503 | Gender Roles and Loving Your Neighbor | Sheila Gregoire

Welcome to the Pirate Monk podcast.

Good to have you on with us today.

Hey, this is Aaron Porter, here in Nashville, Tennessee.

Want to give you a little update.

There's going to be a few episodes here where you might not be hearing from Nate, and

if you are not following his posts, you might be wondering why.

His wife, Ali, has been diagnosed with cancer.

Not a lot of details right now.

They're currently trying to get into hospital oncologist in Nashville to get more information

and find out what they're going to do as far as treatment.

So Nate is taking this time to spend with her and make those plans.

So be praying for the larkens during this time.

In the meantime, we do have some podcasts coming up and interviews in the can.

But you're just stuck with me at the beginning, I guess, for now, and I apologize for that.

I'm going to be trying to get some Pirate Monks on, sharing their stories as well.

But today, I'm just going to talk about something that is on my mind.

On the Samson Society app, we have a Versa of the Day podcast.

This week, the Versa of the Day was a proverb that was speaking about the tongue

and that it holds the power of life and death.

And scripture has a lot to say about the tongue.

I mean, usually people go to the James verse, right?

James 3, James says the tongue is a small part of the body, but makes great boasts

and is a small spark that can set a whole forest on fire.

That's usually where people go.

Small member, but like a small rudder, it can steer the ship.

And as I was talking about that because in the Versa of the Day, it's usually just where I'm at

on that day, me writing down my thoughts and what it means to me, I was looking at other

verses that had to do with the tongue, what comes out of our mouth.

And first Peter 4.11 came to mind since I was a kid, I was fascinated and terrified by that verse.

The first part of verse 11 says whoever speaks as one who speaks the oracles of God.

If I speak, speak as one who speaks the oracles of God, that's crazy.

That word oracles is coming out of the word logos or logos that we read in John 1,

where it says in the beginning was the word, the logos.

It's where we get our word logic from.

It's the person of God.

It's not just the words of God.

It's not just what's put out there.

It is the essence because we read later in John 1 that the word became flesh and dwelt

among us.

Jesus was the fullness of this word.

And here I'm told to use my words to speak with the gravitas of the person of God.

That's huge.

I got off social media a while ago just because it was too heartbreaking.

And I hadn't considered until this week doing the Versa of the Day podcast how all of these

verses are about the tongue, the tongue, the tongue, what we say.

But these days most people say as much with their fingers as they do with their mouths.

That's how we talk.

Emails, chat rooms, social media posts.

And I was really convicted both with the words that I speak and what I write to ask

myself a simple question.

Would Jesus have said that?

Would he have written that on his social media post, which is a funny thought?

I would get back on social media to read that.

I feel like for me it's an easy question to answer.

If I've just had a conversation with someone and I walk away, he'd it angry.

I can look back at that conversation and know with some degree of clarity, would that

have made it into the red letters in your gospels?

The words of Jesus or would he have chose different words?

Would he have said it a different way?

Would he have stayed silent?

Jesus didn't engage everybody who came up to him and he engaged them differently.

And that's where the Ephesians 429 comes into play where it says, don't let any unwholesome

talk come out of your mouths.

But only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs that it may benefit

those who listen.

And I hate to repeat myself if you listen to the verse of the day podcast, but that piece

according to their needs struck me fresh.

Let any unwholesome talk come out of my mouth, okay, then what should?

The stuff that's going to build somebody else up, but it's not just in a general way,

it's according to their needs, which means my audience, my listener that says it's supposed

to benefit those who listen may have different needs.

They may need me to be very, very soft and very, very careful because of their past

wounds and their past hurts.

I certainly know that the way people approach me either puts me on the defensive or open

to receptivity almost immediately.

I'm sure it is for you.

I don't think any humans are immune to that.

So when I think, okay, my words are supposed to be building this person up and that doesn't

mean I have to be serious all the time.

Sometimes building up can be a lighthearted and fun and funny conversation.

And man, you read the words of Jesus, he was full of Jewish jokes.

We sometimes don't get them, but Jewish jokes were often in hyperbole and he's always

talking about taking a speck out of somebody's eye when you had a log in yours.

That's hyperbole.

That was funny.

People laughed at that and then it went somewhere deeper.

So it's not just about being deep, it's about building others up, but according to their

needs, what are the words I'm using, what are the tones I'm using?

And sometimes that need for the listener is to have a rebuke.

Paul talks about using a scripture to approve, rebuke and exhort.

There's different kinds of conversations we have with each other, but I need to know

who my listener is and what their need is in that moment.

And if a rebuke is not how they're going to receive it, it's not going to build them

up, then there might be a softer way to say something, to lead them to the same place.

That place where kindness leads someone to repentance, not just loud, not just throwing

a verse in someone's face.

So these are the things that I've just been thinking about for days now, as we sit in

a world that is just swirling with angry, hateful words from all sides.

Everybody's making someone else a villain and trying to hunker down with their group so

that they feel like, yeah, I'm right, because look at all these other people, okay?

That's fine, but do I know how to talk to people that have thoughts that are different

than mine?

