Embracity le Blessingsey!

Just doing a quick afternoon drive-by because (a) I haven’t posted a new one in a while, sorry about that; and (b) I have to finish the other half of my workout, because (c) I think I’m going to go see Raiders of the Lost Ark tonight in “IMAX.”  I hate IMAX prices, but I haven’t been to the theater since The Dark Knight’s Ridiculous Conclusion and Raiders is the kind of movie you HAVE to see on the big screen if you have a chance.

Anyhow, I was thinking about the Humility that Christian guy bloggers usually spout about how they’re not worthy of their wives and they cry when they think about how their beatific babes deigned to spend the rest of their lives with lowly guy bloggers who suffer from mundane afflictions like lust sin humanity, and being married only serves to remind them of how very sinful and decrepit they are, and somehow female readers are supposed to read this and wish their own husbands would proclaim the same to the world, and oh how romantic and Christianly it is.

Screw that!

If I’m going to be legally chained to some dude who expects daily sex from me for the rest of my life and thinks that at most I should have a job and not a career, and will watch every bite of dessert that enters my mouth with critical eyes lest I destroy his love with the power of cellulite, then I’d very much like to be married to a guy who knows his worth and believes that he is offering me a pretty darn good thing by inviting me along for the ride.  Why would I willfully bind myself for life to a man who frets and worries that he’s not good enough?  What does that say about ME and my mind, and my values?  It’s an attitude that’s insulting to women – that a woman willfully chose to cheerlead for a weakling, and we should praise her for her act of charity.

What women want is (if you will allow me the Hollywood analogy) a man who says, “I’m directing a movie called The Greatness of Me, and I am looking for a producer.  I have the vision, but I need someone who is going to help me achieve that vision because I can’t do it all by myself.  I think you can be that person.  Are you going to come on board?”

I know that it’s en vogue in Christian circles to constantly second-guess yourself and keep knocking yourself down with “I’M NOT WORTHY!” reminders, and blah blah blah pride conceit vanity blah, but women yearn for men who have thrown off timidity and have stepped out of their hobbit holes to venture beyond the Shire.  You can be humble and still embrace your God-given talents, gifts, and intellect, and have confidence in those abilities that you can give a woman a happy life.  Why did God give you any of these blessings in the first place if He intended you to second-guess Him and His design for your life?  It’s kind of like,

GOD:  Hey, Bob, I’m going to make you smart – which, let’s be real, I don’t give that to just anybody – and I’m also going to make you good at fixing things.  I’m going to give you an even temper, and I’m going to make you good with handling money.  Okay, you’re going to be a little short on athletic ability and unfortunately you’re going to end up doing all the group projects for the athletes in your classes, but you’re going to be a good writer and good with kids to make up for that.

BOB:  OHHHHH GOD I’M NOT WORTHY OF ASHLEY!!!!!!!!!!  SHE’S JUST SO GORGEOUS AND BEAUTIFUL AND HOT!!!!!!!!!!  HOW CAN I POSSIBLY MAKE THIS WOMAN HAPPY?????  SHE PRAYS TO YOU MORE THAN I DO!!!!!!!!!  YESTERDAY I SAID SOMETHING THAT MADE HER FROWN!!!!  I CAN NEVER, EVER, EVER LET THAT HAPPEN AGAIN BECAUSE I LOVE HER SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!  I AM AN AMOEBA AMONG MEN!!!!!!!!!!  HOW COULD YOU GIVE ME SUCH A PRECIOUS GIFT???????????  SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER OFF WITH A FOOTBALL PLAYER!

GOD: ……………………………..

Men, stop flagellating yourselves.  God gave you talents and abilities.  Sure, everyone has moments of self-pity and self-doubt, but give God some credit for His blessings, and give the woman in your life some credit in choosing you.  We’re all sinners.  This isn’t some sort of “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others” scenario.

“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.

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.

What do you say about ugly babies?

My church small group has been going through the Ten Commandments, based on our church’s sermon series.  This week we discussed the ninth Commandment, “thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” which is most commonly translated into “don’t tell lies, you lying liar.”

