In the past couple of weeks there has been a lot of talk about the classic marriage book, Love & Respect, and whether it is harmful or helpful. Sheila Gregoire, blogger at To Love, Honor, and Vacuum and author of several helpful and biblically-based books and courses on marriage including The Great Sex Rescue, used to recommend Love & Respect at her conferences because it was so well-regarded. Then she decided to read it fully for herself. She recounted her experience of reading Love & Respect for the first time. She was shocked at some of what was written. She prayerfully and cautiously began to blog about her concerns about the message of the book. Then she got comments and messages pouring in about how harmful the book had been to people’s marriages. This criticism started gaining broad attention. Focus on the Family even issued a statement standing by Love & Respect and the principles in it.

Although I had listened to a Focus on the Family radio interview with the author of Love & Respect fifteen years ago and found the principles helpful at the time, I had never read the book. I thought this would be a good time to read Love & Respect and see for myself whether I thought the book was helpful or harmful.

First of all, here are the basics about the book in case you have never heard of it.

Love & Respect: The Basics

The author, who has decades of pastoral and counseling experience in addition to a PhD in child and family ecology, wrote Love & Respect to share what he discovered has helped the couples who came to his office with marital problems.  

One day he was reading and meditating on Ephesian 5:33, which says, “Each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” He had an a-ha moment that this was the key to any problem in a marriage (p.15). The book especially focuses on wives respecting their husbands because there are a lot of marriage books out there that focus on love, but not a lot on respect so he wanted to describe in detail what that looks like and how a wife’s respect works in conjunction with a husband’s love.

The first section of the book describes the why behind Love & Respect by looking at the Bible, research studies, and testimonials from attendees at his Love & Respect conferences. The next section of the book is specifically for husbands and how they can love their wives. The third section of the book describes specific ways wives can respect their husbands.

Love & Respect: What is Helpful?

Inasmuch as the author encourages spouses to intentionally seek out love and respect, this book is helpful. In general, the helpful suggestions reflect basic kindness, politeness, and unselfishness.

Do you know any women who tear their husbands down with their words? Or any men who live their own lives and don’t pay much attention to their wives? The practical suggestions in the book for the most part (except the chapters on sexuality and decision-making) will work to turn a marriage around. This makes sense.

Any kind of relationship will improve with basic kindness and thoughtfulness. There are plenty of testimonies in the book that show how a focus on kindness in the form of love and respect knits a husband and wife together. However, beyond the basic principles of kindness, there were aspects of the book that I disagreed with.

Love & Repect: What is Harmful?

What I found harmful is the way the author attributes traditional, cultural male and female personality traits to God’s design. The author is calling cultural gender stereotypes biblical. These stereotypes pit men and women against each other rather than bring husbands and wives together in unity.

Men and Women and How God Made Them

I do not think that I would have been able to see the Love & Respect author’s point of view clearly if I had not just finished reading Beyond Authority and Submission, a tremendously insightful and helpful book by Rachel Green Miller. In Beyond Authority and Submission, Rachel Green Miller gives an overview of Greco-Roman and Victorian gender roles and of First Wave and Second Wave Feminism. She then spells out how these historical traditions have informed the views of women and men in conservative Christianity today. She also shows what Scripture actually says about men and women and how they are to function in marriage, church, and society. She does all this while still maintaining that authority and submission are a part of the marriage relationship and that only qualified men should be ordained in the church.

In Beyond and Authority and Submission, the author spells out particular character traits that are often attributed to just men or just women in some conservative Christian circles. For example, some Christians say that women are to be tender-hearted and gentle while men are created to be strong. However, when we look at Scripture, we see that both men and women are described as gentle or tender. David is soft and tender when he comforts Bathsheba (2 Samuel 12:24). Paul describes his ministry as gentle, like a nursing mother caring for her own children (1 Thessalonians 2:7). Jesus wept and had compassion on the people. The author of Beyond Authority and Submission describes from the Bible that the following character traits are to be realities for both men and women: leading, initiating, providing, protecting, strength, theological discernment, helping, gentleness, quietness, life-giving, and responsive.

Men and Women in Love & Respect

Although God in His word does not divide these character traits into feminine and masculine traits, Love & Repect does. The author says that women are tender (p.7), women want connection (p. 155), women give life (p.177), men protect and provide (p.187), and women are helpers (p.195). The author assigns these traits to men or women to the exclusion of the other.

The most shocking difference he says he notices in Scripture has to do with love. He says that women are created to naturally agape love. That is why in Ephesians 5:33, they are not given the command to love because it is something they naturally do anyway.  Rather, in Ephesians 5:33 wives are given the command to respect because, in his view, respect does not come naturally to women (p. 36). “In short, God designed the woman to love. He’s not going to command her to agape her husband when He created her to do that in the first place. God is not into redundancy.”