Believe differently than I do.

I just felt like this, this is a time when we need to practice, when we need to get good

at this.

We're called to it.

We're called to unity.

We're called to avoid divisiveness and we're called to speak the oracles of God so that

we can build others up.

So that's just the thought that was on my mind might not be relevant to you.

And if not, that's fine because you're just going to stay tuned and hear this interview

that was recorded a little while ago here on the Pirate Monk podcast.

Welcome back to the Pirate Monk podcast.

I have been looking forward to this episode quite some time.

Ever since I heard our upcoming guest on the Sons of Patriarchy podcast, where in a wonderful

and win some way, she blew up a lot of what I thought I knew about what makes a happy

marriage.

Her name is Sheila Rhaeg Gregwar.

She's an author, a podcaster and a researcher into evangelicalism and sex.

She's the founder of baremarriage.com.

And together with her team, she's surveyed over 32,000 people for her books, the great

sex rescue.

She deserves better and her latest book, The Marriage You Want.

So what you thought you were going to get that what you needed in your marriage was your

wife should have orgasms.

She should be participating.

But instead you heard no, just please your husband give him his orgasms and everything

will be fine.

Is that what blew up your mindset?

Is that a bad name?

I don't know why you went straight to sex, Aaron.

That isn't really what stuck out to me in the beginning.

A lot of it had to do.

A lot of it had to do with gender roles and marriage because long, long ago in another

galaxy.

I actually went to Bill Gofford seminar where I was taught what makes a happy family at

any rate.

Sheila, welcome to the podcast.

How in the world did you get into, first of all, how did you get into this work?

Well, gosh.

Okay.

So back in 2008, I guess it was, I started blogging.

That was sort of the mommy blog craze.

I was home with my kids and I just started writing about parenting, housework, organizing,

et cetera.

And the more I talked about sex, the more my traffic grew.

And so I became like this evangelical sex space, which is really weird because no one

thinks to themselves, you know what I want to do when I grow up, right?

But there I was and I'm writing about sex.

Have a couple of big books out about sex.

Good girl's guide to grade sex, 31 days to grade sex.

But the one thing that I don't do is I don't read any other evangelical marriage books

because I have this terrible fear of plagiarizing.

So I'm in evangelical spaces.

I'm going to the conferences.

I'm doing all this great stuff, but I'm not reading anyone else's stuff.

And then one Friday afternoon in a January of 2019, I had a headache, didn't want to

work.

And I was on Twitter as it was called at the time.

And people were debating whether they needed love or respect.

And they were referring to Emerson Agerich's bestselling book, Loveners.

And I thought to myself, I have that book upstairs.

I could go read it.

This would be an amazing way to procrastinate.

So I went and I got it.

And I turned to the sex chapter and I swear a nuclear bomb went off in my living room

because I had just never understood what was being taught and evangelicalism because I read

that chapter.

And it said, you know, if your husband is typical, he has a need that you don't have.

The need was for physical release.

If he doesn't get it, he'll come under satanic attack.

And that sex was a pleasurable act that gives him satisfaction.

There was nothing about a woman's pleasure.

There was nothing about intimacy.

It was just, you have to do this.

And I called my daughter who was working for me at the time and Joanna Swatsky, who was

a statistician.

Epidemiologist who was also working for me and I said, we've got to do something about

this.

And that's what started all our research.

And that's now six books since.

So I've known pastors, having been a pastor, that the advice to women is, this is your

husband's need, take care of this need, take care of it, three to five times a week and

you'll have an amazing marriage.

And yes, it's as if women are not sexual beings.

But then in my discussions with women, they're women who have been married for 10, 15,

20 years, who have never had an orgasm, but they'd sure liked to.

But then it's like, oh, no, that's salacious, don't talk about that.

So give us a little bit about what you found from that research about women's sexuality

that was being ignored by the evangelical church.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, it's a common misperception that men always have the higher libido.

And about 56% of marriages, yes, they do.

So it is, you know, a majority, but it's barely a majority, right?

In another 19%, she has the higher libido and in 23%, it's shared.

So this idea that he always wants it and she doesn't is simply untrue for an awful lot

of marriages.

And then we also need to remember that there's a 47 point orgasm gap in the evangelical

church by which I mean that 95% of men report almost always or always reaching orgasm in

a given sexual encounter compared to just 48% of women.

So there are a lot of women who are not enjoying sex.

And when we broke it down, a lot of what is happening is a lot of the bad outcomes for

both men and women because we've surveyed both men and women now are based on faulty

teaching that's in the church.

And we identified four big teachings, but there's other ones too that are that go along

with them.

But four big ones that there's just really mess things up for everybody.

I'm going to them all in detail if you want, but like just to give you an example, one

of them is all men struggle with lust, it's every man's battle, right?

When women believe this and when they're taught this as teenagers, their libido goes down,

their orgasm rates go down and their rates of sexual pain increase.

When men believe it, they do less for play.

Their wives are less likely to reach orgasm.

They're more likely to be dissatisfied with their wife's level of adventure in the bedroom

and they're going to have a harder time quitting pornography.