This led into a quite energetic discussion about what to say when someone asks you to agree that their (ugly) baby is cute.  I was actually shocked that some people blew this off as a trivial issue, because to me this is one of those rubber meets the road things.  If you’re going to condemn white lies, then the ugly baby issue is smack dab in the middle of that.  And if you’re going to insist that whatever you speak is not only truthful but INSPIRING and KIND, then the ugly baby issue presents a serious conundrum.

Maybe this is more of an issue to someone like myself, with a strong need for ideological congruence, than for someone who is more of a feelings person.  A feelings person would probably not think it important or necessary to delineate what is and is not appropriate to say when presented with an ugly baby issue.  If the receiver of the reply is content, then all is well, no harm, no foul.  I think a feelings person would feel that the overall INTENT of the words was what was important, not the actual words.  So if a feelings person said, “Oh, she’s adorable,” then that would not be a lie because the person wasn’t intending to deceive, per se, but to speak to the subtext of the actual question, which is that the asker is seeking approval.  On the other hand, an analytical person in the same situation suddenly gets thrust into the horrible pressure cooker of trying to be truthful yet not commit the sin of saying something that will upset the other person.  The thought process goes something like:  “This baby is UGLY, it looks like a giant prune, maybe its face will sort itself out when it becomes a toddler, OH CRAP WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SAY?  I can’t say, ‘No, I don’t think your baby is cute,’ but I can’t say, ‘Yes, your baby is cute’ because that is a LIE and as a Christian I can’t tell LIES but what compliment can I actually give this potato-shaped poop machine without sounding like an ogre?”  Then you make a rapid judgment call, weighing possible positive outcomes versus possible negative outcomes, and you either mumble, “Yes, very,” or you try to deflect, saying, “You must be very proud,” (this was one of the proffered suggestions in small group) and hope that Mommy doesn’t dig into your subtext.  But then if you’re subtexting to a subtextual question,  aren’t you BOTH being deceptive, therefore liars, and horribly in need of forgiveness?

I have a hard time when Christians issue hard-line edicts about stuff like this, because an analytical person will feel that the edict goes right up to the most absurd scenario.  (Well, unless that person also has an extremely strong practical mind, as well.)  I mean, if you’re going to tell other Christians that anything with even a whiff of not 100% genuine, heartfelt, objective truthfulness delivered in absolute love and kindness, is SIN SIN SIN SIN SIN, then you need to be prepared for some awkward pauses and hurt feelings.  If you’re implying that people are sinning if they answer “fine” to a coworker’s perfunctory “How are you doing?” question, then people need to be prepared to hear things they don’t want to hear.  (This is why I rarely ever ask people how they are doing, and I often don’t answer the question when it is posed to me.  Most of the time, I do not genuinely care how the other person is doing, so I don’t ask.  PERSON:  “How are you doing?”  ME:  “Hello.”  Of course, a feelings person would probably consider this rude.  Actually, a NO LIE EVER person would probably also consider this rude, because it’s not treating the other person with love and kindness, and it is certainly trying to wiggle out of something.)

I think this ties in to why Christians are horrible at comedy.  A lot of comedy (and basically all great drama, for that matter) LIVES in subtext.  But when you have Christians being instructed to say ONLY EXACTLY what they mean, and only do it in the nicest of ways, then most comedy and most drama will fail.  But ironically, most Christians fall into using subtext precisely because of this enjoinder.  They KNOW they can’t say certain things, so they just find ways to talk around it, and because everyone knows that certain words and phrases and voiced thoughts are off-limits, everyone knows what everyone else means.  My devoutly Christian grandmother is an expert at this.  I remember one time when I was at breakfast with her and my mom, and my grandma wanted to trash my cousin’s wife’s outfit that she had worn to a family gathering.  My grandma, as a Christian, obviously could not say, “I thought J looked like whorish white trash.”  So instead, she asked, “What did you think of J’s outfit?”  Which, to any practiced Christian listener, meant “TRASH WHORE!”  But by bringing the subject up the way she did, she had plausible deniability of trashing, PLUS she had the added advantage of letting someone else do the trashing first.

