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...
What is it that actually kills a marriage? In the Christian world, “lack of commitment” is often named as the culprit that brings a marriage to an end. I don’t agree. Even if you didn’t have commitment, if the marriage was great, why would anyone leave?Sure, every...
Unconditional respect isn't a thing. And yet we're often told that men need unconditional respect, just like women need unconditional love. It's summertime, so I'm taking a month off of recording new podcasts, and instead I'm going to highlight some of my favourites...
Lots of people believe a lot of dumb things about marriage! I'm in the middle of moving our site to our new Bare Marriage domain (we should be up and running by the end of the month!), and we're only taking posts from 2018 and forward with us, leaving over 1000 posts...
Do marriages need someone to be in charge? And what does it mean if you assume that they do? Last week Alistair Begg, a big speaker and theologian, posted this on social media:I could say so much about what's theologically wrong with this statement, but I'd encourage...
The most damaging belief we found on our survey of 20,000 women was the obligation sex message. Getting married believing that a wife was obligated to give her husband sex when he wanted it resulted in much higher rates of sexual pain, lower orgasm rates, and lower...
What if setting up marriage as a hierarchy, where men make the decisions, isn't good for men either? We know that it can lead to problems for women (as we talked about yesterday), but what if it can hurt men too? On Tuesdays I don't do huge posts, but several amazing...
How do you find a good counselor when you need to seek help for marriage issues? Sheila here! I found Sarah Allman on Instagram, where we interacted about the vital importance of vetting counselors before you go to see one. This is something I'd been talking about on...
What do you do when your husband thinks you have a bad sex life? Recently we were talking about 10 marriage and sex red flags--signs that there may be something wrong with your marriage. Here's a really messy question from a woman whose husband has decided to withhold...
What if our underlying understanding of gender roles makes marriage harder than it needs to be? We're talking about doing marriage on hard mode in the month of September--how so often we can make our lives harder, and thus make marriage harder, than it needs to be....
Sometimes, when life gets stressful, we feel like everything is going wrong. Everyone is picking at everyone else. You're late for everything. Your relationship with your mom is messed up. You and your husband never have time alone and your mad at each other...
We often hear that nagging is one of the worst things a woman can do in a marriage. It makes her husband feel infantilized, undermined, talked down to. But what if nagging is not the real issue? What if we're making too big a deal out of nagging, and not enough of a...
How can you tell if your husband has anger management issues, or if he's actually abusive? I'm starting a series on the blog this month on direct communication, and yesterday we looked at what hinders speaking directly. We'll also cover what direct communication looks...
What does it mean to “resolve conflict”? We've been talking so much about sex lately since The Great Sex Rescue launched, and that's been great. But I thought this week I may revisit some of the important things I've written about marriage in general that many of my...