So it's just, it's a toxic message all around.

Tell me, tell me why to the last one.

Why is it harder for them to quit looking at pornography?

Because they're told this is just who you are.

This is what it, this is what being a man is.

I mean, every man's battle literally has the line when it comes to sexual sin, we got

there naturally simply by being male.

And in another book that goes along with a series in every heart restored, they said

men just don't naturally have that Christian view of sex.

So we're teaching men that God actually made you to objectify women and consume women

that this is something that God put in you and this is intrinsic to being a man.

And to women, you need to be the gatekeeper to stop it.

That's right.

Yeah.

And so, yeah.

And so women are taught, like you don't, sex isn't for you, sex is for him.

So it's something that a man is entitled to.

It's a male entitlement and a female obligation.

But at the same time, we're taught that this is a beautiful gift from God and what a beautiful

picture this is.

And it's like, what is beautiful about that?

I don't see anything beautiful about that.

So the obligation teaching, that's, that's the first big one.

This is your obligation.

You are the gatekeeper of your husband going off the rails, but it's not about, hey, you

have your own desires.

Okay.

Give us, give us the next one.

Yeah.

So, so we've got every man all my struggles last, we've got the obligation sex message,

which is a wife is obligated to give her husband sex when he wants it.

We found about 40% of women believe that when they get married and they believe it because

they were taught it in church circles.

And to give you an idea of how toxic this is, when women believe that their chance of experiencing

sexual pain disorders increased to the same statistical significance as if they had been

abused.

So, women's bodies interpret obligation as trauma because both abuse and obligations

say to a woman, you don't matter.

He has the right to use you, however he wants.

And if sex is supposed to be something which is intimate knowing, which we know from the

Bible that it is, right, Genesis 4, verse 1, Adam knew his wifey, sex is supposed to

be an intimate knowing.

When you turn it into an obligation, it actually becomes an erasing of you as a person.

Because it's saying to women, your desires, your wants don't matter.

The things that you feel don't matter, the only thing that matters is your body.

And so instead of it being a knowing, it's an erasing.

And that's a very traumatic thing.

Okay.

That's huge.

And yes, sex, I love that the first mention of sex is knowing.

This is knowing this other person.

Get that so wrong.

It's right there.

Yeah, I don't know.

It's right there.

It is truly right there.

Here's the Hebrew expression of sex is knowing, okay.

What else?

You get four.

Yeah.

Well, the third one kind of goes along with the element struggles last.

It's that a wife should have frequent sex to keep her husband from watching pornography.

And that's when women are taught that, again, sexual pain disorders increase orgasm rates

decrease.

And the other one is kind of related to the things that the girls here growing up, which

is boys are going to push your sexual boundaries and so you need to be the gatekeeper.

And when a teen girl grows up believing that it's like she becomes almost associated from

her body and her sexuality because she has to stay separate.

She can't let herself get too into anything because she has to be the breaks because he's

going to be unable to stop.

Right.

He's going to pass a point of no return.

Boys are just out of control.

And so she has to remain in control at all times.

And that really messes up women's arousal cycles later on.

That's the women side.

The guy side of that, which I've heard you talk about, is understanding lust that anything

that interests you equals this inappropriate lust.

Will you talk a little bit about the guy side and what they've been taught that screws

that whole thing up?

Yeah.

So we fail to distinguish between noticing and lusting, between attraction and lusting

because those are not all the same thing.

Like you know, you can see someone momentarily and think, oh wow, she has a really nice

body or I could think he hasn't really nice body.

But then you can do absolutely nothing else with that information.

Like it can just leave your head.

It's a momentary thing.

It doesn't matter.

You haven't lusted.

Like just noticing that someone has a chest or noticing that someone has a nice figure

is not lusting.

It's just appreciation that's noticing someone is attracted.

But when you take that a step further and you start to imagine things, you stare, you

let your mind run away with you, now you've entered into something deliberate.

And Jesus said, whoever looks at a person with lust, so that's two things.

You know, first of all, it's a deliberate action.

So it's not seeing, it's not noticing, you know, it's looking with lust.

So it's with a particular attitude.

And often what has happened in evangelical spaces is that the cure for lust for men is

to not even look at a woman, right?

You have to bounce your eyes away.

Every man's battle literally says like if you go into an office, remember that women

are usually the receptionist and women and receptionist bend over a lot.

And so it's important when you walk into an office to turn your head away.

So you're not looking at the receptionist.

I mean, this is insane stuff, right?

But if you think about that, both lusting and bouncing your eyes, see women in the

same way.

You see women is a collection of body parts, which are a threat to me, which I get.

And whether or not you consume them, you are still seeing her as a collection of body parts

instead of a true person.

Jesus never refused to look at women.

Jesus chose to truly see women.

And if we want to get over lust, we don't pretend women don't exist.

We learn to see them as people.

Beautiful.

Can we talk a little bit about the complication with both men and women that I've known

who have been trauma at younger ages.

And they have found themselves aroused by certain situations.

And so they're confused by, am I gay?

Did I want it?

All those questions where arousal comes into it, which kind of ties to what you're saying.

