecca: Oh gosh no.

Sheila: Because nobody would have touched you.     

Rebecca: I will say I feel like you are an antimagnetic pole for creepy guys who are trying to groom teenagers because you—our family came in, and they were like back away.  

Sheila: But there were other girls, who were hurt.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Because they didn’t have parents, who are super involved and who—it’s the— 

Sheila: And there were some of them that I looked out for that I do think that I prevented some things.  But the point is don’t just be concerned about your kids.  Please be concerned for the marginalized kids, who are at the church.  Yeah.

Rebecca: We have our patrons talk all the time.  We have a lot of patrons, who have teenagers or kids who are in the junior high years who volunteer.  And they also because they volunteer, they realize what’s being taught at youth group because that’s the big thing.  We hear from people all the time.  I thought this was a great youth group, and they’re going through Every Young Man’s Battle.  And I’m just so divested.  But you know.  Your son didn’t come home after doing 8 weeks of it, and then you find out.  You know ahead of time, and so you can either raise a stink.  Or you can be like, “This is not acceptable.”  And teach your kid at home why it’s not acceptable and why you’re staying back.

Sheila: But also if you’re volunteering, you have a good—you often have a good relationship with the youth volunteers, so that you can raise your concerns.  And we’ve had a lot of our patrons say, “Hey, I went to the youth pastor.  And I said, ‘This is a really toxic book.  Do you know what they say in this book?’  And then the youth pastor put it aside.”  And that’s the thing that’s much easier to do when there is a relationship.  So we talk a lot about this in our book, She Deserves Better, and some of the toxic teachings that are really prevalent in youth groups that can hurt people.  So you can check out She Deserves Better as well.  Yeah.  Okay.  Next question sort of has to do with youth group too and this is coming from a mentor.  So a youth group mentor.  How can I address toxic teachings when they are supported by the teen’s family?

Rebecca: Well, I mean I have a toxic opinion on this.  I mean churches, for generations, have been teaching kids toxic things their parents didn’t agree with.  Why can’t we teach them healthy things their parents don’t agree with?  You have to realize that if you’re the only voice that’s telling this kid, “Actually, no.  Boys are not some different species that are not able to keep themselves from being a predator, and we need to expect boys and men to be held to the same standards of everyone else, of women,”—if you’re the only voice saying that and they brush you off as like, “No.  God made them different,” you’re still that voice in the back of their head.  You’ve now exposed them to something different.  You’ve now given them consent education even if they are still getting that chipped away elsewhere.  You’re fighting against it.  I think there’s a lot of pressure for youth leaders, and youth leaders often feel like they have to rescue these kids.  And they have to get it right now.  Most kids are not going to get it right now.  Most kids are going to work on the foundation that they are building in their teen years, and it will come to fruition in their 20s.  You don’t know where they’ll end up.  You don’t know if that kid, who is in a super conservative fundamentalist family, who shows up in long skirts because she’s not allowed to wear pants and who is not allowed to cut her hair and who isn’t allowed to talk to boys and who is—

Sheila: But let’s use her as an example, okay?  Your job is not to tell her, “Your parents are stupid for making you wear a long skirt.”  But your job might be to tell her, “You’re not responsible for what boys do around you.  And women are worth just as much as men.  You don’t need to be a trad wife.  You don’t need to just be whatever your parent—you can dream big.”  And so that’s more important to address than the fact that their—her parents won’t let her cut her hair.

Rebecca: No.  You don’t need to ever go against someone’s parents.  And if they say, “Well, my parents say this,” it’s like, “Well, your parents are allowed to believe what they believe. But this is what we think.  This is what we see here, and this is why we see it.”  And you say, “Hey, I’m so sorry, sweetie.  Genuinely, I’m not interested in debating your parents—debating with your parents.  You can talk to your parents about it.  But this is what we are teaching here, and this is why we don’t believe that.”  And you can just shut it down.  You’re allowed to tell people, “Hey, if you really want to talk to me about it later, we can talk one on one separately.  Or you can talk to your parents.  But we can’t talk about this in a big group like this.”  You’re allowed to do that in a way that doesn’t embarrass the kid.

