God made men and women different — and truly understanding their distinctions is key to a healthy marriage. Hosts Scott Brown and Jason Dohm break this down with guest Michael Foster. They discuss why men often carry burdens silently, why women tend to communicate more contextually, and how a woman’s cyclical hormonal reality differs from a man’s more stable pattern. Along the way, they unpack “disappointment dynamics” in early marriage, the temptation to despise or judge one another, and why learning to live with “understanding” is essential (1 Pet. 3:7). Their takeaway: embrace God’s design, and your home will be stronger for it. 

Checking out the podcast, just a quick reminder not to use this as a replacement for the good pastoral leadership and teaching in your local church, but really just an encouragement for quiet faithfulness through the sufficiency of scripture. Of Scripture. So let me set this up. We really want to talk about a really pivotal thing in the world called marriage. Everybody comes from a relationship between a husband and wife, or a man and a woman.

But what you've got is you have manhood and you have womanhood. That's a problem. And here's how it works, you know, every woman wants to marry a responsible, good man, she finds him, and then she finds out he's actually a man. And he's different. He feels different, he thinks different, He acts different.

I'll never forget, it must have been 40 years ago, I read Elizabeth Elliott's book, Let Me Be a Woman. It was a letter that she wrote to her daughter who was going to get married. And she's telling her daughter, the problem with marriage is you marry a man and you marry a sinner and you also marry a human being with a bunch of different interests. And, but what I'd like to talk about is just this reality. Men think through problems differently.

They feel differently about problems. I know this is not universal. And a wife often thinks, my husband doesn't understand me. And she's correct. He doesn't completely understand her.

And she often might think, my husband's not hearing my heart. And he doesn't, because he's very different. He carries burdens differently. Most men, and again, I know this is not universal, but most men carry their burdens silently. And Financial burdens, relational burdens, burdens in the church, burdens everywhere.

At the same time, men have tremendous responsibilities in their marriages. Ephesians 5 makes that really, really clear. The husband bears really the greatest weight in the relationship and the detail, the contours of what a husband must do for his wife. In other words, a man just can't just settle into who he is even though he is that way. On the one hand, his wife needs to understand that, but on the other hand, that man needs to understand that he also married a woman, and that creates obligations for him.

So that's what I want to talk about today. So maybe we could just start talking about sort of this disappointment dynamic where you've got a woman marries this man. He's not Charles Atlas, he's a regular guy, but she's disappointed in him and it might be tied to his masculinity. Every couple is going to go through some of this in their marriage just because, especially if you're getting married on the younger side, you're going to not just discover who a person actually is in the fullness, but you are still growing very much. You're still maturing in your 20s and becoming who you will become.

My wife, I remember she didn't grow dirt poor like I did. And I was used to looking at the price per pound or per ounce when I was shopping to see where I could get the greatest value for this or that cereal or whatever. And she didn't grow up knowing how to cook. I grew up knowing how to cook from scratch just because that's how we had to do it in our household. But she's way better at shopping than I am now and a much much better cook than I am and and that's because she was still maturing as a person right turning into who she will become and so anytime you're getting married you are you've got a good idea who someone is, but they're going to reveal more and more of who they are and also they're going to change a whole lot.

So there will be some disappointment and also be some awesome discoveries of who you can become. So those first couple of years, I think the first three years in particular seem to be pretty hard on couples to adjust to a shared life. But I would always tell people, now you got to hear someone cough and make disgusting noises in the restroom or wherever. You're just going to get to know each other in very intimate ways. And that can cause a sort of end of a honeymoon phase.

But also, life is different when you're with each other constantly and being forced to make some hard decisions and folks that didn't argue at all during your courtship, which I kind of think is a bad sign, right? If while you're dating, whatever you want to call it, that there's no sparks flying at all and you're fully agreeing with each other. I like to see some healthy disagreement and learning how to work through conflict. But that will eventually happen in marriage if a man is a man and a woman is a woman. They're going to have differences and it's going to be really hard to resolve them.

You're going to discover things about your spouse that you just didn't know, you couldn't know. And sometimes you discover that your husband has needs that you didn't understand or struggles you didn't understand. And that can really lead to crushing your view of him as, you know, I think that's all the name of this podcast is something like that the man's not a myth. No man is mythical at all. So I think that's just a normal part of marriage.

