Just Love Her: Thoughts on How to Not Just Live in but Glorify God in the Middle of My "Bad" Marriage

“What you need is a good woman.” That was my mother’s consistent counsel from the time I didn’t get asked to play on the neighborhood little league team to when Donna and I broke up in high school. “What you need is a good woman, Don.” I believed my mother when she said it. I didn’t walk around on a daily basis and repeat the mantra of the good wife, but I did take it to heart. It wasn’t until I got married that I realized that although I had a good woman, life wasn’t getting easier or more fulfilling—in fact, it was getting much, much harder.
One of the goals of Just Love Her is to identify a number of the fallacies that many of us men have hung onto, believing like me in my younger days that when you find the right woman, all your problems will magically disappear. Most of the time (not all, but most) it’s after marriage that the real problems begin. It’s not that they weren’t there before, it’s just that our “good woman” turns into a full-length relational mirror exposing the sin and idolatries that were already there, but were easy to run away from, before we got hitched to our eventual “bad” wife.
This little book will identify one of the main causes of “bad” marriages: idolatry. Many if not most, men “worship the ground she walks on” instead of just loving her.

Don Fast has worked as a substance abuse counselor for the past twenty years. Before that he served as a full-time youth speaker, youth, and head pastor for over fifteen years. He has been married to his wife Laurie for nearly twenty years. He and Laurie were divorced for seven years and were remarried almost fifteen years ago.