Two corrections before the review, because the previous version of this page got both of them wrong.
First, this is not a parenting book. It is a marriage book, start to finish. There is no chapter on children. If you came here looking for help fathering, this is the wrong page.
Second, it has two authors. Men Who Love Fierce Women: The Power of Servant Leadership in Your Marriage is by LeRoy Wagner and Kimberly Wagner, husband and wife. Kimberly’s name belongs on the cover of any honest description of this book, and leaving it off was not a small omission: a book teaching men how to love a strong-willed wife, co-written by the strong-willed wife, is a different book than one man’s advice.
Where it came from
Kimberly Wagner wrote Fierce Women: The Power of a Soft Warrior first. The Wagners then did a Focus on the Family interview that became that program’s most-listened broadcast of 2015, and the requests that followed were from men asking for their own version. Moody published this in 2016. It runs about 240 pages.
LeRoy has pastored for more than thirty years, which matters less to the book than the fact that his own marriage nearly came apart. He is direct about it: five years in, he told Kim he no longer loved her. They name the pattern they were stuck in the “fierce woman, fearful man” cycle, and that cycle is the spine of the whole book.
What it actually argues
The core observation is sharp and worth the price on its own. When a man is married to a woman with a stronger personality, his most common response is not aggression. It is retreat. He goes quiet, avoids the conflict, lets her make the call, and calls that peace. She reads the retreat as abandonment and pushes harder. He retreats further. Both people are miserable and neither is doing anything obviously wrong.
The Wagners’ answer is that the way out is not for him to get louder or for her to get smaller. It is for him to re-engage: to show up in the hard conversation, to say the true thing kindly, to stop managing her moods. They call this servant leadership.
The book does have reflection questions at the ends of chapters. That part of the old review checked out.
Where Called to Better sits on this
The Wagners write from a complementarian position and they are specific about it. Their picture of servant leadership assumes the husband carries a distinct responsibility for the direction of the marriage that the wife does not carry in the same way.
We hold that men and women are equal in worth and dignity before God, and that Scripture describes distinct roles for them. We do not go further and spell out what those roles are, because we do not think Scripture spells them out as fully as either side of this argument wants it to. The Wagners go further than we do. Christians who read the Bible carefully land in different places here, and we are not going to tell you their reading is the only faithful one.
Read it knowing that. The diagnosis of the retreat cycle stands on its own and does not depend on agreeing with them about authority. The prescription is more tied to their position, and you can take the first without swallowing the second.
Who it is for
A husband who has quietly given up on a conversation he keeps losing. If you recognise yourself in the going-silent-to-keep-the-peace description, this book is aimed squarely at you and it is uncomfortable in a useful way.
It will not help much with a marriage where the problem is the reverse, or where there is any form of abuse. The Wagners are describing two people stuck in a pattern, not one person harming another, and it is important not to confuse the two.
Men Who Love Fierce Women on Amazon
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