Resource Review: Vertical Marriage

An objective look at a marriage resource.

Title: Vertical Marriage

Authors: Dave and Ann Wilson

Beneficial For: married couples where both spouses faithfully practice living out their Christian walk, engaged couples who are both Christians, couples where one spouse did not come from a faith background

Warnings To: married couples where only one spouse is saved or faithfully practices, women with higher sex drives in their relationship, dating couples

Picture courtesy of Ann Voskamp

Dave Wilson was well known for being a chaplain for the Detroit Lions several years before moving on to become the founding pastor of the Kensington Church. He and his wife, Ann, have since taken as the hosts of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry.

I’ve seen Vertical Marriage recommended several places, including the Weekend to Remember ministry that Cru puts on through FamilyLife. I read through the book in the month of January, taking away a couple of good insights, but leaving a bit disappointed overall.

Helpful Hints

But without the Vertical — without God in the first place — we search for life where there is no life…where there is no higher point of grace to create room for growth, forgiveness, and movement.

Vertical Marriage 35

One of the first points I appreciated about Vertical Marriage was how vulnerable and real the Wilsons were. Both of them have spent their entire marriage serving in ministry, most notably marriage ministry. At no point, however, did they cite their credibility because of what they did right. Instead, there was so much they did wrong.

The Wilsons start off the novel with a recap of their 10th anniversary celebration. At this point, the two of them had been surviving through Dave retiring from football after an injury and then pivoting to serving as a chaplain for the Detroit Lions, which required him to be gone with the team many weekends throughout the year, leaving Ann with their three young boys on her own and away from family fairly often. Dave was riding the career high, and with that, the often accompanying ignorance for how his abandoned and left behind wife was feeling. Ann was filled with resentment and feeling neglected, so when Dave tried to perform a big romantic gesture on their anniversary night, it failed. Miserably.

Dave and Ann spend a good portion of part one of the book exploring how the unaddressed expectations of marriage they entered their union with, combined with the families of origin they came from, sabotaged their relationship.

It left both of them at the very end of their relationship rope, with Ann ready to bail at the end of 10 years. Both of them are very candid with the uncaring, unkind, and unproductive things they have said to one another. I know that it is supposed to be off the table to talk about divorcing — but that is unhelpful advice when you have reached that point in marriage or when you’ve already broken that “cardinal” sin having said the words. I’ve been there, at the end of my rope, saying that I wanted to be done because I don’t want to stay in the loveless relationship my parents have been in for decades. So when I’ve gone to meetings or had friends counseling me about how we should never say this — it’s too late, we are too far gone, where do we go from here?

The Wilsons have the answer to that in the book. Despite all of the really troubling things they’ve said to one another, and the ways they’ve neglected, humiliated, and hurt one another — they were able to make it. They were able to come back from too far gone and course correct. This is what couples need to hear. Not the dos and don’ts of what not to do, never, ever. In counseling, you learn not to make absolute statements — such as never and always — so can we stop saying that in marriage coaching?

Part two is also a realistic and well-researched wealth of advice. The Wilsons soberingly explore how their families of origin impacted their fighting styles, and what they brought to the conflict ring that was not beneficial. I have sat through and read some marriage content recently that seems to brush off counseling and therapy as a worldly way to approach conflict. But I can say from personal and friend experience that having those counseling sessions can save relationships and help heal a couple more than just attending a couple’s group at church can. The Wilsons’ exploration of hurts and the need for Godly counseling to help process things such as forgiveness, conflict styles, and communication is not only helpful; it is something I think will break down the continued reticent attitude of Christians toward counseling.

The reason this works is that the Wilsons’ overarching theme of their resource is that we need vertical love and vertical help. We cannot fulfill our spouse, make them joyful, or meet all their needs — and they will never be able to do that for us. In order to have a functional relationship, we both need to go to God to have those demands met so we can better relate to and communicate with one another. God needs to be the focus of our lives to receive the healing and guidance at the end of the day to help strengthen the horizontal marriage between husband and wife.

The Wilsons also have cited examples of taking some of their acknowledged hurt or frustrations to the Lord to help them work through those issues. This is the answer that couples need to get through at the end of the day and practice for the rest of their relationship together. The Wilsons do well in demonstrating this as they cite even recent issues they have had with one another that ultimately needed to be solved by bringing their issue, frustration, or troubles back to God.

Many times, the Wilsons are able to find the answers to marital peace and joy through getting on their knees together to bring their problems to the One Who Can Solve Them.

Hopeless Hurdles

This is one of the parts that would cause me to struggle to recommend this resource to any and all couples. This is a great resource for couples that work together on their relationship in all aspects — spiritually as well as emotionally and physically.