I’m not saying that we should all go super-spergy and forgo any semblance of tact in our pursuit of truth in speech.  I think the best tactic is to try to choose our battles wisely and try to recuse ourselves from conversations where we have nothing to add.

P.S. During this same small group meeting, we got on the subject of Abraham lying to Pharoah about Sarah being his wife, not just his sister.  Group leader asked, “What did Abraham learn from this experience?”  I said, “That his wife was a liar!”  WOW, did that get a shriek of denial from some of the other women in the group.  Their reasoning was that Sarah was under Abraham’s command.  My comment was, “So are you saying that Sarah had no moral agency?  If your husband asks you to lie and you do it, are you also excused because your husband told you to?”  That line of discussion got scuppered VERY quickly.

 

How John Eldredge would have men live.

I was emailing back and forth with a friend, and she mentioned that she finally watched Legends of the Fall for the first time.  Back in the mid-’90s, this movie helped solidify Brad Pitt’s heartthrob status, as he basically spent the movie looking like Fabio’s younger, blonder, Calvin Klein model-ier brother while alternately brooding or wooing as necessary.

However, what I did not know is that John Eldredge, in his revered Christian book Wild at Heart, used Pitt’s character Tristan to represent the “Wild at Heart” man.

SAY WHAT????

Eldredge writes,

Then there is Tristan, the middle son.  He is wild at heart.  It is Tristan who embodies the West–he catches and rides the wild stallion, fights the grizzly with a knife, and wins the beautiful woman.  I have yet to meet a man who wants to be Alfred [Aidan Quinn, the practical beta brother] or Samuel [Henry Thomas, the wussy, other beta brother].  I’ve yet to meet a woman who wants to marry one.

Did Eldridge watch a different movie than the one that was actually made?  As my friend described it (de-capped for readability),

The guy who tries to kiss his younger brother Henry Thomas’s fiancee Julia Ormond, and then scalps a bunch of Germans because they kill Henry Thomas in WWI, and then comes back and steals Julia from his other brother Aiden Quinn, and then runs away for five years bc he is too ~WRACKED WITH GUILT~ to be happy with Julia, and then comes back and messes with her head after she marries Aiden Quinn after all, and then smolders until she throws herself at him again but he says “No Go Back To Aiden,” and then kills some people because they killed his Indian wife, and then has to go live in the mountains the rest of his life.

That is apparently how John Eldredge would have men live.

It kind of reads like beta longing.  Eldredge obviously can’t be Pitt, but darn it, he really would like to be, if he could just un-imagine all of the bad stuff………

My friend, arbiter of fairness, added,

 To be fair though, Aiden is kind of whiny in it. I mean, hello, obviously she should have just married him first before Brad even came back from the war, but he kinda pulled a Bolin when she and Brad started gettin’ it on.

But when Aiden and Julia got married….they were really cute. Until she killed herself bc she couldn’t be with Brad. Yes this is real.

Don’t even get me started on the women in this movie.

I asked,

Did he see a Mormon edit of the movie or something???

My friend replied,

I DON’T KNOW

BUT IT IS THE WORST

Henry Thomas, despite being a beta virgin, comes off smelling the best of all three. Of course he dies first.

So men, be Wild At Heart.  ‘Tis better to scalp a bunch of Germans, swipe your brother’s wife and play mind games with her, inspire her suicide from your rejection, and go retire in the mountains as a murderer than to die cuckolded or a beta virgin.  First.

I mean, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.  Especially Christian ones.

 

Emotional chastity and the break-up.

