Being extremely patient for feelings.

In a recent Boundless article, the author talked about how he knew upon meeting the woman who became his wife for the first time that she was The One, but that it took five dates over the course of four months for the woman to start having any romantic feelings for him.  (The article also specifies that his wife at the time was 33 years old and specifically gave him a chance because she had accepted that she needed to “intentionally alter her approach and expectations” from those of her younger years.)

I think that if more Christians want to get married, they have to accept that this is how it will probably play out for them.  Not so much the age factor, but just the slowness factor.  It’s something that I am working on accepting.  While it would be nice to meet someone who I immediately thought was good-looking, intelligent, witty, and a good conversationalist, in addition to being a devout Christian, and, most importantly, was also attracted to me AND was marriage-minded…it’s highly unlikely that all of these criteria will be met early on. Realistically, the probability is much higher that I will meet someone who is not physically off-putting and who is nice and that I can talk to, and from there it’s up to me to open my mind.

I think it’s just an issue of everybody having to swallow their pride and accept that most of us are not sexy people and therefore will not end up with someone really sexy, and that therefore the attraction discovery period could end up being lengthy.  Most people are just NOT. THAT. ATTRACTIVE.

Actually, now that I think about it, four months is pretty fast in the grand scheme of things.  This guy’s wife could have taken two years to decide if he was attractive.  Then again, she was 33.  Age is often the NOS of courtship speed.

By the way, I’m just going to reiterate my highly mansopherically unpopular opinion that you don’t need to feel IIII AMMM SOOO CRAZYYYYYYYYYYY ABOUT YOUUUUUUUU to marry someone.  Men can be equally crazy about a series of women, but only the most romantic of women are equally excited about multiple guys over the course of their lives.  Especially as women age, companionship and emotional/financial stability become more important to the love mix.  It’s less about feeling swept away as it is in feeling secure, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the woman doesn’t love the man or that she loves him less, or that she wishes she married someone else.  It’s just more prudent.

“I find men who love the Church to be attractive.”

Just read this most hamsterrific of comments over at Boundless in their current podcast thread about what makes guys hot.  (I know, I know.)

Whenever women say things like this, you have to add the phrase “who are already attractive to me” behind the word “men.”  Because there’s just no way this woman would say this and actually mean it if the guy were, say:

• 35, unemployed, and still living with his parents
• fat and unfunny
• had been turned down by most of the women in the singles group

But oh, boy, does he love Jesus and giving of his time to the Church!  HUBBA HUBBA!  (<– That’s for you, Dalrock.)

I just had a friend who last year cut things off with a guy because he didn’t have a decent job and didn’t seem to be doing much to find one…but he loved to talk about his faith and how he wanted to get more involved in service and outreach!  I mean, this guy made mix CDs of worship songs for her to listen to in the car, and even made one for ME even though I had only met him once.  So let’s just forget this idea that it’s HOTT to love God and that one trait settles the question of hotness once and for all.

For any Christian woman, the guy has to have a suite of attractiveness traits FIRST.  THEN he also has to love God.  More Christian women will stay with a lukewarm/nominal Christian guy who is attractive than they will ever go for a super devout Christian guy who isn’t attractive.  Just like Christian guys don’t go for Christian women first and foremost on account of their character, Christian girls don’t go for Christian guys first and foremost on account of their love of God/evangelism/service/kids/heterosexual marriage/pro-liferism/Africa/creationism/Axe body spray.  Welllll, that last one’s a toss-up.  I’ve seen the commercials.

Anyhow, to anyone well-traveled in these corners, this isn’t Brand New Information!! (/Phoebe on Friends), but I figured that blog comment was reason enough for the re-tread.

Disciplined eating.

This post is sort of off topic for the blog, but it relates in larger context to the ongoing “unrealistic standards of beauty” meme that is constantly going around in Christian singles discussion, and the MSM in general.  Basically, I no longer have time to listen to girls who whine about their body type/not being able to lose weight but still chug Starbucks and constantly circle around the candy jar at work, or who cling to starvation diets in the hope that a miracle will occur.

Since May, I’ve been doing a DVD-based workout program.  Basically, I’d gotten tired of my longtime exercise go-to’s and was having a hard time motivating myself.  I knew that I needed something to revolutionize my exercising, and I figured that if this guy in the videos trained Victoria’s Secret models, then he was probably doing something right.

What I didn’t realize when I ordered the DVDs was that the kit comes with a small booklet called “Fat Burning Foods.”  This booklet contains simple recipes for 12 breakfasts, 12 lunches, and 12 dinners, along with a bunch of “savvy skinny” snack options and advice on the types of foods to order when you are at various types of restaurants.  Each breakfast is around 250 calories, each lunch around 350, and each dinner about 400, with an emphasis on protein and fiber.  I decided that if I was going to give BBL a go, I needed to follow the diet, too.

I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to succeed in sticking to the meal plan unless I put myself on a schedule, which made me realize that undisciplined eating was a big problem for me.  I didn’t have the problem of constantly going to McDonald’s or eating half a sheet cake at a time, but I did have a problem of reaching for convenient snacks because I didn’t keep much food in the house, the idea being that I didn’t want to keep temptation around, or waste food that I no longer had an interest in.  But the thing is, if your stomach is completely empty, you’re not going to reach for those raw baby carrots first, or start gnawing on celery.  That’s where the problems start.

