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Note to Readers
Before we get into this, I want to set the stage. Most of the time, what’s shared here is written for men of every background, men who may or may not have a faith or spiritual tradition, but who all wrestle with the same core struggles: being stuck, disconnected, or unsure about how to move forward.
This article is different. It speaks directly to Christian men who are facing the breakdown of their marriage and trying to reconcile that pain with what they’ve been taught about faith and scripture. That group makes up about a quarter of the men in my readership, and to ignore their unique challenges and pain feels like leaving them without perspectives that may help them discover the clarity they seek.
Naming this tension is important. Whenever topics rooted in any form of spirituality, faith, or religion are addressed, there’s a risk that some will assume the whole body of my work here is religious in nature or only meant for men of faith. That’s not the case. This particular piece is simply aimed at one subset of men. For everyone else, the patterns discussed—idolatry, codependency, misplaced worth—are universal. Even if the language feels different, the dynamics are the same.
Why Bleeding Yourself Dry Won’t Save Your Marriage
So… for the Christian man reading this: if you’re stuck in a high-conflict marriage, a sexless marriage, or already facing divorce—even if your wife is halfway or completely out the door—and you’re telling yourself the way back is to “love her like Christ loves the church,” I want you to stop, sit up, and listen.
Because I’ve watched too many men destroy themselves and their marriages by misunderstanding what that verse actually means.
You’ve probably heard it a hundred times: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). And so you’ve decided that means:
- bending to her every mood or demand
- apologizing endlessly, even when you haven’t actually sinned against her
- buying gifts, writing notes, and pulling out every “grand gesture” you can think of
- sleeping on the couch for weeks or months, telling yourself it’s your cross to bear
- cutting off friendships and hobbies just to prove she’s your priority
- giving her unconditional access to your body, your bank account, your energy, no matter what she gives back
- walking on eggshells so she never feels unsafe, even while you’re dying inside
And you hope that if you just bleed yourself dry, if you just show her how much you’re willing to give up, then she’ll see your “Christlike love,” turn back to you, and the marriage will be saved.
I get why you think that. I grew up in the same culture and heard the same. I’m not casual about the scriptures. I’ve got a degree in Biblical Studies and have been a theology nerd for 35 years. I know exactly how easy it is to hear that verse through the a misguided filter. But let me tell you flat out: if that’s how you’re applying it, you’re not imitating Christ—you’re worshiping your wife.
The Idolatry Trap
Here’s the ugly truth. Most of us learned Christianity through a transactional lens. We were taught: if I give enough worship, obedience, or sacrifice, I’ll get blessing back. That’s not Yahweh. That’s idolatry. That’s how the pagan gods worked.
And when you carry that into your marriage, you end up treating your wife the same way. You convince yourself that if you just give enough—enough service, enough apologies, enough sacrifice—she will return the blessing of love, respect, or intimacy. That’s not covenant. That’s bargaining.
But Scripture is clear: “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24–25).
Yahweh doesn’t need appeasement. He doesn’t need you to pacify Him. He loves because He is love (1 John 4:8).
So when you think “loving her like Christ” means erasing yourself, making endless sacrifices, and giving covenant-level intimacy to a woman who’s told you she doesn’t want to be in covenant with you, you’re not imitating Christ. You’re bowing at the feet of an idol.
A Primer on Idolatry
Idolatry, at its core, is giving something of yourself in order to get something back. That’s why I said earlier, if you give worship to anything—your wife, your children, even a distorted view of God—in order to secure blessing or safety or favor, that’s idolatry.
The Scriptures are full of examples, but the most vivid comes right after Israel was freed from Egypt. Yahweh brought His people to Sinai for an intimate encounter. His desire was that they would know Him directly. “Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples” (Exodus 19:5). The mountain trembled with fire, thunder, and glory. The Creator was offering Himself to them in covenant intimacy.
But the people were terrified. They said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die” (Exodus 20:19). They rejected intimacy. They asked for a mediator. They wanted distance.
And when Moses delayed on the mountain, what did they do? They built the golden calf. They fashioned something tangible, familiar, manageable—something that looked more like the gods they knew back in Egypt. And then they had the audacity to point to that statue and say, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4).
Do you see what happened? They took the credit due to Yahweh and reassigned it to their idol. They wanted something they could control, something they could appease with offerings, something that felt safer than raw intimacy with the living God. They were so uncomfortable with being face-to-face with Him that they settled for worshiping their own projection.
