In this enlightening conversation, Dr. Gary H. Lovejoy discusses the patterns and expectations couples often bring into their marriages, sometimes unknowingly mirroring their families of origin. Lovejoy shares compelling stories illustrating how breaking these learned behaviors can revive struggling relationships. Tune in to discover unique strategies that can transform marital conflicts into opportunities for deeper connection and joy.
Welcome to the good news with Angie Austin. Now with the good news, here’s Angie.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hey there, friend. Angie Austin here with the good news. And the good news is we have joining us author Gary H. Lovejoy, Ph.D. He wrote the book Marriages in the Bible. What did they tell us? Welcome, Gary. Well, thank you for inviting me on your show, Angie. Oh, I’m excited about this. I know you talk about marriage being a complex union, and I can definitely attest to that. So first of all, just give us an overview of your book and a little bit about you. Yes.
SPEAKER 04 :
In regards to the book, one of the things – well, first of all, I can just describe a little bit of my own background. I’ve been in counseling probably for over 40 years. I’ve had a private practice in counseling, and I featured marriage counseling. I’ve counseled hundreds of couples, and I also taught college, and I taught – psychology and courses. And then I also taught world religions and Old and New Testament. And that was on a secular campus, which was a unique opportunity. Oh, wow. It was. It was very, very interesting. And so I’ve had both the experience on college campus. I’ve also had my private practice. And it’s been a great career. With regard to the book… I’ve read lots of books on marriage, but one of the things that struck me was that, um, no book had been focused on the actual marriages in the Bible itself. They would talk about marriage principles and they’d use passages of scripture to substantiate their points, which, and many of them were very good, but, uh, but no one actually has ever looked directly and examined in detail the, uh, marriages in the Bible. And as I went back through, um, the Bible and looked at all the different marriages that God describes, both in the Old and the New Testament, I was struck by the fact that it, at least in some cases, a great deal of detail, but he throws in details about marriage, which you might initially think, why was he putting that in there? Because God never does anything randomly. It’s always with a purpose. And what I discovered was that Each of these marriages, he was giving us some clues about what works or what doesn’t work in relationship. I looked at 17 marriages in this book, both in the Old Testament and the New, and some of them were good marriages, some of them were terrible marriages, some of them were ugly marriages. But in each of them, as he describes them, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece He gives some gem of understanding about marriage relationships, so that by the end, I take all these different pieces, piece them together, and it forms a blueprint for a happy, fulfilling marriage. And so I believe that what God was doing in describing these various marriages, and then taking the time to actually do that, I think was to design the fact that we need to understand what the complex relationship of marriage really is all about what works what doesn’t work what makes it effective what makes it ineffective and um and when you’re done looking at the marriages and i at the last chapter i pull these all together and then i put the jigsaw puzzle together and it’s a beautiful blueprint of what makes for happy and fulfilling marriages so that’s why i wrote the book and uh and i think this is god speaking to us directly through his word what the best kind of marriage that we can possibly have to derive the greatest fulfillment and satisfaction from it.
