Love and Happiness

An insider's guide to being the perfect wife.

Comments (0) By Laura Bond Thursday, Apr 14 2005

Sarah Eggerichs flexes her biceps like a sailor.

Mark Manger

The new Dr. Phil? Emerson Eggerichs contemplates the crazy cycle.

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"Ladies, I want you to reach over and squeeze your husband's muscle," she says to scores of women in the audience at the First Church of the Nazarene. Without word or pause, they reach over and squeeze the arms of the men seated next to them.

"Did it tighten up?" she asks. "I guarantee you it did."

Sarah, who has dark, intense eyes, well-defined cheekbones and a congresswoman's haircut, is presenting her part of Love & Respect, a two-day conference on marriage that's drawn about 200 people to this suburban Englewood church on a beautiful spring Saturday. The point of the muscle exercise, Sarah explains, is to demonstrate how deeply men need to feel strong -- the protectors of women.

"All I know is that when my son was four, five years old, he was already standing in front of the mirror, flexing like Hercules," she says. "My daughter has never once done that.

"Go figure," she says. "It has to be God."

Marriage education is currently bigger than ever in the Christian world, as church leaders try to knock the divorce rate down from its current average of 50 percent. Created by Sarah's husband, Dr. Emerson Eggerichs, the Love & Respect conference is one of the most esteemed evangelical marriage programs in the nation, and a companion book is a bestseller in Christian bookstores. The couple's appearance in Englewood is one of many on a national tour sponsored by Colorado Springs's Focus on the Family, and the Eggerichses draws throngs wherever they stop because they profess to have discovered the ultimate secret to successful relationships. For just fifty bucks a pop, other couples can learn the secret, too.

This seems like too good a bargain to resist, even for an unchurched person like me. I'm not married, but I do have a boyfriend; like any couple, we can use all the help we can get. So even though love and respect do not strike me as the sole purview of the religious, I've plopped myself in the pews armed with a workbook and an eagerness to witness the mystery of male/female relations decoded. Around me, men and women sit with their arms around each other, wedding bands sparkling, giving each other knowing nudges every now and then. There are older couples who look like they've been betrothed for decades; other younger pairs seem freshly wed.

Statistically, half of them will split within five years. Everyone here hopes this conference can help them buck those odds.

"At times it seems like I'm preaching to the choir," Emerson Eggerichs tells me by phone a week before coming to Colorado. "But the choir hasn't been singing so well, so we've got to reach out to them and do something about it. The way we see it, it's not a marital crisis; it's a spiritual crisis."

With mollusk-colored hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Emerson speaks in the clipped, neutral diction of an anchorman. He spent thirty years leading a church in East Lansing, Michigan, culling the biblical clues about relationships that eventually morphed into the fundamental message of Love & Respect. The idea is that men and women have vastly different emotional needs: Men need to feel respected in order to give love, Emerson says, while women need to feel loved in order to give respect. The subtext has a decidedly 1950s ring, recalling a time before gender roles got so mixed up by secularism, pop culture and -- heaven help us -- women's campaigns for equality.

"We live in a love-dominated community that's driven by deep, radical feminism, because forty years ago a bunch of women got together and said, 'My man's unloving. I'm going to divorce him,'" Emerson says. "Women now expect men to land on love, like they do, but the Bible shows us that men land on respect.

"People ask me, 'Well, what about Aretha Franklin and that song 'R-E-S-P-E-C-T'?" he continues. "I tell them, listen carefully: Otis Redding wrote that song, to his wife."

On Friday night, in a presentation that kicked off the conference, Emerson explained that understanding the catch-22 of love and respect makes the difference between "till death do us part" and divorce court. "A woman looks at the world through pink sunglasses," he said. "She also has pink hearing aids and a pink megaphone. I don't know if you knew that. It's like she has this huge love tank connected by an air hose, and if her man, who sees the world with blue sunglasses, comes in like an elephant looking for someplace to eat his peanuts, he's going to accidentally stand on her air hose.

"She feels unloved, she treats him without respect, and then they get set off on 'the crazy cycle,'" he said ominously. "And that's when this baby starts to spin!"

I felt my own head spin during Emerson's opening speech. When it was almost over, as the men and women gathered together in prayer, I ducked out a side entrance and sped away from the First Church of the Nazarene, contemplating the simple elegance of the Eggerichses' "secret" to happy relationships. Most relationships are complex constellations of interwoven feelings, actions, thoughts, signals, intentions and messages that both hit and miss their intended emotional targets. Could it really be as simple as pink and blue? Love versus respect? Otis versus Aretha?