never enough

chapter one

the lie we are sold

The vast majority of us love this stuff, so let me name it plainly. The romance novels with the bare-chested men on the cover. Fifty Shades of Grey, which sold more than 150 million copies, the overwhelming bulk of them to women, a strikingly high number of them to women in the church. Bridgerton. Twilight. Outlander. The Notebook. And the Hallmark Channel Christmas movie, you know the one, because it is always the same one, where the big-city career woman comes home to the small town and falls for the rugged man who runs the Christmas tree farm. We do not merely enjoy these things. We hunger for them, we arrange our daydreams around them, and then, quietly, when no one is looking, we hold our own husbands and our own ordinary lives up against them and find them wanting.

Let me put us on the same side of the table so we understand each other. I am not standing outside all of this looking down my nose at it. I enjoy some of it myself. I truly enjoy the Twilight films. I actually like Bridgerton, though I will say, as an aside, that there is a filtering service called Vidangel that strips out the explicit scenes and the worst of the language. And let me commend that to you in passing: if you or your family would like to watch a great deal of what is out there without all the adult content folded into it, go find a tool like that, for it is a wonderful thing for a household, and especially if there are children about. But that is an aside. My point is this: I am not telling you these stories cannot be enjoyed, or that there is something wrong with liking a good tale well told. I like them too. This is not a work against stories.

Let me draw a line here, because it matters. There is a difference between a story that has bad content in it and a story that is bad content at its core. Bridgerton has a story underneath it, a world, characters, a plot you can actually follow, with explicit scenes laid on top that a tool can strip away, leaving the tale intact. But Fifty Shades is not a good story with a few bad scenes in it. The bad thing is the story. Strip out the domination and the degradation and there is nothing left, because that was the whole point of it. The one has filth poured over it; the other is filth all the way down. So I am not asking you to treat every title alike. I am asking you to learn the difference between what can be cleaned and what is rotten at the root.

Now hear the burden of the whole booklet. I am not wringing my hands over the daughters of Babylon. Of course the world devours these stories and binges these dramas; the world is the world, and the women of Babylon will do what the women of Babylon do, and it is no more surprising than water running downhill. Let them have their books and their movies. That is not my concern, and it is not the point. My concern, my burden, is that the daughters of Christ are lined up at the same trough, feeding on the very same things, and calling it harmless. This is not a work scolding the world. This is a word calling out something inside the church.

My burden is that the daughters of Christ are lined up at the same trough, feeding on the very same things, and calling it harmless.

And I want to suggest something you are not going to like. If nearly every woman on earth craves a thing this badly, if the world simply cannot get enough of it, that is not proof the thing is good for us. For the daughter of God, that is precisely the moment to stop and look twice. I am not saying the world is wrong about everything; that would be foolish. I am saying the world is wrong about a great many things, and our own Bible tells us so plainly. The whole world lieth in wickedness, John writes. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.¹

“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”

– 1 John 2:15

So when I see a book like Fifty Shades sell so readily, I do not think, well, it must be giving them something they truly need. I think: what exactly is the hook, and what is on the other end of the line? Because I have come to believe that this whole glittering culture of romance, the one we were raised on, the one we have been marinating in since we were little girls watching the prince slide the glass slipper onto the right foot, is not the harmless indulgence we tell ourselves it is. I believe it is quietly starving us. I believe it is wrecking marriages, including a great many that look perfectly lovely from the outside. And the saddest part is that most of us will defend it to our dying breath, precisely because it feels so good to want it.

That is what this booklet is about: a lie so sweet and so familiar that we have stopped being able to taste that anything is wrong with it. I am not going to tell you that romance is wicked, or that longing is a sin, or that you must never again enjoy a love story. What I am going to do is show you where the lie hides inside the thing you love, so that you can pull it out, and keep the good, and be free.

chapter two

confessions of an action-oriented woman

I want to tell you something about myself, because I think, if you are honest, you may see a bit of yourself in it that you have never quite admitted out loud. I am a woman. And I happen to be a woman who is wired more toward action than toward sentiment. One might even say wired more masculine than feminine, though the modern culture’s definitions of those labels are wildly inaccurate when set beside the historical ones. If you want the truth of it, a brooding man reciting poetry in the rain does very little for me. Give me Liam Neeson in Taken, tearing a city apart to get his daughter back, or John Wick, or a Jason Statham film where the man simply handles what needs handling. What stirs me is watching a man be a man, strong, capable, competent, doing the thing that needs doing. I would sooner watch a man protect what is his and fight for the innocent than sit through two hours of aching glances and swelling music. That is simply how the Lord wired me, and it has taken me a long time to stop apologizing for it.