SPEAKER 03 :
I love this. Okay, so I want to talk about, you just mentioned the blueprint. So, of course, we all want that. I’m 20 years in to my marriage, but in like I’m doing time. I’m 20 years in. I’ve been in for 20. um no but you know and i i would say we have a relatively uh i would say like you know um nine out of ten you know we’ve got three teenagers so that you know complicates things because we have different views on you know how to handle them per se uh but when you talk about that blueprint or maybe divorce proofing a marriage let’s start there is there such a thing as divorce proofing a marriage uh yes i believe there is um
SPEAKER 04 :
nothing is a 100% guarantee, of course, but yes, there are a lot of things we can do in marriage that can keep it alive and well, and I think a lot of times marriage dies by a thousand cuts. It kind of like dies from neglect. Marriage is, as you said, is a complex union. It’s a cross-pollinization of two sets of interpersonal communication habits, two sets of of expectations and two sets of conflict resolution styles, most of which have been originally learned from our families of origin. And when a couple comes in and they’re struggling, whatever I, um, one of the first questions I ask is what kind of expectations do you have coming into the marriage? And then, uh, and then from there started talking about what did they learn about intimacy in their own families of origin? Because many times people are simply repeating, actually the mistakes, the mistaken interaction patterns that went on in their own families of origin, and they know no other means, so they apply them to their own marriage, and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work any better there than it did in their families of origin. Now, sometimes they may tweak it a little bit and make it a little different, but it’ll still be the same problem. And so sometimes people get really almost mesmerized by the A certain routine becomes very routinized, and it can be very, very dysfunctional. I don’t know if you have the time, but I can share an example of that. Yes, please. Okay. I had a couple. Actually, the wife came in. Most often the wife is the one who comes in first, and then her husband comes in later. Although sometimes they’ll arrive together. But at any rate, this woman came in, and she was talking about her marriage, and it was just – they fought every single day and had done so for over five years. I marveled at the ability of them to even stay together as long as – and they had really terrible fights. And I said, well, tell me, what is the anatomy of their fights? And so she said he hated his job, and he’d come home in a foul mood, and he would take it out on her, and he would start in on her. and she was no wallflower, she would fight back. And so they would have these knock-down, drag-out battles almost every single night, and she was exhausted. She looked like she’d been through World War II. And so I said something that surprised her. I said, well, I think your relationship is too predictable. I mean, there are a lot of things wrong with a relationship, but I just said, I think it’s too predictable. And she said, what do you mean? I said, well, let me ask you a question. I said, do you… Do you know pretty much what he’s going to say when he comes home? Oh, yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be another. He gets home, I’m bracing for it because I know what’s going to happen. And then I said, well, does he know what you’re going to say in response? And she kind of made a sly smile and said, yeah, he knows pretty much most of my attacks. And I said, well, you see, you know each other’s response. It’s a dance you’re doing that is not working. And so I said, why don’t you try something different? And, um, and she said, well, what? And I said, well, uh, I suggested to her to get a squirt gun, buy one on the way home, fill it with water and stick it in the purse. And the next time he starts in on there, you know, when he comes home and starts in on it, instead of doing what she normally does, do something different, which was to pull out the squirt gun and give him a shot and squirt him and then run giggling out of the room. I said, do you think you can do that? And she says, yeah. And you think that would be different? Oh, way different. And, uh, So she says, okay, I’ll give it a try. And so she went home, and two weeks later I saw her, and she came in, she was radiant. And in fact, her husband had made major changes, and we’ll mention that in a moment, but he joined us later, and we really were able to work through a very good relationship. But what happened was this. She said, I did what she suggested, and I got the squirt gun on, And sure enough, he came home and he started on me. But instead of doing what I normally do, I pulled out my squirt gun and gave him a squirt and came giggling out of the room. Except I did one other thing. I looked over my shoulder because I wanted to see how he was responding. And she said he was just sitting there, standing there, water dripping off the end of his nose with a look on his face like, what was that all about? But she said it was effective in stopping the argument. The shock value alone was good enough for that. And so she said, that worked for that night. And the next night, she said, it happened all over again. He came in in foul mood as usual and started in on her. She did the same thing again. Third night, the pattern repeated itself. And she pulled out her squirt gun to give him a shot. And when she did, she turned around and faced him. He was standing there. She was looking down the barrel of his water gun. And so she squirted him. He squirted her back. And they ended up having an old-fashioned squirt gun fight, running through the house, laughing their heads off, squirting each other until they were soaking wet, fell on the ground, laughing as hard as they could. And suddenly they looked at each other and said, you know, this is the first time we’ve laughed in over five years. Wow. And yet they were first attracted to each other because they really had fun together. Well, they