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The Big Picture

Before I begin my critique, I’d like to point out a valuable idea I found in Eggerichs’s book. Many books paint men as being unemotional. Eggerichs does a wonderful job uncovering the insecurities and fears that may show themselves on the surface as beligerence or anger. I am glad Eggerichs gives these types of insights and I am also glad he brings attention to how we can get caught in a cycle or reaction – each spouse reacting to the other’s sin with more sin. These insights are valuable and I am not intending to downplay their helpfulness in many marriages. With that said, I still have serious concerns.

While there are people who have benefited from this book, I believe it has done more harm than good. I believe he sometimes twists scripture to fit his narrative and then filters all his anecdotes through the lens of those twisted scriptures. He notices one problem that *can* happen in marriage and reads that into most marriages in a simplistic fashion.

Picture a vision doctor saying all vision problems are due to nearsightedness. So every person with vision issues gets the same prescription for nearsightedness. He would be right some of the time, but his original premise would be wrong, and he’d actually cause harm some of the time. Likewise, Eggerich tends to squish all marriage problems into the love and respect categories of the “crazy cycle.” Sometimes that is the problem in a marriage. He may have some fans who rave about his good advice, but other readers will be left worse off than they were before. In the end, the advice was wrong. Some vision problems are caused by nearsightedness, but not *All* vision problems are caused by nearsightedness. Some marriage problems are caused by the crazy cycle, but not all marriage problems are caused by the crazy cycle. (And yes, he claims this several times. One very straight forward claim is on page 15.)

Eggerich begins the book by remembering his pastoral days when women in his church would come to him for help in marriage. Their main complaint was that their husbands didn’t act as if they loved them. Eggerich decided the men were feeling disrespected and that’s why they were not acting loving. He believed the wife was not being respectful because she felt unloved. The more disrespectful the wife became the more the husband would be unloving. The more unloving the husband was the more disrespectful the wife would become. He calls this the “Crazy Cycle”.

Can this happen? Of course! And there are fans who have read the book, who had this exact problem, and have been helped tremendously, kind of like the nearsighted people above. I noticed, though, he didn’t leave any room in this introduction for other possibilities. There are many marriage problems that do not fit nicely under the “crazy cycle”. Could a husband be unloving because of child hood trauma? Stress at work? A simple superiority complex over women? Bitterness and over reaction against his ex? Depression? Addictions? He seems to be saying the only reason a man would be unloving is because his wife didn’t respect him.

Likewise, could a wife be hyper-sensitive to male oppression and afraid to give too much deference? Is she just entitled? Is she fearful of being hurt? Does she have childhood baggage? He seems to assume if a wife is disrespectful it is because the husband is being unloving. This seemed simplistic to me, and I was hoping he’d actually define what he meant by “love” and “respect”.

In chapter one, I noticed ambiguity about the definitions of love and respect. He gave examples where he and his wife made the exact same mistake. For example, they both felt everything in their marriage should conform to how they were each personally raised. When his wife did this it was “disrespectful”, but when he did it, it was “unloving”. Later he talked about how it was unloving when a husband forgot his wife’s birthday. But when she forgot he didn’t like pepper on his eggs, it was disrespectful. It was odd how he insisted on using different words for the same thing. Some examples did follow our traditional understanding of love and respect, but I was confused about others.

Toward the end of chapter one, he explains why he is attributing “disrespect” to the wife’s actions and “unloving” to the husband’s actions. He cites Ephesians 5:33, “Each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” He extrapolates from this that men need to be respected more than woman do and woman need to be loved more than men do. He claims that this knowledge is the “key to *any* problem in marriage” (p.15). I see two problems here.

One: I believe he is reading something into this verse it does not clearly say. Instead of allowing the context of the passage to define the verse, he removes it from its context and uses it as a sound bite around which he puts his own context. Before I look at the Ephesians context, I’ll look at how his interpretation lines up with the Bible as a whole.

