Hello and welcome to the bear marriage podcast. My name's Rebecca Lindenback, and normally you'd be hearing from Sheila, but you're hearing from me this week because we are doing something different.

For the last couple of months, we've been planning, researching, writing, recording, and now editing and releasing our three-part

series, deep diving into love and respect, what it teaches, whether or not it holds up

to scrutiny in the scientific or theological realm, and of course, how it impacts people

and what our response as a Christian community should be. Now, this was created as a YouTube

deep dive series, so there might be a few things that don't translate quite as well over to the

audio world, but because we know so many of you love to listen to our podcast while you're

driving to work or on a commute, we wanted to make sure you had an audio version available. So here you are. Of course, if you'd rather watch this on YouTube, the link will be in the video description. Now, this is part one of a three-part series. The other two will be launching on our brand new Good Fruit Faith podcast channel, as well as on YouTube. So make sure you don't miss those and now enjoy part one of

Happily Never After, the curious case of love and respect. It's a tale as old as time. A couple

gets married, madly in love. A few years in, though, they start to have problems because, of course,

they each brought their own baggage into their relationship. So what did they do? Well, this couple is a

Christian. They want to have a good Christian marriage. They want to make God happy and how they're

treating each other. So what they're going to do is go over to the Christian marriage section in their

local bookstore or ask their pastor for a book. And statistically speaking, they are likely to be

handed the best-selling evangelical marriage book that's out there, love and respect.

So the question is, what happens next? Does the book help them? Does it hurt them? That's the question

that our team of researchers has been trying to answer for the last six years.

Or more aptly, we've been trying to understand why things often go so badly when people follow books like love and respect.

And we're going to talk about that today.

My name is Rebecca, and I'm part of Good Fruit Faith.

We are a group of researchers that are dedicated to studying the impact of common evangelical beliefs on women's marital and sexual

satisfaction. And we do also study men as well. But let's be very honest, in evangelicalism,

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