One thing that I don’t think is talked about enough in Christian dating circles is emotional chastity.  Yeah, I know Boundless likes to pound the “intentionality” drum (mainly in the direction of men), but it’s not exactly the same thing.  “Intentionality” makes it sound like you’re running a program called IntentionalityCheck 2.0 that has an intentionality app that you can install on your smartphone to make sure your dating behavior is kept within intentionality guidelines.  “Did I guard my heart?” Check.  “Did he pay for dinner?” Check.  “Did he directly say it was a date and that he would like to pursue me for the purpose of marriage while being the spiritual leader that the Bible instructs him to be while loving me sacrificially as Christ loved the Church so as not to defraud me during this season of singleness?”  Oops.  EJECT!  EJECT!

Emotional chastity, on the other hand, is more a character trait.  It’s internalizing a way of living.  Just as a physically chaste person not only refrains from improper sexual behavior but also lives in such a way as to not put himself in a situation where physical chastity could be compromised in the first place, an emotionally chaste person guards his heart as a matter of being, not as an item on a checklist to qualify for emotional chastity.

I think that Christian singles today get themselves into more trouble by violating emotional chastity (EC) than by physical chastity (PC).  (And since the number of Christian singles who aren’t physically chaste is pretty high, you can only imagine how many aren’t emotionally chaste.)  Especially among Christian singles who are trying to practice PC, the EC thing can be a huge downfall, since getting close to someone emotionally is the only outlet for sexual energy that hasn’t been slapped with a big NO-NO sticker.  As a result, we have Christian singles entwining themselves into friendguy/friendgirl relationships with endless angsting and drama on one party’s end, which just leads Boundless types to shriek at the men to install IntentionalityCheck 2.0 and MAN UP AND MARRY THOSE WORTHY CHRISTIAN GIRLS.

EC isn’t just for the romantic arena, though; its benefits extend to all areas of life.  How many times have you known someone who lacks discretion in how much of himself he gives away to friends, to relatives, to parents, children, or coworkers?  EC isn’t about prevention so much as it’s about discretion and self-control – in a word, maturity.  It’s about maintaining boundaries that are healthy.

In the context of dating relationships, EC can help a relationship blossom as it was meant to unfold.  You’re not oversharing too early.  You’re not becoming emotionally dependent on the other person to the point you’re smothering them.  You’re not promising things you haven’t thought through or don’t intend to follow through on.  You’re taking the time to establish a foundation before you start erecting an emotional three-car garage McHouse with dust-repellent blinds and a mint-green nursery for the twins.  Likewise, if you break up, especially if it’s early into the dating process, you won’t feel like someone robbed you.

Speaking of which, I really think that Christian dating advice needs to focus more on break-ups.  I feel like there is so much emphasis on just trying to get people to date ~intentionally~ that there’s next to nothing out there if that dating doesn’t work out.  Most people don’t marry the first person they date, so what do you do if you realize this person isn’t the one?  Well, that’s easy. You just tell the break-upper that he’s not being sufficiently spiritual or seeking the Lord enough.  That’ll teach him to date a girl and not marry her!  So many people would benefit from getting broken up with swiftly and succinctly, rather than trying to couch it in LJBFs and “You’re so great, someone (else) will be lucky to find you!”s.

New Boundless blogger to men: “Yep, still your fault.”

I noticed today that Boundless has a new male blogger this summer named James.  According to his bio on the site, he will be entering his senior year at Liberty University this coming fall and plans to get a Master’s degree for marriage and family counseling.  Now, obviously James is just one person, but being that he seems to be following a very stereotypical Christian path to a profession that will specifically engage Christians, his views are very likely to be widely held by people like him.  So it’s worth paying attention to his viewpoints, because those are the viewpoints that Christians with marital troubles are going to hear.

Based on his most recent (and introductory) post, those viewpoints are pretty standard churchian stuff.  In “One of the Boys,” he relates an email conversation he had with a reader named Jeff.  Jeff was venting about standard church-manosphere complaints:  churches blame the men for everything and don’t support them with camaraderie or encouragement.

James responds:

I wish I could sit down and have a conversation with Jeff. “Jeff”, I’d say, “I completely understand where you are coming from.” I grew up in a church culture where the mindset seemed to be that men were the animals with the problems and all women had to do was not feed the beast inside the man. The women were the innocent victims of man’s inability to “live right.”