And that's the woman starting to learn a man and what he is. I don't know if that's a good intro to this at all, but those are some thoughts. So Peter's instruction to husbands in 1 Peter 3, 7 is that husbands need to live with their wives in an understanding way. That presumes that you might not understand and you need to apply yourself to understand. And then you need to pattern how you're going to live with your wife according to having an accurate understanding.

The problem is we all assume, We come into marriage with things that we presuppose. We pretty much all think that we understand. But until a man has lived with a woman, he doesn't really understand. Till a woman has lived with a man, she doesn't really understand. So effort needs to be given to gain an understanding of things you didn't know, but need to know and then pattern your life accordingly.

Yeah, that gives me a sense where we're going. Yeah. I like to tell people that guys are coffee cups. Women are goblets, right? A goblet, you know, wine goblet is totally fine for what it's designed for.

Right. It's perfectly designed. It's, it's perfectly strong enough for what it's designed for, but it's not meant to roll around the bottom of a floorboard of your truck. Right. And I've got four, I've got four coffee mugs in there right now.

And, you know, I'll take them out into the house and they're like, oh, that's where this went. But, you know, you don't drink wine out of a coffee mug, at least not ideally, and you don't put wine goblets on the floorboard. There's differences in design And you have to learn to go with the grain of design, not against it. I think, I think some of the big differences are hormonal. Men don't have a period, right?

We have a very, if we're healthy, we have very stable hormonal reality, all the way from our early 20s into our 60s, right? A lot of times, men are still able to produce children quite late in life. Women have a period, right? They menstruate. So that's very cyclical.

There is a very real sense that you didn't marry one woman, you married two. You married the up cycle and down cycle of women. She's going through very different hormonal realities in the month, and that shapes how she feels. Just like, you know, I depend pretty heavily on intuition in my life, and when I have a cold, I always think my wife's mad at me because I don't feel right. My hormones are off of my ability to read people.

It's kind of messed up. And so sometimes if you have a wife that emotions don't quite make sense. It's not that she's irrational, It's that she's got a surge of hormones that are causing her to feel a certain way at a given time. There's a time in a month where your wife very much is like, let's make a baby, and other times where she's like, someone just hold me. There's a very different hormonal reality that also affects every aspect of how you relate.

And then I also think that there is kind of related is, you know, how men have this very stable hormonal reality and a woman has a very cyclical one. Communication tends to follow a similar pattern that I think you can understand through God's design. Men are very action oriented in their communication. So it's heavily concept based. So it's A to B and it's A to B equals C.

So they want it to be very straight. Tell me what you want. Right. Without any going off of it. And at the end, there's a punchline or a call to action.

So a lot of times when a guy is listening to a woman, he's assuming that at the end of this, he's supposed to do something, right? He's supposed to- He's a fixer, right? He's going to fix this. Yeah, he's going to fix it. There's a command that's being given.

So for a guy, it's very mission oriented, very much oriented to building. A woman's communication is very focusing more on kind of knitting people together, relational cultivation or whatever. So for her, she kind of has a circular pattern in her communication where she's not just going to tell you that she went to the grocery store, sometimes she will, but everyone she saw along the way or who called her or what the weather was like or what was on sale or whatever. For her, those are background details that give a fuller picture of her experience that she's trying to share with you. To a man that feels irrational, illogical, communication is about giving me commands in the most efficient manner.

For her, her goal though wasn't a simple call to action. It was painting a picture, sharing her life. She's trying to cultivate shared experience. Women talk that way. For example, and they can be indirect because where men are very content-driven, a woman is very context-driven.

She's painting the context. The woman will say, oh, it sure is cold in here, right? Which is woman for term, you know, start a fire, turn up the heat, give me a blanket, right? What the man wants is someone simply to say, give me a blanket, he'll go get you a blanket. But he feels like you saying that is requiring him to read your mind.

It's not, it's just how women talk. They think in terms of the atmosphere, the context, all the surrounding stuff. So it's a very circular sort of communication pattern. Now that is a stereotype, right? This is how it usually plays out.