If you are the spouse who is working on the marriage relationship without the teamwork of your partner, this resource can be extremely deflating. The Wilsons turn to prayer — but they turn to prayer either together or individually at times that are close to one another. They have not wandered through their marriage relationship where one spouse is willing to pray and engage in bible reading with their partner, but their partner is unwilling or unmotivated to do the same. There is a lot of beauty in praying together with your spouse. But what about the spouse that is spending years reading their bible alone, praying alone, feeling like they are going as Vertical as possible, but because their spouse is keeping things pretty horizontal, it’s not blessing their overall relationship?

This happens in a lot of relationships where one spouse is spiritually invested and the other is either lapse, dead, or not even a Christian. This can happen in many ways, but this book has only one throwaway line at the end of the book that, if this is their readers’ predicament, to keep going vertical all the same.

But how?

The Wilsons’ throwaway of many relationships is littered throughout Part Three: Intimacy. Ann is clearly the much lower sexually driven spouse, while Dave has the culturally acceptable (I am not going to say common or even normal, because honestly, I don’t believe this is the truth) position of being the husband who wants sex every day at the drop of a hat.

One of the parts that is especially insulting is the chapter where Ann talks about the many ‘bags’ she carries throughout the day as the spouse who is the primary caregiver for the children as well as the keeper of the house. At the end of the day, she has all this luggage she is carrying as her mental load, so when Dave arrives with his one luggage of “sex”, she just can’t handle one more thing. He is offended, turns over, and picks up his sleep luggage while she juggles another suitcase of guilt. She then makes a throwaway line that “well, some relationships are flipped” when it comes to who is carrying the luggage of sexual desire in relationships.

This is such a blatantly negligent and careless misunderstanding of flipped desires. Often, higher sexual desire wives still carry all of that luggage. They are the ones who take care of appointments, clean the house, make dinner, do the laundry, making sure everyone is where they need to be — while also remaining extremely aware of how much they would like to pick up that “sex” luggage their husband could care less about picking up but knowing that if they do, they will either be too exhausted to initiate the experience (and they are continually the only ones that do) or risk the embarrassment of being turned down while still juggling everything else. They then go to bed, usually sexually unsatisfied and ashamed because their husband doesn’t want sex with them —but they still want everything else. I wish Ann Wilson and Dave would address this harmful part of their book and include more perspectives or more neutral ones. I know at the end of their resource, they say they are not going to represent all relationships, but my goodness, experts like Shaunti Feldhahn and Dr. Juli Slattery are discovering that higher desire wives make up 25% of marriages — sure, that is not the “majority” statistic wise, but it’s a fair amount of couples. And the other 75% isn’t higher desire husbands. There is a good portion of the population that is pretty evenly matched when it comes to spouses. So when you spend four chapters waxing about how Dave just thinks about sex alllllll the time with Ann, woof, that may be the reality in their relationship, but it ignores a good portion of marriages and leads to further shaming and hiding of marriages that don’t have this dynamic.

The same could be said about Dave’s “neck problem” chapters. While some of this absolutely is generational — Dave is in his 60s and did not grow up with the accessibility of porn that Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha grew up with — the pervasiveness and hurt of porn-addicted husbands (and wives) in marriages is more prevalent than the Wilsons really address. And Dave graciously took Ann’s ire toward it until he got serious. There is little direction for the countless spouses who have a partner who is addicted and either doing little to nothing about it. Nor are they willing to acknowledge or hold space for the pain it causes their spouse. Again, I am not expecting Dave and Ann to fix and solve all relationship issues, but when you spend chapters on struggles that are not the wide experience of people in the church, it feels a little tone-deaf.

Would I Recommend?

Yes.

Overall, despite the Wilsons’ hiccups with intimacy (something I would have less issue with if they didn’t dedicate an entire part and 4 chapters to), there is some really good wisdom to glean in Parts 1 and 2, especially in regards to Part 2.

I think this resource just needs to be recommended with care. I absolutely would not recommend this to dating couples because I think the topics are best suited for those who are seriously marriage-minded or are already in a marriage relationship. I would not recommend this for spouses that are the ones solely pursuing faith in their marriage as I believe it can lead to greater discouragement and unhelpful comparison. And I would not recommend this for couples with intimacy issues. Even those with the louder discrepancy of insatiable husbands and burnt-out wives, the suggestions in their conclusions are relatively unhelpful and don’t really even focus on the vertical.

But for couples that are both pursuing The Lord, want to do a study together, and engaged couples working with a serious pastor on building their future marriage on God, this would be a valuable resource.

If you would like me to review a Christian living resource — whether it’s a book on Spiritual Disciplines, Church History, Marriage, or Living — please let me know in the comments or send me a message.

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