Now, let’s bring this back to marriage. Most of us as men don’t actually know how to love like Yahweh. We are terrified of intimacy, of being fully seen and known. So what do we do? We fashion an idol version of our wife. We assign to her the power to give us worth, safety, blessing, and favor. And then we begin to “worship” her in the literal sense of worth-ship: placating, appeasing, sacrificing, hoping she will turn toward us and give us what we crave.
That’s not marriage. That’s idolatry. And just like Israel’s golden calf, it’s a counterfeit. It might give you a sense of control in the short term, but it kills intimacy in the long term. A marriage built on this pattern cannot survive. And truthfully, it shouldn’t. Because only when that false idol dies is there space to build a marriage rooted in the real thing: covenant love that flows from wholeness, not neediness.
And just like Israel’s golden calf, this kind of marriage will die—and it needs to die—because it’s not built on intimacy at all. Until you stop worshiping your wife as an idol and stand as a whole man in covenant, you will never have the intimacy you long for.
What Christ Actually Modeled
Let’s clear this up. Christ’s love was unconditional in character but covenantal in intimacy. He loved all, but the blessings of covenant come with commitment. That’s why He said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). That’s why the prophets spoke of Yahweh giving Israel a “certificate of divorce” (Jeremiah 3:8) when she broke the covenant.
Notice the pattern. Yahweh’s love for creation is without condition; He causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, the rain to fall on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45). But covenant intimacy, the closeness of being His bride, always comes with boundaries. He never gave Israel unconditional access to covenant blessings while she ran after other gods. He set terms. He kept His character steady, but He never erased Himself to hold onto a wayward bride.
And the same is true of Christ. He didn’t die on the cross because He needed something from us. He wasn’t wringing His hands, desperate for our approval. He didn’t sacrifice Himself to earn our love or to convince us of His worth. He already had that in Himself, in perfect union with the Father. “As the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:26). He needed nothing.
So why the cross? To expose something in us and to reveal something in Him. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). He revealed how badly we misjudge—calling light darkness, calling the Prince of Peace a devil, putting to death the One who came with good news. And He revealed how abundant His love is—that even when misjudged, mocked, and murdered, He remained whole, steady, and faithful.
Now, some will object and say, “But Paul says Christ reconciled us to Himself. Doesn’t that mean He died to win us back?” It’s true Paul uses that language (2 Corinthians 5:18–19). But look carefully: “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” God wasn’t the one estranged or incomplete. We were. We were alienated in our minds (Colossians 1:21), convinced He was against us, when all along He was for us. The cross didn’t change His heart toward us—it revealed His heart to us. Reconciliation wasn’t God paying a price to earn our love. It was Him tearing down the veil of our misjudgment and shame so we could finally see His love as it truly is.
That’s the model. Not self-erasure. Not chasing an unfaithful bride with endless appeasement. Not unconditional partnership without covenant commitment. But standing in fullness, firm in covenant boundaries, willing to be misjudged while holding your ground.
This is why Paul could say, “I want you to be free from anxieties… The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife” (1 Corinthians 7:32–33). The point isn’t that marriage is bad. It’s that if your sense of self depends on your wife’s approval, you’ll miss what Christ modeled. Christ was never anxious about securing love from His bride. He carried His wholeness into the relationship and offered it as a gift.
That’s the difference. Christ’s sacrifice was not a transaction to win love but a revelation of love that needed nothing in return.
Why Nice Guys and Codependents Misread It
Here’s where it gets personal. If you’re a man with low self-worth, if you’ve built your life around keeping everyone else happy, you’re the most vulnerable to twisting this scripture. You read “gave Himself up for her” and you think it means: “I should bleed myself out to earn her love.”
But that’s not the gospel. That’s your codependency baptized in scripture. That’s your fear of abandonment dressed up as theology. And brother, it won’t work. You can’t nice-guy your wife back into covenant. All you’ll do is teach her you have no spine, that your covenants mean nothing, and that you’re too scared to face the pain of being rejected.
And let’s be honest, it’s not just husbands in crisis who do this. Many pastors and teachers preach the same powerless version of “sacrificial love” because they’re living it themselves. They mistake codependency for Christlikeness. They give endless sermons about pouring yourself out, all while living in marriages and lives with no intimacy, no boundaries, and no spine. It’s not surprising. As Jesus warned, “If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit” (Matthew 15:14). Disempowered teachers inevitably teach disempowering theology.
And here’s the real tragedy: it doesn’t even work for them. Their lives don’t bear the fruit of the intimacy, wholeness, or strength they promise. And far too often, we later discover that men in these positions, pastors, teachers, and leaders, were carrying dark, hidden struggles the whole time. Affairs. Addictions. Secret lives that eventually come to light.