I am not saying I cannot enjoy a lighthearted romantic comedy. I can, and I do, every now and again, for the wit, for the fun, for the story. But notice the distinction, because it is the whole point: I enjoy it the way I enjoy a good meal or a pretty evening, not because I am depending on it to fill some ache or to teach me what love is supposed to feel like. I am not running on its fuel. And when it comes to a gift, I would a thousand times rather be handed something useful, something thoughtful, something I can actually put to use, something that took real attention to choose, than the obligatory bouquet that wilts by Friday.

There is nothing wrong with you. There is something wrong with the script.

And here is the part I suspect you already know down where you do not say things out loud: I do not think I am as rare as the culture would have you believe. I think a great many of you are more like this than you would ever confess to your girlfriends. I think if you were honest, the steady, competent, protecting man does more for you than the brooding one ever did, and you have spent years feeling vaguely guilty about it, as though you were failing at being a proper woman because the script they handed you did not fit. So let me be the one to say it plainly: there is nothing wrong with you. There is something wrong with the script. You were sold a single, narrow, manufactured picture of what a woman is, all softness and sentiment and swooning, and then you were quietly made to feel defective for not matching it. But you were never meant to match it, because it was never true to begin with. And that is exactly what we are going to prove.

I tell you my own confession first only so that you will believe me when I say I am not writing this as a woman who hates romance and wants to take your joy away. I am writing as a woman who has lived inside the same lie, who has felt the same vague guilt, and who found, on the far side of it, that the truth fit far better than the costume ever did.

chapter three

drinking from the wrong well

Start with the feeling, because you know the feeling even if you have never had a name for it. It is the sense that there is never quite enough. He does not do enough. He used to be more romantic; the spark has faded; is this really all there is? You look at your life, your marriage, your relationships, and somewhere underneath it runs a low, persistent ache of dissatisfaction, a hunger that a good evening can quiet for a night, but that always comes creeping back by morning. Never quite enough.

Now the world has an explanation for that ache, and it is always the same: you need more. More romance, more attention, a more attentive man, a more exciting life, a bigger gesture, a newer thing. The ache, says the world, is a signal that you are being underfed, and the cure is a larger portion of exactly what you have been eating.

The ache is not telling you that you need more. It is telling you that you are drinking from the wrong well.

But the ache is not telling you that you need more. The ache is telling you that you are drinking from the wrong well. For this is the unfailing mark of an idol, and it is worth learning to recognize, because we will see it again and again before this booklet is done: an idol can never satisfy you. It was not built to. It takes and takes and gives back only thirst. The more you drink, the thirstier you become, and you mistake the thirst for a signal to drink more deeply from the very thing that is drying you out.

Do you remember the woman at the well, in the fourth chapter of John? She had had five husbands, and the man she was with then was not her husband. Here was a woman who had gone looking for something, for love, for security, for the thing that would finally make her whole, in one man after another after another. She was still coming to the well alone in the heat of the day, still empty, still thirsty. And the Lord Jesus, who knew every bit of it, did not leave her wanting comfortably in her sin; He named it plainly, that she had had five husbands, and only then showed her that she had been drinking from the wrong well all along.²

“Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst.”

– John 4:13–14

Do you hear what He is saying to her, and to you? It is not that her thirst was wrong. Thirst is not wrong; we were made thirsty, made with a great aching capacity that cries out to be filled. The trouble was the well. She kept lowering her bucket into the cracked cistern of human romance and hauling up nothing, and calling the nothing a reason to try one more man, which in plain words is adultery. He offered her instead the only water that fills, Himself, the living water, and told her that the soul that drinks of Him shall never thirst that way again.

So before we take apart the lie piece by piece, hold this one truth like a lantern, because everything else in this booklet is lit by it: if you feel like there is never enough, the answer is almost certainly not a bigger drink of the same water. The answer is that you have been lowering your bucket into a well that was never going to fill you, and there is another well, and it has water in it, and the woman who drinks there stops being so desperately, exhaustingly thirsty for everything else.

chapter four

the difference that was invented

Here is the part of this study that I think will surprise you most, because it pulls the rug clean out from under the whole thing. And I want to be precise here, because it would be easy to hear me saying something I am not saying. Men and women are different. Truly, really, by design. God made them male and female, and He did it in the garden, before sin ever entered the world, so the difference between us is not a result of the fall and not a thing to be erased. That difference is real and good and God-given, and I will not breathe a word against it. Hear that clearly before I say the next thing.