These things exist along the spectrum. So I tell a lot of people the problem with a lot of marriages is sort of androgynous assumptions about the opposite sex, right? That we work the exact same way that we're interchangeable. And you have to start to embrace the way your wife communicates and you have to embrace the way your husband communicates and take steps towards understanding each other, learning to speak woman, or at least learning to understand woman and learning to speak man, or at least understanding how to speak man, because you have a very different way of getting at things. And I think women again are very nurturing, cherishing.

They want the baby to be close. They stay closer to the home where a man is pushing the boundaries of the house out. He's going to work with people outside of the family in these larger covenant relationships where the woman tends to stay closer to the house. All that impacts the way they talk. It also impacts the way they deal with conflict.

Where a man's preference for conflict is straightforward, intense, where a woman's way of dealing with conflict is very roundabout and usually involves words more than physicality. So women tear down other women through communication. And we can read that in Scripture. We see that in nature, but in Scripture, you have Paul constantly warning women about being gossips or being slanderers, right? And not warning men.

It's not because men don't gossip or slander, but because that's a more, that sin pattern, right, is more pronounced in women who, in women since they are indirect and how they deal with things where you see Paul pushing on men on anger or wrath, right? Because men are much more intense that way. And So guys, like it's women, if they get in a fight, right. And they throw blows or whatever, they're probably never going to be friends again. That is likely the end of that relationship.

With guys, it's a matter of pecking order and they may become best friends. Matter of fact, one of my good friends in high school called me a name. He wasn't my friend yet. He was on a wrestling team, way bigger than me. And I hadn't hit my growth spurt yet.

And I said, you don't have the guts to say that to me, to my face. And I did that. So I said, I dare you to whisper it in my ear. And I only said that because I knew that's the only way I could hit him because he was so much bigger than me. So when he whispered in my ear, I punched him in his face.

And his glasses flew off across the basketball court. And then the gym coach came and broke it up, which was good, PE teacher, because I would have been beat up. But then that was the very end of a semester. In the next semester, we had what was called Quest. It was like, kind of like DARE, drug abuse resistance education, which evidence that it actually made people do more drugs, but that's a different podcast.

We were in that class together and ended up becoming really friends. We're team captains for two years together on the wrestling team. But I remember when I suggested the name Ashley in passing for the name of a girl years ago My wife was like, oh, I don't like that name There's a girl I knew that I had problems with I was like, I've never heard you mention Ashley. What was that? She's like, oh, I was in fourth grade.

It's like Holding on and so there's just these kind of broad ways that men and women are wired differently. And they do compliment each other because sometimes the more direct confrontational approach is needed. Other times, a kind of more patient contextual approach is needed. And when men and women work together in their home, they cultivate both, both, both they have the feminine, the feminine and the masculine working together to produce really well adjusted people. Yeah, I think that's a blending.

I think we should look at it as a blending of strengths. You have a man who's not as emotional, and he's the kind of guy who's going to go to his wife and say, honey, it's going to be okay. We don't have to get too worked up about it. I think the qualities of manhood are a little bit like ballast in a ship in a storm, they sort of steady the boat while a wife might be cycling through some kinds of concerns. On the other hand, a wife is really introducing something really good and beautiful into a man's life, and both of them are necessary.

I think that's probably why Peter says honor your wife as the weaker vessel. In other words, you're not saying, look, she's an idiot, she's a weaker vessel. You're actually honoring, you're honoring this reality that she is a weaker vessel. There's something that you, there's a role that you have to play with a weaker vessel, but at the same time, you have to recognize There's something about her that's necessary in your life. This is after all the creation order, right?

God actually created this to be the way it is. I think at a macro level, when you think of two fathers in a home only. You recoil from that because of all that would be over-accentuated and all the things that would be missing. And when you think of a home just with two mothers, you recoil from that because of all the things that would be over-accentuated and all the things that would be missing. At a micro level, though, when it's you and someone who's really different than you, it's easy to conclude that's a dumb, okay, about the differences, which is really harmful, but really natural and to see the differences as something that needs to be fixed when actually the home needs the differences.

Amen. That's why I like that wine goblet analogy because a wine goblet is weaker than a coffee mug, so to speak. That's part of that because of its design and that's why you have to take extra care with it. Well, let's talk about this thing that I think is pretty prominent. Men carry their burdens silently way more than women, and that frustrates women often.

They want their husbands to share. And a lot of times they don't know what to share. They don't know how to respond. Because for some, and men just seem to carry burdens internally more than externally. How do you, How do you help a woman understand that or think that through?

