The marriage you want: Evidence-based advice for Christian couples that actually helps

Christians, it seems, love a good book on marriage.

A quick Google will show that if you type in ‘Christian Marriage Advice Books’ and ‘Marriage Advice Books’, you will get a lot of the same results. Many of these undoubtedly contain tried and tested advice. But what about the books that tell couples that the man is the head of the household and as such, should have the final say in all decisions? Or the ones that encourage men to go to work while women should stay at home and take on the never-ending mental load of running the house and raising the kids? Or the ones that tell women that they must be sexually available to their husbands at all times, irrespective of circumstances? Over a long time period, is it possible that kind of advice could do lasting damage?  

The Marriage You Want by Sheila Wray Gregoire and Dr Keith Gregoire (Baker Group Publishing) aims to tackle exactly those questions with gentle but firm advice that is not only backed up by scripture, but also data.

As well as using peer-reviewed studies on marriage from other sources, the authors commissioned a thorough survey. From this they were able to find out that in marriages where the husband holds final decision-making power (even if he consults with her first), “a wife is 11.8 times more likely to say that her opinions don’t matter as much as her husband’s”. 

This book has plenty of graphs and under each one a ‘key takeaway’ box that summarises the findings for those of us not used to interpreting complex survey data. But the message is clear: this advice is not just the authors’ opinions. The book opens with a well-worn image of a triangle, with God at the top and you and your spouse at the bottom, and as you both move closer to God, you also move closer to each other. But what happens when the triangle gets stretched? When couples are encouraged to strive towards a stereotypical image of biblical manhood or biblical womanhood, it ultimately draws them further apart, and doesn’t seem to bring them that much closer to God either.  

The Marriage You Want seeks to undo some of the damage done by harmful relationship teaching in the church. For example, ‘mental load’ is a topic covered in some depth, which is useful, as it often can have a greater impact on a marriage than problems around sex or money. They highlight how if one person takes on responsibility for domestic tasks that have to be done daily at a certain time with no wiggle room (such as feeding the kids, getting them ready for school etc) while the other has domestic tasks that can be done at a time of your choosing, (eg mowing the lawn or balancing the bank accounts) this will result in a feeling of inequality in a marriage. If that inequality is allowed to grow it could ultimately become a chasm that prevents you from the closeness you want in your marriage.  

Some of the advice in the book is genuinely surprising, such as the impact a shared bedtime can have on your marriage, and your sex life. They tell us that: “[w]omen who go to bed at the same time as their husbands ‘at least most nights’ were 38% more likely to always or almost always orgasm than women who go to bed at the same time as their husbands only ‘some nights’”. There’s a frank, yet warm approach to talking about sex in this book. Perhaps one of the most memorable sections is where the authors illustrate a frequent marital complaint by comparing it to a couple who go out for dinner at a restaurant. The wife gets her starter, main course, and dessert whilst the husband is still waiting for his first course. By the time his appetizer finally arrives, she is done and heading out the door. It is possibly the funniest explanation of the orgasm gap you will find in any marriage book! 

The Marriage You Want is a book you can recommend to all couples, Christian or otherwise. Sheila Wray Gregoire and her husband Keith are explicit in their aim: “to change the evangelical conversation about sex and marriage to something healthy, biblical, and evidence-based”.

The Marriage You Want by Sheila Wray Gregoire and Dr Keith Gregoire is out now