But what would she say about dads?

Boundless blogger Martha Krienke, in today’s post for “The Boundless Show”:

One of my favorite TV shows is “A Baby Story” on TLC. I like watching the new parents anticipate and prepare for their new baby, and the birth often makes me cry. My tears, which are the happy kind, are partly a result of witnessing a new life coming into the world, but I also admire the mother who just gave her all on behalf of that little one. What a hero!

A mother’s love for her children is astounding. Giving birth is just the beginning; next is the 2 a.m. feedings and interpreting the baby talk of a 2 year old. And who knows how a parent potty trains a toddler much less finds the nerve to sit in the passenger’s seat while her teen gets behind the wheel.

The Mother’s Day card I bought for my mom this year says:

(front) Motherhood. It’s not rocket science.

(inside) It’s brain surgery on astronauts during a lunar launch while reciting the Declaration of Independence bakwards — only with less logic. Happy Mother’s Day

I think that sums up well the magnitude of a mother’s role and the difference she makes in her child’s life. This Sunday, be sure to take time to honor your mom and express your appreciation.

A couple of comments:

1.  Regarding the Mother’s Day card – would ANYONE be able to find a similar Father’s Day card?  The card just seems to be another in a long line of “moms are superhuman rock stars, dads are sperm donors” messages in the media.  I highly doubt anyone would liken a father’s role to even basic brain surgery, even if he were an actual brain surgeon.

2.  My single male readers should spam bomb Martha with bountiful negs designed to tinglate the Christian soul.  Unlike all of the ungrateful urban wenches harboring Sex and the City dreams, this chick loves babies so much she cries when women she doesn’t even know personally have babies.  She could be YOUR baby-maker!  Step to it, sons.

Also discussed in this week’s podcast:

She says she has infatuated feelings for almost every guy she meets. Not only is this habit starting to interfere with how she interacts with men, it’s also affecting how she views herself and her relationship with God. Candice Watters, a regular contributor to Boundless.org, offers advice for this college-age reader to begin seeing her male peers as brothers in Christ.

I haven’t listened to the podcast, so I can’t speak to the advice given by Mrs. CW, but it’s not uncommon for some girls to develop crushes on everyone possessing a Y chromosome.  Everyone knows someone like that.  (Given the cynical attitudes in the manosphere about what type of man is able to attract women, one does wonder how many of the men in her orbit this reader actually does notice, however….)

What I imagine is going on in this reader’s scenario is that she crushes easily on any guy who looks at her more than half a second, and she gets irrationally excited at ~possibilities~, leading her to fantasize about being married to whichever guy she is talking to at the moment, which she then feels guilty about because she may be trying to flirt with him when she hasn’t gotten the green light from him to proceed, OR she’s dreaming about Guy X when someone else is praying out loud, or she finds it difficult to think about God because Guy X COULD BE THE ONE, MAYBE, LIKE SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE AFTER THEY’VE DATED CHASTELY FOR A YEAR OR SO AND HE PROPOSES ON ONE KNEE WITH A BEAUTIFUL SOLITAIRE IN HAND AND HOPEFULLY HE THINKS “JAYDEN” WOULD BE A TERRIFIC BOY’S NAME AND OH NO I HAVEN’T PAID ATTENTION TO THE SERMON THIS MORNING I AM A HORRIBLE CHRISTIAN.

This isn’t something I’ve struggled with, but this reader’s scenario seems pretty harmless to me and not necessarily requiring a rehabilitation so she can “begin seeing her male peers as brothers in Christ,” which is, I’m sure, what all of her brothers in Christ are hoping for.  As long as the people around her are encouraging prudent behavior and a more reasonable view of the situation, things’ll probably work themselves out just fine.  If it IS a spiritual concern for her – for example, her fantasy life is going off the rails sexually, or her infatuations are blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, or she is blindly following her tingles with men who wouldn’t make suitable husbands – then she should definitely pray about it.

On a more practical level, if this girl is crushing on every guy she meets, then she should probably also be taking a closer look at these men to see if she can find a potential husband in one of them.  Finding lots of male peers attractive isn’t exactly the worst problem in the world to have.