Yeah, I mean our job is to be tough to go out there. You know, I think of it as God has made us to deal with thorns and thistles to some degree. It's certainly, like women quite literally have skin that is not as tough as male skin. It feels softer, it rips easier. And So men are expected to be tougher.

Also if a woman hits a man, the odds that she's going to kill him, like a grown woman hits a grown man is like extremely low. But the odds that if a man punches a woman as hard as he could, that he could actually kill her or, you know, they're much higher. And so we have to learn to practice a sort of Christian stoicism, like this emotional control, right? And so you teach a man to deal with his emotions because he's so powerful, he's physically powerful and he's a representative head. So the mistakes he makes affects a whole lot of people.

So it's just kind of built into men. And certainly if they're around other men that are of have gravitas and character are going to train them to be extremely emotionally disciplined and not to be to gush. I think this is something I hear people talk about is that women do resent really emotionally vulnerable men. They'll say that's what they want. I just don't think it's true.

I think a woman wants a strong man, but she wants people to connect with them. So if the guy is like overly emotional and weak or comes off as weak or feminine, it's going to be an incredible turn off and undermine the woman's trust of him. And it'll be hard for her to admit that's true, but you'll see this with girls that talk about like, you see this a lot in the dating courtship process where, oh, he's such a nice Christian guy and I know I should like him, but I'm just not attracted to him. And usually what she means by nice is like, he's just overly agreeable and kind of a pushover and while, you know, like clean, but she doesn't respect there's a lack of sort of manly gruff and push and a little bit of swagger. I think that can happen in marriages too, where if the guy is crying too much or whatever, I think that's going to undermine his wife's trust because she's like, hey, I'm the woman.

I just want to know that you feel and connect. I have seen the modern trips of women making fun of men for being stoic and saying they should share their emotions more only to resent them. So I think that's another thing. Guys know that their manhood is on the line if they are overly emotional. I also think since they're duty driven, a lot of guys are, at least masculine guys, that they don't want to have to over-praise their children, which I think is a mistake.

I think children need lots of courage, and you can't give courage without being encouraging. But I did work for this guy, old Vic Willoughby. He was a plumber in southern Indiana, And he took me on as a plumber, a princess. I never did any plumbing though. I just worked on his farm.

And Vic was like literally impossible to please it felt like. And he never praised. But what I learned is that if he looked around and kind of shook his head up and down a little bit like, like, and then it complained and gave you like an extra 20, then you had done a really good job. Right. And, and that's certainly older kind of version of guys that they're pushing for excellence, they're expecting you to have a commitment to excellence and be duty bound.

I think because guys are more duty bound, they can be overly stoic. I do think the greatest generation probably was overly stoic and did have some negative effects in their children, the boomers in particular, I think because of the amount of suffering they went through, because of the war, because of all that, they seem to really... Some of them struggle to be emotionally available. You'll hear some especially older boomers describe how, like, my grandpa never told me he loved me, but I know he... Or my dad never told me he loved me, and I know he did, but I never saw him cry.

After a while, you're like, look, man, I'm not an emotional guy, but that kind of sounds unhealthy at some point. So I do think just in general, you know, anyone that's going to be out there in war, high trauma or whatever, has a tendency to be very stoic, to keep it on the inside. That's why it's so important that men have a vibrant prayer life, so they're dealing with these issues. So I think the woman just has to start to understand, like, she has to start to read them and take what he gives her and accept that as enough, like push them a little bit, but not too much and understand them. You know, I don't think the younger generation has problems sharing their emotions, just to be frank.

I think some of them need to stop being babies and toughen up. I think the 35 and down crowd is extremely weak, extremely fragile. It's pretty incredible. How do you think that happened? I think it's almost like the opposite of like they're the children of wealth.

If you, I mean, as they hit their twenties, it got rougher, to be fair. But as little kids, they grew up in a very wealthy time in America, the late 80s, 90s, and very early 2000s. Things are pretty good until the downturn. So I think they grew up in a time of softness, of ease. I think they also were taught a lot about self-esteem and all that sort of stuff.

