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...
How did people fall for Love & Respect? Emerson Eggerichs' 2004 best-selling marriage book is honestly one of the worst books I've ever read. It's badly researched. It messed up stats. It states bizarre opinions as if they are common sense. It gets the Bible...
It's impossible for Emerson Eggerichs' ideas in Love & Respect to work in practice. Because what he tells men to do and what he tells women to do are completely and utterly mutually exclusive. So something will have to give. And in Eggerichs' world, that's always...
With thanks to Zondervan and the book For the Love of Women for sponsoring this post! When you need help with your marriage, where do you go? We've been talking on social media a lot over the last week about unscrupulous people putting themselves forward as "marriage...
Toxic marriage advice hurts those in abusive marriages. But it also hurts those in so-called good marriages–because bad advice is just plain bad advice. Here at Bare Marriage we often critique marriage advice that’s given in evangelical circles, showing how that...
Don't let people use your house for a birthday party without telling your spouse. That's a pretty good rule for life! And right now, over on Threads, thousands upon thousands of people worldwide have been invested in Birthday Party Lady's story of how she held her...
Who should we ultimately follow? I'm wrapping up my submission series soon, and today's post gets to the heart of the matter: too often we tell women that once they're married, their husband stands in the place of Jesus in their lives. On Monday we talked about how...
If I were to ask you what it means to submit to your husband, what would you say? When I’ve asked that question at marriage groups, people hem and haw and then eventually come up with something like this:When we’re disagreeing about something, the husband gets the...
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...
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...
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...
Can you feel hurt without actually being harmed? And is there a difference between hurt and harm? This is a conversation that we’ve been having in our Patreon facebook group (exclusive for our Patreon supporters; you can join for as little as $5 a month!), and I...
What do you practically do about entitlement in marriage? We’re at the end of our entitlement series, and all month we’ve been looking at how entitlement can impact a marriage. We’ve looked at the difference between realistic expectations and entitlement. We’ve looked...
What if a lot of entitlement comes from a desire to not have to grow up? It’s Rebecca on the blog today, and I’m expanding on what I sent in a newsletter back last week. But I want to start with a story of a time when I was refusing to be a grown up, and it caused me...