What if I told you that Dr. Emerson Eggerichs bestselling book, Love & Respect, has some incredible problems in it?
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I feel quite nervous saying such a thing so publicly. For one thing, talking about marriage in a public setting is rather intimidating. Teresa and I better have our own marriage put together, right?
But even more, people I love and have tremendous appreciation for have been helped by and advocates of Dr. Eggerichs work.
In full transparency, I have used and recommended Dr. Eggerichs work myself. I enjoy hearing him speak. He’s funny, down to earth, and touches on an aspect of marital intimacy that other popular marriage books do not: “respect” goes a long way in gaining trust and influence with a man. His “crazy cycle” also helped me understand why male-female relationships can deteriorate so quickly:
But in recent years, I’ve begun to reflect on the message of the book more deeply. The more I study scripture, the more I realize how revolutionizing scripture is in its vision of how to wield power whether among nations, tribes, or families. I have come to realize that the culture I grew up in more resembles the patriarchal cultures surrounding biblical characters and not the vision of mutual submission that Jesus and His apostles taught.
I have seen “respect” be demanded while love gets overlooked. I’ve witnessed how sometimes women are effectively silenced while men get away with destructive behavior. This has led me to take a deeper look at Love & Respect to see what specifically may have facilitated these issues.
You may wonder why I put “respect” in quotation marks. I have observed that people define “respect” in different ways. Sometimes true respect may end up feeling “disrespectful” to a man, depending on how he has defined “respect” in his mind.
But let’s go back and walk through some of the problems with Love & Respect beginning with its subtitle: “The Love She Most Desires, The Respect He Desperately Needs.”
This subtitle synthesizes a juxtaposition that has led to (at minimal) borderline abusive behavior.
It insinuates that men need “respect” while women merely desire “love.” For a marriage to work, the wife must make sure she respects her husband. If she does, the marriage will be successful and her desire for love will be fulfilled.
The book begins with this emphasis in its introduction:
You may remember how the Beatles sang, “All you need is love.” I absolutely disagree with that conclusion. Five out of ten marriages today are ending in divorce because love alone is not enough. Yes, love is vital, especially for the wife, but what we have missed is the husband’s need for respect. This book is about how the wife can fulfill her need to be loved by giving her husband what he needs—respect.[1]
We again hear the message that love is a part of the makeup of the wife, but the husband needs “respect.” In fact, the reason marriages are failing is that the husbands aren’t being “respected.”
The book goes on to frequently insinuate and give examples of how issues within the marriage often have to do with the wife not “respecting” her husband.
At one point, Dr. Eggerichs gives an example from his own marriage where his wife, Sarah, was “trying to change everyone to conform to her standards of neatness.”[2]
The problem was that she was complaining about crumbs left on the counter, clothes left on the floor and wet towels left on the bed. One day, Sarah and their daughter took a trip to see Sarah’s mom, leaving Dr. Eggerichs and their two sons at home. When they returned, Sarah wondered how their time had gone. Dr. Eggerichs said their time went great. They ate where they wanted to and made their beds when they wanted to. Dr. Eggerichs writes,
Sarah got my message. She realized that we had made the beds for the first time that week just before coming to the airport. And she also realized that we hadn’t really missed her that much. Oh, we still loved her as wife and mother, but we hadn’t missed all the badgering and criticizing.
Right there Sarah made a choice that she would like me and our sons despite our sloppiness. She realized we had gotten married because we liked each other. We were friends, and she knew she needed to be friendly as well as loving.[3]
If Sarah wanted to feel valued and needed, she must forego her desire for neatness in order to give her husband and sons the “respect” they desperately need.
Is this really what Paul had in mind when he wrote Ephesians 5:33?
Do men “desperately need respect,” and must their need for “respect” trump all other needs in the family?
We often jump into the middle of Ephesians 5 where it appears to begin its discourse on marriage relationships and focus on those verses. But nothing in the text indicates that Paul is wanting to emphasize marriage relationships more than any other type of relationship at this point.