They really taught to think highly about themselves. People that think they're awesome struggle with correction. There's that old episode of Andy Griffith where Opie's letting the kid win the chess games all the time. And then Andy says, you look, that's not any way to help your friend. If you want to help your friend, you should, you know, actually try.

And Opie beats him right away and the kid like knocks over the chess board and all that. I think it was kind of a coddled generation. It was a generation like my son, I had to correct. He was talking about his anxiety too much. And I was like, son, we didn't even know what anxiety was back when I was in high school.

We had never heard of such a thing. It was something very, very far off. We didn't really know too much about that. That's life's tough. Sometimes you have worries.

Sometimes you have to cast your cares on the Lord because he cares for you and not be a big baby. So I think they were kind of babied. And so it's their responsibility to toughen up. But their parents did, and society did fail them. You know, it wasn't, They didn't come out of nowhere.

The guys are part of the generation that took out student loans. Student loans were a terrible, terrible financial sin, in my opinion. To have miners sign a promissory note that's tens of thousands of dollars, that's not dischargeable in bankruptcy. It's crazy. It never should have happened.

And it was a very bad thing. So I didn't know any better. I was a 17-year-old kid. It's still my responsibility to deal with now, but it wasn't a societal failure. And I think society really failed the millennials in some big way.

The zoomers I'm a little more upbeat about, but we'll see. We'll see. We just gotta, Each man's got to step up and be responsible for what God's given to them. But I do think they're weak. They're very, very weak on the whole, especially the women, actually.

The women are the worst. Yeah. And I think that's helpful as we're doing marriage counseling for young people, trying to help them figure out how to be married. I think the whole thing from this podcast really is, so men are very different, women are very different. Men have a tremendous responsibility to nourish, cherish, to wash their wives in the water, the word to live with them in an understanding way.

Women, they have to recognize their husbands are different and they should have some sense of respect for it and not despise it. You know, today, you know, I think is it 75% of women are the ones who file for divorce? Women are getting very disappointed in their marriages, even older women. And I think some of this has to do. That's the divorce fantasy, right?

Yeah. Well, so the divorce fantasy is the movies they grew up with. So it's usually a woman who's trying to climb up in corporate America, has some loser boyfriend from maybe husband, but it's usually a boyfriend. And she breaks up with him because he just can't get it together. And now she's got the big project at work.

And what's this, this tall, dark and handsome other man's man comes into the office and now she's got to compete with them. And actually she falls in love with him and he falls in love with her and he respects her for the awesome, you know, girl boss that she is and they live every happily ever after. It's a divorce fantasy. You drop the loser later in life and there's like Prince Charming's waiting for you. No, he's not.

The same goes for men as well. Life after divorce, especially in your late 30s, is extremely difficult. Women have been given these fantasies. They've been told to dream, to not give up on their dreams, never lower your standards. Well, I'd say never lower biblical standards, but some of these standards are insane.

This is crazy stuff, right? On both sides. And women have been coddled so much. They've been coddled by their postures. They've been coddled by Titus II women because, I mean, that's what we really need.

We need a generation of loving, no-nonsense Titus II women. My friend Rosaria, I was talking to her and I was like, we just need more women like you that are spending time with women. Just telling them to learn to be content and to toughen up and all this. But the women have been coddled like, bad man. And so now you have this sort of blowhard, patriarchal blowback, which is like, they're still whining goblets, they still are.

And now they're like, why isn't the pastor screaming from the stage and correcting the women the way they correct the men? I'll tell you what, here's why. Is that when you scream, like I was at a wrestling match this past week, my son is at the very end of his wrestling season. I saw kids lose matches, clearly upset, the boys were, and they would go out and kind of cry somewhere in a corner or whatever. But also the coach would like, you shouldn't have done this.

You should have done this, yada, yada, yada to the guys and say, all right, you'll get it next time. Right. So it was still stern. And then you'd see, I was watching this girl, wrestling, another girl, and she just started crying during the match. I wanted to be like Tom Hanks and a league of their own.

There's no crying and wrestling, not on the mat, not on the mat, at least right. Like, like everyone's, but, But when you scream at guys, when you stern with guys, you get results. They're like stiff, they stiffen up and they like, I'm not going to let that guy do that. I will overcome this. With women, they just, they wilt, they cry, they run, they freak out.