I don’t say that to condemn them. I say it with compassion because I doubt many of them weren’t scheming hypocrites. Rather, most likely, most were men who sincerely tried to live out a codependency-based “good news” that was never good news at all. They were told to bleed themselves dry, erase themselves, and carry the weight of everyone else’s approval until eventually it crushed them.
And when you take that same powerless model into your marriage, you’ll end up crushed the same way. You’re not following Christ when you do that, you’re following a model that has already proven to collapse under its own weight.
If your understanding of the gospel isn’t producing “rivers of living water flowing from your innermost being” (John 7:38), then the problem isn’t with Christ’s promise. The problem is with the version of the gospel you’ve been handed. It is either counterfeit or unclear, and it is keeping you powerless.
The Way of Wholeness and Boundaries
So what does it mean to love your wife like Christ? It means embodying His character: unconditional high regard, compassion, kindness, dignity. You don’t become cold, bitter, or vindictive. You don’t lash out or return evil for evil. You keep showing up with steadiness, because that’s who you are in Him.
But it also means you reserve covenant blessings—your body, your emotional intimacy, your partnership—for covenant relationship. You don’t keep giving husband-level access to someone who has declared she doesn’t want to be your wife. You don’t keep funding her life unconditionally, sharing your bed unconditionally, or offering your emotional world unconditionally. Those are covenant gifts, and covenant requires commitment.
If she says she’s done, then let her be done. That’s not vindictive. That’s covenant. And it’s exactly how Yahweh loves. Unconditional in character, but covenantal in intimacy. “Can two walk together, unless they are agreed?” (Amos 3:3). That’s why Paul could say, “If the unbeliever departs, let him depart. The brother or the sister is not under bondage in such cases” (1 Corinthians 7:15).
And here’s the part that most men miss. To love this way means becoming so whole in yourself that you are entirely okay being misjudged and misunderstood. That is not weakness, and it’s not spineless. It’s the opposite. Only a man who knows his value and worth can stand calmly in the face of false judgment without needing to beg, plead, or manipulate for approval.
This is exactly what Christ did. “When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to Him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23). His wholeness allowed Him to be safe, even when misjudged as a blasphemer, a liar, or a devil. And it was His abiding in the Father that made Him unshakable.
That’s what it means to abide (John 15). Not to treat yourself as a worthless beggar scraping for a daily morsel, but to rest in the life and fullness of the Vine, knowing that your worth and identity are already secure. From that place of abiding, you bear fruit naturally—not to earn love, not to appease idols, but because His life flows through you.
Wholeness means you can stand in love without collapsing into appeasement. Boundaries mean you can offer respect and kindness without giving away covenant intimacy to someone who refuses covenant. And abiding means you can endure misjudgment without losing yourself. Together, that’s what makes you safe, trustworthy, and deeply attractive.
And here’s the blunt truth. So many Christian men don’t report a life that looks like abiding, but begging. They’ve been taught to see themselves as depraved, worthless, and needy, so they come to Christ like a beggar hoping for scraps. Then they turn around and treat their wife the same way, as if she’s the god who can fill them. That is not abiding in the Vine of a sonship relationship with the Almighty, that’s an anxiously attached, unfree beggar chasing an avoidant and fickle spouse. That’s idolatry, and it will always keep you small, anxious, and unfree.
An Encouragement To A Shift In Perspective
Here’s the call. Stop worshiping your wife. Stop trying to appease her as if she were the source of your worth. You cannot love her like Christ loves His bride until you first learn to be loved as a first-class son.
That means standing in the place of the prodigal who was embraced, clothed, and celebrated by his Father—not treated as a servant who had to earn his way back, but welcomed as a son with full privilege (Luke 15:22–24). Paul uses the same language when he describes us as “adopted as sons” and made heirs with Christ (Romans 8:15–17; Galatians 4:4–7). That’s where wholeness begins.
Until you know that love, you’ll keep running back to idols. You’ll keep trying to prove your worth through appeasement and sacrifice. But when you know yourself as a beloved son—privileged, secure, mature—you can finally stand whole, firm, and willing to be misjudged, without needing your wife or anyone else to complete you. Only then can you love her like Christ loves His bride. Otherwise, you’ll miss the good news entirely.
If this is hitting home, you don’t have to stay stuck here. I wrote The Unchained Husband for men walking through these exact struggles, men who have been nice, codependent, and exhausted from trying to earn their wife’s love.
You can grab it as an ebook or audiobook here, or as a paperback here.
And if you’re ready for deep, personal help to break these patterns without undermining your marriage or your faith, and you want it from someone who has walked this exact landscape and now has a thriving, happy marriage, you can apply for a 1-on-1 intensive here.
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