What Did You Expect?

I did not like this book. Tim Keller’s book, the Meaning of Marriage, is a much better written, more complete, and more accurate Biblical guidance on marriage. John Gottman’s book, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail, gives much more practical insight on how to talk about your marriage and make changes. This book in comparison to both of the above is EXTREMELY repetitive. There are some good points, and some good insights tucked away in this book, but they are surrounded by very repetitive content. You get many details about how several couples met and how their marriage got into trouble, but then you only get generalizations and no really specific examples of how they got better. I found this continually frustrating. His main thesis is that ALL marital trouble stems from a lack of spiritual maturity. But if this were really true, NO non-believing couples would have happy and satisfying marriages, and they do. So while spiritual maturity may be a way to help a failing marriage, it certainly cannot be the reason for why all marriages have problems in the first place. He also only gives examples where no affairs, no abuse, or anything huge has gone wrong. Which may leave those couples feeling out in the cold when reading this book. He also touches so lightly on sex you might think this is a book written for a pre-teen audience. While nothing he says is particularly wrong, it is all just very general. He also strategically AVOIDS the passages in the Bible which specifically address marriage, which seems strange. It is fine for him to use the whole bible and the full gospel message as a context, but the Bible has a lot to say about marriage specifically, and he avoids it completely. The Bible deserves better from someone who is basing their whole philosophy of marriage on the Bible.