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In the main, The Rules for Marriage (and "Rules," by the way, is trademarked) is consistent with the original dating rules, which are all about manipulating the guy and appearing not to need or desire anything on your own terms. Dating women are instructed, for example, to let their hair grow, because men prefer long tresses. Husband-hunters are told "don't call him and rarely return his calls," and advised not to accept invitations issued at the last minute—you wouldn't want to appear to have anything other than the fullest dance card. Once you are married, you should practice a machiavellian submissiveness: Do not, for example, return the gifts hubby gives you "unless you absolutely can't look at them and are positive that you will never wear them." Calling him at the office is forbidden (but since you didn't call him while you were dating, you probably won't even be tempted). Oh, and also you're to "keep … to yourself … how not in the mood you are to make love," and you're to have sex whenever he wants: "When it comes to sex in a marriage, husbands rule the roost. Whether you like it or not or think it's right or fair, your husband determines your sex life."
Animating all these tips, suggestions, rules, and questions is a vision of what the good marriage is. So one might expect Christian marriage guides to differ markedly from their secular counterparts. And in some respects they do. Consider my three favorites.
Les and Leslie Parrott's helpful Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts rehearses many solid and standard marriage basics—learn to fight well, learn to communicate, cultivate intimacy and commitment. But the Parrotts also insist that men and women can't make marriages work by themselves. "On our own," write the Parrotts, " … We can't … look all the uncertainty of life full in the face and say, 'I will make one thing certain: my faithfulness to my partner.' " That proclamation relies on God's faithfulness, without which "marriage would have no hope of enduring." Walter Wangerin's wonderful As For Me and My House insists that sin has distorted God's ideals for marriage, and hence Wangerin puts the practice of forgiveness at the center of married life. And Mike Mason's The Mystery of Marriage, which has a cult following in some corners of the kingdom, is shot through with the understanding that marriage is not "in any sense separate from or subordinate to the life of faith." Marriage is a "practicing … for Heaven," an institution in which God disciples us, "helping men and women to humble themselves, to surrender their errant wills."
And yet, alongside these distinctives, there are some underlying assumptions about marriage that are common to almost every marriage self-help book I've read, secular or Christian, and these assumptions are, I think, questionable.
The first has to do with eros—or, more plainly, sex and romance. It's no surprise that many of the current marriage guides focus on sex: According to The Sex-Starved Marriage (and according to a lot of shopworn jokes), married couples are in an outright crisis of libido. Twenty percent of married couples have sex less than once a month. Couples are harried, busy, stressed, exhausted. They're clinically depressed, or their hormones are out of whack, or they're dealing with childhood sexual abuse. Whatever the cause, married folks don't seem to be having much sex.
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