Yeah.

So there's a phrase that I think everybody needs to know.

And I wish this was something that we could teach to our teenagers at a much earlier age.

You know, even 10, 11, 12.

And that's arousal non-concordance.

This is really, really important because what can happen is that your body can be physically

aroused while your brain is totally not.

So your brain can be experiencing something or looking at something or whatever and being

freaked out, being scared, you can be disgusted, whatever, but your body might get aroused.

And so the message that you think is, well, if I got aroused, I must have wanted it.

I must have enjoyed it.

This must be something which I like.

And often what happens is that's, that feeling is paired with a traumatic event, right?

And that can cause all kinds of different things, often in order to resolve the trauma, we

end up going back to it to see if we could have a different ending.

So people who might see something, and this especially happens with pornography, right?

You see something that's horribly violent or degrading or terrible, but you get this

physical response.

And so then you seek it out again to see like, did I really like this?

And now your arousal patterns are paired with something which is awful, but it doesn't

mean that you liked it or that you wanted it.

And this is especially true in the case of sexual assault and even more so for men, because

for men, the complicating factor is that a lot of sexual acts cannot happen unless you

have an erection.

And so there's this, there's this real feeling like if I hadn't been aroused, it wouldn't

have happened.

Therefore I must have wanted it on the one who caused it to happen where no, if someone

had power over you, if someone was older, if someone used violence against you, that

was not on you.

That was your body responding when your brain didn't want to.

Consent has absolutely nothing to do with arousal.

And it comes into this identity thing, right, where it's like that must mean blank about

me.

I think that's especially true with pornography too, because sometimes we can get swept

up, you know, your 10, 11, 12, you watch porn that you wouldn't even like, like you

wouldn't even want to do those things in real life, but you get caught up in it.

And I think it's important to remember that in most jurisdictions, showing porn to children

is child abuse.

And so if you're 10, 11, 12, even if you sought out that pornography for whatever reason,

right?

Maybe you, maybe someone showed you something on a school bus and then you were curious

whatever it was.

That is the equivalent of child abuse, even if you were the one seeking it out.

And so, you know, I wish that we could have so much more grace for the little version

of ourselves that was traumatized in all of these different ways, so many of us were

and that did have our arousal patterns, you know, and our arousal maps changed because

of trauma.

But none of that means that is necessarily who you are or that that's something that

made.

I'm giving you a chance.

Okay.

Good.

Yeah.

I want to pull back a little bit.

We focused in on sex right away.

I like to pull back a little bit to talk about happiness in marriage overall and how it relates

to gender roles and loveling.

So I was walking with a good friend the other day who said, you know, my therapist told you

close to a Christian terrorist.

My therapist told me, I'm actually the wife in this marriage because I want to talk and

she doesn't.

And so he really felt like something was wrong with him because he wasn't playing the

right role in the marriage.

There's just a jumping off point for you, Sheila.

Where do you go from there?

Okay.

I find this so strange because we have this idea that men are like this and women are like

this.

I already talked about it in terms of libido, no, we have the idea that men want sex and

women don't and that's actually not necessarily true, but we have it in all kinds of different

ideas like we think men, men are stoic and women are emotional, right?

Women like to talk and men don't and things just are not binary like that.

Let me give you an example.

My great-grandmother was five foot 11 and my her husband, my great-grandfather was five

foot seven, but they did not have scientists knocking at the door saying, how is this possible

because we all know and we all instinctively understand that while men are taller than

women, that doesn't mean that every man is taller than every woman, right?

Because there's such things as bell curves.

So while the average man is taller than the average woman, there's lots of exceptions.

And most things when it comes to our personalities, our proclivities, whatever, most things exist

on bell curves.

So whether or not you talk, yes, the average woman may talk slightly more than the average

man.

It's actually much more common than we think and there's not actually that much difference

when you look at studies, but anyway, or the average woman might enjoy talking about

emotions more than the average man or whatever, but that doesn't mean that there's not overlap.

And let me give you some numbers to this.

So for our book, The Mirage You Want, we took a look at a survey of 60,000 people of MBTI,

the Myers-Briggs personality type inventory, which is a personality test.

And one of the things that they measure, feelers versus thinkers.

So people who are really in tune to emotions or people who tend to make decisions more

based on facts.

And sure enough, okay, I think it was like 56% of men are thinkers.

So it does match the stereotype.

It's just not by very much.

And about 73% of women are feelers, so that even more matches this stereotype, but still

not very much.

Now, if you remember from middle school math, how do you tell the chance that two things

are going to occur together?

If you know the chance of one of them each occurring, of the each occurring separately,

you multiply them together, okay?

And when you multiply these numbers together, and I could have them slightly wrong, you're

going to end up with about 41%.

So the chance that you're going to have a thinker man married to a feeler woman is 41%,

which means that every sermon that you have ever heard, every example of a woman wanting

to talk about her feelings and then being more logical, does not apply to 58%.

Oh, I'm sorry.

It doesn't apply to 58% of people.

And yet we keep talking in terms of stereotypes, and it doesn't help.

