The Love Dare by Stephen and Alex Kendrick

I’m not gonna lie.  I am  not even sure how to write about this book.  I will tell you that a little over 40 days ago my husband and I had our yearly fight.  Yes, we have one a year and it’s always over the same thing…. his raging libido and my libido that just barely has a pulse.  This is a common argument among married couples so we aren’t alone.  Though in the throws of this argument, both of us feel quite alone.  I will also tell you that this particular subject (sex) is the ONLY subject that has ever brought  our marriage to its knees.

The argument is always the same…he wants more and I feel like I don’t get what I need outside of the bedroom.  No, I’m not telling stories outside of class.  This is just a truth of our lives, and I’m willing to bet its the truth for many marriages.  When a woman doesn’t feel like she is getting what she needs outside of the bedroom,  physical intimacy is just not what she wants to give to him.  Then it becomes a vicious cycle.  Doesn’t it?  I know you have been there!

So we have tried therapy…not much help and I won’t get into it.  Let’s just say Boise,Idaho,  is much too small of a place when it comes to finding good therapists.  Desperate for guidance and help, we decided we would try anything.  We rented the movie Fireproof….about making your marriage “fireproof”..surviving anything.  We knew it was a conservative Christian movie on  marriage, but we thought we would watch it anyway.  It ended up being more about “accepting Christ as your Savior” than it was about saving a marriage.  The movie  pretty much turned my husband (and myself) off.  So in hopes that the book it was based on (The Love Dare) was a bit different, I purchased the book and started the journey….  The Love Dare.

The Love Dare gives you 40 days of dares to follow in hopes of helping your marriage grow stronger.  All of it is based on traditional, conservative Christian values.  It has been featured on Focus on the Family.  If you are a fan of Focus on the Family and/or are a Christian with traditional marriage values then this book is for you!  It is full of traditional wisdom, advice and Bible verses!

I, on the other hand,  was skeptical at best when I started this book.  Let’s face it, I bought it for TRACY to read..not for me.  But he didn’t pick up the book for an entire week.  Instead, I picked it up and started taking on the Dares.  At first I was resentful.  I resented the fact that (in my perception) Tracy wasn’t doing any thing to make “us” better.  It was all me.  It was all of my fault and all of me trying to fix it.  It felt very one-sided.  But I kept going through the dares telling myself to “trust the process” (this becomes very important come about day 35..I’ll explain later).  Eventually, I started seeing some change in Tracy and the way he treated me.  This Love Dare stuff was working!  Yay!!!!  We started communicating better.  He started doing little things for me around the house.  My “love tank” (as mentioned in The 5 Love Languages which I read while doing the dare and have already blogged on) was filling up!  Yay!!!!

Then came days 19, 20 and 21!  This is where the book turns to a very Christian book…daring you to pray the prayer of repentance and accepting God into your heart.  Most of the days AFTER days 20 and 21 are focused not on the  marriage itself but on your personal relationship with Jesus and how this pertains to your marriage.  Even going as far as to say, “The truth is, you can’t live without Him (God) and you can’t love without Him.  But there is no telling what He could do in your  marriage if you put your trust in Him.”  So, unless I accept the Christian God, I can not give or receive true love?  My marriage won’t work?  I beg to differ!  I take a great exception to this!  There are millions of marriages that thrive and the spouses do not ascribe to the Christian belief!

With that said, I do believe there are some great points in this book.  And even in the pages I just mentioned, I found that as long as I translated what the book was saying into my own personal spiritual belief and trusted the process, it made a heck of a lot of sense.  In pages 19-21 it talks about asking Christ into your heart.  I do not believe God lives outside of me.  I believe that I am and always have been ONE/UNIFIED with God.  I believe God IS love and God IS perfect…and since I am ONE/UNIFIED with God (and so is my mate) then I have only to Recognize this and know this to be true..to remember this…and then I am UNIFIED with that same love that this book refers to.  And YES!  It helped me with my marriage :).

I loved the Dares in this book…especially in the beginning :).  They were great reminders of how I should show up in my marriage…patience, kindness, selflessness, thoughtful, and so much more!  After ever day (40 in total) of reading, you will receive a dare and then a place to reflect on that day’s dare.  I did learn a great deal about myself and it was totally worth the time and the days it took to do it.  I will continue with much of what I read in  mind.  Remember when I said I would talk about “trusting the process”?  Well here it is.  All the way through, I kept telling myself to let go of the completely Christian stuff that would normally turn  me off and just “trust the process”.  Well around day 35, I started week 7 of my seminary class, and the title of the workbook section for week 7 was “Trust the process of life”.  There are no coincidences in life!  I love how  my life works perfectly!  Being able to blend what I  learned in this book and what I know to be the truth about my spiritual beliefs was a fun challenge and very enlightening :).

Like I said, this book is conservative Christian and I totally believe it is the IT book on marriage for a Christian couple.  It is phenomenal.  I’m still look for the IT book on  marriage for those of us who are metaphysical and more spiritual.  My husband told me that  maybe I should write my own book…umm..ya..not going to happen.  Who would listen to me anyway?  *laugh*  Aside from the fact that we have been together for 27 years and with the exception of the once a year discussion we are incredibly  happy, why else would someone want to learn  marriage secrets from me?  However, I really wish someone would take The Love Dare and re-write it and re-word it from a Religious Science perspective :).  It might have been easy for me to re-think it while I was reading it, but I guarantee you, it would piss some other people off.  *laugh*  Which is a shame…because it really is a great marriage book :).