I, however, don’t want to deny the truth that God created men to lead and take responsibility of their families. Therefore, changing men’s hearts and lives is the most effective way to shot block our culture’s high divorce rate. Here at Boundless, our passion and dream is to see men rise up to their full potential as leaders, filled with the Spirit, putting aside their own desires, and passionately sacrificing for their families. If men will lead well, women will follow. In trying to communicate this to our readers, however, some guys seem to receive a nagging and condemning rant, rather than an inspiring and encouraging call to arms.

This is where Boundless, and the whole churchosphere of gender relations, just completely misses the boat.

One, if “changing men’s hearts and lives” is the most effective way to reduce divorce, then that effectively means that women are not responsible for their own actions and will justify divorcing their husbands because they don’t have the correct “heart” and “life.”  So James has some sort of cognitive dissonance that he can recognize his own church’s special snowflake stance, yet buys into it at the same time.  This stance ignores or at best downplays the possibility that women have depraved hearts as well, and may choose rebellion against their husbands regardless of the husband’s actions.  Furthermore, look at how many women remain married to awful men, or who won’t leave adulterous or abusive husbands.  It’s pretty obvious that “changing men’s hearts and lives” is not necessarily an effective method of reducing divorce.  Sure, in some cases it will work, but it won’t work as often or as well as Boundless thinks it will.

Second, James’s assertion seems to be that leading well is equivalent to more self-denial, more self-sacrifice, and more appeasement, with no room to say enough.  I feel like the churchosphere’s idea of manly leadership is running yourself ragged for your wife and kids to get them the things they need to feel loved, and if you’re not doing that, you’re an inadequate man whose wife will probably divorce you on account of bad leadership.  In reality, real leadership often boils down to judiciously and firmly saying no, and holding others accountable for their actions.

Third, and this is really mind-boggling – if the readership is continually saying it feels nagged and condemned by all the exhortations to man up, THEN MAYBE YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.  Maybe you are scolding them like a woman, and as a man you should recognize that MEN HATE THAT.  If your “inspiring and encouraging call to arms” comes across like finger-wagging scolding, then maybe you need to change your approach and stop blaming everyone else for being too sensitive or not being submitted to God enough to hear His special message for you or whatever.

Any effective campaign to reduce divorce needs to address BOTH women and men.  You can’t just tell the men to lead and expect the women to follow when there is no concurrent expectation for women to change their behavior and mindsets.  Every time you tell men to man up and lead, you have to tell women to simmer down and submit.  Otherwise, the implicit message is just “you only need to submit if he’s doing an adequate job of leading.”  Which is precisely the attitude that landed us in this too-much-divorce culture in the first place!

I mean, you just can’t have a church culture where the men are constantly called on to be more humble, more sacrificial, more manly, yet the women’s heads are filled with messages that they are Daughters of the King! and special and anointed and powerful and beautiful and shouldn’t settle for less than God’s best.  Can anyone honestly say that this is a recipe for reducing divorces?

Men, you should stop abusing your wives. Women, let me think of something you shouldn’t do.

My church is currently doing a sermon series on the Ten Commandments.  This morning the sermon centered around the second commandment, which is the anti-idolatry commandment.  If you read beyond the actual verse prohibiting the making of an idol, you will find that God goes on to say that the third and fourth generations after the idolaters will be punished.

My pastor interpreted this as meaning that the negative consequences of the sins of the father will be experienced by his grandchildren and even great-grandchildren.  And I agree – we see this play out over and over in society.  For example, alcoholics tend to produce alcoholics, smokers produce smokers, welfare recipients produce welfare recipients, baby daddies and baby mamas produce more baby daddies and baby mamas, obese parents produce obese kids, etc.

But did my pastor use any of these as examples?  No.  For some reason, after an admonition to men to provide for their families and sacrifice for their wives, he brought up ABUSE and said that fathers who model abuse to their families will produce abusers.  So fathers should think twice about abusing their families.  I don’t want to downplay abuse, but this seemed like a really random and extreme example to use.  Then he said that mothers have a responsibility, too – to treat their husbands well and give them respect and encouragement.

