"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?
The next morning, from the back row, I listen to Sarah Eggerichs explain that yes, it can.
"Let us accept that men and women are different -- not better or worse, just different. This is God's will, apparently," she says. "The question, ladies, is how would you like your future daughter-in-law to act towards your son? Would you want her to honor him in his differences and treat him with respect? You know you would."
The Love & Respect conference orbits the assumption that the woman's place is in the home. But as a professional woman, Sarah is an exception to the rules she preaches. In her segment of the conference, she coaches women to regularly praise "their husband's commitment to bring home the bacon." She gives them other tips on good wifery, encouraging them to do guy things with their husbands ("You may be bored, sitting in the back of a fishing boat or watching him do woodworking, but he will love it"), to welcome his advances ("As a wise woman once asked, 'Why would you deprive him of something that takes such a short time and makes him soooo happy?'") and to clean up: "I hear from men all the time who say, 'I work with women who always look their best, and I come home, and my wife is in clothes that are unbecoming, and her hair's not fixed,'" Sarah says. "They just think, 'How it would honor me if she would look her best for me!'
"Think about it, ladies," she urges. "I say if the barn needs painting, paint it."
As the conference winds down, Sarah gives the podium back over to her husband, who offers one cosmic wallop of a closing thought: Even if your marriage stinks, he tells the crowd, stick with it, for Jesus's sake.
"Something's coming, folks," he says. "We believe that this world is just an intermediary to something greater. You may suffer for the next fifteen years. You may not have a great marriage. But you will have a wonderful eternity."
Later, over a beer with my boyfriend, I break out the workbook that accompanied the conference. He snatches it from my hands and reads aloud from a page with the heading "As Your Husband I Feel Respected When..." It's a kind of crib sheet for wives.
"I feel respected when you tell me that you are deeply touched by the thought that I'd die for you," he reads, in an exaggerated macho voice. "I feel respected when you honor my authority in front of the kids and differ with me in private. You cheer my successes whether in business or in sports."
"Honey," he says to me, taking a swig, "I would like you to cheer my success in drinking this Budweiser."
We laugh. I promise, in jest, to paint my barn. And after talking it over, we agree that Aretha's version is infinitely better than Otis's.
When I grab his arm, he tightens up.
