What impact does our new book The Marriage You Want have on people? I was recently tagged in a post on Substack by Joy LaPrade, a woman I've met on social media whom I first encountered through her interview on the podcast Bodies Behind the Bus. She shared how our...
With thanks to Zondervan and Saving Face for sponsoring this post When I was seven years old I used to go on walks with Jesus. I was the only child of a single mother, and I was often quite lonely. But I took Jesus at His word when He said, “I have called you friend.”...
Let's take a look at The Love Dare by the Kendrick brothers Do you remember the movie Fireproof? It had a book that went along with it--The Love Dare--and that book has been a huge best-seller for two decades. Today we're going to take a close look at it for a...
I’ve spent years trying to untangle the Christian marriage advice puzzle. When we started researching the best-selling marriage books when we were writing The Great Sex Rescue, we found, to our dismay, that the majority of them ended up giving really bad advice, that...
Ephesians 5 calls husbands to submit too. But whenever we talk about men submitting, so many men take offense to that! I wrote up this super quick overview of Ephesians 5 on social media last week, and it went so big that I thought I'd post it here, too, so people...
Is marriage primarily about teaching you to be selfless and to grow like Jesus through suffering? I hope you would all say a resounding, “no!” We know that God thinks of marriage for our benefit–our emotional benefit, not just our character-transforming benefit. He...
How exactly do we judge something by its fruit? One of the things we’re adamant about here at Bare Marriage is the concept of “evidence-based” and “healthy” advice–meaning that you can judge things by their fruit. If we’re going to figure out if a teaching is healthy...
"The husband has to be prepared to die for his wife." One of the most bizarre arguments defending men being in authority over women is the idea that one day, he may have to take a bullet for you. A husband has to be prepared to die for his wife, but God doesn’t ask...
How do you have a Christian marriage? And is a healthy Christian marriage different from a healthy marriage of two non-Christians? A woman wrote in asking:You guys do a wonderful job showing what biblical marriage is NOT but sometimes I’d love just a clear and concise...
Does complementarianism lead to good marriage outcomes? I'm going to answer that question in this post, but I want you to keep something in the back of your head as you're reading this. One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t...
When it comes to marriage, teamwork is associated with all the good stuff! Hierarchy, on the other hand, is associated with all the bad stuff. We explain today on the Bare Marriage podcast some of our biggest picture findings in The Marriage You Want, and how we...
I often get accused of just hating all evangelical marriage books. Surely there's SOMETHING you like, Sheila? Right? Or are you just trying to badmouth everything so that you can sell more books? The critiques often go like that. But here's the thing: It actually...
The idea that men want respect while women want love doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny. We've studied it, as have others, and we can now definitively say that it's bunk. And I wanted a post that outlined some of it here on the blog--not just in our new book The...
When evangelical teachers say “men need respect”, what do they mean? On both Facebook and Threads, I posted this question:“Men have a unique, God-given need for respect.” When evangelical leaders teach this in regards to marriage, what, practically, are they saying...
Focus on the Family thinks life was better in 1964. You know, when many minorities in the U.S. had few civil rights. When women couldn't leave abusive husbands. When women couldn't get credit in their own name, or get a mortgage. That was better! When Rebecca and I...