You know, there is no point in talking about men and women like that.

It is much more helpful to talk about, hey, if someone is more emotional and someone

is more of a thinker, how do we find balance?

How do we communicate with one another?

So instead of talking about men or like this and women or like this, it would be much

more helpful to just say, hey, if you're someone who is more emotional, if you're someone

who likes talking about emotions, if you're someone who's very expressive and you're

married to someone who isn't, how do we bridge that gap and how do we communicate?

Rather than saying men and women, it just doesn't make any sense.

So we talked about this idea, the false idea that man is always the initiator insects.

There's also an idea that the man is always to be his initiator in decision making and

in leadership, and that that is necessary for a Christian marriage.

How does that shake out?

And how does it shake out in comparison to studies around happiness?

Is there a correlation?

Okay.

Okay.

So here's the thing.

A lot of evangelicals believe that the Bible calls for a husband to be an authority over

his wife.

And they get that from various Bible passages.

Those same Bible passages have other possible interpretations that I think are more in line

with the Greek and with the culture at the time.

What do you do when you have two different interpretations of something?

So some people believe that men should be an authority and men should make the found

decisions.

Other people believe that husband and wife should decide together and should go to God

together.

And there isn't anyone who has that final tie-breaking authority.

Well, in Matthew 7, Jesus told us that when you're trying to figure out who is a false

teacher, you look at the fruit, right?

Because a good tree can't bear bad fruit and a bad tree can't bear good fruit.

And so that's kind of what we do in all of our surveys is we're trying to measure fruit.

For our latest book, The Marriage You Want, we looked at decision-making.

We looked at how it affected both men and women.

And for the first time in our surveys, this was really cool.

We were able to match pairs, which means that we were able to match a husband's responses

with his wife's responses.

It was still anonymous, but if a husband said one thing, we could see how it affected

the wife and vice versa.

And what we found is that when husbands and wives believe that the husband has a tie-breaking

vote, everything else goes badly.

All the measures that we measured and we have about, I think we have about 20 in that

particular chart of things like we have shared hobbies.

I am frequently in pain.

I have high libido.

I enjoy talking about my feelings.

I feel like my spouse knows how to make me laugh.

Like whatever the measures were, everything got worse if you believe that he has a tie-breaking

vote.

On the other hand, if you tend to make decisions together and you believe that nobody

has a tie-breaking vote, everything gets better.

You're more likely to have those shared hobbies.

You're more likely to say, hey, we know how to make each other laugh.

You're more likely to enjoy talking together.

You're more likely to enjoy sex.

She's more likely to reach orgasm, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

When someone has the tie-breaking vote, what that basically means is that someone's

opinion matters more.

Once you feel like your opinion doesn't matter as much, that leads to all kinds of uncomfortable

and terrible dynamics.

One of the things that we found that this is most highly covalent with is markers of

emotional immaturity.

When you feel like he has that tie-breaking vote, couples are more likely to have emotional

regulation issues.

They're more likely to have rage issues to be passive-aggressive and to not know how to

resolve costs.

It's just kind of ugly all around.

Does it correlate it all with divorce statistics?

It's my last question, with divorce statistics.

When you believe it, divorce goes up some.

When you act it out, this is what's really bad.

When you actually act it out, so that he does have the decision-making power, divorce increases

7.4 times.

We're not the only ones who found this.

The John Gottman Institute, which is the world's premier marriage researchers, they found

a divorce rate of 81% in that case.

What's really important to understand is that most people who believe it don't act it out,

and awful lot of people say that they believe the husband should have the tie-breaking

vote, but then they actually function as equal.

My thing is, you know what, if you're going to function as equals anyway, what

I didn't, you just admit that's what you believe, because even believing something wrong

does hurt you, just not to the extent that it does if you actually act it out.

Okay, so I want to slow this way down, even speaking it slowly.

Okay.

I believe what you're saying.

I mean, I believe it goes all the way back to God making woman the helpmate as it is

translated, even though it's translated every other time for God as the helper to rescue,

like here's your rescuer, not your vacuum mate.

Secretary.

Yeah.

Your secretary.

Right.

And so there are these things that were like, hey, this is what I was, what I was handed.

She's my helpmate.

She's supposed to help me do what I do where scripture indicates, no, this is the one

to rescue.

And I had a crush on Pippi Longstocking, so I love any woman who can kick a pirate's

ass.

Right.

But these are the things going all the way back to let me understand this paradigm.

And this can be very confusing for guys.

When it's been hand to them, it's very confusing to women when it's been hand to them, right?

Even to the fact that the whole Eve was deceived, but not Adam and that whole dynamic of like,

oh, you're telling me there's stuff to know and he's he's backing up and she's pressing

in like shows a dynamic that is not, here's the passive person and he's the pressing in

person.

It's the exact opposite.

So where do we start in a gentle way to be like, okay, hey, your relationship with another

human being and you've been given some wacky information that's actually not completely

accurate to the biblical narrative, where do you start with that?

I would go back to what Jesus said to the two greatest commandments.

I'd love the Lord to God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your

neighbor as yourself.

