Preventive thinking.

Unlike most people my age, I’ve never had sex with a stranger (a.k.a. one night stand) or even made out with/groped a stranger.  Part of the reason for this is that I don’t hang out at places where things like this usually get started (bars and clubs), part of it is that single men in my age range (make that men in general) very rarely even try to strike up conversations with me, and part of it is my morals.  Usually when I am considering bending my morals, though, the following thoughts usually start running through my head:

• What if it’s bad?  Like, repulsively bad?  I don’t want to be stuck with that kind of memory.
• What if it’s bad because of me and he tells all of his friends how awful I am and I become a dinner party story?
• What if he gets fat and bald and I see him again in the future and am stuck with the knowledge that I made out with that bald lardball?
• What if he becomes obsessed with me?
• What if it’s awkward afterward?
• What if I become clingy and emo?
• What if he has a girlfriend?
• I probably don’t mean anything to him.
• He probably wouldn’t care if it’s me or some other girl.
• What if I find out that he regularly hooks up with dumb, trashy girls?
• What will my friends think?…oh, who am I kidding?  I know what they’ll think.
• You’ve been in such a long dry spell…is this the guy you really want to end the dry spell with?
• Am I going to be glad or embarrassed tomorrow?

I know, I should probably be thinking of Bible verses against sexual immorality instead, but vanity works, too.

Before wife, loser. After wife, ex-loser?

Or: with your help, he shall be healed.

I’ve noticed that it’s fairly common in evangelical circles for a man to more or less prostrate himself at the feet of his wife’s saintly goodness, proclaiming some mixture of the following:

• I don’t deserve my wife.
• I was a mess before I met my wife.
• If it weren’t for my wife, I don’t know where I’d be right now.
• I don’t know what she sees in me.
• I’m an idiot, but for some reason, she married me.

Among Christian women, humility is an ENORMOUS turn-on and is considered an outward sign of inward maturity.  This is probably why Christian women love saying that they were “blessed” by something someone said or did ( e.g., “Your thoughtful words just blessed my day so much”, as opposed to “Thank you for stroking my ego the compliment”) and that doing something for someone else is a “privilege” (e.g., “I had the privilege of ministering to those in need today” instead of “We served food to the homeless”).  So I suppose it makes sense that Christian men have learned that putting themselves down scores points with the opposite sex.  It’s also part of the beta scourge that has infected the modern church – men feeling so guilt-ridden and/or unworthy and/or inferior to women that they have a hard time owning their masculinity.  It is very rare to hear a Gen-X or younger Christian man say of his wife, with gusto, “Heck, yeah, she got one heckuva deal in marrying me!” and actually mean it.

This “my wife is better than me” attitude is sad.  It may be humble on the surface, but it’s really just a big fat ugly DLV.  I would hope that a husband would feel that he is shaping his wife’s character just as much as she is shaping his, and that the quality of her life has improved by being married to him.  Otherwise it starts to seem like the whole marriage hinges on the wife’s inexplicable beneficence – which of course just makes her seem all the more saintly.

Basically, men should be grateful for the good that their wives bring into their lives – but not at the expense of acknowledging the reverse.