And they're different than men. And even so pastors are in a tricky spot where we have to correct women and rebuke them for their sin. But I can't even, I can't treat women just like I treat men. They're different. And that's where the tightest two women are so valuable, where it's like, Hey, look, like I can remember this one girl, she'd always wear, she'd wear her purse strap in between her breasts and it would lean and it'd lift her one breast up really high.

So it's, it's like, like saying, look at me, right? It was very awkward. I'm not going to tell that girl, Hey, you got your purse strap wrapped around your boob. Why I'm never doing that. Like that's a terrible, that's how you, that's how you get on the internet, man.

Like I'm not doing that. But someone's, someone's got to tell her, right? So I was like, Hey, sweetheart, had, did you notice so and so she's like, Oh yeah, I was like, I can't say anything. Will you, will you like politely like say something and if you think it's this accidental and she's clueless be soft. But if you detect a little bit more pressure on it a little bit.

Pastors work that way, just like fathers work through, I'm not going to talk to my daughter about girls. It's a hard conversation. I'll do what I got to do. Right. But, but I think what's interesting right now is there's a over correction where like, well, they wouldn't rebuke women.

So now we will, and we'll treat them just like men. Right. So that's why when I wrote the book, it's good to be a man with my friend Dominic, our point that we were trying to make was in drogyny's with one of the greatest enemies, which is the interchangeability or diminishing of sexual differences. Right. And I think if we want to be good pastors and husbands and fathers, we have to recognize these things and it requires a soft touch and a lot of wisdom.

So Scott, a parting shot for me. I know we're almost at time, But Romans 14 is a chapter about the stronger and weaker brother. And I think it's applicable to the marriage relationship in that it's not uncommon that you don't see exactly eye to eye, you're seeing things differently. And so Paul says to one, don't you despise this other? And then he turns to the other and says, don't you judge this one?

And why is he giving that counsel? Because there are these predispositions towards both of those things, to see somebody that you don't see eye to eye with and to despise them because they're obviously an idiot, because they don't think the way you do. And meanwhile, the other person is judging you really in the other direction because you can't see eye to eye. And so they're thinking much the same thing. That can happen in marriage just because men are men and women can view masculinity as something to be fixed, and women are women, and men can view femininity as something to be fixed.

And neither one of those things is true. Yeah. You got a parting shot, Mr. Foster. I think we're in great need of, of having a more robust view of sexuality.

We have to, there's been such wild over corrections over the last several years. And, And I think we have to, we need to be praying for God to raise up. We've been talking about the problem of father hunger for a long time in culture, But there's a real mother hunger right now. And there's a deep need for younger women to be discipled by older women. And what I would say to any older woman that's listening to this, You may say, well, I'm still waiting for that older woman.

Well, sometimes you don't get it. Right. And that is more or less the case with my wife is that just she had a couple people pour into her here and there, but nothing like this wonderful one-on-one mentorship that lasted years, just a few people. But now, now I'm like, sweetie, I know you and I are just in our early 40s, or she's in her early 40s, but this lot's fallen to us. And now you have to, you have to be the tightest two women to these 25 year olds who grew up without a mom or had a feminist mom.

And so I think, if we really want a robust view of sexuality, we have to pray for a God to raise up spiritual mothers, mothers of Israel and also more fathers in the church. We're in really treacherous times right now. That's my party shot. My party shot to anyone out there is maybe you didn't get the mother or father you wanted to. Well, we all have to accept what God gives us.

And maybe you're getting a battlefield promotion to be that Titus II woman, or to be that guy that speaks in the younger men's life and tells them to stop being a baby. Or sometimes, I've been through that brother, come here. You don't have to cry in front of your wife, you can cry in front of me and then I'll slap you after you're done. You know what I mean? Like you need, I think guys can be vulnerable with each other and we'll have a lot of sympathy for one another.

Like, all right, well, you got it out. Now, get back out there. Let's go at it. That's God's calling us to step up and do our best. And he draws straight lines with crooked sticks.

So he can use anybody. Okay. Well, I think we solved it. We solved the whole tension, you know, right here on this podcast. Michael, thank you so much for coming on today.

It was a fun talk. Thank you. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope you can be with us next time. And hope you can see us at Ridgecrest, where we're having our manhood and womanhood conference.

And Michael's going to preach there. And it's going to be a great time. Hope to see you there. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com.