Sheila: Right.  Okay.  Here’s a similar one but coming from a slightly different standpoint.  Okay?  How do you deal with friends, who are hard core Doug Wilson, Joel Webbon type fans?  And this is a really big problem among especially young men.  And we see it in the Christian realm.  We see it in the political realm where more and more young men are getting pulled into these incel cultures, the manosphere, and even in Christianity.  And Joel Webbon is—he’s a guy.  I think his church has less than 100 people.  He’s a nobody in real life.  And yet, he has outsized influence online because all of these super far right people have launched onto him because he’ll say ridiculous things loudly.  And so they gravitate to him because he will say the stuff that everybody—that all these manosphere people want to hear like women shouldn’t have the vote.  You get to declare when your wife goes to the bathroom kind of thing.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  Exactly.  

Sheila: And then Doug Wilson, of course, is coming out of Moscow, Idaho.  You can listen to the podcast, Sons of Patriarchy, to find out more about Doug Wilson.  But he has said all kinds of horrible stuff that we’ve reported on this podcast.

Rebecca: He’s just a problem.

Sheila: And there’s many, many, many more like them, right?  So what do you do if you know especially a young man, who is being sucked into this?  And this is a really big problem.  I also don’t know.  And this is my unpopular opinion.  Okay?  I don’t know if this women’s problem to fix.  I think if you are a mother it’s very important for you to watch what your sons are watching.  And I haven’t seen it because we canceled Netflix.  But there’s that TV show on Netflix, that series that everyone is talking about, Adolescence.  About the boy who gets sucked in to incel culture and ends up murdering his classmate and how the parents are dealing with this and the community, et cetera.  But what it’s really showing is that kids get sucked in by algorithms, right?  If they have unfettered access to YouTube, to Reddit, to all—to all—well, just the Internet in general—

Rebecca: Yeah.  Just the cesspool that is the Internet that we work on.

Sheila: Yeah.  They are going to get funneled into incel culture very, very likely if they are boys.  And so it really is up to you, as a mom and as a dad, to watch what your sons especially are watching and counteract it.  

Rebecca: And teach your kids media literacy.  A big thing that I do—because here’s the thing.  I actually deal with this.  My (inaudible) page is constantly trying to show me all right stuff because of our job.  So my Google search and my online activity is wild compared to what I actually want to look at, right?  But the amount of stuff that I’m Googling and researching, I’m constantly like my 1 thing will be gardening, happy little puppies, should women have rights.  Here’s why not.  I’m like okay.  That is because of the things that I looked up for work.  And teaching your kids and teaching yourself as well how algorithms work where you have to actively go and follow the kinds of accounts that you want to see more of and you need to actively to do a thing I’m not interest and think about what kind of message is this giving about who the algorithm thinks I am.  This is a whole new level of media literacy that we didn’t have to do when I was a kid before the algorithms really existed.  You definitely didn’t have to do.  Sorry.  For the slight age jab there.  But this is a new area of literacy that we have not been trained for, right?  And so teaching your kids not just counteracting what they’re teaching but actually being like, “Hey, here’s actually how you get to have a decent person for you page.”

Sheila: You know those jokes when Grandma has been sucked in to the far right.  And so you grab her phone when she’s not there, and you start Googling—

Rebecca: Yes.  Exactly.  Exactly.

Sheila: – all these new things to try to change her algorithm.  We need to teach our kids to change their algorithm, to keep following the stuff that they actually want to see, to mark as not interested the stuff they don’t want to see, and don’t engage.  This is a really big thing.  When it is rage baiting, don’t engage.  I have to filter my Facebook comments on our Facebook page probably about 8 or 9 times a day.  Once an hour at work I am going through and doing all the comments.  And I am getting rid of at least 3 bot comments every time I go on on different posts.  The bots are so real.  And the dead Internet theory is real.

Rebecca: Oh I’m sorry.  Yeah.  It’s wild.  It’s getting bad.

