Sheila Wray Gregoire's Blog, page 144
December 8, 2016
Family Fun Board Games
Usually I buy us a special game each year–a newer game that maybe many people have never heard of, but we try it out and play it and have a great time!
One of the most popular posts on this blog is my post on two-player board games. I wrote it originally a few years ago, and then I kept replacing some games with other great ones that people recommended, so it’s been constantly updated. Some are old staples, but some are newer games that are really fun!
And today I thought I’d share some of our family’s favourite family board games to get you ready for family time this Christmas!
Great Family Board Games for Families with Little Kids

This inexpensive game was our family’s staple for years! Basically each player is growing their own beans. Yes, beans. There are a whole variety of beans in the game–blue beans and green beans are really common, but cocoa beans are worth a lot (the game makers are very smart).
You can only plant one type of bean in each field, and you start with two fields, which you can expand over time. And you have to plant the beans that are in your hand in order. So if you have a bean that you can’t plant, you have to trade it for something you do want. It’s the trading that’s the fun part, and kids have to be old enough to understand that a cocoa bean for a green bean is a really bad trade, no matter how much their sister tries to con them into it. But it’s really easy to learn and kids love the pictures!

I always liked this game because it taught such great spatial skills! Basically, each person gets their own colour (you can only play with 4 players, or you can play with two and each get to do the other colour). And each of your pieces has a different shape. You have to play all of your pieces to win (or the game is over when no one else can place a piece). But your pieces can only be placed corner to corner–no two sides can ever be against each other. So it takes some thinking! But even young children can conceptualize it.
Guillotine–$11.14
Okay, this card game sounds really gruesome–but it’s seriously fun! When our kids were little, all of their friends coming over for play dates always wanted to play Guillotine.
Basically, you’re a French executioner and you have to cut off people’s heads (they get cut off just by being at the front of the line when it’s your turn). And each person is worth a different number of points. The king is worth a ton. But the martyr is worth NEGATIVE points if you kill him! You have action cards in your hands which can shuffle the deck or move people around so that they come up for execution when it’s your turn.
It’s really, really easy to learn, and even younger children can get the hang of it. And it’s not as gruesome as it sounds (plus you can teach a lot of history!) Check it out!

This is a cool game where you build the city and you add tiles every turn, while placing your people to “claim” points. You get points for farming, or for a road, or for cities. And there are expansions that give you points for other things, too. And then, as you’re placing your tiles, you can cut off an opponent’s road, or cut their field in half, or do other things that take away points from them and add them to you. It isn’t hard to learn and it doesn’t take very long, and every game is different because you build it!
Set–$11.49
Here’s a card game where it’s all about matching–or not matching. This is going to be hard to explain, but once you get the concept, it’s easy. The cards have different colours, different shapes, different fills, and different numbers. A “set” is something with three cards where each element is either ALL the same, or ALL different. So you could have a set where they’re all purple, they’re all ovals, and they’re all fully shaded–but the numbers are all different. Or you could have a set where one is orange, one is purple, and one is green, and three different shapes, and three different fills, and three different numbers.
The neat thing about this game is that there’s NO advantage to being older. So kids can win as often as adults do (and our kids often beat us!) And it’s great at teaching patterning.
Now, what about when kids get older and can handle more strategy? Here are some games that don’t take too long!
Family Board Games that Take Around Half an Hour
Seriously, you need some that are fast!
Dominion–$29.97
We LOVE Dominion. Each Dominion game comes with 24 or 25 different cards which all do different things, but you actually only play with 10. So each game you can switch it up and something new will happen and the strategy will change! It’s super fast to learn and super fun. This was our family game back in 2012, and it’s become a staple. The next year I added an expansion to it–Dominion Intrigue, which adds more cards that you can potentially play, with a bunch of other suggested strategies.
We’ve played it with our own kids, but also with friends away at a cabin, and with people just over for dinner!

This is our new family favourite. Or at least, Keith and I love it the best! It will definitely played this Boxing Day. You choose a different era of the ancient world, and then you have tasks that you have to complete. Each era has 7 turns, and you get to choose cards and try to amass the most wealth, while also trading with those around you. I really enjoy this one, and it’s not that hard to explain. It takes about half an hour for each era.
Family Board Games That Can Take a Few Hours
When we were younger, it was all Monopoly or Risk! And those are certainly fun. But they’re not the only ones around anymore. Here are some more of our staples:
Settlers of Catan (now just called Catan, but I’m old school)–$31.48
A family staple! You build your initial settlements on resources–grain, iron, brick, sheep, or wood–and then each resource space has a number associated with it. Every time someone rolls that number on dice, you collect the resources for that square. And with those resources you build things–roads, settlements, cities. And that gets you points. But you can also block people in (that’s mean!) or try to get a monopoly on a resource. It’s really fun! And if you have more than four people, there’s also an expansion set for 5 or 6 players (we’ve used that; it works well).
This game will be to the next generation what Risk was to us.

Here’s a different kind of game because you’re not in competition with each other–you actually cooperate! Four diseases have broken out in the world, and your team of specialists has to cure them before they infect the populace too much. So you have to work to your strengths as characters. You can’t play with more than four players, though, which is unfortunate, but it’s still really fun!
Ticket to Ride–$29.39
Every time we have people over for dinner we play Ticket to Ride. It’s fairly easy to explain, and lots of fun to play! You start the game with three “routes”–routes that you have to build joining two cities. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, your routes overlap. (Like Toronto-Miami and Chicago-Miami). Sometimes, if you’re unlucky, they don’t. (Toronto-Miami and Seattle-Las Vegas). But you build your routes with your trains, and sometimes you even block other people in!
I’m actually pretty darn good at this game, if I do say so myself. Check it out here.
Family Board Games That Teenagers Will Really Love
Awkward Family Photos–$27.98
The photos are awkward. And so are the categories! You choose a photo for that particular turn, and then you roll the dice. For each dice roll there’s an assignment associated with it: What are the people in the picture thinking? What would make this photo even more awkward? If this photo were on a magazine cover, what would the magazine be called? What happened just before this picture was taken? Everyone has to write down their answer in secret, and then the “judge” for that round has to guess who gave each answer, and then gets to award points for the best answer. It’s super awkward. Which is awesome.

This card game exploded onto the scene last year with all of its exploding kittens and laser beams and sometimes goats. It’s just plain funny–and the cards and action cards are funny, too (if you like that kind of humour). You draw cards and play until someone explodes, so the goal is to get points before the other person happens to explode. We gave this one to our kids who live out of town last year, and they really like it, too!