Here is the next thing. The particular picture of that difference that you have been handed, the one that says women are the soft, emotional, sentiment-driven sex, weeping and feeling and longing, while men are the stony creatures who simply do not understand, that specific portrait is far more recent than you have been led to believe, and far more manufactured. It is not the eternal truth of womanhood. It is, in large part, a costume sewn in the last two centuries and then hung on all of us as though we had been born wearing it.

Go and look at the history yourself; I do not ask you to take my word for it. The sharp split of the world into two halves, a hard, rational, public world that belongs to men, and a soft, emotional, private world of the home that belongs to women, is something historians can actually date. It gathered force in the 1790s and hardened into a full-blown ideology through the 1800s, the era we now call Victorian. They gave it names in their own time: the doctrine of separate spheres, the cult of domesticity. It taught that a woman’s very nature was tender, delicate, emotional, and suited only to the hearth, and it taught it so thoroughly, in so many novels and sermons and ladies’ magazines, that within a few generations everyone simply assumed it had always been so.³

But it had not always been so. Go back further and you find women depicted very differently, as shrewd, capable, hardworking managers of households that were themselves centers of real production; as women who bought and sold, who ran farms and trades and kept the accounts, who were tough and practical because survival required it. You do not find, in most of human history, this notion that a woman is a delicate vessel of feeling who must be romanced into contentment. That is a comparatively new idea, and a comparatively wealthy one, a luxury costume for a leisured age.

What nurture has built, nurture can break. It is not bred in the bone. It is painted on, and paint comes off.

And here is where I want you to feel the ground shift. If the women-are-all-emotion portrait is not ancient and not universal but recent and invented, then it is not nature. It is nurture, something taught into us, drilled into us, generation handing it down to generation until it feels as natural as breathing. And that matters enormously, because of this simple, freeing fact: what nurture has built, nurture can break. A thing that was trained into you can be untrained. You are not a prisoner of this-is-just-how-women-are, because a great deal of how women supposedly are is in fact how women were taught to be. It is not bred in the bone. It is painted on, and paint comes off.

I raise it here only far enough to knock the legs out from under the romance lie, because the romance lie is built squarely on top of this invented difference. It needs you to believe that you are a creature who runs on romantic feeling, who must be emotionally swept away, who is fundamentally so unlike a man that only an endless supply of the right gestures can bridge the gap. And once you see that the very foundation is a costume and not your skin, the whole structure standing on it begins to lean. You are a woman, made by God, truly and beautifully different from a man. But you are not the fragile feelings-creature the last two centuries painted. You never were.

chapter five

the diamond that was not forever

If you doubt how easily a whole culture can be taught to want something and then be convinced it had wanted it all along, let me hand you the single cleanest proof I know. It is sitting, very possibly, on your own left hand. Ask almost any woman why an engagement is sealed with a diamond, and she will tell you it is timeless, that diamonds have always meant love, that a diamond is forever, that this is simply how it has always been done. It feels ancient. It feels like one of the fixed stars of romance. It is nothing of the kind.

Before the Second World War, only a small fraction of American engagement rings contained a diamond at all, by the best accounts somewhere around one in ten. The diamond engagement ring as a near-universal expectation simply did not exist. Then, in the late 1930s, the De Beers diamond company, whose sales had collapsed in the Great Depression, hired the advertising agency N. W. Ayer to fix the problem. And in 1947 a copywriter named Frances Gerety, at the end of a long night’s work, scratched out four words: A Diamond Is Forever.⁴

“There is no new thing under the sun… and that which is done is that which shall be done.”

– Ecclesiastes 1:9

A marketing department reached into the collective heart of womankind and installed a longing, and we have been calling it timeless romance ever since.

That slogan, and the campaign around it, did not describe a tradition. It created one. They planted stories in the magazines, placed the rings in the films, lent the jewels to the actresses, and quietly taught an entire civilization that a man who loved you would prove it with a diamond, and that the size of the stone was the measure of the love. Within a generation the thing was done: by the end of the century the overwhelming majority of brides expected a diamond, and believed, with perfect sincerity, that they always had. A marketing department reached into the collective heart of womankind and installed a longing, and we have been calling it timeless romance ever since.

