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...
Recovery from obligation sex begins with understanding autonomy and consent. It begins with understanding it was never God's will for one person to use someone else's body for their own pleasure/emotional coping mechanism, without consideration of what this was doing...
Yesterday I had a message from a woman being summoned in to defend herself to a toxic elders' board. She had been going to a very hierarchical, controlling church and had realized it wasn't healthy and had decided to take her family and go elsewhere. The elders' board...
Let's look at His Needs, Her Needs by Willard Harley But first... One of the things we’re passionate about on this blog is making sure the self-help and relationship advice in the evangelical world is healthy. Over the last few years, our team has surveyed 40,000...
How do Christian marriage books harm? We talk a lot at Bare Marriage about how Christian marriage books can harm people, often by teaching toxic things about staying in abusive marriages, giving sex on demand, or perpetuating teachings that we know are correlated with...
What if marriage could actually be a partnership? So much of Christian marriage literature is centered around the strange idea that God ordained wives to fulfill one role in the relationship (submission and housework), while men were created to fill another...
In marriage, should husbands make the final decision if the couple can’t reach agreement? Many Christians would say yes. In fact, in our survey of 20,000 women that we ran for The Great Sex Rescue, 39.4% of respondents agreed with that statement. Many Christians who...
Evangelical men can't get married. And it's all women's fault, according to Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. It's a "crisis", a "five-alarm fire". It's bad. In his podcast "The Briefing", he recently did some commentary on a Wall Street...
I've been doing podcast interviews about our new book The Marriage You Want all over the place! And one that I landed last week was the Shifting Culture podcast. Its host, Joshua Johnson, wrote an article on his substack about my interview on his podcast, and I was...
Women aren't more emotional and men more logical That's the rhetoric that we often hear, but men are just as emotional as women--they just don't necessarily process those emotions as well. Chapters 7 and 8 in our new book The Marriage You Want are all about how to...
We're hoping The Marriage You Want can be a great clarifier. Our newest book, The Marriage You Want, was published last Tuesday, and it's doing well--the #1 new release in Christian marriage all week. Thank you for that! But I had a commenter say something important...
The Marriage You Want is now officially launched! I'm really excited about this book, because it's HEALTHY and I think it has the potential to upend the Christian marriage market and be disruptive (in a good way) like The Great Sex Rescue was. I told you a little bit...
What does immaturity have to do with complementarianism? We had a hard time trying to figure out what to call this episode, because we didn't want to be TOO controversial--but at the same time, the findings were super interesting. When we looked at the data from our...
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...
Is it a "love language" to do basic chores? When we wrote The Great Sex Rescue, one of the things that really bothered us was that evangelical marriage authors talked a ton about increasing the frequency of sex without ever mentioning the orgasm gap or sexual pain...