Gloom–$17.74
If exploding kittens and guillotine weren’t gruesome enough for you, here’s the Gloom game! Each person has their own unfortunate family. Your goal is to kill off every member of your family in as gruesome a way as possible, and to have bad things happen to them. They may be “mocked by midgets” or “pursued by poodles”. And you can play happy things on your opponents (which will aggrieve them to no end). And it makes the game even more fun if, when you play the card, you make up a story to explain what happened.
When we were first getting to know our now son-in-law, Connor, we played this game. He was remarkably good at coming up with sad, unfortunate stories and circumstances. Not sure what that said to us.
December 7, 2016
On Economics, Sex, and Hillary Clinton’s Relationship to Women Like Me
I wish someone had just asked me.
I could have told them.
I love writing posts on how to help your marriage, and on how to build a great sex life, but every now and then, as my long-time readers know, I just like to rant a bit. And so today I hope you will all excuse me.
I don’t want this to be a political piece so much, because to me this isn’t about Democrats and Republicans as much as it is about marriage and our dating culture. And I have a LOT to say about this. (And I’ve already written about how I understand why women couldn’t vote for Donald Trump, too! I do get it. I just think this has more to do with marriage, and warrants its own post).
“Is it too much to ask that a guy doesn’t use porn?”
Let me start with a story. It was 1994, and I was sitting in my graduate student office at Queen’s University. An undergrad came in to get help on an essay she was writing. We ended up talking and she started tearing up and telling me about her boyfriend. They had been living together for a year, but he had all kinds of porn magazines all over the place. She didn’t like it, but what could she say?
All the guys she knew used porn.
And so she figured she must be a prude. Why couldn’t she just get over this? It was going to be impossible to find a guy who didn’t use porn, so she had better get used to it.
That conversation broke my heart.
Women have a unique experience that men just don’t have.
We worry that we will not be the sole object of our husband’s sexual attention, because naked women are on display everywhere–and many men look. And so we feel insecure. (I am not saying that women don’t look or that women don’t have affairs; only that the situation is heavily tilted in one direction).
Then there’s the feminist revolution, which somehow succeeded into making women sexual objects even more than they were before and calling it female empowerment.
Now that couples can have sex with zero risk of a baby (because she can always get an abortion), then sex becomes responsibility-free.
In economics what’s happened is that the “price” of sex has come down. In order to have sex several decades ago, people had to get married. Today you don’t even have to buy anyone dinner. The hooking up culture has become so commonplace that people don’t even know how to date anymore. By trying to free women from the strains of patriarchy, feminism inadvertently gave men what some of them always wanted–sex with no strings attached–without really giving women anything in return.
So you have these girls who grow up yearning to find real love–a man who will adore them, who won’t look elsewhere and who won’t check out all these other naked women, but will honestly commit for the rest of his life–but they’re lost.
How does true love happen in today’s culture?
That may be what we want, but that’s not what most women are getting (and I’m quite aware that women are often the driving force behind having sex casually. But deep inside, most still yearn to get married and have that lifetime commitment).
And we sense that things have gone off kilter. When you interview college-age females, there’s so much depression and anxiety because relationships aren’t working out well. How do you find real love when sex has been so degraded?
That’s what life was like when I was in grad school, too.
And then Bill Clinton became president.
We all knew about the affairs. They had been covered during the 1992 election. But because he was a Democrat, many feminists vouched for him. I remember an interview I heard during the 1992 campaign when Naomi Wolf, a woman I very much admired then, said that the tapes of conversations between Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers (the woman with whom he’d had a 12-year affair) made her respect Clinton more, because he talked to Flowers like she was an equal.
But what about Hillary? I thought. Who cares how he treated his mistress if he’s having an affair on his wife? Shouldn’t Hillary count? Why are we so quick to say that affairs don’t matter? What does that tell young girls who are just wanting to know that marriage for life is possible?
But Hillary stayed with him, despite the rumours.
Over the next few years that trickle of rumours escalated until it turned into a deluge.
Rape allegations. More affairs. More sexual assault allegations. And then Monica Lewinsky.
I was 27 when the Monica story broke. She was 21. Clinton was 52. I remember sitting in church one Sunday and looking around to try to identify men who were around 52. Then I tried to imagine anything sexual with them. GROSS!!!! Did people not see how disgusting this was? Did no one actually bother to think about what 21 and 52 means? What that says about Clinton as a person? Does he still “respect” women, Ms. Wolf, if he’s getting it on with his intern?
Hillary, of course, denied that the stories were true. We later found out that she had deliberately hired people to destroy the women’s reputations who were accusing Bill of rape or assault, or even just an affair. She eviscerated them in the press, because she needed to keep Bill’s reputation intact.
And so, after learning that her husband was a rapist, that he had used a 21-year-old intern, that he had had numerous affairs, what did Hillary do?
Absolutely diddly squat.
She stayed with him.
And that’s when she lost my generation of women.
We’ve learned since that Bill Clinton has had more affairs. That he has flown to convicted pedophile’s Jeffrey Epstein’s island 26 times, where underage children were being used as sex slaves. And Hillary? She keeps staying with him.
When the most powerful woman in the world can’t get her husband to love her unconditionally and be faithful to her, then what does that say for the rest of us who simply dream of it?
When the most powerful woman in the world doesn’t stand up for herself but lets her husband have dalliances with no consequences, what message does that send to women who actually think their husbands SHOULD stay faithful–that affairs actually matter?
Look, I completely believe in second chances and in forgiveness.
I have known so many marriages that have come back after affairs, and that have turned around, and that have been stronger than ever. But those marriages have come back not because the women said, “it’s okay, I forgive you.” It’s because they said, “this is serious. We need help. You will not continue to treat me this way. I don’t want to lose our marriage, but if we’re going to stay together, then it has to be a marriage–a real one.” And they’ve fought for it.
They’ve gone to the counsellors. They’ve arranged for accountability. They’ve worked on their own issues. And they’ve set clear boundaries that say, “no more of this.”
But when you paper over affairs again and again; when you stand by as your husband sexually assaults women; when you do nothing when your husband sexually harasses women at work–then you are the problem.
In fact, I have an easier time forgiving Bill than I do Hillary, which I know is actually quite sexist in my own brain. She turned her back on women like that young student in my office, who wondered if she was crazy for just wanting a guy who didn’t look at porn. Was that too much to ask? By ignoring Bill’s sins, Hillary told her, very emphatically, yes. It was too much to ask.