Sheila: They’re saying that over 50% of accounts on social media platforms now are not real people.  They are bots.  And so if you see an account that is just rage baiting—we saw this a lot in the Canadian election.  I was just blocking like crazy.  If there is somebody who has 30 followers, they don’t have any posts, but they have a ton of replies, that’s not a real person.  So you don’t want to get sucked into a conversation with them.  So teaching your kids how to recognize bots is a huge thing. 

Rebecca: And if you don’t know any of this stuff too, you can always just Google it with them.  This is a great thing for you to learn together.  How do algorithms work?  Why do I keep getting weird content on my feed?  There’s a lot of stuff that you can do also for yourself.  And what I have found is just the mental health benefits in realizing not only, “Oh, do I agree with this or not?  Oh, is this the kind of person I want to be or not,” because let’s be real.  The things that we watch, the things that we engage with, they become part of who we are, right?  But also asking what is this trying to elicit in me?  Is this trying to make me angry?  Is this trying to make me divisive?  Is this trying to make me see people as the other?  Is this trying to make me ostracize the unclean of whoever that might be, right?  And realizing that it’s not—even if you agree with their point, that’s not the kind of thing that you want in your brain because you can make that same point without dehumanizing another person.  And having it be not just about do I agree with this or not but also is this something that makes the world a better place or is this making me a worse person even if I think that it’s correct?  It helps your mental health a lot if you just kind of—if the algorithm starts to realize, “Oh, they don’t like angry content.”  

Sheila: Yeah.  So every now and then after dinner, get your kids’ phone.  Get your teens’ phones and look at the top 10 posts on their social media thing and talk about what they have common.  Why do you think they’re there?

Rebecca: Everyone do an algorithm purge together.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And that’s the kind of thing we need to be talking to our teens about.  When it comes to your friends, if your friends are really into this stuff, one of the key questions that I like to ask is what could they say which would make you not follow them?  And if there is nothing, then they’re not interested in a conversation.  They’re in a cult.  And that applies to politics too, right?  What would that person have to do to lose your support?  Right?  And if they can’t tell you anything, then yeah.  Then it’s not even worth a conversation.  But I think that you can say, “I’m really—I’m concerned.  Can you explain to me why you like this?  Can you understand why when they say that women shouldn’t vote that that makes me very uncomfortable around you because that’s what you think about me?”  And just start asking them questions like that.  But I also think that it isn’t up to women to solve this problem.  And that kind of gets to the next question that we had which is how do we create healthy Christian male communities and change the current direction.  I don’t know that that’s something that we can really help with that much.

Rebecca: Yeah.  And these are questions from women, right?  Yeah.

Sheila: Yes.  Yes.  It’s like all the stuff on social media about the male loneliness epidemic and what to do.  This is where women tend to form support groups.  Women tend to form craft groups.

Rebecca: Start a board game night with your buddies.

Sheila: Yeah.  And so it’s like if men want more community groups and more support, they’re going to have to do it themselves.  They’re going to have to do the things that women have already been doing.  And I know that’s difficult because they weren’t raised to be community oriented in the same way that women were.  We have a lot of that in The Marriage You Want in chapter 8.  

Rebecca: But there’s also like—I mean you just—at some point, you just got to learn how to do it.  You just got to do it.  And also men do do it.  Everywhere.  I’m sorry.  Men get together every whatever day the sports ball is on.  And they watch the sports ball all over.

Sheila: Yeah.  The sports ball?  

Rebecca: I don’t know.  

Sheila: Sports ball.  

Rebecca: Friends, I—unlike what many of you may believe, I don’t know everything.  Sports are something I don’t know.  I know that ours is hockey.  

Sheila: Yes.  I think our national sport is lacrosse.

Rebecca: Oh, it’s lacrosse.  But we’re hockey.  

Sheila: But we’re hockey.  Yeah.  Mm-hmm.