I have a few issues with this view because of these facts from Scripture:

Love is commanded to both men and women in the Bible.

There are so many commands to love in the Bible that apply to both men and women. Love one another. Love your neighbor. Even in Ephesians 5, in verse 2, men and women are told to “walk in love (agape) as Christ also has loved us.” Just because Ephesians 5:33 tells women “to respect” rather than “to love” doesn’t mean that women are naturally loving and do not need a command to love. The totality of Scripture shows us that both women and men need the command to love.

Respect is commanded to both husbands and wives in the Bible.

In Ephesians 5:33, wives are commanded to respect their husbands. In I Peter 3:7, husbands are commanded to respect their wives. “Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect.” Therefore, respect is not exclusively for wives to give to husbands. 

Husbands and wives are both sinful.

We do not have any goodness in and of ourselves naturally. Romans 3:10-11 says, “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God.”

Any love that either men or women have is the work of Jesus Christ through sanctification. Agape love is a fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22). Love does not naturally unfold from a woman’s nature. Love is the work of God through sanctification in both men and women.  

Again, it is my view that Paul in Ephesians 5:33 is describing basic kindness for both men and women in a marriage relationship. The demonstration of love and respect in a marriage will look different in each marriage based on the unique personalities of each husband and wife. It is unnecessary to create division between the natures of man and woman because of one Bible verse. Love and respect are commanded to both husbands and wives in the totality of Scripture. 

Love & Respect and Sexuality

In Love & Respect, there is no mention of sexuality in the section of the book that is addressed to men. The only chapter on sexuality appears in the section of the book that is aimed at woman. The chapter is entitled “Sexuality-Appreciate His Desire for Sexual Intimacy.” The chapter describes sex in marriage as a man’s need for physical release and instructs wives to meet their husband’s needs.

Here is what the author says to wives: “The point here is that your husband’s anatomy and design is much different than yours. He needs sexual release as you need emotional release. That is why he loves the act of sex in and of itself. It is a pleasurable act that brings him satisfaction. As a woman you may feel that the two of you have to feel and be close in order to share sexually. For him, however, it is the reverse: the sexual act is what brings the two of you close.” (p. 253).

This statement sums up the feel of the whole chapter. Wives are to have sex for the purpose of the husband’s sexual release. Stop holding out or he will fall into porn or an affair. The feeling I got from this chapter in the book is that wives need to put sex with their husbands high up on the to-do list because it’s for him and good wives meet their husband’s needs.

Sex from the Book of Nature and the Bible

This view didn’t line up with what I see about how God created women and how God talks about sex in Scripture. First of all, in the above quote, the author refers to a man’s anatomy being different than a woman. That is true.

However, God created both men and women with anatomy that feels sexual pleasure. In fact, women have a body part that was created solely for sexual pleasure. The author did not acknowledge that God designed women to experience sexual pleasure.

In addition, the author uses 1 Corinthians 7:5 to describe that the man has need for sexual release.  “Stop depriving one another except by agreement for a time so that you may devote yourself to prayer and come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” The author says that this verse means that both husbands and wives are to fulfill each other’s needs (p.252), however, he goes on to say that “husbands, particularly, can come under satanic attack when deprived of sexual release.” It is clear to me in 1 Corinthians 7:5, Paul says both men and women should equally not deprive one another, not men especially.

Because the author of Love & Respect assumes that God has created men and women with so many inborn personality differences, he constantly interprets Scripture through this dividing line. But the truth is that there are far more verses in Scripture that are commands to men and women collectively since both are created in the image of God, both are in need of Jesus Christ the Savior, and both have the same Holy Spirit at work in their lives.

Love & Respect: Helpful or Harmful?

Although I found the general overarching theme of basic kindness and selflessness to be helpful, the theological basis for the commands to love and respect perpetuates cultural stereotypes about how husbands and wives are supposed to function.

There are too many overgeneralizations about men and women and their needs based on cultural stereotypes. Although there are verses in Scripture that speak specifically to men and women (like Ephesians 5:33), there are far more commands in Scripture that speak to both men and women collectively. Love & Respect also refers to sex in marriage primarily as a sexual release for the husband whereas the Lord has created sex for pleasure and deep connection for both the husband and the wife.

For Further Reading

I highly recommend that readers see for themselves whether you think Love & Respect is helpful or harmful.

I also recommend reading Beyond Authority and Submission: Men and Women in Marriage, Church, and Society by Rachel Green Miller in addition to Sheila Gregoire’s The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended

---

Note: Some of the above links are Amazon affiliate links.