Should the Marriage Be Prioritized Over the Kids?

It’s constant, and we’re always reminded that one day the kids will leave home, but your husband will still be there. He needs to be the priority.

You know what we don’t hear?

“Husbands, your wife has just given birth, and her body has gone through more trauma that it likely ever will again, except when she has more children. Her hormones have dropped precipitously. She isn’t sleeping. Her milk is regulating. She is getting used to being a mom. Now is the time to step up and be a fully engaged partner, taking shifts at night as much as possible so you both can sleep, caring for her during the day, and making sure meals are made.”

Nope. Instead we get advice like this, from Gary Thomas’ best-selling book A Lifelong Love:

Notice what he is saying: If the wife tends to a helpless infant’s cries, she is neglecting her husband, and she has power over her husband.

There is no talk about how the husband can help too. There is no talk about how the baby SHOULD come first–because it’s a baby.

There is only guilt trips thrown at a woman for wanting to tend to her helpless infant in distress, because somehow this is taking away from her husband’s sex life.

What kind of man feels jealous of a baby? What kind of man sees a baby as a threat, rather than as someone to nurture and love? This boggles my mind.

And in the chapter where this quote appears, Gary is talking about power shifts in marriage, and how the power rests with the one who is the least invested in the marriage. He points to different times this can happen, when power shifts back and forth.

But what he is saying is that caring for your infant means you’re less invested in the marriage.

Who says that? Why are evangelical resources pitting husbands and kids up as if they’re in competition with each other? This frames husbands as kids that women need to care for while they are at their weakest, rather than as partners they can rely on to share the load and care for them.

Most dads actually are involved dads! Most dads don’t resent their kids. Most marriages are happy, and about 50% of evangelical marriages function as healthy partnerships! It’s not that evangelicals don’t ever get this right.

It’s instead that our advice gets it so totally backwards, because evangelical marriage advice tends to center the man, rather than looking at what leads to the best outcomes and best reflects the heart of Christ.

Like many of you, I’ve been glued to the Lindsay Clancy case, where a mother allegedly killed her three children due to postpartum psychosis. There is much speculation about many aspects of the case, but one of the important cultural moments is the wider discussion of how much the postpartum period consumes a woman and the toll it has on her.

I’ve read countless studies over the last week about how one of the biggest predictors of postpartum depression (PPD) is the amount of support a woman has at home. Having a husband who picks up his share of the load lets her feel that she is safe and she’s less likely to develop PPD.

The postpartum period is absolutely crucial for the mother and baby. It can’t get more crucial. And yet what do evangelical marriage books say about this time?

• Kevin Leman in Sheet Music insists that you should give hand jobs and oral sex, since “faithfulness is a two-person job.”

• Gary Thomas talks in Married Sex about how much men like hand jobs during this period, because he loves seeing you so excited as you give them (note to Gary: she’s moaning to get it over with faster, not because she’s excited. In our focus groups women told us that they often moaned when giving sexual favours they were guilted into to speed up the process. And the “wetness between her thighs” that you say excite you so much is not her sexual lubrication when she’s postpartum or on her period; it’s blood. Yes, a large minority of women enjoy doing this postpartum, and more power to them! But if you have to write a book convincing women to do this, these aren’t the women who already want to do it).

• Intended for Pleasure says that when you can’t have intercourse after giving birth, you should give manual stimulation to the same frequency as you had sex before you gave birth, so that he will not be jealous of the baby and his needs will be met.

I am so done. I am so disgusted.

Here’s a clip of us from a podcast taking on Josh Howerton saying something similar. I’m just gobsmacked at how evangelical pastors and authors see women who are run ragged with children, and feeling distant from their spouses, and the answer is always, “women, you need to save your best energy for your husbands, so try harder at night,” rather than “men, if your wife is exhausted, it means you’re not doing enough. Jump in. They’re your kids too!” (We talked about this dynamic quite a bit when we looked at Jimmy Evans’ book Marriage on the Rock as well.)

Yes, divorces do spike once kids leave home. But our matched pair study of 7000 people for The Marriage You Want found that this wasn’t because people had nothing in common once the kids were gone. Instead, it was that women had been putting up with deeply unfair dynamics in a number of areas for years, and you can only put up with that for about 20 years before you break.

Women can have sex without orgasming for about 5 years without it bothering them too much, but at 10 years they start to get upset, at 15 years they’re really mad, and at 20 they’ve had it.

Women can do the vast majority of the housework, even if they work outside the home, for about 5 years and it doesn’t bother them that much, but at 10 years it registers. At 15 they’re mad, and at 20 they’ve had it.

We call this the unfairness threshold, and we showed several examples of it in The Marriage You Want. When she’s the main one to initiate repair after conflict; the main one to make all the medical and dental appointments; the main one doing all the kin keeping for your own side of the family, but also your own. When too much of the burden falls on her, and she isn’t cared for equally, the marriage suffers.

Those divorces that happen after the kids leave home, then, aren’t primarily because the couple has nothing in common anymore. It’s that the husband has been treating the wife unfairly for decades, and when the kids leave, she finally feels that she’s able to leave too.

When they teach that the main priority on the birth of a child is that the husband still ejaculates, rather than that the wife gets support and sleep, that sets up the dynamics that will lead to divorce.

When they teach that the problem in a marriage where she is carrying the mental load and emotional labour for the family, and that she is doing most of the hands-on housework and childcare, is that she isn’t saving her best energy for her husband at night, they train couples to ignore the inherent unfairness of all of that labour being put on the wife.

The very evangelical advice that teaches people to put the marriage before the kids actually destroys the marriage.

If, instead, they taught people to be partners and care for children together, that marriage would grow and would likely last, because she would feel valued, less tired, and part of a team.

The Lindsay Clancy case is showing us how desperately important it is to support new moms. The evangelical church instead decides that new moms need guilt trips about their husbands’ sex lives.

Wake up, church.

And everyone else: walk out of any church that teaches like Josh Howerton does. Let’s stop supporting any organization, book, or church that gives these horrible messages that literally destroy lives and families.

• The Great Sex Rescue, where we have a chapter talking about the atrocious advice given to couples postpartum and during her period

• Our podcast on postpartum advice given to women about sex

• The Marriage You Want, which comes with a video study and a study guide with small group discussion questions and premarital questions

• Our podcast episode Let Dads Be Dads, about the ways that evangelical advice sets dads up as children who need to be cared for, rather than expecting them to be engaged dads with their own kids