Now hear me, because I am not saying there is anything wrong with a diamond. A ring is a lovely thing; a husband who gives one does a kind thing; I am not asking anyone to pry the stone off her finger. I am asking you to notice the ease with which a feeling that seems like the most natural, eternal, womanly thing in the world turned out to be, on inspection, a twentieth-century advertising campaign. It was sold to us. And we bought it so completely that we forgot we had ever been sold anything.

So I ask you the obvious and uncomfortable question: if the single most iconic symbol of romantic love in the modern world, the diamond ring itself, is in truth a piece of marketing barely older than your grandmother, then how much else of what feels like timeless, natural, God-given female longing is in fact a thing that was sold to you? The flowers, the chocolates, the prescribed gestures, the whole calendar of manufactured romantic occasions, a great deal of it built, like the diamond, for one simple reason: because there was money in teaching you to want it. That is not a comfortable thought. It is meant not to be. But it is a freeing one, because the moment you can see the price tag on a thing, it loses its power to rule you, and a longing you can recognize as installed is a longing you can begin to lay down.

chapter six

men written by women

I have to be careful here, because I have spent several chapters telling you that the emotional, romance-needing picture of womanhood is a costume, and someone is going to hear that and conclude that I think a woman ought not to long for a strong man at all. That is not what I think, and it is not what the Scripture teaches. So let me draw a line down the middle of this, because there is a real thing and there is a counterfeit, and they look alike from a distance.

Here is the real thing. A woman is genuinely, rightly drawn to a man who is strong, and I mean strong in the way that matters. Not a man with large arms, though there is no harm in those. I mean a man whose identity is secure, and secure in the right place first: anchored in the Lord, not in her, not in his work, not in his conquests, not in her approval. A man who knows who he is before God, and who therefore does not need her to prop him up or complete him. And out of that settled strength, a man who knows how to protect, to provide, to cover, to stand between his household and the storm. Provision is not merely a paycheck; it is covering, safety, steadiness, a roof under which the people he loves can rest without fear. A woman was made to love and respect a man like that, and there is nothing in the world wrong with the longing. She was designed for it.

Now here is where it goes wrong, and it goes wrong in two opposite directions at once, which is the thing I most want you to see. The romance culture takes that true and God-given longing for a strong, covering man and it sells you back a forgery of him. But it does not sell you only one forgery. It sells you two, and they are opposites, and most women are hooked by one or the other, and both are lies.

It does not sell you one forgery. It sells you two, and they are opposites, and both are lies.

The first forgery is the beast. The dangerous man who consumes. This is the whole engine of Fifty Shades, which dressed up a controlling, dominating man as the height of desire and sold that fantasy to women by the tens of millions, and it is the shadow lurking in Twilight too, where Edward’s possessiveness and obsession, the watching her sleep, the deciding for her, get repainted as devotion. The lie here is that it dresses domination up to look like strength, when they are opposites. A man who controls is not strong; he is a slave to his own appetites. A man who consumes a woman is not covering her; he is feeding on her. Domination is not protection. Control is not covering. That is what the modern therapy culture, wrong more often than not, here correctly calls narcissism. Scripture calls it even more plainly still: self-love, which is pride.

The second forgery is the opposite, and the church rarely warns about it because it looks so harmless, even sweet. It is the man who is not a man at all, but a woman in a man’s body. The one who is all feelings, endlessly attentive, always available, who reads her heart perfectly and says the perfect tender thing and wants nothing more than to process emotions with her by candlelight. He is the hero of a thousand Hallmark movies and the book-boyfriend of a thousand romance novels, and he is a fantasy too, just a quieter one. He is not a strong man softened; he is not a man at all. He is what a woman imagines she would be if she were a man, projected onto a male body and handed back to her as her ideal. And a steady diet of him will leave a woman just as unable to love a real husband, because a real husband is not a girlfriend with stubble. He is a man, and a man is a different creature, and she has been taught to want something that does not exist.

The beast is a woman’s fear of a man. The lapdog is a woman’s wish to be the man. Neither one is a man.