HAHAHAHA, just kidding!

What he actually said was that mothers should think twice about staying in abusive relationships because they’re teaching their daughters to that a loving relationship includes abuse.  And that was the extent of things mothers need to do to stop propagating bad family situations.

While the pastor was giving these examples, I started wondering if my church had an actual problem with abusive husbands.  Why else would the pastor use this kind of example?  I mean, is he getting a lot of calls each month from women claiming to be abused (whether physically or verbally) by their husbands?  Am I attending a church where the husbands are constantly roughing up their wives and calling them profanity-laden pejoratives or otherwise psychologically manipulating them to believe they are worthless?

Or is it that abuse is such a knee-jerk sympathy trigger and clear-cut black and white issue that no one will argue with it?  Hmmmmmmm.  Regardless, I was disappointed that the teaching was presented in such a way as to make it look like husbands are the main propagators of badness in future generations, except for those wives who stay with abusers.  In reality, women are just as capable of destroying the futures of their children as men are.  They’re just given more of a pass because they don’t have the ability to be as physically dangerous as a man.

 

 

Even old widowers need game.

I was talking on the phone with my mom this afternoon, and she told me that there is an older widower at church who is trying to find an older widow to date.  He’s attempting the classic (and futile) church guy game plan of approaching each widow, one by one, until he can find someone who will accept.  All the widows know about this, so that’s a big pre-UNselection minus.  Worse, he has a poor reputation and since he has been in the church for a long time, everyone knows what his problems are.  So that’s even exponentially worse pre-UNselection.

I suggested that this guy find another church, but then again, the evangelical church community in my hometown isn’t so big that word about him still wouldn’t get around.  My mom, knowing that this guy spends part of the year in Florida, suggested that he might have better luck there because nobody would know him.  Ouch.

The other bad thing about old widower game is that the older widower must also compete against the memories of all of the widows’ late husbands – men who married their wives when the wives were very young, were often the women’s first major loves, and who were the fathers of the women’s children.  That can be a really tough act to follow.  Plus, if the first husband did things right financially, the widow will have no economic incentive to remarry, either.

Bottom line:  Game is for all seasons.

God’s perfect timing = hamster food?

One of the most difficult explanations to counter in churchly circles is that of “God’s will,” a.k.a., for dating/marriage purposes, “God’s perfect timing.”  See, if God is all-knowing and all-powerful while you’re just a broken, measly human with sinfully compromised reasoning capabilities, then pretty much no explanations, short of outright contradicting Scripture, can disprove “God’s will.”

But is God’s perfect timing just fancy hamster food?  In a recent Boundless article, Candice Watters answers a reader who sounds like a typical Christian beta girl.  Reader writes:

I’ve never had a boyfriend. To love a man with the love God has given me for others is one thing I desire above all else. But I’ve yet remained “invisible.” Is something wrong with me? Every person I know tells me “Oh, you’re the sweetest person I know,” “You’re so loving,” and so forth. From others’ compliments I don’t think I’m hard to get along with, and I think I’m average looking.

I try to get myself involved with different social circles and activities, but I’m invisible. And the guy friends that I’ve thought, Maybe there is something here, end up dating other girls. I’m happy for them, but it makes me wonder what’s wrong with me? What is your suggestion for shaking this feeling of “something-must-be-wrong-with-me” syndrome that I seem to be struggling with?

Now, if Watters were a member of the manosphere, she would probably first congratulate the girl on keeping her virtue intact because everyone knows that even a pretty ugly girl can go out and extract sex from some random dude, so isn’t it a miraculous accomplishment that this girl hasn’t turned into the vilest of slutty slut sluts yet, not that anyone believes truly virtuous girls actually exist.  Then Watters would probably tell Reader to lower her expectations, not to get promoted at work, and become wildly sexually attracted to someone she’s not that attracted to, because 30 is on the horizon and the mewls of the cats are getting louder.  Tough love, you hear.

