The strangest thing about watching Netflix’s Death of a Pastor’s Wife is how familiar it all feels. Our family has been attending an Anglican Church since COVID ended. We haven’t been in a typical evangelical church for over 7 years. We left because of trauma and...
Evangelicalism has huge double standards of sexual expectations in marriage. One of the things we tried to drive home in The Marriage You Want is that the biggest killer of marriage is entitlement. When you think you're owed something from your spouse without you...
Let's look at how specific discipleship materials actually enable marital rape. But first, a bit of background. Last week on my Substack I re-ran a post I wrote a few years ago on this blog about the two kinds of marital rape (here's the Substack post and the original...
What if our desires make us fully human? And what if they're what give us our individuality? Jay Stringer joins us on the podcast today to talk about his new book Desire, an attempt to answer the question about why so much therapy doesn't work by coming up with a...
Does waiting for marriage for sex increase sexual pain disorders? In short, yes. We found this in our survey of 20,000 women for our book The Great Sex Rescue, and we've been trying to raise awareness of this for quite a while. We know that pelvic floor...
We have a crisis in the evangelical church of pastors normalizing sexual sin and the objectification of women. Late last week I started talking about a horrible Facebook live that SBC megachurch pastor Jonathan Pokluda made, where he admitted he wanted to sleep with...
Social media comments often give a sobering insight into what men are thinking. And today I'd like to show you what a thematic analysis of social media comments would look like! As you may know, we're quite busy behind the scenes drafting academic papers, some in...
One of the most frequent questions I get from men is this one: How can I get my wife to understand my sexual needs? He feels like he’s in a sex-starved marriage, and he’s desperate for sex. But the more he talks about sex, the more his wife pulls away. What’s the...
Is frequency of sex related to marital happiness? Like, does having more sex make your marriage better? Well, yes. And also no. It's nuanced. And today Rebecca and I are going to look at the studies, and show you why our approach to sex, and our go-to advice, is so...
Is it fair to call sex a need? We're very much against obligation sex here at Bare Marriage--we've done research that has shown that the obligation sex message results in far worse marital and sexual outcomes, and contributes to abuse rates. But at the same time, is...
Is the Evangelical Church a Safe Place for Women? Today we're joined by Dr. Andrew Bauman, with his new book Safe Church, based on his research into women's experiences in church. He shares with us why so many women have been harmed in evangelicalism, from things like...
Is reading romance novels the same as watching porn? When I call out watching porn, I inevitably get some commenters (usually men) complaining that I don’t call out women reading romance novels. Both set up unrealistic expectations; both get people to focus on sex...
You shouldn't prioritize sex in your marriage. That's how we open chapter four of our new book The Marriage You Want. Instead, we argue, you should prioritize the ingredients of great sex. I'm going to talking about this further in a FREE webinar with Jay Stringer...
Is it fair to compare romance novels to porn? Quite often in comment sections in our posts about porn, or even in pastor's sermons or various websites for single women, the topic of romance novels = porn will be raised. Men will often say, "sure, you call out guys for...
Why are so many evangelical authors trying to convince married women not to have sexual boundaries? In episode 260 of the Bare Marriage podcast, that dropped last week, Rebecca and I had one of my favourite convos so far, when we looked at how too many evangelical...