A funny thing happened last week for Mother’s Day.

The Gospel Coalition, a rather mainstream evangelical organization founded by the late Tim Keller and having entirely male leadership, published a Facebook post.

And what was their message for Mother’s Day? Was it about how dads could step up to the plate and appreciate their wives? Was it about the unique contribution women make? Was it about how God is a mother too? Was it about how we should all recognize the extra burdens mothers bear?

No, it was something very different.

This post first appeared on my Substack last Friday! Posting here for posterity!

It was: Hey, women, don’t expect anything and you won’t be disappointed!

For an organization that claims to care about men leading their families, this was the message that they wanted to make sure people heard about Mother’s Day: women, don’t expect anything.

The same day that The Gospel Coalition posted that, Focus on the Family chimed in.

This wasn’t specifically a Mother’s Day post, but it appeared the day before Mother’s Day. And what was the message?

Stop expecting your spouse to change. Just let go of all expectations. “Expectations are the thief of joy.”

I talked about this post on my Facebook Page, but I want to elaborate on a few themes here today.

This is an excellent example of a false dichotomy.

Either she is:

1. Expecting him to act in every way exactly like her; or she

2. Leaves her expectations behind, loves her spouse exactly as he is right now.

But what if there’s another option?

What if there’s simply expecting that he will act as a partner in the marriage? You don’t expect him to do as much as you, or in the same way as you. You just expect him to do SOMETHING, because he is a grown adult and he is the father of these children and he promised in his wedding vows.

Expectations are not the thief of joy.

The real thief of joy, as we have found repeatedly in our surveys, is unfairness.

Women can put up with unfairness for about 10-15 years before everything explodes and falls apart.

But posts like this continuously tell women that if you expect the bare minimum, you’re really expecting the moon.

If you expect him to do something–anything–that’s the same thing as expecting him to be just like you.

But those are not the same thing.

And what is the solution that Focus on the Family gives for this situation, where a man isn’t fulfilling his basic responsibilities?

To merely pray.

It’s not to say anything. It’s not to draw boundaries. It’s not to have a big sit down and make reasonable expectations crystal clear. It’s just to pray and learn to live with things just as they are.

This advice doesn’t work. This is the same advice that Emerson Eggerichs gives in Love & Respect, where he reports that he was leaving wet towels on the bed and candy wrappers on the floor, and the solution was that his wife stopped expecting things to change. (By expecting change, she was being “disrespectful.”)

Marriages can’t thrive when one person is being treated profoundly unfairly, and to frame the expectation that you will have a partner in marriage as being the problem is gaslighting.

In our data for our book The Marriage You Want that we uncovered a trend we named “The Unfairness Threshold”. It showed up in a number of different areas of marriage—when they keep having sex but she never has an orgasm; when she does the vast majority of the housework; when she’s the one who always initiates repair in the relationship or when she’s the one who takes care of everybody’s extended family.In all cases, these things don’t bother her for the first few years. Even at 10 years she’s okay. But by 15 years she starts getting really upset, and by year 20 things often fall apart. Marriages end or often become sexless.

Unfairness is not sustainable in the long run.

And overwhemingly, in all the different areas of marriage that we measured, the unfairness tends to go in women’s direction, at at least a 4:1 or 5:1 ratio (with things like kin keeping it’s even higher).

That’s why, when we see advice like Focus on the Family gives, we know that even though it uses gender neutral language, it’s really directed at women, because it’s women who have far lower marital satisfaction than men do, especially in the evangelical church.

This is the fruit of telling women to have no expectations. When we marry, we promise to go through life together. To love one another and care about one another. To be faithful and respect one another. When your spouse isn’t following through on their vows, and is showing you disdain, that is not okay.

And to pretend it is simply does what this woman found: It enables selfishness and entitlement to grow. That is the opposite of what Christ wants for us.

Surely Focus on the Family and The Gospel Coalition know an absence of expectations enables entitement?

Yes, I think they do. But remember that one of the founding values of both organizations is male hierarchy. And they value that above marital harmony. The aim is to keep men in power, which means shielding men from accountability.

And that’s why marriage advice is focused on telling the person who is upset to stop being upset, rather than solving the problem. If they solved the problem, they’d have to confront the fact that male hierarchy causes entitlement. So instead, they just tell women to stop being upset.

Pretty much of all of our problems with evangelical marriage and sex books come down to this: They frame the problem as being the person who wants change, NOT the person who is creating a deeply unfair relationship.

The solution to marriage problems is to make the person who is upset feel as if they have no right to be upset, so the marriage stays intact.

But if things are deeply unfair, that relationship is not a healthy one.

If one person is being taken for granted, and carrying significantly more of the load than the other, that is not healthy. If one person is using the other for emotional regulation and using them like a sex toy devoid of intimacy, that is not healthy.

When we become upset because we’re being treated unfairly, that is our emotions warning us of something that is seriously wrong. We can’t have intimacy when there is also deep unfairness.

But instead of treating the unfairness as the problem, evangelical marriage advice treats the emotional turmoil and disappointment that the unfairness causes as the problem.

Yes, Jesus told us to forgive. But He also told us to walk in truth. He also wants us to grow. He does not want marriage to be a place where selfishness is enabled, and where emotional growth is stunted because one partner can use the other to cover up for their deficiencies.

Quite frankly, much evangelical marriage advice ignores everything we supposedly teach about discipleship and spiritual growth.

And that’s why you can read book after book and hear the same messages, and keep feeling like you’re the problem when all you want is actual intimacy.

You aren’t wrong for expecting your spouse to love you and show up in the relationship and be a partner for you. That’s what you vowed, and that’s why you got married. God didn’t make marriage to enable selfishness, and our marriage advice should be pointing people to growth, not entitlement.

What do you think? Were you taught that expectations in marriage were sinful? Let’s talk in the comments!