So we are to love our neighbor as ourselves.

So that means that you're to love your spouse as you love yourself.

And I would just challenge a lot of men who are maybe getting their backup right now

by some of the things I'm saying and just ask how would you feel if your wife had the

ability to override your and had the ability to just say no, I'm going to decide and

what you say doesn't matter.

Would you like that?

If you wouldn't like it, then why do you think she should?

Because I have penis.

Oh, I'm sorry.

You weren't actually.

Yeah.

No, that's what it all comes down to, right?

And it's like, but it doesn't make any sense and if we know, I think there's something

else here.

Let me let me talk about the emotionally maturity part for a minute and explain how I think

this works.

So let's say that you grow up in a church and you're taught that the epitome of happiness

and success is you get married, you have this wife, she's going to raise kids for you.

You're going to have a job, you're going to bring home the bacon and everything's going

to be lovely and she's going to serve you your whole life.

And then you get married at 22 because you're supposed to and this doesn't happen because

what you've never really been taught is how to experience real intimacy.

Because real intimacy, that means you have to actually share what you think.

That means you have to share what you feel.

That means you might even have to share what you're scared of or what you dream of or the

things you haven't told other people because nobody can truly love you and accept you

if they don't know you.

And many of us, and especially many men, simply because of the way that we raise boys,

are not taught how to open up and say those things.

And a lot of men don't even know how to express what they're thinking or feeling because

they were never given words.

If they felt anything, if they were sad, they were told, boys don't cry.

If they felt rejected, they were told, you know, just stop it.

Go, I don't know, go bounce a basketball around or whatever it is, but your emotions

were really encouraged.

And so you've never really felt known.

You've never really felt like someone actually knows me and still wants to be here.

And then you get married and you think this is going to fix everything.

You think that sex is going to fix it.

You think that having a wife is going to fix it and it doesn't because you're still

not known.

And so what do you do?

Well, you try to make this marriage work and the way you make this marriage work is

you make sure that things go the way you want it to because this is your job as a man.

So you make decisions, but you don't know how to talk about these decisions because you

were never given those tools because you were just supposed to be the boss.

And so you get, and meanwhile, she's been told that you are going to make her life better

because all she's wanted her whole life is to get married because she's told this is

the pinnacle, but she was never taught how to speak up for herself or how to say what

she wants because saying what she wants, well, that's being disrespectful.

And so she's not letting you in.

You don't know how to let her in.

It's so difficult because you were given the right tools.

And I think a lot of couples are in the midst of this where they can't share who they

are because they're not even sure how to express to themselves who they are.

And then how are you supposed to function and make decisions when you don't have that

level of emotional maturity and you've got issues in the bedroom.

You've got issues with past addictive behaviors and it's all a really big mess.

And so how do we start untangling it?

And I think some of the ways to start untangling it is to start saying, I need, I need to be

more vulnerable.

I need to open up.

I need to actually let my spouse know me.

So what do you say?

Because I'm, I'm picturing guys who have been doing work, right?

Recovery work.

They've been in rooms.

They've learned to talk to other men, but talking to their spouse is still terrifying

and in part, legitimate and part illegitimate.

In part, their spouse might have gotten angry or have big emotions.

And so they're like, I'm never going to do that again.

I'll keep talking to these guys.

How does he bridge the gap with intimacy as he's learning with other men to bring it

into his men?

Let's start with intimacy in a different way.

Like let's, let's take it out of of the bedroom for a minute because when you are, especially

when you're going through recovery, program regards to pornography, sex addictions, whatever,

you know, sharing all of that with your wife right away is not always the most helpful

thing to put it mildly.

But what you can do is, is learn to share in other ways.

And here's a really simple exercise, which, which can help tremendously, it doesn't need

to take more than 10 minutes a day, but it can really, it can help you have emotional conversations.

And that's every day, share at the end of the day, maybe it's when you're lying in bed

at night, maybe it's when you come home from work and you just grab a cup of coffee

together before dinner or whatever it might be.

Maybe it's after the kids go to bed, but just share, this is the moment today where I

was the most in the group, like I was doing what the Holy Spirit put me on us to do.

This is just amazing.

And what was the moment where you felt the most defeated?

Like I hate this.

This is a slog.

This is awful because what we often do at the end of a day is we'll say, what did you

do today?

And how do you answer that?

Right?

Well, I had six client meetings.

I went to the bank at lunch.

You know, like it doesn't let you in on anyone's emotional state.

But when you give two emotional pictures, two emotional windows into your day, suddenly

you're connecting on a more emotional level and it teaches you to be comfortable with

these things.

It lets your spouse in, but it also actually lets you in on your own emotional state.

That everyone, my husband and I started doing this, I don't know, 10, 12 years ago.

I found that my, the moment I was the most defeated was the same every single day and

it was when I had to check my inbox.

And after about a week of this, I was like, baby, I should hire someone to do my emails.

I did it.

It made like a huge difference in my life because I was getting all these emails from all

these traumatized people and wanting marriage advice.

It was depressing.

So, you know, I hired someone else to do it.

Now my life is a lot better.