Rebecca: No.  But anyway—but this is the thing.  I’m making a joke there, by the way.  I’m not just saying men like sports.  Blah, blah, blah.  But I’m saying like there’s lots of things.  You can do board game nights.  We have a friend, who gets together, I think, 3 nights a week.  One of them is with us.  He and his wife.  With a bunch of other friends to do board games and tabletop RBGs, right?  These are fun things you can do with friends.  And you just have community.  And then if you’re having a bad day, you can go hang out with people and grumble at them.  It’s great, right?  

Sheila: So there you go.    

Rebecca: I don’t know.  I also think about the friend thing, if you have friends who are getting into this stuff.  I think a lot of people in our position, especially people listening to our podcast where they used to be in these churches and they used to believe this stuff as well and they left but none of their friends did, and I want to say if that’s the situation that you’re in you actually owe it to yourself to make new friends.  Because if you are trying, in essence, be a missionary to people who have a thwarted—a contorted view of Christ, you are going to need support yourself.  You are going to need to have community that you don’t need to take care of frankly.  And I do believe that the people who have been—who have bought into this highly patriarchal version of pseudo Christianity frankly, I do believe that we are kind of in a weird situation where we are acting like missionaries because I do believe that the answer is actually understanding Christ.  Everyone who has ever done any form of outreach work has understood that you can’t just go in with no support.  So make a priority to meet people who you otherwise wouldn’t have been friends with.  Join your local Dungeons and Dragons groups.  You want to meet the weirdos in town.  And that’s a good thing.  That’s a good thing.  I’m one of the weirdos, guys.  Okay?  Bowling leagues.

Sheila: We had a great time this week volunteering at political campaigns.  We had a great time.  Yeah.

Rebecca: You know how many towns have bowling leagues and pickle ball leagues.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Do that kind of thing.  Okay.  I want to say something about Jesus for a minute because I had someone comment on this yesterday.  I thought this was a really good idea for a podcast.  Maybe we should do later.  I just need a theologian on with me.  But how our different views of atonement and what the cross is actually impact how we see our role in marriage and in Christianity because there’s different views of the meaning of the cross.  

Rebecca: I’m sorry.  I just thought of the whole would you love me if I was a worm.  It’s okay.  You hate me because I’m just a worm.  

Sheila: Basically, yes.  Exactly.  So anyway, we should do that sometime.  Okay.  I want to get through the rest of these.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Sorry.  I’m talking too long.

Sheila: No.  That was good.  That was good.  This one will be quick.  How do you bring up egalitarianism when you’re dating?

Rebecca: You bring up egalitarianism when you’re dating.  

Sheila: I want to say more about this.  I would say that half of the questions that we had on Instagram were about single and dating and finding a good person to marry.  So this is the only question I’ve included here because we’re actually going to do a whole podcast on that in June.  In June, we’re going to have—June is going to be dedicated to the big things.  Everything we think about some big topic that we are always talking about and getting asked about.  And one of them is going to be dating.  We’re going to be talking about everything we think about dating even though we are not experts.  

Rebecca: That’s the thing.  We’re going to do all the things that we have no interest in talking about again.

Sheila: Well, it’s like we did this one podcast all about obligation sex.  And it’s really nice to have that because then I can just point people to that because it is a really important topic.  And it’s so much easier if we’ve got the whole thing in one place instead of here’s 10 different podcasts to listen to, right?  But I do want to say 1 thing just as a teaser for that podcast which is I really like the burn the haystack method of dating.  And you can Google it and watch her TED Talks.  I forget what her name is.  We’ll talk about it on that podcast.  But her idea is, look, you’re looking for a needle in the haystack, right?  And how do you find a needle in the haystack?  How do you find that one amazing person out of all the people in the world or all the people that you could date how do you find that one gem?  Is you burn the haystack.  Your goal is to get rid of as many people as possible.  And part of the problem we have when we’re dating is we’re like we’re desperately trying to keep people.  And her object is, no, you need to get rid of them.  You need to get rid of them fast so that you can find that one person.  And so if this is something that’s super important to you, you let them know right off the top.  And if that is a deal breaker, then that was never going to work anyway.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  Do you really want to be with someone who you have to convince to want you to have rights?  No.  