The sexual empowerment movement made the price of sex so low that now it’s hard to find love.
But then Hillary made the price of marriage low.
You no longer have to promise fidelity. You just have to promise, “I’ll keep you by my side, most of the time.”
Goodbye, fairytales.
Hillary Clinton changed how women of my generation saw marriage. And that was a tragedy.
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If Hillary had dumped Bill after the Lewinsky scandal, I think there’s a much greater chance that she’d be president today, because she would have shown that she understood how women felt. She would have shown some solidarity with those of us who just want a guy to love us forever. But she didn’t, because she showed that her own marriage was simply a sham, arranged so that she could get what she really wanted: Political power. And for those of us who really want a super strong family and to be loved, that makes no sense whatsoever.
I don’t know where that girl is today who sat in my office crying over her boyfriend’s Hustler magazines.
But I know many of you are in the same place as she is. Is it so wrong to just want a guy to love you? Is it too much to ask that he remain faithful, that he not text other women, that he not check other women out in public? Is it too much to ask that you’ll be his sole object of sexual attention?
No, it isn’t. We ARE to love each other unconditionally. We are called to faithfulness to our spouses, and the Bible gives NO excuses for messing up. 1 Corinthians 10:31 tells us that there are no temptations that can’t be overcome with God’s help. There is no “boys will be boys“. There’s only “boys choosing to be boys”.
And I have a great guy who has never, ever given me even a moment to doubt him. True love is possible. I see it everyday; I pray and believe it for my daughters; I know so many, many faithful men.
Yet increasingly, I think these faithful men are in the minority. We see far too many pastors fall in sexual sin. We hear pastors spreading that boys will be boys message. We hear about how hard it is to fight against porn.
And there’s a part of each woman that dies inside every time she hears that, who wonders, “really? Can’t I ever, just once, be enough?”
We know, too, that the problem does not just lie with men.
The problem lies with women as well, because what would happen if every woman just said “No”? If every woman in a dating relationship just had zero tolerance for porn or affairs, then men would step up the plate (the same goes the other way, too). Instinctively we know, just like that undergrad student did, that the more women give guys passes because “boys will be boys”, the more boys will act that way. And when high profile women do it? It makes it even worse. It defeats the girls who would have demanded better. It tells everybody, “all guys do this.” So what’s the sense in trying to wait for more?
That’s why women my age don’t like Hillary Clinton. It’s not about politics. It’s about love.
We may disagree with her on policy issues (which I certainly do). But we dislike her because she torpedoed girls’ dreams of real love. And you don’t take that away from a whole generation without paying the price.
Why Generation X women couldn't vote for Hillary: It's not what you think.
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The post On Economics, Sex, and Hillary Clinton’s Relationship to Women Like Me appeared first on To Love, Honor and Vacuum.
December 6, 2016
10 Ways to Have a SEXY Christmas!
In fact, to the words “sexy” and “Christmas” even go together?
I was a little hesitant to publish this, because I don’t want to seem sacrilegious. Obviously the purpose of Christmas is to remember Christ’s birth, and to look forward to His coming again. We’re supposed to remember “God with us”.
But maybe it’s because our anniversary is December 21, but I’ve always kind of associated Christmas with fun in marriage, too! And since I’m one who totally believes that hot and holy can go together, and who totally believes that God WANTS us to have fun in our marriages, then I think Christmas is a great time to reignite some of those marriage flames.
After all, you tend to have more time together around this time of year because work schedules fall off. There aren’t as many other commitments after December 20. Things shut down for two weeks. And grandparents are often around to watch the kids! And, besides, for many men, all they want for Christmas really IS you.
December 5, 2016
A Christmas Marriage Round Up!
And this morning we woke up to snow! It seems fitting. So I’m sitting with my tea and my hot water bottle and I’m feeling nice and cozy. And I’ve got the lights on on my Christmas tree, too.
December 2, 2016
If My Husband Betrays Me, How Can I Trust the Memories?
This week on To Love, Honor and Vacuum we’ve been looking at how to rebuild trust. We started with talking about how in Christian circles women have too often been taught to “respect” totally inappropriately, and that that can actually make marriage problems far worse. And then we’ve talked about porn addictions.
I want to end the week on hopefully a happier note–or at least a healing note. Every Friday I write a short, 400 word piece with one thought to take you through the weekend. I thought some of you may need this thought.
Sheila’s Marriage Moment: Was It All Just a Lie?
When you’ve been blindsided by an affair, or discovering your husband’s porn use, or something that makes you feel as if your husband rejected you, does that mean that everything else was a lie?
I recently received this email from a reader:
I feel like hubby and I are finally building a new standard for our relationship after 7 years of lies about the porn addiction. However, what I do struggle with now is knowing how to look back on our memories. Every time I remember something I used to cherish, I feel that it was all fake, like I was living a lie and I get this sick feeling in my stomach. I don’t know how to look at the “pre-porn-discovery” days without a sense of everything being tainted by lies.
I understand her pain. Can you?
Let me tell you about a family I used to know. Two boys in their late teens. Two very involved parents who were at every game. They took fun vacations as a family. They were a unit.
Then one summer the dad, out of the blue, confessed to an affair with a younger woman and moved in with her, and her three very young children.
Obviously the wife was devastated. But so were the boys. And they basically cut off contact with him (which really I totally understand). What was haunting them, though, was the question, “Did he ever really love us?”
He chose a younger woman over his faithful, fun wife. He chose three toddlers over his two teenagers. Was his love ever real?
One of the things I find most amazing about Scripture is how God talks about deeply flawed people. He calls David, a guy who committed adultery and plotted to have someone killed, was a man “after his own heart.”
How does that compute?
God sees what we want to be. God sees the desires of our hearts. And He knows that sometimes our actions don’t match up with those desires. But He judges us by whether our hearts really love Him.
That doesn’t mean sin doesn’t matter. There were real-life consequences for David. But David also repented and still loved God through it all, even if, for a time, he let his focus fall.
One of the hardest things to do in a relationship is to understand that someone can be both good and bad at the same time. That doesn’t mean that the bad doesn’t matter; it only means that the good matters, too.
If your husband has hurt you, feel that hurt. Don’t deny it. Don’t diminish it. Deal with it appropriately. But also remember that it’s okay to remember the good times. Your husband’s sin has hijacked your present. That doesn’t mean it has to steal your past, too.
If your husband's sin has hijacked your present, don't let it rob you of your past, too.
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I’ve written at length about this before in my article on the Hamilton musical. But when we were speaking at the Jasper marriage conference recently, I shared that concept, and a few women came up to me afterwards and told me how much it had helped them. So I just thought it needed to be said again.