If anyone has listened to the podcast, please fill me in.

Alpha Christian dating.

I feel like I’ve been reading a lot on game blogs lately how important it is to push a girl further sexually than she professes to want to go.  The M.O. is basically that of “she’ll have sex with you if you push, then back off, then push harder.”  And it obviously works, if the stories being recounted in the comments are true.  Of course, these successes tend to occur when the woman puts herself in an already compromising position – she’s looking for sex but doesn’t want to admit it (in case the man turns out to be a beta), she’s drunk, or she’s at his apartment late at night just for the naked but chaste cuddles in his bed.

Christian dating, or at least the ideal of Christian dating, is the polar opposite of these scenarios.  Men are typically urged to acquiesce to whatever the woman wants, except in the case of sex, in which case the man should “man up” and draw a big chastity line in the sand.  If women are the gatekeepers, then men should be the gatekeepers’ keepers (in a kindly, protective, safekeeping way, not in an evil, domineering way).  I think this attitude springs from the idea that women are naturally more moral and sexually reticent than men, yet women are also naturally very susceptible to pressure to put out.  Because women are more moral, it is men’s duty to support women’s superior morality, lest the woman become immoral.  It’s all a part of being a leader and manning up and being intentional.

So if Christian men are enjoined from sex or any physical escalation that the woman claims not to want, and Christian men are not to take advantage of alcohol, a bar setting, sexual innuendo, and being alone with a woman in his or her home, then how can a Christian man impress a woman with his alpha bona fides?

I’m sure that if you posed this question to the Boundless types, they would scoff at the idea that a real man even needs alcohol et al. to accomplish his mission.  Real men impress through their superior character and leadership skills!  But how do you do that when you have none of the common cultural tools in your chest?  Here are the most common ones:

• Join the church band/be a worship leader.  Playing an instrument is always a DHV.  Guitar is the most common, but if you’re good at the piano or keyboard, even better.  Plus, you’re just more visible to more women.  (DLV:  working the sound board or the PowerPoint slides.)
• Teach Sunday School or work with the youth group.  Many Christian women start feeling their ovaries quiver when they encounter a man who’s good with kids and wants to teach them the faith.  However, make sure that your bonding with kids is over cool stuff, like sports, music, or rough-and-tumble play, and not, say, Star Trek.
• Go on a foreign missions trip.  Missions trips are very quick ways to prove your Christian bona fides, but make sure that you have a good story to tell when you get back, preferably if it includes some sort of Providential intervention.  (In such cases, it is okay to cry when talking about your experience.  Africa changed you.)
• Join a small group.  You’re not just a Sunday Christian, and you desire the intimacy and learning that a small group affords.
• Pray out loud in group settings.  Possibly the ultimate DHV.  Offer to bless the meal.  Offer to close.  Be the first to jump in with the popcorn prayer.  Just don’t fall into the habit of following a script, or say “Lord” or “Father” every five words.
• Lead social gospel outings.  Be the point person for the soup kitchen, or the clean-up trip, or the day at Habitat for Humanity, or ministering at Skid Row, or cause du jour is.  And be organized.  It’s no good to lead if you’re terrible at administration and planning ahead.

Generally speaking, Christian women – at least those brought up in church culture – are highly attuned to displays of visible, acknowledged leadership.  It’s not always enough to be the alpha of your clique of friends.  Then again, in a church setting, it’s hard to be the alpha of your clique if you’re not doing at least one of the above.

If you happen to score a first date with a GCG (Good Christian Girl), the best default game plan is to play the part of a gentleman.  Open doors, pull the seat out for her, grab the check before it burns a hole in the tablecloth, compliment her outfit (“I like your dress” is fine, but “you look gorgeous” is a little too much, too soon), pray over the meal, don’t order alcohol, and DON’T TAKE HER TO A BAR.  Much of the time, a GCG, especially if she has already graduated from college, is screening for husband (and future father) candidates, which means she expects to be treated like a lady.  If you fail in this department, I can almost guarantee that her friends will deem you unworthy in the inevitable post-game analysis.  If you fail and she likes caddishness, then she’s probably not a true GCG, even if her dad is a deacon, a pastor, a missionary, or an elder.  Oftentimes PKs and MKs are the worst of all, because they get off on rebelling.