And here is the thing that ties the two forgeries together, and it is worth saying plainly even though it will sting. Look at who writes these men. Fifty Shades, a woman. Twilight, a woman. The romance novels, overwhelmingly women. The Hallmark movies, largely women. This whole vast machine of fantasy men is, in the main, men as imagined and written by women, and the striking thing, once you see it, is that women write men almost uniformly wrong, and wrong in exactly these two directions: either the domineering beast or the soft woman-in-a-man’s-body. It is not an accident that those are the two, because those are the two shapes the deception takes. If you want to see men written closer to what men actually are, you do not go to the romance shelf; you go to the things men themselves make and love, the John Wick and the Jason Statham films, yes, but more than that the stories of fatherhood and brotherhood and duty, Band of Brothers and the like, where men are shown as men see men.⁵

So let me say it as the shot across the bow it is meant to be, and then guard it fairly. If you see a man written by a woman, be wary. Not as an ironclad law, but as a caution that will hold true far more often than not, because it will almost always be one of the two forgeries. There are exceptions, a very few, and it is only fair to name one: Kathryn Bigelow, who directed Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker, renders men truer than nearly any woman working, and she is proof it can be done. But she is the rare exception that shows how rare it is. And it cuts the other way too, in fairness: plenty of men write this same soft fantasy, so it is not simply that women cannot and men can. It is that the romance machine is mostly built by women, for women, and it mostly gets men wrong in these two ways, and a daughter of God ought to know that before she lets it teach her what to want.

But I have saved the most important thing for last, because it is the whole reason this belongs in a booklet like this one. The women who write these men are not villains. They are, most of them, deceived, exactly as this whole the daughters of God are being deceived. Do you see what the two forgeries actually are? They are what happens when a real, God-given longing gets loose from the truth and runs to an extreme. The beast is that longing twisted into fear and control; the lapdog is that longing twisted into a wish to erase the very difference she was made to complement. Same good desire at the root, deceived into two opposite ditches. So when a woman writes one of these men, she is not merely writing badly. She is showing us, on the page, the deception at work in her own heart, and in ours. That is why it is here. Not so you can sneer at the writers, but so you can look at the two forgeries and recognize the pull of both in yourself, and be free of them.

“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.”

– Ephesians 5:25

For the real man, the one neither forgery can imitate, is the man patterned after Christ toward His church: strength that spends itself in protecting, providing, laying down its life. It is strength for her, not strength over her, and not strength dissolved into her either. The beast keeps the strength and aims it at his own appetite. The lapdog keeps the tenderness and throws the strength away. The true man keeps both and points them where Christ pointed His: outward, downward, toward the good of the one he covers. That is the thing the forgeries were only ever imitating, and it is real, and it is worth holding out for and worth building toward, and it is nothing the romance machine has ever once put on a page or a screen.

And do you see why the forgeries sell so well? Because the real longing underneath them is true. The industry could not have moved so many copies of a fantasy about a controlling man, nor filled a hundred Christmas movies with a fantasy about a feelings-man, if women did not carry, down deep, a genuine God-given desire for a strong and covering one. The industry is parasitic. It finds a real hunger that God placed in you and answers it with a poisoned counterfeit, in whichever of the two flavors you prefer. The problem was never your longing. The longing is good. The problem is that you were handed a forgery, or two of them, and told one was the real thing. So do not conclude that the fantasy is meeting a need it has no business meeting. Conclude what a daughter of God ought to conclude: that a true and holy longing has been hijacked, counterfeited, and sold back to you, and then go looking for the real thing the forgeries were only imitating.

chapter seven

eros on the throne

We need to talk now about a particular kind of love, and about how it climbed up onto a throne that was never meant for it. The old Greeks, whose language the New Testament is written in, had more than one word for what we flatten into the single English word love. There was storge, the affection of family. There was philia, the love of friends and the bond of deep companionship. And there was agape, the highest of them, the self-giving, sacrificial, covenant love that chooses the good of the other whatever the cost. These are the loves the Holy Spirit reached for when He moved the writers of the New Testament to set down the Word of God.

But there was a fourth word, and I want you to notice what was done with it. The Greeks also had eros, romantic and passionate desire, the love that wants, the love of being swept away and consumed. And here is the thing you are almost never told from a pulpit: the word never once appears in the New Testament. Not a single time. The men who wrote the Scriptures knew the word, it was common in their own tongue, on every street and in every poem, and they deliberately, pointedly, did not use it. When the Spirit of God built His vocabulary of love, He passed over eros entirely. That is not an accident or an oversight. That is a choice, and the choice is a sermon all its own.⁶

When the Spirit of God built His vocabulary of love, He passed over eros entirely. That is a choice, and the choice is a sermon all its own.

