It’s not every day a magazine interview that is supposed to last 30-ish minutes ends up going 2 hours and subsequent plans are made to meet the interviewer the following week in L.A.

(Man, I wish I was about to tell you the interviewer was a dude!)

But alas, this is what happened when columnist Chelsea Batten, contacted me last-minute for an interview for the relationship section in Converge Magazine. We talked, we laughed, and we shared our hearts and theories on God and love. A week later, we were meeting at the Q conference in L.A.

And the rest is history. 

Chelsea and I at the Q Conference. Trying to be cool.

Oh, and here is Chelsea’s article. She is a fantastic writer and while my work is to help my generation of single, dating, and married. With the two of us being single, that’s the spin Chelsea ended up taking after our two hour convo…

Interview: Joy Eggerichs

By Chelsea Batten

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It’s said that brevity is the soul of wit. And after five volumes of Field Notes sourced exclusively from my own experience, I felt I owed it to everyone to pass the microphone to someone else.

But it was a good excuse to connect with the radiant Joy Eggerichs, who runs Love and Respect (Now). After years of helping out at marriage conferences taught by her pastor parents, Joy had heard countless couples utter the phrase “I wish I’d known this 20 years ago!” She decided to empower her generation with the same information taught at marriage conferences, tailored to help them in their single lives.

Joy has spent even more time than I have examining the foibles of opposite sex relationships; it was refreshing to hear her well-considered opinion, while silently admiring her music video-worthy hair.

Do singles our age know that they need this information? Or is it a hard sell?

I tell my dad, “I have a tougher job than you.” He’s coming from academia, plus 30 years of being a pastor. Whereas I’m just a girl who finds male-female relationships interesting.

My mom always says, “God didn’t make us husband and wife, he made us male and female.” I think learning to relate as male and female makes you a better person. There’s bad people out there, but for the most part, I think we just get mean to each other. We get impolite. You get comfortable with somebody in a relationship, and stop being polite; you just react out of your wounds.

Starting to think about how we are, as a male or a female, actually is going to benefit the person we date…

Read the rest of the interview at CONVERGE. 

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