The Bible is clear we are all to love each other. (1 Cor. 14). Peter tells husbands to honor their wives. (1 Peter 3) We are all to esteem each other as more important than ourselves. (Phillipians 2) Paul tells the older ladies to teach the younger ladies to love their husbands. If we look at the whole Bible, we see we are all called to both love and respect each other.

What would happen if he read other passages the same way he reads Ephesians 5? If we follow his way of interpreting Ephesians 5 and apply it to other passages, we end up with a confused mess. In Ephesians 5, husbands are commanded to love their wives. He decides this means women need love more and men need respect more. That’s why the husband was commanded to love and not the wife. And the command for wives to respect their husbands means men need respect more than women. So, the pattern seems to be this. If God commands a certain group of people to do a specific action in a passage, He is telling us what the beneficiaries of that command need that action more than others. Let’s follow that pattern with other verses. Titus 2:4 says, “The older women must train the younger women to love their husbands.” So, in this case, it’s the wife who is to love instead of the husband. Does this mean husbands need love more than wives? And wouldn’t that contradict? And what do we do with Peter’s command for men to honor their wives? Wives need more honor than husbands?

He also believes these commands show us our natural strengths and weaknesses. A husband is commanded to love because wives are more naturally loving. Men have to be reminded, but women know naturally. But again, what do we do with the verse that commands wives to love? And again, he says men naturally respect women and don’t need to be told. What do we do with 1 Peter where men are told to honor their wives rather than looking down on them?

This is the problem with taking one verse out of context to try and prove a point. You can make the verse say whatever you want!

In context, Ephesians 5 is talking about the body of Christ, the church. God is setting up an analogy between Christ and His bride, the church. He is comparing that to a husband and his wife. The husband is to lay down his life like Christ lays down his life for his bride. The wife is to respect and submit herself to her husband like the church respects and submits to Christ. Christ is the head of the church and we are his body and he loves us as his own self. A husband is the head of the wife and he is to love her as his own body. God is using the words love and respect to explain one aspect of Christian marriage, namely, how it teaches us about Christ and His bride. It is not the only aspect of marriage. There are other verses that focus on different things and therefore use different verbs-such as wives loving husbands and husbands honoring wives. This passage is not a psychological treatise about what women need and what men need. Its an allegory. We need to take verses in context.

So, no, the Bible never says men need respect more and women need love more. Yet, that is the premise to his whole book and the lens by which he judges the different scenarios he comes across.

My second issue with the above statement, “this knowledge is the key to any problem in marriage”. Let’s say we allowed for his fuzzy definitions of love and respect. Let’s say we came away with the general idea that when one person is unloving and disrespectful the other person will be tempted to also be unloving and disrespectful. Someone has to break the cycle. This is great advice. But it is not the key to *all* marriage problems. What if a man is harsh and controlling because he thinks he is superior to his wife? Will unconditional respect win him over? He expects it! Lack of respect is not the problem, therefore it is not the solution. What if a man is married to a self-centered, prideful woman? Will bending over backward for her catch her attention? She believes she deserves to be on a pedestal!

Matthew 18 tells us if our brother or sister sins against us, we are to rebuke them. If they don’t repent, we are to ask for help. Of course, love covers a multitude of sins. We all sin against each other, and there’s a place for mercy and for loving those who are not loving. There’s also a place for rebuke. Not all marriage problems fall into the category of the “crazy cycle”. When problems don’t fit this structure he built, following his advice can actually make things worse. I believe it can easily set up a co-dependent relationship where one spouse is trying to love or respect the other in order to get their own needs met. It can also enable the sinning spouse to grow in and escalate their sin.

In part 2, https://laughingsarah.wordpress.com/2023/02/12/is-the-book-love-and-respect-biblical-part-2/ I’d like to show the implications of reducing all marriage problems to the crazy cycle. In part three, https://laughingsarah.wordpress.com/2023/02/19/love-and-respect-part-3/ I’d like to go through the many verses I believe he twists to make them say things they don’t say.