Sheila: So anyway, we’ll have more to say about dating soon but go look at the burn the haystack method.  I’ll put a link in the podcast to her TED Talk because it really was—it was awesome.  I loved it.  Okay.  Here.  I included this one because this was your pet peeve, and you wanted to say something on this.

Rebecca: Oh, oh, yes.  This is one people are going to be mad at me for opinion on which is always great because I’m going to get engagement.  

Sheila: Okay.  Here we go.  How can you tell if someone is a narcissist?

Rebecca: It’s not your job to tell if someone is a narcissist, people.  This is one of my hugest pet peeves.  And it’s probably because I did my undergrad in psychology, and every single class in psychology they say, “You are not a psychologist.  It is not your job to tell if someone is bipolar.  It is not your job to tell if someone has histrionic personality disorder.  It’s not your job to call someone a narcissist.  If you do that, I will personally kick you out of my class because you are not a psychologist.  You do not have diagnosing privileges because you are not a psychologist.”  And here’s my thing.  Here’s why I get frustrated with the whole narcissism conversations happening on social media.  I feel like often what is happening is people are trying to explain why someone mistreated them in a way where it makes it makes sense which is a totally valid and understandable reaction.  No shade there.  The issue is what I’ve seen happen is a lot of people kind of try to—how to deal with a narcissist, how to deal with—and it’s all just kind of more manipulation and it gets people stuck longer in situations where it doesn’t actually matter if someone is mistreating because they are a narcissist or because they are manipulative or because they are emotionally immature or because they are selfish or because they are sadistic or because they’re a psychopath or—list whatever reason.  The reason doesn’t actually matter.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  The point is they’re mistreating you. 

Rebecca: The point is they’re mistreating you because I’ve seen so many women say, “Well, he can’t help it.  He has X, Y, Zed diagnosis.  He can’t—well, I know normally this isn’t okay, but,”—okay.  I know I shouldn’t put up with it, but he’s this.  And I find it very frustrating because it’s like it doesn’t matter why.  The impact on you is the same.  We use these labels to describe and explain why things happen, not describe and explain why you should stay or give you a label that explains that—why it was worse for this situation versus another.  It’s not a competition.  Someone can be abused by a narcissist, and someone can be abused a psychopath.  And someone can be abused by someone who is just emotionally immature and selfish.  And you don’t have to attach a diagnostic label on it for it to have been valid.  But what I’m seeing online is all this—he was a narcissist conversation almost feels like women are trying to prove that the abuse was bad enough  that they could leave or trying to prove—and, again, I’m so sorry.  There are people who genuinely go through narcissistic abuse.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about the—I’m talking about just raw numbers here.  A very small percentage of the population is actually diagnosable with narcissistic personality disorder.  It seems online close to 80% of people who experience abuse have experienced narcissistic personality disorder abuse.  That’s just not possible.  And what I’m concerned about is that we are changing the goal posts for what’s quote unquote acceptable to be called abuse.  And what I think is happening is because women are so disenfranchised and feel like they can’t escape we have to use these words like he was a psychopath.  He was a narcissist.  He was a sadist, whatever it was.  He was a sociopath.  That’s the word.  Sorry.  We have to use whatever buzzword we have to quote unquote prove that it was bad enough.  You could have been abused by someone simply because they were selfish, and your abuse is still abuse.  You are valid.  Your story is valid.  You don’t have to have a diagnosis behind it.  You don’t owe people the story of exactly how you were harmed.  You don’t owe that to people.  You don’t need to rationalize what you went through.  But at the same time, we don’t need to label people as much as label behavior because it’s—because narcissist personality disorder is so rare, I think there’s a lot of people who I’ve talked to who say, “Well, it isn’t that bad because it isn’t that.”  And because we’re always talking about narcissism in terms of abuse, it’s like okay.  But what if it’s not narcissism?  Do these people feel like they don’t have the ability to get out?  I just want us to get back to talk about specifically what behaviors are not acceptable because they’re not acceptable no matter if it’s because of narcissistic personality disorder or not.  So yeah.  This is my perhaps unpopular opinion, and I’m not trying to rag on people who went through horrible things and are talking about their ex is a narcissist.  You can do you.  Do whatever.  And it also might be true for you.  I don’t know.  I just do know that there are a lot of people, who are very, very evil and very, very bad who still do not fit the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder.  And I just don’t like the feeling that I have when I look at a lot of these forums and areas where it almost feels like my abuse was worse than yours because it was narcissistic abuse.

