Pints With Aquinas - Reacting to Viral Marriage Advice on TikTok | Dr. Dan Allender | Last Call Ep. 25

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

It’s Last Call! Dr. Dan Allender is back to react to viral TikTok marriage advice. Enjoy these episodes and exclusive content ad free, one week early with DailyWire+ : https://get.dailywire.com Pints: Last Call Ep. 25 - - - 📚Resources Mentioned: The Intimate Mystery: https://a.co/d/0iNtFXd3 Deep Rooted Marriage: https://a.co/d/05iCT3X3 Truthy 30 Day Free Trial: https://get.truthly.ai/TlbX/MATT30 - - - Sponsors: Catholic Match: Visit https://CatholicMatch.com or download the app today. It’s free to get started. St. Paul Center: Start your 30-day free trial today at https://StPaulCenter.com/pints . Or become an Annual Member and receive a free copy of the complete Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. Relay: Don’t settle for secrecy when freedom is possible. Go to https://joinrelay.app and enter code PINTS for a 7-day free trial. - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠⁠ 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mattfradd.locals.com/support⁠⁠⁠⁠ - - - 💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas⁠⁠⁠ 🎵 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas⁠⁠⁠ 📚 PWA Merch – ⁠⁠⁠https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch⁠⁠ 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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What if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day? With pray.com, you can begin each morning with powerful daily prayers, inspiring Bible stories, and messages created to strengthen your faith. Whether you need peace, encouragement, or a fresh start, pray.com helps you make prayer part of your everyday life. Download the pray.com app today. Here's how you fix every marriage. You have more fun together as opposed to rehearsing grievance. More fun, less grievance. I want to hear what he means by fun.

I think for a lot of couples, fun is distraction. As you create beauty, there's nothing that brings more joy to the human heart than doing harm to evil, growing glory. That's what I define as fun. Dr. Dan Allender, thank you very much for being with me. Matt, a delight. We are going to look at several TikTok. which you have not yet seen, apparently it is marriage advice.

So we'll look at this and see what we think. Let's check out the first one. I'm 21 years old right now and I got married this past April. Congratulations. Thank you. That's phenomenal. I've never had a good role model in terms of marriage with my parents. So I was wondering what would your best advice be for having a long happy marriage?

Look, I mean, it's not about you. That's the most important thing that you'll learn really quick. It's about service. It's about commitment to the other. You're married for like an afternoon. You realize men and women are very much not the same. Carve time for one another. And so I turn my phone off every Friday night, turn it back on Sunday morning.

You just have to focus on another person. The last thing I'll say is this, is social media and phones will do everything it possibly can to get in the way of your marriage. Do what you can to put those aside, silence them. And I wish you a very, very long and happy marriage. And hopefully children sometime soon. So these are obviously quick answers that you can criticize or we can build upon. but what do you think? I couldn't agree more about phones and distractions.

You will lose your soul if you give it over to a media-structured marriage. Like if all you're doing is watching TV, all you're doing is watching a video, or looking at your phone, you will be taken away from the face of the other. But when he says marriage is not about you, what? It's one of those typical, some level legitimate, but the reality is, yes, it's about you and about your spouse and what you create together. So the idea that, let's just say sexually, it's all about your spouse and not about you. So your pleasure has no point whatsoever. Are you kidding?

If your spouse loves you, they want you to have pleasure and they want you to bring pleasure. So in that sense, it's a mutuality where the intersection of your desire and play and your spouses have a chance to come together. So I understand it's not about you, but it's about us, which means it's about both of us in a playground designed to create more intimacy for one another. The phone is so insidious because there's always a legitimate reason to be on it. You know, you might say to the other, what are you doing? I'm just, I need to do. There's always a reason to send that email to check this text, to book this hotel, there's a million things you can do in this thing.