Why would they refuse it? Because eros was never a clean thing waiting to be baptized. To the Greek mind it was a god, Eros, a deity, a divine power that seized its victims and overwhelmed their reason; the Romans called him Cupid and armed him with arrows that struck men and women mad with desire against their will. This was not romance as a sweet gift; it was romance as a possessing, maddening force. And their own philosophers built it up higher still. In Plato’s Symposium, eros becomes a ladder, a climbing, ascending hunger that uses the thing in front of it as a rung toward the next, never satisfied, always straining upward toward some higher object. A ladder of longing that, by its very design, can never arrive.⁷

So understand what the modern religion of romance actually is. It did not fall out of heaven. It is eros, the pagan god, the maddening possessing force, Plato’s restless ladder, dragged up out of the ground where the Spirit of God left it buried, and crowned king over every other love. Find your soulmate. Follow your heart. Chase the spark. When the feeling fades, the love is gone and you are free to climb to the next rung. That is not a Christian idea wearing worldly clothes. That is a frankly pagan thing that the church should have wanted nothing to do with, the very word our own Scriptures would not so much as print, and we have not only made our peace with it, we have enthroned it and called it the meaning of life.

And it has a long pedigree, this enthroning. The Greek god, the Roman arrows, and much later the medieval troubadours with their courtly love, the cult of the unattainable lady and the knight consumed with longing for her, from which a great deal of what we now call timeless romance descends. Passion-worship has been clawing its way toward the throne for a very long time, and for most of that long stretch the church knew better than to bow. Somewhere along the way, sadly, the church forgot, and began to baptize the very thing the apostles refused to name.

For here is what Scripture does instead, and it is a quiet revolution if you have eyes to see it. When the Bible builds a marriage, it does not build it on the passion the world worships. It builds it on agape. The husband is not commanded to feel a spark for his wife; he is commanded to love her as Christ loved the church, that is, to give himself for her. The thing that holds a marriage together, in the mind of God, is not the volatile feeling on the throne. It is the steady, chosen, self-giving covenant love that does not rise and fall with the feeling at all, the love that gives, as Christ gave, rather than the love that wants and climbs and consumes.

Do you feel the weight lift even a little, just in hearing that? You have very likely spent years afraid of the day the spark would fade, because you were taught that the spark was the love, and that when it went, the love had died. But the spark was never the foundation. A warm affection inside a marriage is a good and lovely thing, and I am not at war with affection or with desire inside a marriage. But that warmth was always meant to be a guest in the house, never the pillar holding up the roof, and certainly never a god. The pillar is agape. And agape does not fade, because agape was never a feeling at all. It is a choice you make and a thing you do.

chapter eight

the treadmill

Here is the actual machinery of the lie, the gears underneath it, because once you see how it is built, you can never quite un-see it, and that is the beginning of getting off of it. The romance culture runs on a treadmill. I can think of no truer word for it. You are promised a feeling, the swept-away spark, and for a little while, when you get it, you do feel it. But here is the cruel engineering of the thing: the feeling never lasts, and the next time it takes a little more to reach the same height. What thrilled you last year is ordinary this year. The gesture that once would have melted you now barely registers. So you need more, and bigger, and newer, and you are walking faster and faster on a belt that is going nowhere, and calling the exhaustion love.

It is the exact mechanism of an addiction: the culture trains a tolerance, and then sells you the cure for the very craving it created.

If that pattern sounds familiar, it should, because it is the exact mechanism of an addiction. The drunkard needs more drink to feel what one drink once gave him; the addict chases a first high he will never feel again, taking more and more only to keep the emptiness at bay. That is not a harsh comparison; it is simply an honest one. The romance culture trains in you a tolerance, precisely the way a drug does, and then it sells you the cure for the very craving it created, which is, of course, more of itself.⁸

And mark this well, because it is the heart of the cruelty: the treadmill is rigged so that no one can ever win it. The woman can never get enough, because the whole system is engineered to keep her wanting. And the man can never give enough, because the bar he is asked to clear rises every single time he clears it. He brings flowers; soon flowers are nothing. He plans the evening; soon a grander evening is needed to feel like anything at all. He is set up, by the very design of the thing, to fail, not because he is a bad man, but because he has been handed a task with no finish line. A faithful, hardworking, present husband stands there having genuinely loved his wife, and is treated as a disappointment, because he cannot out-run a fantasy that accelerates the moment he catches up to it. There is something almost wicked in it, when you see it plainly: a machine that guarantees the woman will feel starved and the man will feel a failure, and calls the whole miserable arrangement romance.