What’s #1 at To Love, Honor and Vacuum?
#1 Post on the Blog: 10 Signs You’re Respecting Your Husband Too Much
#1 on the Blog Overall: 20 Two Player Games To Play With Your Husband
#2 from Facebook: Can We Cause Someone To Sin?
#3 from Pinterest: Creating Christmas Traditions When You Don’t Have Kids
I’m Done Until January!
I flew back from British Columbia last night and I’m done until January! No more speaking until we head back to Arizona and California after Christmas. I’m really excited to have a month to myself to get some work done and to start knitting some Christmas presents! I’ll do more of an update next week, but for now, I’m a little jetlagged. So I hope you have a great weekend, everyone!
The post If My Husband Betrays Me, How Can I Trust the Memories? appeared first on To Love, Honor and Vacuum.
December 1, 2016
How to Treat a Porn Addiction: A Psychologist Speaks
I’ve written a lot about what to do when you realize your husband watches porn, and why porn is so damaging to marriage–even if you watch it together.
Today Dr. Wyatt Fisher, a Christian psychologist with tons of experience in actually treating porn addiction. Porn is not harmless, and it can wreak havoc on relationships. But it’s not impossible to quit a porn addiction–and if you or your spouse watches porn, I hope these steps can bring the two of you to a road of healing.
Here’s Wyatt:
Since the beginning of time, men have wrestled with lust. King David is one of the best examples during Biblical times and most are familiar with his Bathsheba encounter in 2 Samuel 11: 2-4. He was up on his rooftop and spotted a beautiful woman in the village bathing naked. Does he turn away and repent of his lustful eyes? No, he calls her to his bedroom and has sex with her!
Many years later Jesus tells his audience “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28, NIV). Jesus wouldn’t warn his audience on a behavior unless it was something that happened often. Therefore, lust in the human heart is nothing new.
However, easy access to sexually explicit content through the internet is new. Now men have access to free pornography 24/7 right in their pocket on their phones. The combination of a lustful heart plus easy access has created an explosion of pornography addiction over the past few years that’s destroyed marriages, devastated families, wrecked employment, and in some cases even caused imprisonment. As most addiction specialist know, the three A’s to addiction are accessibility, affordability, and anonymity and porn provides all three. It’s accessible because it’s everywhere on the internet, it’s affordable because the majority of it is free, and it’s anonymous because you can view it without no one ever knowing.
Unfortunately, most men have no idea how addicting porn can be and how devastating the impact is. “Till an arrow pierces his liver, like a bird darting into a snare, little knowing it will cost him his life” (Proverbs 7:23, NIV). Porn has been shown to be as addictive as heroin or crack cocaine because it lights up the same reward center in the brain.1 Combating porn is not as simple as just deciding to stop. It’s a neurological addiction akin to alcohol or drug addiction, making it very complicated.
In addition, the Family Research Council reports that men who regularly view porn are more likely to feel dissatisfied with their wives and are at heightened risk for infidelity and divorce. As men consume porn filled with airbrushed bodies of women getting paid to be overly responsive, men often start preferring porn over real sex with their wife. Further, young people being raised with porn are becoming desensitized to it and view not recycling as more immoral than viewing pornography, according to a new study by Barna. Last, Barna reports that up to 64% of all Christian men are viewing pornography at least once a month. The power of pornography has infiltrated the church, filling men with shame, guilt, and powerlessness. Paul sums it up well when he says “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do … For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. “(Romans 7:15-19, NIV).
Something must be done! Here’s a list of ideas for couples to get started on winning the war with pornography!
1. Men: tell her
Husbands who struggle with porn addiction must open up to their wives about it. Women are often much more hurt when they accidentally discover their husband’s porn use compared to if he voluntarily admits it. When the wife accidentally finds out, not only does it feel like sexual betrayal, but it’s also a major breach in trust because of the lying and deceit about it, which is often more painful than the porn use itself.
2. Wives: balance your reaction
Wives, try to balance your reaction by not over-reacting but also not under-reacting. A wife who over-reacts threatens divorce and has no empathy for her husband’s porn addiction. This type of reaction often encourages the husband to dive deeper into secrecy to ensure his wife never finds out again. At the same time, a wife who under-reacts is also detrimental. She responds by being a bit disappointed but knows it’s a “guy thing” and not that big of deal. This type of reaction often doesn’t create enough motivation for the man to stop looking at porn because it doesn’t seem to really bother his wife.
3. Become a unified front
Couples must learn to become a unified front on battling porn. I specialize in marriage counseling in Boulder, CO and porn is a common problem with couples I see. Often, the goal is helping the husband completely open up about his porn use and helping the wife work through her feelings of betrayal and understanding why it’s such a struggle for her husband.
Similar to discovering your husband is an alcoholic, wives must spend time understanding pornography as a neurological addiction, why it’s so powerful for their husband, what his triggers are, and what about their marriage may influence it. For example, husbands who feel sexually satisfied in their marriage often have a decreased risk of pornography. However, it’s never the wife’s fault that her husband looks at porn because it’s ultimately his choice to cross the line. But, chronic sexual dissatisfaction within marriage can certainly increase a man’s temptation to turn to porn for fulfillment. “Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control” (1 Corinthians 7:5, NIV).
My wife and I created a free, online porn addiction help seminar to help couples become a unified front by first understanding the power of pornography and second learning how to overcome the power of pornography together.
4. Men must understand their past
Men must understand their story to understand what drives their porn addiction. They should make a timeline from childhood to current on all of their sexual encounters. When did they first see a naked women, what was their first sexual encounter, what was their sexual experiences like in high school and college, what was their relationship like with their mother, were they ever abused, etc.
These types of questions tend to reveal a lot about a man’s sexual story. For example, some men who struggle with porn may have had a mother who was cold and rejecting and looking at porn provides a woman’s attention they never received. Another example may be a man who never felt like he was successful with girls in high school compared to all his buddies but in porn he can finally feel like the alpha. Still others may have been the alpha male growing up with lots of sexual encounters and now they are married but porn allows them to keep that feeling alive.
Men must learn their history and what led to their porn addiction because it’s often fueled by something other than just the rush of seeing a naked woman. The Fight of Your Life by Clinton and Laasar is an excellent resource for this.
5. Eradicate it on the outside and inside
Men must develop a battle plan to start eradicating lust from their life both internally and externally. One of the first things men should do to eradicate porn externally is download a filter onto all of their devices, such as Covenant Eyes. This type of software will save them from themselves because even if they have a weak moment and desire porn the filter will block it for them.