had not had fun for five years. But they realized that That’s what they missed in their relationship. And so they sat up soaking wet as they were and began talking seriously about their relationship. And they decided to make some serious changes. They wanted to recapture what they once had. And so he came in and we worked together for the next six months. And they ended up with a very, very powerful relationship. They still are very vibrant to this day. But what was he there was not a squirt gun. It was something to break up the patterns that they had become so enmeshed in that was destroying their relationship. And I don’t think they would last a whole lot longer. She was looked like she was about to finish. And, uh, she came in, this is a desperate move to do something, but it, but people get trapped into these patterns of relationship that are very dysfunctional, very destructive. And, uh, again, death by a thousand cuts, Matt kind of marriage. And, uh, And they can keep repeating it until they kill the marriage off. Something happens that will break that pattern. And sometimes just doing something different will do that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, yeah, just one little thing. And breaking that pattern, it’s an interesting way to do it for sure. But if that’s not something we feel comfortable with, then there’s other ways to do it. There isn’t just one way to skin a cat, as they say, which I guess isn’t the most great terminology. But I like the idea, though, of giving people just, I mean, these patterns we get into are so destructive and so repetitive that it’s shocking to me that well-educated people continue to do this. So when people like in this case, she sounded the alarm. Who is the first person in a marriage do you think who sounds the alarm to trouble and why?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes. Well, it’s usually the wife who does. In fact, almost when I do marriage counseling, probably at least in 50 to 60 percent of the cases, the wife comes in first. She’s the scout, so to speak. And oftentimes the husband is very reluctant to speak. They don’t like to share their dirty linen in public before a stranger, and so they’re reluctant. And when it comes to actually divorce, the statistics show that 70% to 80% of women are the ones who initiate divorce. Men don’t. And part of the reason is that men have certain benefits from marriage that they don’t want to give up, such as marriage. such as the domestic issues that they get taken care of, they get dinner, they get some other benefits from it. But when we look at that, and by the way, those statistics are applied to marriages of all age ranges, regardless of whether the couple is in their early 20s or in their 90s. Two of the most common complaints from women is either neglect, either physically or emotionally or both, in which they feel excruciatingly lonely in a family and in a relationship. You know, a lot of people think, well, if I didn’t marry… Hey, doctor.
SPEAKER 03 :
Doctor, I hate to… I’m so wrapped up in what you’re saying that we’re out of time. Will you stick around while we take a break? Sure. Okay. All right, doc. We’ll be right back with the good news.
SPEAKER 02 :
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SPEAKER 03 :
Colby, Kansas is listening to the mighty 670 KLT Denver. Hey there, friend. Welcome back to the good news. Well, I got so wrapped up into what Gary Lovejoy is telling us about that I lost track of time, which I often do when we have guests on. Just thrilled to have you, Dr. Gary Lovejoy, Ph.D., Marriages in the Bible. What do they tell us? Okay, Doc, go ahead and pick up where we left off.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, so as I said before, women are usually the ones that initiate the divorce. And by the way, they initiate more often now, partly because women have more job opportunities, have higher independent incomes. In fact, sometimes women have higher incomes than their husbands. And so it makes getting a divorce less financially risky than it has been in the past. And likewise, too, divorces often become easier to get, especially after the legalization of no-fault divorces. So And as I said, men gain benefits from marriage, such as better health, longer life expectancy, and they’re being taken care of domestically. Women don’t enjoy the same perks. And so men are less likely to initiate the divorce, even if they’re angry within their relationship. But I was saying about women’s common complaint, one is neglect. They feel either emotionally or physically neglect. And when I say physically, I don’t mean just sexually, but Just touching, just holding your spouse’s face and telling her you love her, those kinds of touching, those intimate kinds of touching. And so they feel excruciatingly lonely in a relationship. And like I was saying before when we had to stop is that we often think of, well, if I don’t get married, I’ll be really lonely. But in fact, some of the loneliest people I’ve ever met are in marriage. And it’s because their marriage has become so empty and without meaning. The other one is having over-controlling husbands. They often are into a basic power struggle in their marriages, and they hate it. And they’ve probably been going on since day one. Women usually are socialized to be more emotionally aware than men. And so they’re more likely to perceive problems in the relationship earlier. And also I think women are also better communicators than men and are more likely to talk about their problems that they perceive going on. And they want to talk about it. Because men are less likely to have that kind of emotional awareness. And I think it’s a cultural thing, partly. Partly also familial issues. But they are less likely to have that emotional awareness to see as clearly the problems as his wife does, and the communication skills to talk about them are not as good. And so this leads women to feeling as if their needs are not being met in the relationship and they become increasingly dissatisfied. Men, on the other hand, it’s more an issue with adequacy. They often feel like they’re