Service is always about mutuality, not only about what the other desires. So when you understand, it's us, about us. How do we grow together where I and you, where we begin to be different and yet with a union? many ways were meant to reveal the Trinity, one and yet different. And in the difference, our own legitimate desires need to be honored and engaged, yet in a way in which we're playing together to grow one another's goodness and glory. So I love the remark about media. I want him to add a bit more about the nature of, it isn't just about you. It isn't just about me. It's about us growing each one of us to become more of what we're meant to be. At my wedding, all the old

people gave the exact same advice. Like all the old couples that have been together for like 40, 50, 60 years, they all give the exact same advice, which is like, put the friendship first. What's that mean? Basically, they all said, you're married now. There's going to be good years. There's going to be bad years. There's going to be romantic times. There's going to be non-romantic times. There's going to be difficult points in your life. There's going to be really great points in your life. Like, put the friendship first because that's going to carry you through everything. Everything else is going to come and go. You'll have patience at different times. But if you're not friends, you're not going to have the patience to wait. I love the notion of marriage as friendship. Yeah. But let's just say the nature of

friendship is not the same I have with my best friends. So a marriage is a friendship, but unlike any other. I don't have sex with my friends. I have sex with my wife. I have sex with my wife. I tell my wife things. I don't tell my friends. The basic premise that your marriage actually should be a relationship of honor, of goodness, of delight, that's a good friendship. So I'm fully on board, but then to be able to go, it's a friendship that now will help you redefine what being a good friend to all your other friends will be. And that's some. it's the prime friendship other than your friendship with God. So when you hear somebody say, I'm best friends with my spouse, what in you, is there anything

in you that bristles at that because of how, what that might mean? I think the dilemma with that is, and so who's your second best friend? Because if you're asking your spouse to be all that all friendships can be, you're asking your spouse to take a role and play a role that no human being can be. So I have conversations with my best friend who happens to be a brilliant theologian by the name a Trumper Longman III. I talk with him about certain things I need to think through before I bring that into conversation with my wife.

So I don't want my wife to be my sole best friend, S-O-L-E. I want her to be my sole best friend, S-O-U-L. Yeah, when I've heard people say you shouldn't be best friends with your wife, First time I heard that, I'm like, yeah, I think it was best friends with your wife. I thought, what are you going to say here? And the person, what they meant was, we shouldn't come to our spouse and just dump everything on them maybe in a way that we might occasionally do with a friend at the pub. Like you're there to be to support your wife. You're there to be the head of the household and not necessarily burden her with concerns that she may not be in a place to receive right then and then.

to protect her from that. That might sound a little infantilizing, but do you think there's anything there? No, I think it's true, and I think my good friends are deeply committed to me loving my wife well. They will not put up with crap about my complaints without coming back to say, and what's your part? How do you want to love her?

Yes. What's going on on your behalf that you need to address? So John Eldridge, Trimper Longman, a few other deep, deep, deep, deep friends, call me to be the man I'm meant to be with my wife. In that sense, I need good friends. I need best friends who call me to be a soul friend to my wife. Tell me what you think about this advice. My wife and I met a couple in Assisi, and they had just got married and the woman asked my wife, what advice do you have for us? And my wife said, If you're angry with him, call a friend who you know will take his side.

And if you're angry with her, obviously within reason, call a friend who you know will take her side. I love that. And here's where it gets complex. The side I want them to be on is the side of the man I am meant to grow to become. Not the side that can be small, petty, and in many ways vindictive. That's very, it's a great qualifier. One of the challenges of modern dating is that we have more options than ever before. And oddly enough, that can make it harder to choose. We start building these incredible detailed checklists. They have to be a certain height, have certain hobbies, a certain look, a certain career.

And before long, we're filtering out perfectly good people for reasons that won't matter 20 years into a marriage. Now, don't misunderstand me. You should obviously be intentional about the things that matter. shared faith matters character matters obviously virtue matters openness to marriage and family that matters but a slightly different hobby list a profile photo that isn't perfect some minor preference you've turned into a requirement those things matter a lot less than we sometimes think one thing i appreciate about catholic match is that it helps people focus on what actually matters Members answer faith-based compatibility questions about mass attendance, the sacraments and family life before you ever send a message.

That means you can spend less time obsessing over superficial details and more time discerning whether you're moving toward the same ultimate goal. And remember, the goal isn't to collect matches. The goal is to meet someone. This dating app has one job to put itself out of a job. So hold the line on faith and character, hand out grace. on height and hobbies and the perfect profile photo. The person you marry probably won't match your checklist. Thank God for that. Visit Catholicmatch.com or download the app today. It's free to get started. One of the things I hear from Catholics all the time is this. I want to share my faith,

but I don't feel equipped. Maybe you've experienced that. A friend asks a question about the Eucharist, a family member challenges the church's teaching. Someone asks you why you're Catholic and suddenly you feel like you have no idea what to say. Well, the answer isn't necessarily to become a professional apologist. The answer is knowing Jesus Christ more deeply because confidence in sharing the faith doesn't come from memorizing arguments. It actually comes from encountering Christ and understanding the story of who he's inviting us to be. That's why I love the St. Paul Center. Their studies help Catholics become deeply rooted in scripture so that sharing the faith becomes less about, winning debates and more about sharing a person. We are called, as I have on many occasions,