For men who struggle with porn, if they have access to it somewhere, it’s usually just a matter of time before they view it. Similarly, an alcoholic trying to recover would never leave a bottle of Jack Daniels in the closet. In addition, it’s important to have the man’s wife set up the password for their account so they’re never tempted to login and disable the filter. Also, it’s ideal to set up their wife as their accountability partner to receive a weekly report with all of their online activity. Knowing their buddy who also struggles with porn will receive their accountability report may increase motivation some but knowing their wife will receive a report of all their online activity will send their motivation through the roof.
Next, men must pay attention to all of the subtle ways they’re fuelling their lust. They may not be looking at porn anymore, but how much do they view programs with sensuality, look at articles about the hottest celebs, stare at women’s breasts every time they see them in public, etc. Each man must track how they are feeding their lust and strive towards purity instead. Rather than seeing how much they can get away with before crossing the line, they must see how holy they can become so there’s not “even a hint of sexual immorality” (Ephesians 5:3, NIV).
Next, to eradicate lust from their life internally one of the most important things is to prioritize time with God daily. Men need time to get filled with His presence and power to help them overcome their lustful bent. Also, memorizing Scripture pertaining to lust is important so when temptation hits, they can counter it with the Word, similar to how Jesus rebuked Satan in the desert with Scripture.
Next, men must identity their maladaptive beliefs about women and learn to modify them. For example, after deep reflection and discussion, one man I worked with uncovered his belief that experiencing a woman’s breasts was the most important goal in life. Once he was able to articulate this belief, he then could critique and modify it. He eventually changed it to say, “Experiencing a woman’s breasts is not the most important goal in life and to think so is immature, the most important goal in life is honoring God, my family, and my career.” He put this new belief on his phone to meditate on it daily so it could slowly replace his original perspective. Doing so eventually helped him become less obsessed with women’s breasts and to keep them in proper perspective rather than as an idol in his life.
6. Relearning sex
Men should consider having a sex fast with no masturbation each time they fall into pornography for a period of time they and their wife agree upon. Doing so can serve as a natural consequence and provide an opportunity for them to regain mastery over their sexual behavior because it has just mastered them.
It also can provide time for their wife to heal from the breach in trust. In addition, men must learn how to have intimacy oriented sex rather than body oriented sex. Porn viewing makes men overly focused on body parts and sexual encounters become more about them getting their “high” than becoming one with their wife. Instead, men need to learn how to connect with their wives emotionally through sex. One excellent way to facilitate this is for men to share some of their loving feelings toward their wife before sex, focus on her pleasure during sex, and look into her eyes occasionally during the encounter and especially during orgasm. Eye contact will help men connect to their wife’s soul rather than just to her body.
Remember, overcoming porn addiction is often a journey and not a destination. There’s going to be setbacks so expect them. However, putting these steps into practice can send you well on your way to victory!
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Dr. Wyatt Fisher is a licensed psychologist. He and his wife lead Christian marriage retreats and he also runs a Christian dating site.
References:
1-Judith Reisman, Jeffrey Sanitover, Marry Anne Layden, and James B. Weaver, “Hearing on the brain science behind pornography addiction and the effects of addiction on families and communities,” Hearing to U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, Nov. 18, 2004.
The post How to Treat a Porn Addiction: A Psychologist Speaks appeared first on To Love, Honor and Vacuum.
November 30, 2016
How Your Husband Can Quit Porn: One Husband’s Advice
We’re living in a world where we have access to the entire world on our phones. And that includes the very dark and sinful parts of the world, too, not just videos of cats playing with baby ducklings.
But if your husband is struggling with porn, is there hope? It’s so easy to relapse, and the road to recovery can seem long and overwhelming at times.
Today I have a bit of encouragement for you. An anonymous guest poster is telling you his story of the struggles he faced while overcoming his porn addiction. But you know what? He overcame it. It is possible–so be encouraged.

For a bit more than six years I have been completely free of masturbation, porn, and any sort of sexually suggestive online or TV content (actually we do not have a TV anymore).
I consider my recovery from these corruptions as complete as it can be. I have reached a point where the desire to stick to what I have achieved, and the determination not to nullify so many years with just one unnecessary action, are much stronger than the temptations in a moment of weakness.
Prior to these six years, it took me about a year and a half of struggling, of failures, of development, until I could reach my goal.
These were really difficult times. I would like to share some of the lessons I learned, and I hope it offers some encouragement.
First of all, I don’t think that it is possible to attempt this struggle without the knowledge (and help) of one’s wife. I tried that at first, but that made me feel very lonely in my fight, made it hard to explain my bad moods and frustrated attitude, and all this made me weaker–which was not a good thing. Once I explained what was going on, that hurt my wife deeply, and for very long time. It was to be expected. The fact that I was fighting with it was of little consolation to her then. She was hurt by the knowledge that I am still occasionally relapsing into these activities. That sounds bad, but it was of great help, as wanting to stop hurting her was one of my biggest motivations.
Also, in spite of her pain and the pain that it was causing me, I felt a certain relief, and that our connection strengthened a lot. Which was very important for my progress.
Here are some of the struggles I had while quitting porn use:
I questioned if what I was attempting to achieve was even possible.
To a large extent this was because of things I had read online on the topic. Now I know it is.
Longer periods, like a week or two, without sex, which can happen to any couple for various reasons, did provoke a certain level of physical discomfort and feeling of “pressure”.
I had to learn to deal with that by going to the gym (which was very needed anyway!). A good workout decreased the discomfort, and also made falling asleep in such periods not a problem at all.
I needed to find a way to distract my thoughts to other subjects.
Some people get a hobby; me, I became a bit workaholic. That actually became a bit of an issue a couple of years later, but it was a problem much easier to solve than the one it partly replaced.
I was left without my main coping mechanism for my anxiety.
It turned out that looking at sexually suggestive content and masturbation was my main mechanism (a very maladapted one) for dealing with anxiety. That was a good time to find other mechanisms, ones that actually worked: gym, more sleep, magnesium with vitamin B, drinking more water, etc.
I believe that it is important to consider looking at porn or sexually suggestive content on the one hand, and masturbation on the other, as a whole, and to try to quit them together. I tried quitting first one and then the other, and that did not work for me. That being said, I know that all people are different, and that what works for one does not for another. I think finding the right way to quit requires patience and experimentation.