So, like I learned stuff about myself that I hadn't realized, too.

You're touching on something that I think is important where the idea of I'm trying to

get my needs met in this other human, but I'm not considering that they are human.

So, you take it sexually, I'm trying to get my sexual needs met.

I want to have my orgasm, I don't think about theirs, this will be great if that works

out.

No, it won't.

Her emotional connection is like this process brings you to the stuff you actually want

when you leave her out of it emotionally physically.

All these ways, it doesn't end up working out the way you want.

And certainly not the way we were told in a purity culture, evangelical industrial church

complex kind of way.

Prosperity gospel kind of way, yes, do everything right, you're going to have the most incredible

sex in your life, yes.

Oh, you're talking about bringing in a holistic.

Yeah, and I remember like a couple of times my husband is a physician and you know,

when he'd share some of the times he felt the most defeated, it was when he felt like

he had messed up.

You know, even if he really hadn't, like even if it had taken him like, let's say 10 minutes

longer to make a diagnosis or he had almost missed something, he hadn't actually missed

something, but he had almost missed something.

And the amount of shame that he would feel about that.

And for him to tell me that was such a huge thing.

And I didn't think that much of it.

I'm like, oh, yeah, that must have been rough, but like it was really rough for him.

And I didn't even realize the enormity of the weight that he was carrying for that.

And as he started to be able to share it with me, like that weight got a lot less when

he saw that I didn't think you were a terrible person for taking 10 minutes to figure that

out.

Right?

Like I didn't think you were a terrible person for that.

I thought, oh, yeah.

Wow.

That must have been stressful, but it wasn't earth shattering, you know?

And so like to let your wife in, did that make you feel loved at all like that he was

carrying that much feeling for?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

But I think what I think it just, it's so important to understand what makes your

spouse tick, you know, to understand, oh, this is, this is an area of real woundedness

for him.

Like this is an area of real, of real stress for him.

So how can I care for him more in that way?

And how can I, like, be grateful that he's sharing this with me, you know, and how can

I show him like it matters to me what you are feeling?

And as we each do that for each other, you know, it brings a level of safety into the

marriage.

And that is what is so key is that you can never have a good sex life if there's not

safety at the root of it.

And so when you each know I am safe to share who I am, I'm not going to be rejected.

Like I'm going to be comforted.

I'm going to know that, okay, this is, this is a place where I can really open up.

Then that's going to help your sex life so much more than, you know, almost any other

things that were, that were taught have to do with sex.

Like the beginning of sex is safety is emotional safety.

It's not different techniques or anything like that.

Safety in relationship.

You know, it's one thing we focus on in the Samson societies.

We want to make sure we get guys in the room to talk.

We understand that that room first and foremost has to be safe.

But nobody's going to attack me for what I say.

I think it's the main reason that a lot of wives push their husbands out the door to go

to this.

They like what was back.

I feel as though I learned not that I'm a pro at it, but I'm much better at having

conversations with my wife now that I have learned non-sexual intimacy with other men

saying danger again.

And when you say those dangerous things, they lose a lot of their danger.

They do.

Yeah.

When you're able to just voice it, this thing that was so heavy for you, you know,

it loses a lot of its weight.

And I think that's one of the beautiful parts of marriage is that we can do that for each

other.

But I think part of what you're talking about, which is really important in this, is

men have been taught that their wives are the solution to their problem.

And if they keep going into even recovery circles, talking as if she's supposed to fix it,

it's going to keep putting the pressure on her that actually ends up based on your research,

pushing her farther from the solutions he wants.

So can you talk a little bit about that mindset and where he needs to shift it?

Yeah.

I think one of the lies that we have been taught, and it's in the church, but it's also

outside of the church.

So I think it's an area where the church has copied the world, is that the way that men

connect is through sex.

And so if he's going to feel connected, if he's going to feel loved, he needs to have sex.

And so while women connect through talking, men connect through sex in the marriage.

And what often happens is that a man will want to have sex because afterwards he feels

connected.

He's got the high, you know, the oxytocin highs, the hormonal highs of an orgasm.

So he'll feel connected, but he hasn't done the work of connection.

And when that happens, sex often leaves her feeling less connected because if he is having

sex with her, if he's using her body so that he feels connected, but he hasn't let her

into her heart and he hasn't shown care for her, then sex actually feels like she isn't

connected at all.

And when we asked women about this about, I think I think it was around 18% of women said

that they're fine.

Their primary emotion after sex is feeling used.

So it's not connection whatsoever.

And so he wants sex so that he can feel connected.

He can feel loved.

He can feel all these things, but in so doing, he is making her feel less loved.

And he's pushing her away because sex without connection is not connection.

And if we can help both men and women see that the reason sex is about connection is

because it's an expression of who you are together.

And when sex happens out of that experience of who you are together, out of that, yes,

we love each other.

We feel we feel connected.

I feel like you really know me.

And so I want to express it physically, then it's going to be connecting.

But when it's not that, when it's there's a lot of me that I'm still hiding, I don't feel

comfortable talking to you, I find your emotions overwhelming me.

