Book Review: Love Must Be Tough

Title: Love Must Be Tough

Author: James C. Dobson

Date: 1983

Publisher: Word

ISBN: 0-8499-0348-3

Length: 212 pages

Quote: “There would be fewer bitter divorces if young husbands and wives knew how to draw therir drifting partners toward them, rather than relentlessly drive them away.”

Dr. Dobson thinks the concept of tough love is “relevant to all human relationships...business and labor, guards and prisoners, Americans and Russians.” He doesn’t want readers to think he’s promising them more than he can deliver: “Genuine insights into human behavior are not everyday occurrences...if one stumbles into two or three fundamental principles in the course of a lifetime, he has done well. The pages that follow focus on one of my allotted few.”

His insight was that it takes two people to save a relationship. If the other person refuses to do anything to save it, your best chance is to toughen up, stand on your principles, get a life of your own, and let the other person come back around to you. Or not.

In the early 1980s, Dr. Dobson was actually offering a big improvement over what some Christian counsellors were telling people, which was to forgive everything, be a doormat, keep pleading for love and being rejected, and offer your misery up to God.

Now that we’ve all agreed that walking away from a relationship before it becomes toxic is more likely to work toward everyone’s Highest Good than enabling abuse is, however, there is a need for a next step. Christians who are not in twelve-step groups have yet to discover the power of community to help tough love work.

A young couple “fall in love,” get married, believe that making babies is the only way they can really “make love,” and do it often. After ten years, the husband notices that love is not exactly what he feels for his messy house, his five needy whiny children, and his fat, depressive, lactating wife. If he were a Real Man he’d get tough,. himself, and recognize that feelings are supposed to come and go, and plan on doing the decent thing for a few years until the children reach a more enjoyable stage of development and the wife recovers her health. Real Men, however, were always a minority; in his generation they’re an endangered species. So he makes excuses to move out—“on business”—and, since he has a good income and has moved into a low-rent neighborhood, very soon he’s sharing a house with a divorced woman. Then he’s sharing a bed. Then they have a baby. Then he’s genuinely torn for a while, because his wife is beautiful (apart from the temporary weight problem) and has Background, whereas the divorcee is frequently mistaken for a fat boy and is known among her people as White Trash, but in the end, the house with one infant seems more pleasant than the house with five. So he files for divorce.

Now, more than twenty-five years after Love Must Be Tough was first published, at least all the qualified and unqualified counsellors are telling the divorced mother the same thing. Give him tough love! Raise the babies alone! Show him that you’re a thoroughbred! Living well is the best revenge! Get a better job than he’s got, lose the surplus weight, put all five kids through college without him! Go, girl!

It all sounds good, and plays well on TV, but reality is that she's not qualified for a job that's going to put anybody through college. There are those who say, “What she needs to do is beg for handouts.” First of all, there’s a long line of people waiting for every handout our government can still afford to offer, and we all know our government is offering more than it can afford. Then, if she has any assets, such as her looks and Background, instead of feeling moved to help her, social workers probably feel inclined to gloat; they don't want to help her back up to the lifestyle to which she is accustomed, they want to push her further down into the mire. Maybe they can "help" her move into a housing project where she has to share a bathroom with a drug dealer.

Christians need to learn from the apostles’ example. The apostolic church was not content to sit around telling people how they were supposed to feel. The apostolic church understood “love” as an active verb. Although some apostolic church communities actually practiced voluntary communism, or communalism, for a while, no apostolic church community was foolish enough to offer handouts to people who were able to work. Even the “widows...taken into the number” of respectable ladies over age seventy still seem to have been expected to give something back to the community. Instead of doling out handouts and pauperizing people who wanted to be useful, the apostolic church put these people’s talents and energy to work. St. Paul ordered them to “Let him that stole steal no more, but let him labor...that he may have to give to him that needeth,” and, “If any will not work, neither let him eat.”

It would be pleasant if Dr. Dobson had written another book advising Christians how to help fat, depressive, heartbroken rejects practice Tough Love and be fascinatingly independent. That mother of five needs help on both practical and emotional levels if she is going to practice Tough Love. Women, particularly, need to rally around a woman who is in financial straits. This may be hard to do, especially when the lady in distress is still prettier than they’ll ever be, but if they don’t do it their husbands will. They need to keep this woman busy; they need to make sure her income is steady and her loyalty is to them rather than to their husbands.

Well...that’s the book I think Dobson needed to write. What about the book he did write? It’s still worth reading today. If you’ve already heard a lot about Tough Love, as it might be in a therapy or recovery group, you might feel that you no longer need to read all the examples of tough love Dobson shares. If the concept is relatively new to you, even today, then you might still need to read the whole book, with specific examples of how Tough Love can help people whose spouses have left them or cheated on them, families plagued by domestic violence, families of addicts, parents and teenagers, and so on.

Actually, although the first few chapters try to be inclusive, the first two-thirds of the book deal mostly with adultery...probably reflecting Dobson’s counselling experience; the book never discusses examples of Tough Love between “Americans and Russians.” Dobson had discussed Tough Love for parents and children rather thoroughly in Dare to Discipline and Preparing for Adolescence. The final third of this book discusses other family situations that call for Tough Love. Dobson was among the first Christian counsellors to advise wives to leave abusive husbands--not to remarry, just to go somewhere else for their own safety and that of the children.

Those interested in being counsellors probably need to read the whole book. Counsellees may skim over the sections that don’t apply to them.