At the end of the date, don’t go for the kiss.  Don’t even try.  The only girls who will hold it against you are the ones who are used to cads pushing for more.  Be different and DHV yourself.  Plus, with a GCG, it’s better to let her hamster run for a month or two, or even longer, wondering why you won’t kiss her, than to try too early and confirm that all you want is sex.  Women love the anticipation and the angst of not knowing when they can be treated to your puckered lips.  (However, they should feel relatively assured that it will happen at some point.)

Above all, TREAT EVERY WOMAN AS IF SHE WERE A 10.  This goes for old ladies, fat girls, plain girls, and whatever else isn’t your type.  If you get a reputation for only being nice and friendly to the hotties, it will take a lot to scrub “shallow” and “insincere” from your record.  Jesus loves the plain girls just as much as He loves the hot ones, so you should, too.  Being genuinely nice to the unlovelies is a huge DHV.

Pole dancing for the lover of your soul.

Okay, so, apparently there is a fitness studio in Houston that offers a free “Pole Fitness for Jesus” workout on the second Sunday of each month after church.  Only Christian music is played, and to get in, you have to show your church program.  The proprietor, Crystal Deans, is a former dancer who decided to bring the parts she liked about dancing into the studio.  Judging by Deans’s quotes in the article, she’s encountered a lot of criticism (which I would expect, being that she is in Texas):

“Just to get past the whole stigma of the whole thing, I’m very Christian. I go to church every Sunday and I pray. I talk to God things like that I think there’s nothing wrong with what I do. I teach women to feel good about themselves, to feel empowered and we get in really good shape. God is the only person that judges so anybody who wants to judge me, feel free to but I’m good with God, so that’s what’s important to me and I really don’t care what people think.”

Two points on this.  One, while I think the idea of pole dancing to Christian music is…incongruous (I mean, are they working the pole to a techno version of “My Jesus, I Love Thee”?), I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Christian pole dancing classes.  The classes appear to be women-only and fitness-oriented, and Deans isn’t encouraging the women to go out and get hired.  And, more generally, anything that (a) promotes fitness and (b) helps women feel sexier is a good thing.  I know the manosphere likes to get all up in arms about how women these days have too much self-esteem and fat 5s think they’re slender 9s, but the average woman constantly compares herself to women in TV and film.  That is why you have things like the fat acceptance movement (women who have surrendered to futility) and widespread plastic surgery (women who refuse to give up).  Telling women “Hey, fatty, just go on a diet” isn’t very helpful because most women tie their value to their looks, and therefore rejecting a woman for her looks means rejecting her wholesale.

Second, Deans’s statement that “God is the only person that judges” is the kind of statement that makes the hairs on evangelical ears stand on end for traces of impostor-ism.  Deans may be relatively new to the faith and therefore has not yet become fluent in Christianese, but the proper way to say what she said is, “I felt God calling me to this ministry to other women, to help them heal their self-image issues that they are burdened with in this culture of superficiality.”  Saying “only God can judge” is tantamount in Christian circles to saying, “nyah, nyah, you’re not the boss of me!”.  It’s much better to frame anything controversial as a “calling,” which is very personal and therefore nearly impossible to refute.  Plus, by labeling something a “calling,” you get irrefutability PLUS Christian cred by the implication that you and god are tight.

 

No, thou shalt not let thyself go.

Recently Boundless blogger Suzanne Gosselin highlighted an article on Rachel Held Evans’s blog entitled “Thou Shalt Not Let Thyself Go?“, in which Evans puts Mark Driscoll on blast for the following 2006 statement:

“At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.”

Evans then says:

I fear that the sentiment behind these remarks—that the Bible holds women to a certain standard of beauty that must be maintained throughout all seasons of life—remains pervasive within certain sectors of the conservative evangelical community.