But that’s not, of course, what Watters does.  Instead, Watters launches her own story of how it was not her chubbiness during her 20s that kept her from finding her husband — it was actually God’s will.  Watters says:

Boy, can I relate to your question! I was sure something was wrong with me. Being overweight in college and for most of my 20s, I was certain that if only I could lose 30 pounds, I’d have a boyfriend. That feeling was intensified by all the “you’re such a great gal; some guy is going to be very lucky to get you,” comments I heard from older, married Christian men. I could almost hear the subtext I assumed went with their complements: “You’re a great gal, though a bit on the chubby side, but you sure are nice and have a pretty face.”

Ugh. The longer I went with failed dieting attempts, the more frustrated and lonely I grew. If all that was keeping me from a good man and a godly marriage was a smaller dress size and if I lacked the self-control to lose weight, then it was my own fault for being single for so long.

Thankfully, there was a lot about that “what’s wrong with me?” way of thinking that wasn’t true. Yes, I was overweight. And I suspect there were guys who may have found me attractive and asked me out if I’d been thinner. Maybe. But even more important in my getting married was God’s timing.

So Watters admits that her weight was likely the reason that men weren’t finding her attractive, but she refuses to accept that that ultimately had anything to do with her finding a boyfriend and getting married.

She then goes on to talk about how each person is God’s special creation, which is par for the course for this sort of advice, but she then discusses how we all have a role to play in getting married.  Among the resonsibilities are “striving for sexual purity; being a good steward of your time, talents, and treasure, as well as of your opportunities and your fertility; seeking out and actively participating in Christian community; and waiting to date someone who is spiritually mature (being equally yoked). In short, you’re called to discipleship (2 Peter 3:18).”  But…losing weight isn’t a part of that, when every woman knows deep down inside that thin women are more attractive to men?

Watters then issues her St. Crispin’s Day speech:

Do you think you’re too fat? Too thin? Too tall? Too short? Too shy? Too outgoing? Too ugly? Too pretty? Too blonde? Too old? Too spiritual? Too something? Or maybe you think you’re not enough. Not funny enough. Not thin enough. Not smart enough. Not spiritual enough. Whatever it is that you think you’ve identified about yourself that’s keeping you single, it’s not the whole picture. There may be some areas where you need to mature, and if you’re persisting in sin, then certainly you must repent and turn away. But it’s possible that it’s simply not time yet. This became clear to me when Steve started dating me before I started shrinking. I talked before about finally losing weight. And though I’m glad for that, I’m equally glad that our relationship took off while I still had weight to lose. Turns out there wasn’t anything wrong with me. It’s simply that before Steve, it was the wrong time.

It’s hard for me to make this kind of thinking jive with reality.  If there is no such thing as a soulmate, and you could conceivably have a decent marriage with any number of men, then how is something the “wrong time”?  Is is not possible that Watters could have found someone else to marry had she been thinner younger?  And that they could have had as good a marriage as Watters currently has with her husband?  Is it truly “not time yet” that keeps people from marrying?  This all comes off as pretty ironic, given Boundless’s consistent drum-beating that men have to get off the Xbox and hurry up and march down the aisle with one of the nice, available single Christian women in their congregations.

I mean, I believe in “God’s timing,” but I also think that God’s timing is often used as hamster food.  If no one is attracted to you, then you’re probably doing something wrong.  This goes for both men and women.  I mean, MAYBE in your case it’s God’s supernatural forces preventing anyone from being attracted to you until it’s “the right time,” but given that there are specific attraction factors for each sex, that tend to work regardless of someone’s character (the proof’s in the unmarried pregnant pastor’s daughters), it’s hard to believe that God’s timing is usually REALLY the reason nobody wants to date you.

But you can’t really bring this up to someone who believes in God’s timing, right?  Because if you say, “Well, it’s probably God’s timing that you can’t lose those 20 pounds,” you’re not going to have any more friends, AND you’re going to lose because the rebuttal to that is just, “Well, MY GOD is bigger than 20 pounds.”  And that settles that.  It’s not your fault.  It’s all in God’s hands.