Sheila: Yeah.  I think the key point is look.  If this behavior is hurting you, the key thing is how do we deal with this behavior?  What is our response when someone hurts us?  Not necessarily was my—was it worse than anyone else?  

Rebecca: Or do I need to diagnose him?  No.  You don’t actually.  You need to get to safety.  And it doesn’t matter—because I know a lot of people say, “Well, because they’re a narcissist, they’re not going to stop.”  Okay.  But if they’re not going to stop, it could be because they’re narcissist or because they’re selfish.  It doesn’t matter.  You still get out.  Right?  It’s not like there’s hope if they’re not a narcissist and they’re not changing because that’s just the vibe I get.  And it really makes me feel icky.  It’s like, “Well, if they’re not a narcissist, they might change.  But because he’s a narcissist, he won’t change.”  A lot of people won’t change.   So let’s stop making it be about a label and start making it be about the behavior because then the people who are in that label will still get the help.  But we won’t be kind of making a weird hierarchy of abuse.

Sheila: Yeah.  And that brings us to almost the last question that I want to do which is we had a lot of versions on this one.  But how do you actually draw boundaries and how do you stop enabling abuse?  And we can’t answer this whole thing obviously.  And this is kind of a little bit about what Keith and I talked about at the beginning with this woman whose husband was having the affair.  But I think the big thing is just deciding what are you willing to put up with and what are you not willing to put up with.  And if you’re not willing to put up with something else anymore, then you need to figure out how to stop putting up with it, right?  If he yells at you every night, then maybe you just go into a different room, and you start sleeping in a different room.  And you don’t let him have any access to you.  Or you can just stop that situation from happening.  And remember that the more that you put up with something the more it’s going to keep happening, and you’re going to have to change that balance and change that dance that Keith and I talked about.

Rebecca: And I think that that question makes it clear too because if you’re saying, “Well, I can’t draw boundaries because it’s not safe,” that’s your answer.  That is your answer.  If you’re at the point where you’re like, “Well, I can’t tell him that hurts me because he would lash out.  I can’t speak up.  I can’t do that.  I can’t stop because he’d punch holes in the walls.  He’d threaten me.  He’d threaten the kids,” that is your answer.  

Sheila: But often it doesn’t even get to that point.  Often what I hear is women saying—let’s say that the couple is really in debt.  Okay?  And I’ve heard this one a lot.  So they’re really in debt, but every time she tries to bring up money he just won’t talk about it.  He just won’t talk about it.  Well, you don’t need to put up with that.  And so they’re like, “Well, there’s nothing I can do.”  But then they go back to being a wife in every other way that they always were.  So yeah.  So you’re saying, “Look.  We need to talk about this,” and then he leaves the room and doesn’t talk about it.  Okay.  Well, then tomorrow why are you eating dinner at the same table.  Why are you making dinner for the family including him?  Why are you doing his laundry?  Why are you going to church together?  Why are you acting like everything is normal?  

Rebecca: Or why aren’t you—are you figuring out ways to—can you call the bank and cancel credit cards?  Can you get a separate bank account so that you—and have an automatic deposit set up so that immediately upon paychecks getting in you’re getting a certain percentage of it.

Sheila: Yeah.  There’s lots of things you could do.  But I guess my point is just you don’t have to act like everything is normal because he won’t engage and deal with a problem.  And yeah.  If he won’t engage or if she won’t engage—

Rebecca: Yeah.  Vice versa.

Sheila: Vice versa.  You don’t need to act like everything is normal.  And I think that’s what people often don’t understand is that they do have—you do get to choose how you react and how you act in your marriage.

