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...
Another Duggar son has been charged with sexually abusing a child. This time it’s Joseph Duggar, the seventh born and third son. (I wrote this piece before news broke that his wife Kendra has also been charged with 4 counts of false imprisonment, among other things....
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...
Is "Acts of Service" a real love language? Many of you may be familiar with the runaway best-seller by Gary Chapman The Five Love Languages, which argues that there are five different love languages, and we all have a preferred one: Acts of Service Gifts Words of...
Is being a good wife in conflict with being a good mom? And what does it look like to prioritize your marriage? Episode 270 of Bare Marriage!
Is it wrong to have expectations in marriage? On Monday on the blog (and last Friday on Substack--are you following me there yet?) I was talking about entitlement in marriage, and how we found that to be the biggest marriage killer. (You can read all about it in our...
If you're in conflict, you just compromise, right? Well, not necessarily! Here's the thing: compromise only works if you're starting from an even playing field. If one of you is bearing significantly more of the load for the relationship, then it's not about each of...
What do we mean by “a good marriage”? When we say, “I want a good marriage”, what, exactly, are we talking about? A marriage that lasts 50 years? A marriage that doesn’t divorce? A marriage that produces great kids? A marriage that follows God’s “created order” of a...
I've been talking about this for so long, and it's just about time to open the doors! The Launch Team for our book The Marriage You Want launches--for lack of a better word--next Monday. So now's the time to join so you can be all ready to go when the doors open!...
I believe men can be emotionally healthy and available– –just as much as women can be! I don’t believe that women are necessarily better parents, or more emotionally in tune and healthy, or more emotionally stable than men. I don’t believe that women are more...
Christmas is coming! And back before my blog became more about evidence-based advice for sex and marriage, I gave a lot of general marriage advice and ideas. Around Christmas, I had some posts and ideas I really liked. And so I thought I'd run some of those again as...
There's been a horrible meme circulating about how God used David--so we should rejoice when God uses evil men. I've seen it myself; it's been shared and debated in our Patreon group; and so many of you have sent it to me. While it does have immediate American...
We don't have to accept pastors demonizing little girls. Recently, I was sent a clip by someone who attends Lake Pointe church and was concerned–I don’t go looking for these. Josh Howerton, you may remember, is the same megachurch pastor who told women to “stand where...