My solution was to go full-on nerd and make myself a spreadsheet accounting for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, as well as two daily snacks between meals.  Then I would make a grocery list and buy everything for the week all at once.  This way I was locked into my meal plan – the investment had already been made, and I had no excuses that I didn’t have those particular foods available.  Additionally, I prepared everything in advance that could be prepared, in order to remove laziness as an excuse not to follow the plan.  If fruit could be cut up in advance, I cut it.  If I was going to be eating quinoa, I prepared that all at once.  When you are tired, even the tiniest amount of chopping or boiling seems like work, so I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t cheat because I felt too lazy tired.

That first spreadsheet worked.  What I found was that having an actual meal plan freed me to eat.  I no longer felt a food dilemma at every meal, wondering what I should have, or worrying that it was too fattening, or not wanting to eat because I snacked too much earlier, or rationalizing a meal out.  I no longer felt guilty about snacking because I had calculated snacks into my meal plan.  Since that first spreadsheet, I’ve made a spreadsheet every week.

The meal plan had other benefits, too.  First, it re-normalized my idea of correct portion size.  When you’re measuring most of your food with a measuring cup, and you see it on your plate, you start to get a feel for how much you should be eating at a time.  Second, it kept me from ever feeling like I overate AND it kept me from ever feeling ravenously hungry.  When your hunger level stays pretty even keel all day, the desire to dig into bad snacks greatly diminishes.  Third, it reset my taste buds.  I’ve only had butter a handful of times since starting the meal plan, and I can’t say I really miss it.  I almost never put salt on anything anymore.  And, maybe the biggest change, I don’t have much of an appetite for junk food anymore.  I don’t have cravings for cake or cookies the way I used to, or for chips, or desserts.  I still enjoy these foods, but, for example, if I eat one cookie, I don’t have the desire to eat a bunch more.  Doritos don’t hold the same appeal.  This was probably the most unexpected of all the results of changing the way I ate.  Usually when you think of following a diet, you think of denial and wanting all of the foods you’re not supposed to have anymore.  But I’ve found that eating right isn’t really denial, because your desires for the bad stuff subside.  Fourth, my digestive system is much happier now.  (TMI or not, it’s true.)  And fifth, my skin now has a glow that no amount of exfoliation could have ever given it.

I can’t say that what happened for me will happen for everyone if they just do what I did.  But I do think that a lot of people who are basically healthy and active but keep struggling with weight that just won’t disappear are probably dealing with eating discipline issues.  If this is you, I encourage you to examine your eating habits and see if undisciplined eating is holding you back.

Theory on the men bad, women good attitude in churches.

Hi, guys.  Sorry I’ve been sort of out of commission.  I got sucked into the Olympics last week with all the gymnastics and swimming, and then this week has been so incredibly hot that the desire to do much of anything has been zapped from me.  Also, church softball season is underway again, so that takes away another night of my week.

I recently completed the spring/summer “semester” of small groups at my church (the semesters run for ten weeks at a time so you’re not making an indefinite commitment, which is nice), and one of the women attending our group this time around is in the process of divorcing her husband.  In this case, it’s on account of her husband taking up with another woman and walking away from the family.  (Yes, he actually told her that he feels more alive than he ever has and that adultery has been the best thing that ever happened to him.  Okay, maybe not those exact words.  But this is a pretty accurate paraphrase.)  She and her husband are currently selling their house – she has found a smaller one to move into, and their teenage daughters basically hate their dad now and are incredibly bitter that they have to move out of their house.

As far as I can tell, the dad has left the church, which got me thinking that, in addition to the influence of feminism on the church, the fact that it’s typically the women who stick around after a divorce probably abets the image that it’s the men who are always the ones doing wrong.  At its root, it’s selection bias.

Who sticks around after the divorce, because she needs the support more than ever?  The woman.

Who comes to the church after the divorce, because she needs the support more than ever?  The woman.

Who’s more likely to drop out of the church and more likely not to attend in the first place?  The man.

So a pastor, typically a guy who felt “the call” from a fairly young age, and who married his wife at a young age, and hasn’t been in the SMP for years, is going to look at his situation and project.  Well, of COURSE it’s the men who are at fault!  Look at all these women who are seeking the Lord when something bad has happened!  Shame on those men who are abandoning their duties to their wives and children!  It’s just a natural response, and then you add in the feminism, and the guy practically has no chance.

If you’ve been reading manosphere blogs pretty heavily for a while, you might have forgotten that sometimes women DO get blindsided and left by their husbands.  It’s not always, “oh, she must have been a crappy wife and deserved it” or “she really was a horrible woman and deserved it” or “well, DUH, she got FATTTTTTT!”  In the game of no-fault divorce, women can be the losers, too.

My last thought for this post is that divorce SUCKS.  If you have kids, really think twice about pitching your spouse.  You can permanently damage your relationship with your kids, and not just that, but their entire ability to trust, love, and develop healthy relationships with others.  Your legacy rests with your kids, so make sure it’s a good one.