whether that be on airplanes or with people I bump into and just strike up a random conversation with, we aren't just called to know Christ. We are called to share Christ. And that is the mission. So start your 30-day free trial today at St. Paul's Center.com slash pints, or you can become an annual member and you'll receive a free copy of the complete Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. Again, that's St.pool Center.com slash pints. Here's how you fix every marriage. You do four things. Number one, you have more fun together as opposed to rehearsing grievance.

More fun, less grievance. Therapy is like, grievance, grievance, grievance. Have more fun together. Second is pray together. If you get married, the goal is to fuse your right hemispheres. The best way to do that is by meditating together, is by praying together, is by doing right hemisphere activity together. The third protocol is to make eye contact whenever you talk.

Never be talking without making eye contact. Way more important for your wife than it is for you. Way more important because she gets three times as much oxytocin, which means she's better at bonding, but it also means that she's better at starving when she's not getting enough oxytocin. And last but not least is remember, A, B, T, always be touching. Always be touching.

More important for men than for women, as a matter of fact. That's why when you're with your beloved and she hooks her arm into your arm while you're walking on the street, and you're like, I'm big and strong. Why? What was good? What can be critiqued? I mean, to be fair to all of these people, we're giving them a minute.

So we're not saying this. Right. Let's start with face-to-face, eye-to-eye. And it is where our brains change. When we are face-to-face, our brain begins to develop a degree of oxytocin, which is our bonding biochemical. So when you are face-to-face and not hostile, you can be face-to-face and actually increase a sense of stress biochemicals. But when there's care between you and another human being, your brain will produce the bonding biochemical, even with pure unadulterated strangers and even

with dogs, cats, maybe not cats, nonetheless. So that is absolutely true. The idea that we are to be engaged in right hemisphere activities, prayer is primary. But what I would say is wherever the imagination is set free. And prayer is a form of calling into our relationship with God and one another, something of the imagination of what our heart's desire, what we command in his name. And it draws us actually into a change of a right hemisphere. But that can be done by imagining where would you like to go for dinner. Let's imagine it. So your brain changes with right hemisphere activities, with mere facts. I think the thing where I would go, he begins with fun. And what I want to say is fun comes in the context of the quality of your relationship, the commitment of face-to-face

engagement, committed to your brains, your bodies, your hearts changing to become what God wants you to be. So what's fun? I think for a lot of couples, fun is distraction. Fun is a form of watching a movie together and you enjoyed eating popcorn and you were moved by the movie and then you depart. Was that fun? I want to go. A lot of distractions seem pleasurable. I want to hear what he means by fun. Here's what I think is fun, putting your foot on the neck of evil together. So when you are joining together to do harm to what evil is brought to this world together, So when you dance, it violates evil. When you eat well, it violates evil.

When you have good sex, you violate evil because it's all part of growing something glorious. So when you stand against that which is contrary to God, but then you create together something beautiful, beautiful together. And it can be a meal. It could be a portrait. It could be a vacation. As you create beauty, there's nothing that. that brings more joy to the human heart than doing harm to evil, growing glory.

That's what I define as fun. I love walking with my wife. We have a lovely little neighborhood that we might do several. It takes 15 minutes to do a lap. And we probably do that three or four times a day. And I have often found, like, if there's something we need to work through,

maybe I'm avoiding something here, you'll have to tell me. But I actually enjoy the two of us walking together, not looking at each other as we're trying to talk these things through. I sometimes find that that helps. I think there are conversations we can be side to side. But Becky and I know that in a car or walking,

when we need to actually be engaged with one another in a way in which our hearts are connected, we need to turn our faces. And it's not best for us as older people to walk with our eyes on one another. So we have places on our particular 45-minute, walk, that are places we often stop to continue, this is where we pray. To go deeper there. This is where we've got conflict to resolve.