constantly criticized. Respect is a huge issue for them. And so when they’re exposed to constant criticism and nagging in a marriage, it’s a real killer. And for they, they often feel like I never can do anything right in my wife’s eyes. No matter what I do, it doesn’t matter. She’s going to criticize it. And they end up feeling completely helpless. And they hate that feeling. Men do not like to feel inadequate. But oftentimes within the context of marriage, that’s exactly how they feel. And a wife’s continuous criticism usually is emerging because she’s so unhappy in the relationship because she’s because she feels alone, she feels like they’re not connected, you know, lots of different reasons. And so she doesn’t feel like her needs are being met, and he doesn’t feel like his are. And so there’s a chasm that develops between the two of them, and they have to begin to understand where they came from. And so many times they don’t understand the dynamics of their families in terms of how they’re impacting on their present marriage. And so that makes a huge difference. And so it makes it very difficult. And one of the other things I just might mention in this regard, and this is true for both men and women in the relationship, is one of the most common origins of problems within the relationship is low self-esteem. It’s interesting because there’s a passage in Psalm 46.10 that says, be still and know that I am God. And the question is, why did he put that in there? What Well, of course, being still is that we’re so busy anyway. We’re always involved in our own lives. So it takes time to be still enough to sit down and think about your relationship to God. Because we get the wellspring. God is the wellspring, really, of a believer’s identity formation. And it’s in our relationship with him that we are confronted with three important things and three important truths about ourselves. First of all, the persistence of our sin nature. Secondly, our inherent lovability. That’s the self-esteem issue. And thirdly, the power of God’s grace in confirming our essential worth in Christ. Without self-esteem, you don’t really have the ability, and this sounds almost like an oxymoron, but without self-esteem, you do not have the ability to be truly humble. And why do I say that? Because when people have low self-esteem, Where is their attention? It’s on themselves. Oh, I look terrible. Oh, they’ll go to a meeting and they’ll walk away thinking, oh, I shouldn’t have said that. Oh, I really blew this. I really blew that. What do other people think? They are always mining the social relationships for what positive feedback they can get back because they don’t feel it themselves. And so they are riveted. They become actually more self-centered. And because even in entering relationships, what am I getting or not getting in this relationship? It’s not what can I give to the relationship, it’s what I’m getting in our relationship. And that’s what low self-esteem does. It focuses us on what are we getting or are we being rejected and so forth. High sensitivity to perceived words that felt like, well, you’ve criticized me. It may not have been a criticism, but they are hypersensitized to it and hypervigilant to it. But when I say our lovability, and people misunderstand that and think, oh, are we supposed to be narcissistic? No, that’s not what it is. In fact, that’s just the opposite. Because when we have the sense of self-esteem, we are able then, that issue is settled, and we can look out and serve other people. And that’s why I think when Jesus is saying that you love yourself, love others, love your neighbor as yourself. He was presuming, presupposing that we would have love for ourselves. Not love in the sense of narcissism, like I’m important and more important than anybody else, but rather love in the sense that loving ourselves in the sense that we appreciate God’s creative ability in creating us with the strength that he uniquely gave to us. From the beginning, our love ability has been linked not to what others think, but because we’re created in the image of God. And to deny our own lovability is to deny His truth. And the reason I say that is to repudiate, if we repudiate our person, we reject the nature of His. And you have to think about that for a moment. Because when it says in 1 John that God is not just merely loving, He is love. He’s the embodiment of love. And so God, who is love, cannot create anything in his image that is not lovable. I can draw an analogy to that. When you were having your first child, did you and your husband talk about, well, what are we going to have? Monkey? Squirrel? What do you think? No, you knew you were going to have a baby. Why? Because you could only produce that which is in your own image physically. And from a spiritual standpoint, that’s exactly what It is true for God. God can only create something in his image that is lovable. Therefore, it would be an act against his own character if he didn’t produce that. It is lovable. And that’s why he sees us through those eyes that we are lovable to him, so lovable that he was willing to give his life on the cross for our sake. And that’s why that was the greatest confirmation. In fact, that’s where we derive our sense of humility, because I think humility is is a sense of worth affirmed in Christ and of a sense of an adequacy empowered by the Holy Spirit. And so it includes an attitude of gratefulness that God and that Christ has covered the cost of our sin and of modesty and how we see our own importance. And so it helps us to turn outward and so that we’re serving other people. And I think the way I think of it this way, instead of thinking less of ourselves, we think of ourselves less. Ah. And so in that respect, we are then more likely to want to serve others, and that’s where our attention would be. And oftentimes that’s how people even look for churches. What do they say when they’re looking for a church? I’m trying to find a church that meets my needs. Right, right. Do people ever say, I look for a church where I can give of myself to somebody else or to the church? No, we don’t usually say that.