I don’t know if any of this would be of use or help to somebody, but if by any chance that happens, that would be great! If not, still it was of help to me, as it is always good to externalize our struggles, and because writing this down further strengthens my commitments.
This is a hard fight, but not an impossible one.
Have more questions about porn’s effects on a marriage, or how to handle discovering if your husband is using porn? Here are some other posts on the topic:
Reader Question: Is Watching Porn Together Okay if We Both Agree?
You Can Recover from Your Husband’s Porn Use
4 Things You Must Do If Your Husband Uses Porn
Regaining Intimacy and Rebuilding Trust After a Porn Addiction
Discovering Your Husband’s Porn Use

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November 29, 2016
10 Signs You’re Respecting Your Husband Too Much
That “men need respect and women need love” thing has been popularized in Christian circles in the last decade, and women are often encouraged to respect their husbands at all costs. There’s even a book that says that men need unconditional respect and women need unconditional love.
I know many have been helped by that book–but those people tend to be in marriages that are good, or at least marriages that may have grown distant but there’s a lot of goodwill there.
The problem I have is that the advice really doesn’t always work. It can too easily be one of those “Christian pat answers” that may sound right, but which actually can do some damage in some relationships.
While you can unconditionally love someone but still offer “tough love”, there’s no equivalent for “tough respect”.
For instance, if your drug addicted sister comes to you and asks for $500, it’s showing her love to refuse. But how do you offer respect to someone addicted to porn, or with anger management issues? I’ve argued that respect cannot mean respecting what they do, but rather respecting their right to make their own choices, free of manipulation from you. However, that also means that you have a right to make your own choices in return.
This week on To Love, Honor and Vacuum I want to look at how to rebuild trust after it’s been broken. And today, to start us off, I thought I’d try to offer a more balanced view of what healthy respect looks like in a relationship–and when we may be respecting too much.
Here’s the key: God’s goal is always that we look more and more like Christ, not just that we’re “nice”.
Therefore, if the way that we are acting is enabling people to look less like Christ, then we are doing something wrong.
If the way we are acting enables someone to look less like Christ, we're doing something wrong.
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Unfortunately, with the way that we often talk about respect, oftentimes women are encouraged to act in such a way that moves a husband away from Christlike behaviour.
So let’s look at 10 signs that you may be showing respect in an unhealthy way:
Can you RESPECT your husband too much? Yep. 10 ways respect can backfire:
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1. You don’t confront your husband when he’s doing something wrong.
The way respect is often explained, it sounds like we have to always respect his decisions and his actions, as if they are RIGHT. We’re told that men need women’s approval, and so if we disapprove, then we’re robbing him of a great need that he has.
But no one is ever perfect, and God created you as a “help meet” to your husband. And that includes helping him look more like Christ!
So if, for instance, you find your husband doing something wrong, like watching porn, you will confront him. Real respect is always a two-way street; a person can’t really feel respected by someone that they also can’t respect. And if you can’t confront him on things that are wrong, then you become a pushover. If you’re a doormat or a pushover, then your “respect” won’t register. You’ve become an object to use, not a person whose opinion matters.
If you become a doormat so that your husband doesn't respect you, your respect won't register.
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2. You find yourself apologizing when you were originally sure it was him who started the problem.
Maybe you try to confront your husband when you feel hurt or when you feel he did something wrong, but he always turns it around and blames you for it. And you tend to end up apologizing.
If his interpretation of events is the only one that matters, then you aren’t treating yourself as a helpmeet to your husband. You’re treating yourself as a doormat. Look, often when my husband and I are arguing, I’m sure I’m right, but as we talk, I realize I misunderstood something and I apologize. We SHOULD apologize when we’re wrong. But if you’re the one who is always apologizing, and your husband never admits any wrong, then it’s quite likely that you aren’t sticking up for truth. You’re allowing your husband to define it rather than listening to God.
3. When something is wrong with the way your husband is treating you, your first thought is to berate yourself for not being a good wife.
You’re quick to internalize problems in the marriage and blame yourself for them. Again, there is some truth: we are told to remove the plank from our own eye before we remove the speck from our brother’s eye (Matthew 7:3-5).
Sometimes, though, we’re quick to blame ourselves because we want to feel like we have some control. If we can just figure out the magic formula to make him act a certain way, then he’ll stop hurting us. But that assumes that the problem is ALWAYS with us. That’s not true. Let’s take responsibility for the things that we do wrong, but let’s make sure that we don’t take responsibility for things that are out of our control.
4. You study your husband so that you can avoid “setting him off”.
In a similar vein, if you spend your time studying your husband to see what “sets him off”, then that’s a sign that your husband isn’t respecting you and isn’t loving you.
A big theme in Scripture is that people “reap what they sow”. As I explained at length in 9 Thoughts That Can Change Your Marriage, though, often a husband may sow discord by being angry and critical, but we’re the ones who reap it by taking the blame and by trying to appease him. Instead, we should set limits, lovingly, on what we will accept, because it is not respecting someone to allow them to yell at you or criticize you. Let’s instead “spur each other to love and good deeds”, not encourage someone to act wrongly.
5. You study at length what you can do to turn the marriage around–which almost inevitably means being “nicer”.
Every woman I have ever known in a bad marriage has studied book after book to learn how she can be “nicer” and “more loving” so that her husband will love her in return.
And it has always backfired.
If you want real change in your marriage, often the answer is to stop being so nice and start enforcing some boundaries. Boundaries are loving because they point people to their responsibility in Christ. Having no boundaries pushes people away from Christ.
6. You run interference between your husband and your children.
If your husband and your kids aren’t getting along, you often try to make peace between them. You tell the kids they need to be nicer to dad or “respect” dad. You tell your kids “that’s just the way Dad is.”
But if we’re going to allow people to reap what they sow, and we’re going to teach our kids conflict resolution skills, it would be better to teach them, “you may not talk back to your father, and you shouldn’t nurture anger. If you’re upset, you should go and tell him.” Don’t try to fix it; stand back and let the kids work it out with him (if that’s safe for them to do).
7. You make excuses for your husband to others.
If your husband is consistently not following through on what he’s promised to do, and you find yourself making excuses to family, friends, work, or church colleagues, again, you may be allowing him to act in an unChristlike manner. If your husband doesn’t show up for a family function, for instance, it’s perfectly fine to go yourself and then tell his sister, “For some reason Bob decided not to come today.” You don’t need to badmouth Bob, but you also don’t need to make excuses for him, either.