Rebecca: Really important thing to say to that because whenever men—often what we find is when men say, “She just won’t engage in the marriage.  She just won’t fix things,” what he says is, “She just won’t have sex with me.”  Okay?  If that’s what you’re thinking, really, “Well, she won’t have sex with me, so I’m going to stop being a good husband,” ask why she doesn’t want to have sex.  Because, again, the studies show if the sex is good, if the relationship is healthy, sex happens.  Okay?  So this is not about sex frequency.  This is about other areas such as financial mismanagement, such as the way that you’re speaking to each other, such as the housework division— 

Sheila: The housework, division of labor, mental load.  Yeah.

Rebecca: Those kinds of things.  Just that caveat because—

Sheila: Yes.  Yes.  You have to hear that.  Okay.  We went through all the ones that I pulled out so thank you on Instagram for leaving me your questions.  And I want to end with two quick ones that people left.  And first, someone said how is Keith doing after his father’s death which thank you for asking.  It’s been a rough couple of months.  I think we’re all okay but just sad.  Processing stuff.  It just takes awhile.  Yeah.  Yeah.  So it’s just been—

Rebecca: I mean we lost a beloved family member.  Everyone knows how that feels.  So insert that feeling.

Sheila: Yes.  But thank you for asking.  And then the same person said, “And what are you all excited about that may be coming up?”  

Rebecca: Summer.   I’m going to be really honest.  I hate winter.  I’m such a bad Canadian.  I know that’s such a simple answer but I was up with insomnia last night because of just the rush of stress hormones because of election season.  And I’m sitting there at 3:30 in the morning wide awake with insomnia, but there are birds.  And I’m like, “This is okay.  This is okay.” 

Sheila: Yes.  Been planning our garden and what we’re going to grow.  So that.  And then work wise, yeah.  We’ve been working on some projects behind the scenes that were actually—have been funded by the Good Fruit Faith Initiative.  So our fundraising call that we did in December.     

Rebecca: And we’re keeping that pretty under wraps.  Our patrons, I think, know what’s going on, but we’re keeping that pretty under wraps for our patrons.  And I think we’re sending out emails soon to the actual Good Fruit Faith donors as well.  

Sheila: But yeah.  But we got some fun things coming hopefully late fall or early next winter.  Yeah.  Yeah.  But really good.  And I’m hoping to start work on another book.  It probably won’t be out for two years, but I kind of feel a second wind.  There’s some stuff I want to say, so I might start writing in my RV this summer.

Rebecca: Which will be very fun.

Sheila: Yeah.  All right.  So that is our ask me anything.  It’s been quite the week in Canada for the election, and we are thinking of Australia, who is heading to the polls—I think this weekend.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Sheila: Yeah.  So to all of our Aussie listeners—do they say—what’s the equivalent of—   

Rebecca: I don’t know.      

Sheila: Giver.  We say giver.    

Rebecca: Yeah.  We say giver.  It’s just giver.

Sheila: I don’t know.  But yes.  Thinking of you.  

Rebecca: Yes.  Throw them ballots on the barbie.  About to get cancelled by all of our Australian viewers.        

Sheila: Yeah.  So thinking of you and thank you for joining us on the Bare Marriage podcast.  And remember that if you are part of my Instagram then you can answer these questions when they come up at the last minute.  

Rebecca: Yep.  Next time we have an interview that went awry because audio failed we’ll be like, “Yo.  Give us your questions.”

Sheila: So follow me on Instagram.com/sheilagregoire.  I’m Sheila Gregoire on Threads as well and on Bluesky.  So head on over there.  And then, of course, on Facebook, we’re Bare Marriage Official.  And yeah.

Rebecca: I think that’s it.  Thank you again to our sponsors and our patrons.  So our sponsor again is Zondervan with Aimee Byrd’s new book, Saving Face.    

Sheila: And the link to that is in the podcast notes, and we will see you next week.  Bye-bye.

Rebecca: Bye-bye.