So I just want to have sex so that that stress goes away.

That is not connection.

And that's one of the biggest shifts to make because so many people have grown up feeling

like sex.

When it isn't, it's the culmination of connection.

It isn't the actual connection itself.

Well, can we pause on that that a lot of guys are affirmed that that's connection, but

that they don't realize it's not connection for them either.

It's not just the women that aren't connected in that moment.

It's a false intimacy for them, yes?

Yes, absolutely.

Because it gives you, again, it gives you that dopamine hit.

It gives you, it gives you all the nice hormonal chemicals stew that happens after orgasm.

And it brings stress levels down.

It helps you sleep.

It's got all of these nice things that happen, but that's not actual connection.

And the problem is a lot of men, as I'm sure you've experienced in your, in your

Samson groups, have gone through life without actually really connecting with another

human being.

And so they don't even realize what they're missing.

They don't realize what it was supposed to be.

And because she doesn't realize it either, there's this toxic stew where you're not connecting

you're missing each other and you're actually pushing each other further away by the way

that you're interacting in the bedroom where you both feel, you both feel disconnected and

disjointed and rejected over sex because we're giving sex.

We're giving sex a role it was never meant to carry.

My first sponsor, I remember my first sponsor in 12-step recovery.

You have never made love in your life.

And I said, hey, what do you mean?

I got three kids.

He said, oh, you've had sex.

Your dog can have sex.

You've never made it.

And he was right.

And I'm just so grateful that I have had the chance to get a taste of what it would, but

it only comes with vulnerability, right?

An actual emotional connection.

Yeah.

I'm not trying to say vulnerability is easy, but the thing is there's no shortcuts, feet,

like, and when so many of us have grown up without being able to talk about what we're

really feeling and with needing other things to use for emotional regulation, it's like

you're learning a whole other language when you're, you know, 48 that you should learn

when you were 13.

And it's hard to repair it yourself, but a lot of us are having to repair it ourselves

well into our middle age, because if you think about what happens, okay, let's look at

teenage life.

What are you supposed to learn when you're a teenager?

You're supposed to learn how to deal with rejection, right?

You're supposed to learn how to deal with boredom.

You're supposed to learn how to deal with failure, you know, when you don't get a good mark

on that test.

Like, there's all kinds of things that happen in your teenage life that are not nice,

like, you know, they happen to you when you're a teenager before things are really, really

too important.

And so you learn to deal with these bad things, right?

What if instead of learning to deal with those things, when you were 12, 13, 14 years old,

you started watching porn or maybe you started drinking or using drugs or gambling or some

other sort of addicted behavior that gives you that high?

Well, then when you're bored, instead of trying to deal with that feeling of boredom,

you turn to pornography because it makes you feel better.

When you didn't make the basketball team, you turn to pornography because it makes you

feel better.

Suddenly, you end up in adult to 28 years old with two little kids and you've never learned

to deal with boredom or rejection or feelings of inadequacy or anything because when you had

them, when you were 14, 15, 16, you turned to porn.

Yes.

And so now when your wife is upset at you, you get that feeling of, okay, I, you know,

I feel rejected, I feel threatened, I feel like someone doesn't like me.

And when I get this feeling, what do I do?

I go, use porn because you haven't learned emotional regulation techniques.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's just this vicious cycle, right, which we need to break and we need to, we need

to say, okay, you're 13 years old, you didn't make the basketball team, what are we going

to do about it?

Yeah.

All right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I am more and more coming to recognize that the major task in recovery is learning emotional

regulation.

Yeah.

Well, Sheila, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to talk with us.

I know this is going to be an episode widely shared through our community.

And I know that some of our people are going to want to, uh, many of our folks are going

to want to get your books, uh, connect with you.

I know that none of them can connect with you personally, but how do they, how do they

connect with your team?

How do they come on board?

Yeah.

So, um, if you go to baremarriage.com, that's B-A-R-E, baremarriage.com.

Um, you'll can see all our books.

We have our Thursday podcasts that, that's out every week.

But our, our two big books that I think that are the most important for this conversation

would be the marriage you want.

And it comes, it's right here over my shoulder for those watching and video.

It comes with a video series if you wanted to do a small group.

And it also has a study guide.

And that's just a wonderful book to understand what really goes into marriage.

And for all of you, like, math geeks, there's so many charts, you're going to love the charts.

The charts are awesome.

Then we also have the great sex rescue, which goes into all these negative things that we've

been told about sex.

And then we have other books, the good guys guide to great sex, I think is really good because

it goes into all our findings around lust, which I think can be really freeing for men because

I just wanted, I just want men to know, like, God did not create you to be a terrible monster.

Like, I just can't believe the teachings and the church, the treatment, like their monsters,

men are not monsters.

Yeah, so I hope that that's freeing for some people.

But you can find all those books if you just go to baremarys.com or look them up on Amazon

or wherever you get them.

Thank you so very much.

Listeners, our guest again was Sheila Ray Greguar.

Do follow up with her and we'll be right back in just a moment on the Pirate Monk podcast.

Hey, welcome back to the Pirate Monk podcast.

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