Now I must touch something heavier. The marriage crisis in the church is real, and it is not new, and it has been deepening for the better part of a century. We are all fallen creatures; of course two sinners under one roof will have trouble, that has been true since Eden and needs no special explanation. But I am convinced that this treadmill is one of the quiet engines grinding marriages down, even inside the church, perhaps especially inside the church, because the church took the world’s worship of eros, wrapped it in Christian paper, and handed it back to us as though it were holy. A wife taught to measure her marriage by the spark will always find it wanting. A husband taught that his job is to keep her perpetually swept away will always, eventually, fail. And two good people who genuinely love each other can be slowly crushed between the fantasy and the reality, never once suspecting that the fantasy itself was the thing breaking them. The treadmill cannot be won. It can only be stepped off of.

chapter nine

the calf in christian wrapping

I could spend this whole booklet pointing at the world, and it would be easy, and it would let us all off the hook. The painful part, the part that made me angry, the part I promised I would not flinch from, is what the church has done with all of this. Because the church did not resist the romance lie. The church baptized it.

Look at what we have built inside our own walls. The marriage conferences with their breathless promise to reignite your passion. The endless studies built not on the hard, holy work of covenant but on feelings, on tips for keeping the spark alive, on how to get your needs met, on the husband’s solemn duty to pursue and romance and sweep his wife off her feet as though that were the sum of godly manhood. And the whole industry of Christian romance fiction, which took the world’s swept-away fantasy, trimmed off the most explicit bits, sprinkled it with Scripture, and sold it back to us as wholesome. We made our own Christian version of the very thing, so we could keep the idol and feel holy about it: the inspirational-romance shelf at the Christian bookstore, the Amish-romance novels stacked by the dozen, books passed reverently from woman to woman in the church as though they fed the soul instead of starving it. It is the same eros idol; it has simply been handed a study guide.

And the soft, pious teaching that God has a soulmate picked out for you and will deliver him in His timing, which is nothing but the world’s fairy tale with a coat of theological paint, training a generation of young women to wait on a feeling and call their longing faith. It begins early. We hand it to our little girls before they can read: Cinderella and her glass slipper, Sleeping Beauty waiting to be woken by true love’s kiss, Rapunzel in the tower waiting for the prince who completes her, the wedding that is the end of the story, as though life crests at the altar and the marriage afterward is a mere footnote. The girl grows up with the fantasy woven so deep into her that she mistakes it for her own heart.

We have taught women to want the wedding more than the marriage, the peak more than the union.

And notice the tell of the whole thing: the culture, and the church right along with it, pours its treasure into the wedding, the dress, the day, the spectacle, the perfect romantic peak, and almost nothing into the marriage, which is the actual covenant and the actual work. We have taught women to want the wedding more than the marriage, the peak more than the union. It is the spectacle eclipsing the substance, every time. And then there is the comparison, which the little glowing rectangle in your hand has turned from an occasional temptation into a daily flood: the other husband’s grand gesture posted for all to admire, the flowers on the kitchen island with the caption about how blessed she is. You measure your own quiet, faithful husband against a thousand curated peak moments belonging to a thousand other women, and of course he comes up short, because you are comparing the whole unedited reality of your marriage against everyone else’s highlight reel. And the ache says: why do I not have that? More, more, the wrong well. And underneath it, if we are honest, sits an ugly little root with an old name, discontent, which is only ingratitude wearing perfume: the refusal to receive the real and present gift because it is not the fantasy.

And here I have to step on some toes, because there is a wildly popular framework, beloved in the church and taught in the retreats and the premarital classes and the small-group studies, that has done a great deal more harm than the good it promised. You very likely know the one I mean: Gary Chapman’s Five Love Languages. It tells you that each of us has a particular language, one of a tidy handful of them, through which we chiefly receive love, and that your spouse must learn to speak yours if your tank is to be filled. I will not be unkind about the man who built it, for he professes the name of Christ. But profession of faith does not sanctify a method, and here is the trouble at the very root of this one: it is not drawn from Scripture at all. It is a secular, psychological framework dressed in Christian clothes and carried into the church as though the baptizing of it made it sound. It did not. We cannot take the world’s psychology of self-fulfillment, sprinkle a few verses over it, and call it discipleship.⁹

And once you see what the framework is actually built upon, you see the rot: it is a system organized entirely around the meeting of my needs, the filling of my tank, the satisfying of my desires in my preferred currency. This is the exact opposite of agape. That is not the love of Scripture. That is self-actualization wearing a counselor’s cardigan, the very same hunger for self-fulfillment we have been tracing through this whole booklet, now handed to the church as marriage advice. And worse, its foundation is simply false. For the truth is that we do not each run on one channel while the others scarcely matter to us. We all want them all. Every soul alive wants kind words, and wants help, and wants to be given to, and wants time and attention, and wants to be held. We may lean a little heavier on one or another, but no woman truly does without the rest, and the moment a husband is taught that touch is not her language and may be safely neglected, a wife is being quietly starved in a way she very much feels. The framework teaches you to identify and demand your preferred input as a thing you are owed. It turns love into shopping. It reimagines love as getting your tank filled in your favorite currency, which is the very opposite of the self-giving, self-spending love the Lord commands.