She then calls out Christian authors Dorothy Patterson and Martha Pearce, as well as unnamed pastors in her own life, for telling women that they should remain beautiful and sexually satisfy their husbands to the point where the husbands will have zero temptation to stray.

Evans warns:

The message is as clear as it is ominous: Stay beautiful or your husband might leave you.  And if he does, it’s partially your fault.

Evans goes on to say that nowhere in the Bible are women commanded to remain physically beautiful for their husbands and instead highlights the usual verses about how beauty is fleeting, yada yada yada.  But Evans then goes one step further and labels the advice to stay attractive misogyny.  She contends that Scripture affirms that beauty decreases with age and childbearing, and – SHAMING ALERT! – “frankly, the suggestion that men are too weak to handle these realities is as emasculating as it is unbiblical.”  (Anytime someone starts a sentence with “frankly,” it’s an alert that condescension and/or shaming is imminent.)

Evans ends the article with this hamsterrific, projection-tastic piece de resistance:

Rather it is to help set women free—from the lie that God is disappointed when our bodies change, from the lie that it’s our fault when men cheat, from the lie that we become worthless as we grow older, and from the lie that that the Bible is just another glossy magazine whose standards of beauty we will always fail to meet.

While reading this article, I questioned whether Evans knows anything about men, or about women.  I don’t know anything about Evans, but it seems like she’s projecting her own insecurities onto men at large, and in trying to defend herself is actually propagating more garbage.

Very few men expect their wives to remain as physically attractive over time as they were on their wedding day, so Evans’s contention that there is some sort of churchian imperative never to age just seems totally bogus.  What men do expect, however, is that their wives care for their looks.  There is a big difference between showing natural signs of aging and packing on fifty pounds and wearing sweatpants all the time.  A wedding ring isn’t a license to start eating Ho-Hos to your heart’s desire, or shoving all your makeup in a drawer that will never again see the light of day.  So yes, this means that a woman who completely neglects her appearance and expects her husband to “just deal with it” is a woman who enables her husband to stray.  She doesn’t cause him to stray, but in neglecting her appearance, she makes it easier for another woman to catch his eye.  The reality that Evans seems to be most ignoring is that to a man, his wife’s investment in her appearance is a sign of respect for him.  And a man usually interprets his wife’s respect as love.  So man whose wife doesn’t care for her appearance tends to think that she doesn’t love him.  And a man who feels unloved is an unhappy man who is a prime target for temptation.  It’s up to your man to stray, but you can make it easier for him not to.

Does the Bible contain positive commands to women never to age or to work as hard as they can to retain their beauty?  No.  But the Bible doesn’t contain positive commands NOT to do so, either.  When the Bible tells women that their greatest beauty is in their spirit and demeanor, it’s not a permission not to care about their looks; it’s a reminder that the true beauty of a person comes from within, not that their looks have NO place of value.

But even if you buy everything Evans is selling, consider the shoe on the other foot.  Would Evans ever consider it okay for men to stop caring about making a living?  Would she be okay with a man deciding, “Well, I’m married now.  That’s a lot of responsibility, so I just can’t work as much as I used to.  I don’t think I should be expected to keep making more and more money, anyway.  That’s an ominous lie of materialism and there is no biblical command to make a lot of money.  So, yep, I think my wife should be okay with me not making $100,000 a year and keep loving me the same now that I’m only bringing home $20,000.”  Yeah…I don’t think so.

All I’m saying really boils down to one thing:  do things that make it easier for your spouse to love you.

P.S.  I glanced at the comments.  Oy, vey.

[ETA for reference: Suzanne Gosselin’s referring article, “Thou Shalt Not Become Ugly.”]

Boundless: Charlie Sheen >>>>> Kanye West.

Boundless blogger Glenn Stanton recently took Kanye West to task for his tweets on abortion, while somehow throwing in a comparison to Charlie Sheen, in his post “He Makes Charlie Sheen Look Downright Gentlemanly.”  How Sheen’s recent antics have anything to do with West’s tweets is a giant non-sequitur to me.  But, this being Boundlessworld, that Sheen has avoided speaking about abortion is enough to earn him pity and a moral free pass:

Charlie is obviously deeply and sadly troubled. As a human being, he deserves our sympathy and prayers.

