Do gender stereotypes go too far? Are they really useful when we're talking about marriage?

That's what we're going to be talking about today on the To Love Honor and Vacuum Podcast, the place where we try to stop marriage from feeling like a big to-do list

and make it feel like a passionate adventure. I'm Sheila Ray Gregworth, a

blogger from To Love Honor and Vacuum and I'm so glad that you are joining me today.

I follow a guy named Tim Fall on Twitter and he said recently,

God created the male and female, not masculine and feminine.

And I thought that was really insightful because you know masculine and feminine are

cultural constructs and what I mean by that is that they can change over time

they're very varied what we understand to be masculine or feminine isn't

universal for all times and all places. And that's why I really worry that we've

gone off base with the way that we talk about gender stereotypes especially in

church and especially in marriage and we've all heard those

stereotypes right you know the whole men are from Mars women are from Venus thing or

whenever people talk about how men are like this and women are like this.

I find this a problem because even blogging I do tend to make generalities and I try to always say but we know that not all men are like this or not all women are like this because we very

rarely do fall into a category where 100% of men are one way or 100% of women or another way.

We actually are quite different and that's hardly surprising. I mean look at

nature. We live in a world which has so much diversity. My husband is a big bird watcher and

when we started a bird watching we thought duck meant

Mallard like you know what a Mallard duck is they're the most common form of duck and we never

knew there were any other kinds of ducks until we started bird watching and then we learned about wood ducks and Harlequin ducks and King Iders and all of these different kinds of ducks.

But I never knew they existed because we just thought duck equals

...