SPEAKER 05 :
Right.
SPEAKER 04 :
In fact, we just finished – We just finished Christmas in the holiday season. And, you know, how people line up the family and take a picture.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 04 :
And I usually ask people, what’s the first thing you look at when you look at that photo? You look at yourself. If it’s a good picture of you, it’s a great picture. If it’s a terrible picture of you, you didn’t have the right expression or whatever, eyes were closed or whatever, then you say, well, it’s a terrible picture. Even though it was really good of everyone else because we’re focused on us and ourselves. And what high self-esteem does is it enables us to see outside of ourselves and to serve others. And so I think that’s what’s so important, I think, involved in that. And that’s what the essence of humility is all about.
SPEAKER 03 :
I love it. You know, at the end of the book, I know that you have a final appraisal. So let’s talk about, we’ve got about two or three minutes left. What advice do you give in your final appraisal in marriages in the Bible? What do they tell us?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, well, there are many marriages, of course, that we cover, but just to use an example, Abraham and Sarah. Abraham was an interesting character because he was very bold. He followed God’s calling and left Haran with his family and headed out for a country he was unfamiliar with and probably dangerous along the way. And yet he was able and bold enough to do that. However, in his domestic relationship, it was just the opposite. He was very passive, and he was very— almost placating in his marriage. Because what happened, I remember twice, not once, but once with the Pharaoh and again with King Abimelech, where he was fearful for his own life. So what did he do? He shoved his wife out there and said, here’s my sister, take her. And I don’t think Sarah was terribly impressed by his protectiveness there. And that’s one of the things that’s important, is that we protect our wives or we protect our spouse. In other words, we don’t allow someone to jump on our spouse and really be criticizing without coming to their protection. And when we don’t, people become very disengaged in the relationship. They feel unprotected. In fact, I’ve done work with marriages where it’s very, very difficult because maybe let’s say the husband is… very close to his family and his family doesn’t want to let go of him and they get married and the wife feels like she’s competing with his family for his attention. And if the family wants to do something that she doesn’t want to do, he goes with the family. And so he’s not efficiently emancipated from his own family of origin. And so consequently, she feels unprotected and she feels unimportant. And that’s a deadly situation. I’ve seen that happen on numerous occasions. So it’s really important. to be assertive in our relationship and in protecting this. So that’s one example. Another is just to be transparent with each other, disclosing our thoughts and our feelings so that our spouse is not in the dark. Sometimes you come in, they’re harboring secrets. They don’t even know what’s going on in the mind of their partner. And when they don’t, then these things just simply go underground and work like a cancer, slowly eroding and killing off the relationship So it’s really important to be honest in disclosing our thoughts and feelings and what’s going on inside and to actively practice honesty in our relationship. And then another is to kind of take the initiative to propose.
SPEAKER 03 :
Gary, I hate to say it, but we’re out of time. We used up the whole show. Well, give us a website where we can find you.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, counselingforthefuture.com. And then in terms of the book, it’s available on almost all the media outlets. It’s being released on February 1st, offering the Kindle version of the book for free. If you go to Amazon Kindle Unlimited, you can download it for free.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, sorry to say we’re out of time, Gary Lovejoy. Marriage is in the Bible. What do they tell us? Thank you, Gary. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you for listening to The Good News with Angie Austin on AM670 KLTT.
In this enlightening conversation, Dr. Gary H. Lovejoy discusses the patterns and expectations couples often bring into their marriages, sometimes unknowingly mirroring their families of origin. Lovejoy shares compelling stories illustrating how breaking these learned behaviors can revive struggling relationships. Tune in to discover unique strategies that can transform marital conflicts into opportunities for deeper connection and joy.