Ephesians 5 comes smack in the middle of a letter Paul wrote to Christians in Ephesus where he laid out how God is creating a new humanity in Jesus Christ (2:15) to display to both the spiritual realms and the physical nations (3:8-10) that the promised blessing of Abraham is available to anyone from any background or ethnicity (2:12, 17-19).
Chapters 1-3 explain how God has and is doing this. Chapters 4-6 explain the nature of this new humanity. Part of its nature is to walk in love (5:2) and submit to one another (5:21) because of what Jesus has done for us (chapters 1-3).
We should not view Ephesians 5:22-6:9 as Paul revealing the desperate needs of people and how to make marital, parental-child, or master-servant relationships work. Rather, we should view these verses as Paul fleshing out what it looks like to walk in mutually submissive relationship with each other.
Furthermore, we should not derive a theology of marriage from merely one verse. We could sit and debate the exact intention of Paul’s use of “respect” in 5:33 and why he may have thrown that word in there. Is it because he knew men had a unique need for it? Perhaps.
But Paul’s exhortation to men in this passage is far more extensive than his exhortation to women.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
(Eph. 5:25-31)
Furthermore, in his own epistle, Peter tells husbands to,
…live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.
(1Pet. 3:7)
We should not use Ephesians 5:33 as a biblical basis for women subjecting themselves to authoritarian-like expectations of respect for their husbands when scripture actually gives a greater emphasis on husbands living understandingly and sacrificially with their wives. Scripture regularly flips our earthly way of thinking about power, authority, and leadership on its head. It calls us to reorient our vision of power around a Messiah who had access to all power yet refused to grasp it. Instead He submitted Himself to servitude and death on behalf of redeeming creation (Phil. 2:3-11).
Many dynamics go into marital struggles.
They don’t all hang on the wife. The plain and simple reality is that both husband and wife deal with innate selfishness that continually gets confronted throughout marital intimacy.
Submission and Respect in the Context of Abuse
We recently released a series of articles for our Patreon members that takes a deeper dive into what submission and respect should look like in the context of abuse.
Is a wife supposed to submit to her husband when he’s actively living in sin? Is there really never a time for a wife to leave her husband in order to protect herself and her children from ongoing abuse?
If this sounds like a series you could benefit from, you can learn more about it by clicking here.
Part of my concern with Love & Respect is that Dr. Eggerichs barely deals with selfishness. In fact, the whole book is framed on selfishness: wives can get the “love” they desire if they give men the “respect” they need (see again the introduction).
Why didn’t he confront the selfish way he and his sons were living? Why did he overlook how to live with Sarah in an understanding way, as Peter put it, would have meant to hang wet towels on a hook in the bathroom instead of leaving them lay on the bed? When we view men as “desperately needing respect,” we inevitably give too much space for them not “loving” their wives.
Men don’t “desperately need respect.” They desperately need Jesus.
Sure, “respect” feels good and, as Paul said, “love” and “respect” are part of living in mutually submissive relationships with each other. But it’s possible to be “loving” and “respecting” each other out of mere selfishness, and it is selfishness that ruins marriage relationships.
It is also possible to be “loving” and “respecting” each other and the other person feel “unloved” or “disrespected.” If one or the other is acting abusively, the most “loving” or “respectful” thing the other spouse could do is confront it. But in a world where “respect” must trump all other needs, attempts from wives to confront abusive behavior in their husbands gets labeled “disrespect.” Sometimes, people label it something even more damaging, like “matriarchal spirit” or “Jezebel.”
Men need respect as much as anyone needs respect. But we should define respect as treating someone with the dignity of being made in the image of God, not as always making them feel good and never contradicting them or trying to get them to change.
Ultimately, we need Jesus. We need a Messiah who speaks His value, worth, and dignity over us while vividly confronting our selfish sinfulness. As men, let’s not make demands; let’s take responsibility for laying down our lives in living understandingly with our wives.
I’d like to hear what your experience with Love & Respect has been like. You can share in the comments below. Please be respectful to each other as you do. Grace and peace.
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[1] Eggerichs, Dr. Emerson. Love and Respect: The Love She Most Desires; The Respect He Desperately Needs (p. 1). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
[2] Ibid., p. 242.
[3] Ibid., p. 243.