8. Your husband keeps secrets and blames you for it.
In Thought #6 of 9 Thoughts That Can Change Your Marriage, I gave examples of people insisting that you meet illegitimate needs. Let me give you an example. A legitimate need is to feel as if you have some autonomy and privacy in your life. An illegitimate need is to insist that you have the right to keep major secrets from a spouse (like porn use). A legitimate need is for sex. An illegitimate need is to get sexual release where you want (including porn or watching other women). If you feel deeply disrespected because he is violating one of your needs (such as the need to be his sole object of affection), then it’s okay to speak up. “I’m a guy, and this is what guys do” is not an excuse.
9. You invest so much time in learning your husband’s love language and in loving your husband, but he doesn’t do that in return.
The last two signs really sum everything up. If you are turning yourself inside out trying to love and respect him, but he isn’t doing any of that in return, then you’re likely doing it in the wrong way. You’re not respecting him; you’re enabling him to make bad decisions, and that in turn causes you to seem like a doormat. It’s very hard to love a doormat and it’s very easy to dismiss a doormat. If he isn’t putting any effort in the relationship, the problem is likely not that you’re not respecting him enough, but rather that you’re bending over backwards too much without expecting him to treat you well.
10. You force yourself to share your body without any reciprocal need to share his heart.
This plays out in the bedroom, too. All of you at this blog know that I’m a big advocate for healthy sex in marriage! I love sex, and I think it should be frequent and fun. But if you’re forcing yourself to have sex with him on a consistent basis, without a reciprocal need for him to emotionally connect with you, then you’re allowing yourself to be treated like an object, not a person. And that’s very unhealthy.
Of course, sex is often the gateway to a healthier relationship. When we withhold sex, he often emotionally withdraws, and deciding to have sex more often is frequently the way to get better emotional connection.
However, this is not always the case. If you are consistently feeling used, that’s likely a sign that he isn’t sharing his heart.
In short, a good marriage relationship means that both spouses with love and respect each other.
A good marriage is one where BOTH spouses love and respect. Women need respect too!
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As a woman, I wouldn’t say that I need love more than respect because I can’t distinguish between the two of them. If Keith claimed he loved me but then treated me like a doormat, I would not feel loved at all. Instead of talking about “love” and “respect” we should talk about “spurring each other on to love and good deeds.” Let’s help each other be more Christlike, which will involve loving and respecting and forgiving and being kind and generous and overlooking numerous faults, but will also involve helping our spouses to treat us well by being the kind of person who must be respected. You really can’t have one without the other, and if you’re trying to get love by respecting him with no obligation in return, then it’s likely you’re setting yourself up for a very empty marriage.
Want some more perspective on this? Check out 9 Thoughts That Can Change Your Marriage, which shows what we can do to properly love our husbands and treat them well, but also what we can do to create a healthier dynamic between the two of us.

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November 28, 2016
Why I Couldn’t Wake Up This Morning
It’s been a very busy couple of weeks.
I was expecting to have a post up this morning, but I didn’t wake up until 9:30 am, which is extremely unlike me. But allow me to do a more personal post today and tell you a little bit of what’s going on in my life.
I flew back from our Alberta tour last Wednesday, and it was wonderful to be home–and we ended on a great high with a wonderful event in Erskine, a tiny town south of Edmonton. (Tiny towns are often the best; people are so excited that you’re there and they’re eager to come out!)
Then on Friday I headed just west of Toronto for another awesome event in Grimsby (near St. Catharines). On the way there I stopped at Sunnybrook hospital to see a good friend, who is recovering from surgery. Sunnybrook is Canada’s equivalent of the Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins. It’s our top of the line research centre and trauma centre.
Here we are in better times–at a women’s retreat I was speaking at a while ago:
Even though the care you get at Sunnybrook tends to be good from the doctors and nurses (though my friend had an extremely traumatic experience with one doctor), the whole thing left me rather embarrassed to be a Canadian. I don’t want to go into detail of why my friend was there, but suffice it to say that she really needed healthy food to recover. She’s in the hospital for several weeks, and they serve the WORST food. Like it’s truly awful. Half a cup of rice krispies and a stale croissant for breakfast (where’s the protein? Where’s the healthy fat?). Lunch is two pieces of white bread with a slice of processed meat. And some congealed beef and barley soup. And that’s it. No lettuce, no tomato, nothing that’s the least bit healthy.
So I spent Thursday cooking some salmon with avocado and some quinoa salad loaded with veggies and buying some nuts and some dark chocolate and all kinds of things to try to give her something healthy in her system. How are you supposed to recover if the food is so bad for you? Our bodies do need fuel.
And the hospital itself looks like an old school from the 70s that’s falling apart.
Anyway, I had a good visit with her but I was just annoyed–annoyed that I couldn’t do more because I was so busy (she’s my best friend and she went into the hospital the day I left for my Alberta tour. She’d already been there for two weeks by the time I got to see her); annoyed that the hospital administration thought it was acceptable to feed recovering people food with no nutritional value whatsoever; annoyed with the doctor who had seriously hurt her. Just annoyed.
Plus when I was driving to Grimsby, I had that weird feeling, “I am actually dangerous right now.” I don’t get that very often, and I drive A LOT, but I was just so tired. Thankfully Katie called and I talked to her on speaker for 45 minutes and she kept me awake.
When I got to the church I did something I hardly ever do. I asked if I could take a 20 minute nap. That sounds so totally unprofessional to me, but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get through the evening if I didn’t. So I lay down, and felt much better, and the event was super fun!
On Saturday I had another speaking engagement, but before that my ministry director Tammy and I decided to head to a brunch hosted by WIMM (Women in Music and Media) at the Crossroads Centre in Burlington. I was excited to see a bunch of friends there, including Hollie Sackett-Reid, who is the morning host for ShineFM in Edmonton. She’s a riot and we always have fun together. Everyone was supposed to pose by the WIMM backdrop, but as we were standing there I said to her, “let’s do something more interesting, like Charlie’s Angels”. So we did. We were back to back and didn’t see what the other was doing. But even our feet match!
(If you’re Canadian and you’re involved in media in some way, check out WIMM! They have meetings across the country and it’s a great way to network!).
The worship leader at the event was Charmaine Brown (accompanied by her husband Jason), and I was BLOWN AWAY. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone with as good a voice as hers live before. If you’re looking for something new on Apple Music, search for Charmaine Brown, and listen to her Christmas album (The Survivor Song on one of her other albums is really good, too).
Saturday night I had an event at Kennedy Road Tabernacle in Brampton, just northwest of Toronto. It was an outreach with 450 women, and I did something very different. Instead of my typical sex talk, I gave a Christmas talk, much more in line with the talks I used to give all the time before The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex came out. It was neat because I got to give a gospel invitation (and people responded!), and really share my heart.
