Love and Respect was published in 2004 and has been a massive seller in the Christian community—outpacing every book but Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages over these past fifteen years. Having finally read Love and Respect, I have mixed emotions about Emerson Eggerich’s blockbuster.

Eggerichs aims to balance what he feels has been imbalanced teaching on marriage, where men are lambasted for not being the husbands they ought to be while women are largely just told to be patient with their husbands. Drawing the foundation of his book from the conclusion of Paul’s admonition to husbands and wives in Ephesians 5:33, which calls men to love their wives and Christ loved the church and wives to respect their husbands, Eggerichs tells his reader that the key to marriage is husbands loving their wives well and wives respecting their husbands.

While the Beatles belted out, “All you need is love,” Eggerichs contends that “love alone is not enough.” Love is only half of the equation. Without respect, marriages will crumble.

Eggerichs spends most of his time and energy on the second half of that admonition (wives, respect your husbands). Of the 300 pages, probably 200 are spent explaining why husbands need respect and how wives can offer that respect to them.

Eggerichs believes that women are wired to need love and men are wired to need respect. Eggerichs utilizes research from psychologist John Gottman and others to back this claim. Some of the most interesting parts of the book are when Eggerichs shares some of that research. For instance, it was in Gottman’s lab where he studied over 2,000 marriages over twenty years that he discovered the most corrosive force in marriage is contempt. And it was in that same lab that Gottman boiled down (from a secular framework) the two most important ingredients in marriage: love and respect.

Other surveys have shown that men have a greater fear of being disrespected than being unloved and that, in the middle of conflict with their wives or significant others, men internalize the conflict not as demonstrating their spouse or significant other’s loss of love for them, but their loss of respect.

Perhaps Eggerich’s most important insight in Love and Respect is that we are called not only to unconditional love, but also to unconditional respect. This insight will certainly shape the way that I think about respect going forward and the way that I counsel couples.

The book is broken into three parts: in part one, Eggerichs makes an argument for why marriages go sour when men do not love their wives and wives do not respect their husbands. He calls this the “crazy cycle”—when husbands withdraw love and, in return, wives withdraw respect (or vice versa). It is this “crazy cycle” Eggerichs wants to help us break. In part two: Eggerichs spends six chapters detailing how husbands can love their wives (his six components are: closeness, openness, understanding, peacemaking, loyalty, and esteem), and then six chapters on how wives can respect their husbands (his six components are: conquest, hierarchy, authority, insight, relationship, and sexuality). This large section is practical and most every couple will benefit from it. I would imagine it is an especially helpful tool if a couple reads the section together and shares how their spouse can love and respect them well.

While the book is worth the read and there are helpful insights for husbands and wives alike, there are two drawbacks. The first is that I disagree with Eggerichs contention that the admonition for husbands to love their wives and wives to respect their husbands in Ephesians 5 is primarily because this is how God has designed the needs of men and women.

I think Eggerichs has a compelling argument that this is generally psychologically true for men and women, but the clear reason for Paul’s admonition to husbands and wives in Ephesians 5 is because husbands and wives in marriage are intended to display the relationship between Christ and the church. In the “aha” moment in the passage in 5:32 Paul says, “This mystery is profound (referring to Genesis 2:24 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”). There is much that can be said about this, but, in short, Paul builds the practical calling for husbands and wives in marriage on the reality that marriage from the very start was made to display that God’s redemptive plan was for the Son to leave the Father and come for his bride, the church.

In other words, while I think Eggerichs may well be right about the psychological differences of men and women that God is calling us to meet in his admonition for husbands to love and wives to respect, this is a secondary truth in the passage, not the primary truth. And to invert the interpretation of the passage and place the psychological as primary is problematic.

My second critique is just that at times the book devolves into a Christianized Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. The book has the same popular, lightweight feel with little to no emphasis on our sinfulness. Additionally, Eggerichs tends to overstate gender differences. While understating gender differences might be our greater proclivity as a culture, overstating those differences isn’t helpful either.

If that final issue isn’t a trigger topic for you, then I commend Love and Respect to you. Eggerichs serves marriages well with his key insights. Otherwise, I would commend to you Allender and Longman’s Intimate Allies, or Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage as more thoughtful and nuanced guides to stepping into the difficult but beautiful calling of marriage.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

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