But for West there is no pity!  For making the following observations,

an abortion can cost a ballin’ n**ga up to 50gs maybe a 100.  Gold diggin’ bi**hes be getting pregnant on purpose. #STRAPUP my n**gas!

West is relegated to the scrap-heap of humanity.  Stanton then clutches his pearls and asks us, in italics, “What does one say?” Stanton continues with what may possibly be the most white-knighting, mangina-tastic, hand-flaily rant to grace Boundless in months:

Does our culture have even the most liberal criteria for a gag-reflex where we can collectively say, “This guy deserves to never be heard from again!” This guy is an offense not just to women, but to men as well who believe that women are perhaps — just maybe — much more than sexual objects that need fixing when they become mothers.

Kanye at least reveals what most women should realize, that abortion is not a feminist sacrament, but rather a predatory male’s plan B — a way to keep his woman in the sexual market for maximum access.

Neither Charlie nor Kanye are men. And it would be an insult to boys to call them boys. Charlie is pitiable. Kanye is not. He should be forced, like a man, to take responsibility for his misogynistic offensiveness. Will his market demand this of him?

So, let me get this straight:  Charlie Sheen, the proudly drug-addicted client of prostitutes and father of children by three different women, who once (accidentally?) shot then-fiancee Kelly Preston in the arm, who has slandered his boss Chuck Lorre with an anti-Semitic slur, deserves our pity and prayers.  But Kanye West, who spoke truth about abortion and gold-digging hos, is an evil misogynist the world should strike down?  Stanton seems to have no concept of the world that West lives in, which is one where many women, driven by both tingles and shrewd practicality, see powerful men as banks.  No, in Stanton’s world, a woman who sees an opportunity to extort resources from a man by bearing his child does not exist.  Instead, it’s the men who shoulder all the blame for using innocent women as sexual objects and using abortion as a means to keep women as slutty as possible.

And people wonder why gender relations in the church are so messed up.

West’s tweets are not the problem, and attacking West for his tweets will solve nothing.  Screeching against West is about as effective as putting a Band-Aid on a leg full of gangrene.  If the folks at Boundless (and elsewhere) want to see real social change, then they have to embrace the reality of female sexuality.  But what is the likelihood of that happening?  And what is the likelihood of anyone at Boundless ceasing to be so myopic as to understand that abortion is not a cause, it is a symptom?

 

More anecdotal evidence that men don’t care about virginity.

So, in an effort to scrounge up twelve dates by May 10, because nobody I know knows any single Christian men, I finally forked over money to eHarmz.  The level of psychological pain this action incurred was comparable to my feelings when I see how much of each paycheck I lose to taxes.  Since starting eHarmz about a week or so ago, I have been matched with close to a couple dozen men and am in the early communication stages with a handful (they initiated contact).

In these early stages, you can send five pre-scripted, multiple choice questions to the other person.  One of the questions is “what are your feelings about premarital sex?”.  The answer choices range from “totally against” to “very much a fan” (paraphrase).  One of my friends always uses this question as a sort of litmus test for the man’s spiritual commitment, so I figured I would, too.  So far none of the men who have answered this question have answered “totally against.”  And in my preferences, I have matches restricted to the highest level of religious commitment as well as to primarily conservative Protestant denominations.  So on the anecdotal level, the idea that supposedly committed Christian men believe that sex is only for marriage is bunk.

Even more telling, though, is that NONE OF THESE MEN HAS ASKED ME THE SAME QUESTION.  If virginity/restriction of sex is supposedly so important to men, wouldn’t they be very interested in my feelings about it?  Yet so far nobody has sent out this question.

Then again, one of my other questions is “what are your feelings about gender roles” (with answers ranging from “get in da kitchen and make me mah DINNUH!” to “halfsies on all chores!”), I haven’t gotten matched with anyone who believes in traditional gender roles, and a number of the men have chosen the “we should define gender roles for ourselves” option.

I’m trying to keep an open mind, but my apathy is rising.