Same calf. The world cast it in plain gold and the church re-cast it in gold with a cross stamped on the side.

Same calf. The world cast it in plain gold and the church re-cast it in gold with a cross stamped on the side, but it is the same calf, and we have been dancing around it in the sanctuary and calling it worship.

chapter ten

tearing it down

So what do we do, now that we have seen the lie from every side? We tear the idol down. And I want to show you that tearing it down is not the grim, joyless thing you might fear, that it is, in fact, the very doorway into the joy the lie kept promising and never delivered. Start with the truth that undoes the whole machine. Love is not a feeling that happens to you. The world says it is; you fall, you are swept, and when the swept feeling stops, the love is simply over, and you are free to go find it again with someone new. That single lie has emptied more marriages than perhaps any other. But it is a lie. Turn to the great chapter, the one read at all the weddings, and look at what it actually says.

“Charity suffereth long, and is kind… beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.”

– 1 Corinthians 13:4, 7

Every word of it is a verb. It is not a list of feelings love has; it is a list of things love does.

Every word of it is a verb. Suffers long. Is kind. Bears. Believes. Hopes. Endures. It is not a list of feelings love has; it is a list of things love does. The love the Bible holds up as the highest is agape, and agape is not something you fall into, it is something you choose and something you do, again and again, on the mornings you feel it and the mornings you do not. God so loved the world, that He gave. His love was proved not in a feeling but in an action, in the giving of His Son. And that is the love a marriage is built on: chosen, active, self-spending, steady as a foundation precisely because it does not depend on the weather of the emotions. So when you hear yourself say, or hear another woman say, I just do not feel it anymore, you may answer, gently, that the feeling was never the thing. The thing is still fully within your power, because the thing was always a choice and never a feeling.¹⁰

Now name the idol honestly, for it has a face. For the married woman, the romance idol most often becomes the husband himself: he is asked to be her completion, her fulfillment, her everything, the source of a satisfaction no mortal man was ever built to supply. That is a crushing weight to lay on a man, and it is, plainly, idolatry: she has set him in the place of God and is furious with him for not being God. For the unmarried woman, the idol is just as real, only it wears the face of a man who does not yet exist, the future husband, the imagined one who will finally make her life begin, so that the present is merely a waiting room and she cannot be content or whole until he arrives. Either way, married or single, a person has been placed on the throne where God belongs, and made to bear a weight that crushes him and starves her both.

So take him down off the throne, the real husband or the imagined one, and put the Lord back where He belongs. Go and drink, at last, from the well that actually has water in it. And here is the wonder of it, the thing the lie never told you: when you stop demanding that romance be your god, you are finally free to enjoy it as a gift. The idol could never be enjoyed; it could only be served, and feared, and fed. But a gift received from your Father’s hand, held with open palms and no desperation, that can be enjoyed freely, lightly, with a glad and grateful heart. Tear the idol down and you do not lose romance; you receive it back, clean, for the first time. The marriage grows lighter. The man is finally allowed to succeed instead of always failing. And the woman, no longer starving, no longer measuring, no longer thirsty unto death for the next gesture, can simply love and be loved.

Tear the idol down and you do not lose romance. You receive it back, clean, for the first time.

And hear the largeness of what you are freed into. A woman who is not starving is a woman who can finally be generous. When you are no longer measuring him against the fantasy, no longer lowering your bucket into the dry well and coming up angry, you have something to give instead of only a hunger to be fed. You can love your husband as he actually is rather than resenting him for the man in the book. You can enjoy the single season instead of treating it as a waiting room. You can receive a small, ordinary kindness as the gift it is rather than the down payment on a debt. That is what comes back to you on the far side of the torn-down idol, and this freedom belongs to every one of you alike: the wife and the single woman, the mother and the one longing to be one, the young woman and the widow. Your worth was never in a man’s gestures, and your fullness was never going to come up out of that dry and cracking well. There is a well with living water in it. Go and drink, and you will find, to your astonishment, that you finally have enough, and more than enough, and to spare.