“She was a winning hand.”

Today at work I asked my married coworker who sits in the cube next to mine if he had felt his wife was The One (or could have been The One) early on.

He replied that yes, upon first meeting her (through mutual friends), he felt that she was special.  He said that ultimately, he realized that she was a “winning hand.”***  He put it this way:

Could I have continued looking for a better hand?  Sure.  But she was a winning hand.

Probably the best meditation on settling that I’ve ever heard.

***P.S. totally not endorsing poker of course

If you have to say you’re alpha, you’re probably not that alpha.

One thing that I’ve started noticing on manosphere blogs is commenters seeking advice about their woman situations and prefacing their comments with “I’m pretty alpha (but)…”.

The minute I see that, I know that the following discussion will most likely reveal the commenter to be not-alpha.  Not just because that’s the rule of irony on the internets, but simply because an alpha IS.  Alpha is a state of mind and a state of being.  An alpha doesn’t examine himself and conclude, “Yep, I’ve gone down the checklist and it turns out I’m pretty alpha.”  An alpha just does his thing with the inner confidence that he’s doing what he’s doing and that’s that.  So many guys trying to apply game get caught up in  “it’s alpha to do this but beta to do that,” and that is fundamentally a beta frame to begin with, because a genuine alpha would already be off doing his thing and not worrying about whether or not he was doing alpha stuff or beta stuff.  This isn’t to say that alphas can’t have moments of real self-doubt, and it’s also not to condescend to men who are truly trying to change their courses – but generally speaking, outcome independence is a good brightline test for alpha-dom.

For the purposes of internet discussion – saying you’re alpha before showing you’re alpha is like saying you’re funny before you’ve shown you’re funny.  If you’re really alpha, or really funny, people will get it without you having to tell them first.

Give them something real.

Hey, guys, writing my first post from my new laptop!  The old one finally crapped out after six years, and now I’m trying to figure out if Windows 8 is a brilliant innovation or a brilliant disaster.

I’ve had this post on my mind for a while, and it sort of has to do with the usual around here, but it also applies to life in general.  My boss recently celebrated her birthday.  I’m not a gift person, but I felt that a card was not enough (and then I found out that she isn’t a card person anyway, which mooted the card idea), so I decided to bake some cupcakes for her.  Not cupcakes from a box – cupcakes from scratch, with frosting from scratch.**

When I brought in the cupcakes the next day, my boss acted like I had roped the stars and laid them on her desk.  She then proudly handed out cupcakes to everyone on the floor.  Afterward I had several people rave about the cupcakes to me – and look completely shocked to find out they were made from scratch.

The whole experience hammered home that people are starved for realness – not just food, but from people.  Our world is so fast and fake, and I think a lot of adults spend much of their time feeling overwhelmed to some degree.  So when someone injects some simple realness and simple consideration into their lives, they can hardly believe it.

Maybe in the church community we take realness for granted, because churches are all about building community and meeting together and eating (seriously, how many church events do NOT include eating?).  But people who aren’t plugged into a church community are often very isolated, especially if they don’t have family nearby or are estranged from their families.  I think that as Christians we sometimes, as a result of being in a community, get very myopic and spend a lot of time tending mainly to ourselves.  Some of this is natural, but even as we take collections for missionaries and do specific missions activities, we forget that there are people we associate with every day who are in need of simple acts of real love.  And I know that this blog mainly exists because church culture gets a lot wrong, especially in the area of dating and romance, but as Christians we do have something very real to offer the people in our lives.  We have the chance to pass on the love that transformed our lives to others.  I think we too often forget how profound that is, because we’re too busy measuring ourselves against the super-Christianity of Joe Worship Leader or Sir-Prays-Out-Loud all the time.

So, give the people in your life something real this week.  People are looking for the genuine article.  The small things, in the end, are often the biggest things.

**I used the Betty Crocker carrot cake recipe.