So I really, if there's a lot he offers, but the basic I would say is learn how to keep the intensity of eye-to-eye engagement. Don't try to deal with conflict in a car. Don't try to make major decisions in a car. That's popcorn conversations. in a car, be face to face. And if you're face to face in a car, you are setting yourself up for death. So don't do that. And then always be touching my, I love it when my wife touches me. When we're at mass and she'll scratch my back or she'll just like, she'll say, here, do you want me to rub some

hand lotion on your hands? Like, yes. You notice I didn't deal with that. I didn't talk about that one. Why not? Well, I mean, to be fair, always be touching is clearly hyperbole. Hyperbole. And there are times where I want touch, she doesn't. She wants touch, I don't. And in that sense, we have to have a sensitivity that touch has different meanings at different times. And if you make it a universal, you're losing the particularity of people's lives and stories

in their own moment of a situation. So there are moments where I can tell Becky just doesn't want to be touched. And I'm like, what's up? Well, it becomes data. And there are other times where she's like, you don't want to be touched, but you need to be touch. Let's not just touch. Let's deal with the fact, why are you pushing me away? If I were to now come sit in your lap or put my arm around you, you would not be happy.

And I'm like, okay, you know, now we've got the ability to deal with confidence. to let touch have meaning. Don't think of it as a panacea that takes away all the difficulties, as if this is a cure for whatever ails you. Let touch have meaning. And this is advice to men in particular in marriage, and that is to stop bitching. We've lost the sense of stoicism in men completely in marriages. And so now because we encourage men to be very open about your emotions. And what that ends up happening is that you just like dump all of this stuff onto your wife all the time, everything that you're worrying but everything you're thinking about.

And the idea that a man would just shoulder something in silence is it's considered, you know, offensive. No, you have to be open about your feelings. I'm really interested to see what you have to say about this. I love straw men that are easily burned down. Yeah. Okay. Is there a world, we'll call it the Oprah Fensation of the universe,

where everybody shares something particularly difficult as if self-disclosure is the basis of integrity and authenticity. Not true. So the issue is wisdom. I mean, there are many, many wives who long for their husband to actually enter into the conflicts and the struggles they're in the middle of.

But if you're a person who's blurting, vomiting, if you will, constantly all that you're feeling, of course your spouse is going to bear a certain... Like, if you're in the presence of vomit, you don't, at one level, have a little bit of sense of disgust. Something's not well with your olifactory process. On the other hand, if we can hold the tension of, we've got to grow in wisdom to know what needs to be shared, when it needs to be shared, and how it's going to be shared. That's a whole different category.

I think it's a straw man against, I don't know, I don't know, who he's against. Stoicism is not a framework that could be called biblical. Epacetus, who basically took many nights sleep and basically a bathtub in Rome, father of stoicism. It is ultimately the ultimate platonic structure of being able to annul what is not the best part of us, which is emotions. So you want to really believe in a platonic structure of a philosophical approach, stoicism, and think that's going to honor a marriage. All I want to say is read a little

bit more. I don't think you'd be saying that. Aristotle and the Nicomachian ethics talks about if you want to stick to bend back the right way. You don't just bend it to the middle. You bend it further, so it will be in the middle, having to do with virtue and vice. So I think what he might be saying is we might be dealing with people who are, as you said earlier, constantly going to their spouse to be everything that they can be, looking to their spouse to be their therapist, their life coach, their everything else. Then we're with you. We're 100% with you.

And again, I agree with you. We're watching a brief. Let's hope no one does that. Let's hope no one does that to our interview later, right? Sorry, you may have said what? It's just the complication of being able to go, nuance is so foreign in our culture that to be able to say, I'm not going to give you. any kind of answer as to how to go about building a marriage other than can we grow you and can

we grow in wisdom. Summer can be a strange season. Schedules change. Routines disappear. There's more free time, more travel, more late nights. For a lot of men, honestly, that's when temptation gets louder. Not because you're weak, but because isolation creates opportunities for things we struggle with most. The devil loves secrecy. He loves convincing you that you're the only one fighting this battle, that everyone else has it figured out, that you're too far gone, that if people knew the truth, they'd walk away. But none of that's true. One of the most important moments in my own journey towards freedom was realizing I didn't need to keep pretending. What I needed was honesty. I needed accountability. I needed other people. And that's why relay exists.

I'm really excited about this. Please check it out. Relay isn't just another blocker or monitoring app. It's Brotherhood. Relay, a community of men who understand the fight, who can help you identify triggers and who are committed to helping each other pursue lasting freedom. If you're tired of fighting this battle alone,

check out Relay. And use my code pints for a seven-day free trial. Don't settle for secrecy when freedom is possible. If you want to have happy children have a happy marriage, That is the most important thing you can do for your children. If it's a choice between going to Dylan's soccer game and taking your wife to dinner, take your wife to dinner, your kids will benefit from that much more than anything you could do for that. Make your wife happy, and your children will be happy and secure.

