Customer Reviews

Honey, I Don't Have a Headache Tonight: Help for Women Who Want to Feel More In the Mood

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Shelia Wray Gregoire has an incredible way of telling it like it is in this book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, as did my husband, and will recommend it to ALL of my married friends. She hit every single nail on the head with all of my issues concerning sex and intimacy in a Christian marriage, helping me to feel that I am not alone or abnormal. Sex for women is a head thing and Sheila teaches you how to retrain your thoughts and emotions to better allow you to not only enjoy that intimacy with your husband, but to also WANT it!!! (something I had just about given up on) Another thing that was great was the way she shows you the men's perspective on sex. It helps a lot just knowing where he is coming from. Plus she gives a special section at the end of each chapter just for the men to read that hits the main points of what you just read (in case he doesn't want to read the whole book). This is a book I don't recommend lending to friends, only because you will want to hold on to it forever and make notes in it and highlite areas and reread it many, many times! This is the first book of hers I have read, but I plan to find To Love, Honor, and Vacuum because of how much I enjoyed reading this one.

Women, if you want to REALLY understand your man's needs and expectations, this book is for you. This well-written tome is intended for women, but as a man, let me tell you, Shiela understands the opposite sex! My wife and I read it together and learned a lot. Shiela ends each chapter with advice for men...I appreciate that.

Shiela's writing is crisp; her observations fascinating; her conclusions dead-on. She offers hope to women with imperfect bodies and unpredictable sex drives. The book is tastefully modest but is still direct and to-the-point.

I predict that this book will help thousands of couples experience all the joy God intended for them in the bedroom. I highly recommend this book!

Like many couples, my wife and I could use more intimacy in our lives. Kids, work, school, and the bad habits that have built up over the time we've known each other have slowly stripped a great deal of the intimacy from our lives. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why this is happening, but it takes a shared perception of the problem for a couple to fully address the issues that have brought their marriage to this state.

Because my wife is an avid reader, I felt that Honey, I Don't Have a Headache Tonight may be a great way to get on the same page with ideas to improve the intimacy and increase the closeness in our marriage. After reading the few reviews of the book, I figured that while it may have a Christian basis, the lessons the book sought to teach would be more relationship-centric. Instead, the book reads a sermon of Christian extremism and fails to acknowledge many realities of current society outside the Bible belt. While Sheila Wray Gregoire acknowledges and identifies many of the issues that can affect intimacy, her solutions often revolve around the bible which she incessantly cites as proof that one should undertake a given action. This may be fine for people who fully subscribe to her theology, but it is useless to those who are not of the more extreme Christian denominations. As you read through the book, this premise becomes more aggravating as you realize that unless you and your spouse are devout Christians in Sheila's sense of the phrase, the book will hold little for you.

The extreme Christian slant on non-marriage issues presented in this book further erodes any sense of perspective or insight on behalf of the author. The thought that the absence of the working dad in the lives of his children leads to homosexuality or the author's view on the use of pornography and masturbation are quick clues to how applicable her advice may be to your situation. I would say that if you are a devout Christian, obey a strict interpretation of the word of God, and can identify with her perspective; Sheila's book may be of service to you. However, for the vast majority of married couples, including moderate Christians, it is hard to swallow her advice because it is predicated on a strict interpretation of the bible that lacks the perspective and understanding of the relationships of the less devout to be of any service to them.

This is a letter I wrote to the author in response to the book, which pretty much covers my response:

Hi, Sheila. I've been reading your book, "Honey, I Don't Have a Headache Tonight," and I have enjoyed both your advice and your humor. I think you have written a needed and useful book.

However, I do have serious concerns with both the content and intention of your chapter on masculinity. My concerns come as both a Christian and as a feminist. As I was reading, I found myself wondering whether the intention of that chapter was really to help the reader have an improved sex life, or if it was to grind axes with feminists and liberals and others who don't align with the right-wing ideology that pervades much contemporary conservative Protestant thinking.

There were two passages that I found particularly troubling, especially from a Christian perspective. The first was the ridiculing of Bill Clinton for expressing empathy while lauding Donald Rumsfeld for lashing out with violence. I found myself dumbfounded and deeply upset by that. Which of those responses seems more like Jesus? Which way would we expect Jesus to respond, and which way did he ask that we respond? Without going into an unncessary and technical discussion of why retalitory violence is completely counter to Christian ethics, suffice to say that I cannot image that Jesus would agree with your assessment of those men, in any way.

And I had a similar response to your approval of a BBC article that bemoaned curricula that included questions beyond factual recall, with the author arguing that "[i]nstead of fact-retention and recall, in which girls and boys are roughly equal, the question now requires empathy, something that females excel in, and at which males are useless." God help us all if that is really the case! I'm just grateful that Jesus was not useless at empathy, and in fact excelled in it, and I am raising my son to excel in empathy, as well. It is certainly not unnatural to him. He will be one year old in two weeks, and he gets upset when another baby begins to cry, or when I am upset. Empathy appears to be natural for him, not something he is useless at, and I can only hope that the empathy he learns in our family and our church can sustain in him when our culture tries to kill it in him, telling him, as your book does, that it is not right for a man to have.

The fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, kindness, and self-control. While empathy is not explicitly mentioned, it is far easier to imagine it as part of the list than "adroitness at factual recall" or "tendency to lash out violently upon provocation." Those are the traits that Jesus' presence within us provides, whether we are male or female, and yet they look nothing like the masculinity that our culture lauds, or that you laud in the chapter I am discussing. They are the traits that, as wives, sisters, mothers, daughters, and friends, we should seek to encourage and admire in the men around us. In many ways, taking on those traits in a world that demands the exact opposite from men for them to be "real men" is a greater challenge than avoiding the temptations of sex and lust. And yet, the battle against lust is given so much more attention and validation than the battle to enact the fruits in a culture that asks men to deny those very traits. That is why I cannot help but think that many of your complaints in that chapter have less to do with either a desire to improve marriage relationships or a true contemplation of Christian manhood but rather a desire to grind axes with feminists and liberals and to encourage your readers to adopt right-wing views about gender, regardless of how well they actually conform to the example and teachings of Jesus.

I thank God that Jesus not only revealed God's amazing love to us, but also freed us from the shackles of the identities set for us by the "principalities and powers," among them the institutions that tell men that they must be violent, quick to anger, aggressive, militant, and without empathy. It is unfortunate that, today, the church--or at least some branches of it--is among the principalities and powers still promulgating those identities.

I pray that you take what I have written in the spirit it is intended, from someone who appreciates very much the work you have done and the wonderful advice you've given, but is deeply troubled by one particular section, in which I was left feeling like the spirit of grace and truth so evident in the rest of the book was lacking.