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...
If you just have enough faith, and if you just pray enough, then shouldn't God save your marriage? The first women's Bible study I ever went to, I think right around the time Rebecca was born, was for the book Power of a Praying Wife. The book has sold 8,000,000...
What if the evangelical church is diagnosing the problems with marriage WRONG--and so offering the wrong solutions? That's what we've been looking at on the blog all month, and there's lots more to come! Today on the podcast I walk Keith through the highlights of all...
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...
Most of us agree that you shouldn't have to submit to an abusive husband. But what if you're married to a good husband? I get lots of emails from women who believe in hierarchy in marriage, where the woman submits her will to her husband and follows his decisions....
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 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...
Yesterday we posted an important podcast about the idea that "men need respect and women need love", and that these should be unconditional. It's blown up on Twitter, and I've had so much feedback it's hard to keep track. But a few things have come out of the...
Anger is often a secondary emotion. So we need to ask: What's going on below the surface? We're wrapping up our emotional maturity series with a look at anger. Yesterday I was talking about how anger is like an iceberg; anger is the emotion that we're comfortable with...