What they want is security, predictability, knowing that at the center of the family is an immovable rock called this marriage, this love between man and wife. I think it's that simple. That's great advice. Thank you. It's work for me. Do you know many people that's probably going to help? That's amazing.

Your thoughts. Feel free to be critical. The core premise, I couldn't agree with more. Your greatest commitment to your children is the quality of your marriage. But if you think having a happy spouse is the core, it's your children need to see you handle conflict together. They need to see you fight together. They need to see you struggle together. And with the uniqueness of who you are as a person with them as a person, so that they begin to go,

I'm a lot like dad here, but I'm a lot like mom. here, but I see ultimately, even in their conflicts, there is a commitment to honor each other, even a kind of delight in the conflict, even if it bears a certain degree of heartache, if your children can begin to see you can be in conflict, you can have differences, you can actually be at times not well with one another, but be well. then they have confidence that they can be in conflict eventually and actually have it lead to good. So if the commitment is a happy wife, what I would say is there's something fundamentally patronizing about that notion. So I'm here to make you happy and you will know that because I have a happy wife, everything's good.

it sets children up for a false vision of what true living with one sinner with another sinner is actually about. So I would rather say, I want my children to see me be able to confess, to repent, and to grow in the context of being able to grow to a new union, even in the middle of Harding. So I've heard people say never fight in front of your kids. And I think what they mean by that is, if you can't fight fair, then don't fight in front of your kids. So where's, yeah. Totally agree with that. But what's fighting fair? It's the absence of contempt. When I win.

No, sorry. Absence of contempt. It's the absence of contempt. And with enough curiosity to be able to say, I am so totally, I don't see how you're thinking this or making this decision. But I know there must be blindness. I know there's blindness in me. So talk. actually openness to the view and the thoughts of the other, even if you eventually still differ.

I think that's more powerful than a happy spouse. Okay. Suppose someone was here a couple of people and they said, we're getting married next month. What advice do you have? Well, first of all, have you sat with a really wise, honorable, committed, friend, therapist, pastor, and begun to do some of the work of asking, how is your past going to play out in your present? In other words, whether you call it premarital counseling or not, where you've actually done the work of talking about where will conflicts uniquely come? How have we already begun to develop patterns that may not

be the most honorable and the most generative? If you've not done something prior to that, postpone that sucker because you don't want to carry into your marriage what you have not prepared for. If you are going on a trip to the Amazon, would you not do a bit of preparation or would you just show up with somebody having packed your bag with no information? That's insane. So do the work beforehand. And as you're stepping in, there are two very most important issues that you deal with. How you deal with conflict, how you deal with sex. If we can get those two things talked about together in a way that prepares you for what's ahead, I've got confidence, then you can then deal with all the other issues.

Final point, you need to leave your mother and father. And that's not geographic, and that's not primarily financial. That's deep issues of loyalty. So when my children, I had the privilege of officiating all three ceremonies. I said to my children, I want you to turn to all the parents, and I'll be sitting down there with them and say, thank you for all that you've done on our behalf. But when I turn my back to you, I am committing a loyalty to my spouse that will now never be the same as it was with you in the years prior. And all my children said, it would be the craziest thing ever heard in a marriage

ceremony. We won't do it. And I said, okay. I asked you to. I asked you to think about it. Yeah. But I'm asking you to live it. Oh, that's very healthy. So in that, what I would say is, are you prepared to leave your mother and father? Not financially. That's not the issue. Not geographically. That's not the issue. In terms of loyalty, you are committing to a loyalty that makes the core priority now your spouse, not your parents. People are going to want to learn more about what you have had to say about marriage. Obviously, you've thought about this and spoken about this and lived through this a lot, what would you point them to? Well, it's self-serving to say I would love for you.

It's a softball. I've written three books. Intimate allies, intimate mystery. Those are two books. And then the book, most recent, deep-rooted marriage. So when you begin to think about marriage and you begin to go, you don't just get married, you have to not just prepare, but you've got to be aware. It's a long lifetime process to grow your marriage.

and the more you're willing to actually ask good hard questions of yourself and your spouse, read, think, grow, your marriage is going to inevitably be beautiful. If you don't, good luck. Dr. Alando, thank you very much for being with us.