And Kennedy Road church is very multicultural–90 countries represented there (Toronto IS the most multicultural city in the world). I just love events like that.
After the event Tammy and I grabbed some dinner at 11:30 at night and then headed to our hotel.
Then yesterday I went back to Sunnybrook to spend most of the day with my friend before driving home.
This time Rebecca talked to me on speaker phone all the drive home to keep me awake.
I headed to bed at 8:30. I was just so tired.
But because I’m still on Alberta time, I woke up at 9:30. Totally awake. Like I had taken an afternoon nap or something. I stayed in bed, but at 11:30 I gave up and took a sleeping pill. I have a prescription the doctor gave me 4 years ago for when I travel, but I hardly ever take any.
At 12:30 I was still wide awake. I figured the pills must have expired, so I took another one for good measure.
Let’s just say they were still pretty powerful, because when I finally woke up at 9:30–I was still totally out of it. Moral of the story: even if the pills expired three years ago, DON’T TAKE TWO!
Anyway, I have a whole bunch to do today before I head out to Vancouver. I’m speaking at the Christian Entrepreneurial Association’s meeting, sharing about this blog and what I’ve learned as it’s grown. Maybe one thing I learned is that you shouldn’t take two sleeping pills eight hours before a normal post is supposed to go live!
November 25, 2016
When Dad Talked To Me About Love
The more I’m in the marriage and family realm of the internet the more I’m learning that parents’ greatest impact on their children is often through the simplest conversations.
It’s not always some sit-down discussion, or a five-part Bible study series we did together that makes the biggest impact. Sometimes it’s just the throwaway comments or the questions they ask that can challenge us to make a change.
And I’ve got a great story that shows just that. Usually I write a 400-word “Marriage Moment” on Fridays but I’m on tour today and I just don’t have the time! So instead Doreen Frick joins us with a heart-warming story of how her dad talked to her about love. I just love this one!

Back when I was fourteen Dad and I did a lot of back and forth together.
He’d drive me to choir practice, since we both sang. It was a long drive, and we often sang along with the radio. I was into what was popular, and Dad was not. Sometimes he’d slip in an eight-track with music he loved, like Hank Williams. The first Hank, the one that died in the back of his Caddy. Or Peter, Paul and Mary. Funny how I can still hear Dad singing, “We’re Going to the Zoo” like he was a little kid excited to be going. He didn’t know it, but he would be a little kid again when I would marry four years later, have a couple of kids, and he’d take them to the zoo.
Dad never got a chance to go to the zoo as a kid because he grew up in a school/home for boys without fathers. But the funny thing about that isn’t how much he enjoyed my kids, was how much he enjoyed me, as a kid. He often told Mom that we kids never cried, and she’d roll her eyes as if to say, Where were you when they woke up in the middle of the night? Well that was simple, Dad was traveling. Dad was oblivious. Dad was unaware.
On one trip together Dad and went to Wildwood New Jersey so he could hold a business meeting. I guess that’s what it was, I was too young to pay much attention to what he was doing there, but I remember the trip home in the dark and the music on the radio. Glen Campbell was singing Gentle on my Mind. And of course since Glen was also on television a lot that year I thought his music was right up my alley, and of course those kinds of things stay with a person. Glen is still right up my alley. But then again, I was a kid who was also thinking and dreaming about my future. And what it was I wanted in it.Dad had never spoken up about my music and the edgier groups that made their way into my world because Dad loved music.
But he also loved me.
Me, his starry-eyed wishful thinking, naive daughter who was looking for her Prince Charming and her happily-ever-after fairy tale world she still believed existed. During the song where Glen sings, “I’ll keep my sleeping bag rolled up and stashed behind your couch,” Dad interrupted, and said, “Doreen, do you know what that means?”
Now you might laugh here, but think back to your innocence. I remember as if it were yesterday a new thought whispering in my head: He doesn’t want to marry her! I still love that song after forty-four years of marriage, because that line will never leave me.
It was the first and only talk about love and what I wanted in love that never went any further than Dad asking one simple question. A question I did not answer, and he did not elaborate on.
But that talk lingered in my heart.
Later, when I did meet boys who I knew weren’t marriage material, I left the door open for the one who was. I met that boy/man when I was sixteen, and yes, he did once suggest we just move in together. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding. I knew what I wanted and told him so. He knew it too. And he was young, maybe testing the waters, but we both knew there would never be a sleeping bag rolled up and stashed behind my couch.
I never told my husband the story of me and Dad and the Glen Campbell song. He’d probably get a kick out of it. We’re old-fashioned that’s for sure. For a child growing up in the sixties, the only thing that really rubbed off on me were the bell-bottoms and the music and the passion of believing. And it’s a passion that has never grown old or up, just more focused. I let the times roll as they will, with no judgment or shaking fingers at those who’ve done it differently. They have more guts than I do. We all have to listen to our guts sometimes, and our hearts at others. Someone once told me to listen to your heart because it will lead you in good places. I guess I have, and always will. Thanks Dad. Thanks Glen. Thanks heart.
What’s #1 at To Love, Honor and Vacuum?
This week, let’s look at marriage, love, and ways you can show your husband you’re ready for some intimate time together. Check it out in the Tops of the Blog!
#1 Post on the Blog: The Turning Point In A Marriage
#5
on the Blog Overall: 4 Reasons Why Your Husband Doesn’t Want To Make Love
#1 from Facebook: How To Spice Things Up Without 50 Shades Of Grey
#1 from Pinterest: Sexy Stocking Stuffers For Your Husband
I’m on tour!
We’re all over the place with this one–I’m touring a few churches in Ontario then flying out to BC! Make sure you don’t miss me if I come to your town! Check out my speaking schedule here!
Bummed that I’m not coming to your city? You can fix that by hiring me to speak at your church! My Girl Talk event is a ton of fun, so if you want to bring that fun to your church you can let me know here.
Something I’m excited about…
My daughter Rebecca has been working for me for the last three months doing a lot of the background work that makes this blog run smoothly. And I love it because I hate background work so I can just get her to do it instead!
She’s written a few posts for me in the past, and since so many of my readers are young newlywed couples, Rebecca’s going to start writing a Millennial Marriage segment every week here on To Love Honor and Vacuum! It’s amazing for me, as a mother and someone in marriage-related ministry, to see my daughter joining me on this mission. So you can look forward to seeing her around more!
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