NCEG follow-up.

I previously shared a reader’s dilemma with a nerdy engineer who asked her via email for hot chocolate “next week.”  Reader emailed back a “yes” qualified by many mentions of friends and doing things as a group.  Commenters duked it out with competing advice.

All of those with any investment in Reader’s boy problems will be happy to know that said email did not destroy NCEG and that he seems to have gotten the message.  Reader wrote me:

I saw the “NCEG” with a few people last night, and he did not appear hurt, but nor did he mention hot chocolate again or really speak to me one-on-one (as he has in the past)!  I feel like he may have still been looking at me admiringly though–I can’t be sure!  And he offered to drive me home, which is in the opposite direction of where he lives.  At first I said no, but then someone else decided to get a ride with him, so I went along. Hm.  I’m hoping the right message has been sent!

“Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no'”?  Is NCEG still smitten and plotting future email invitations for hot chocolate?  You decide.

Boundless still doesn’t get it.

A trip to Boundless is always good for getting me all het up with semi-righteous fury.  Though their advice reeks of sincerity, it tends to coddle women, castigate men, and completely ignore the biological imperatives of both sexes.  I feel like in Boundlessworld, if you just pray and believe enough, people will stop acting like…people.  Christian belief does not rewrite the biological code; it merely submits it to self-restraint.  If Christian beliefs truly overrode biology, then hot Christian men would be marrying fat and merry Christian women by the truckload, and average-looking Christian women would be dying to marry sincere but impoverished and shy Christian men.  I’m pretty sure a planet of such persons does not exist in the Milky Way.

And because Boundless does not address the harsh realities of biology, we end up with sad single Christians such as this young woman, who wrote to Candice Watters:

I am a 25-year-old Christian. I would like to have a family, and I always thought I would have met my future husband by now. Not surprisingly (as our timing is not always God’s), I haven’t. The possibility of meeting a man at all is very scarce. My church, which I love and am invested in, is very small. The young-adult scene is dominated by women, and only two of the six or so men are beyond age 20.

At first, I was praying pretty intensely for a husband, keeping a journal for him (at my friend’s suggestion), and (separately) writing to God about the characteristics I wanted my future husband to have. I did enjoy keeping the journal; I thought of it as a way to share the parts of my life I’d live before meeting him. I was doing this for several months when it hit me that my future husband may not come for another 10 years, and there are a lot of other things I could be doing and praying for in the meantime.

What I would like to know is:  WHO IS THE FRIEND WHO THOUGHT KEEPING A JOURNAL FOR HER HUSBAND WAS A BRILLIANT IDEA?  Has any man ever expressed sadness and regret that he was not privy to his wife’s most intimate thoughts prior to their meeting?  How many men have any desire to read a journalful of their wife’s every thought about, well, anything?  (Cue NAMALT chorus.)  Here is a classic case of female projection.  Like, to the nth power.  Not that Mrs. Watters addresses this aspect.  Instead, she very gently suggests to the reader that keeping a journal to her husband will send her off into a fantasy world that will prevent her from meeting actual men.  (But, wait…isn’t that what Twilight is for?)

Then there was this poor Christian beta who wrote to John Thomas:

I’ve done my best to play by the rules in terms of intentionality and avoiding passivity. My question is what to do when the woman doesn’t do likewise.

I was pursuing a young woman from my fellowship group earlier this year. I was very up-front and intentional with her from the start, making sure she never had to “guess” or “assume” what my feelings were. It was crystal clear that I was asking her on a date and not merely to hang out as friends. She agreed to the date, and it went well. Conversation was never lacking, and we got along great.

As time went on, things continued in — what I thought — was a positive direction. Our conversations were meaningful; her body language was affirming, and she even left encouraging messages on my Facebook wall (for what that’s worth).

After all this, I’ve recently discovered through a friend that this woman is not romantically interested in me and, in fact, does not even enjoy my company. This came as a surprise to me, and I gave her the benefit of the doubt. But after talking to her about it, it turns out that this is true.

I am certainly not angry that the girl isn’t interested in me, because I understand that not everybody is God’s match for me. But I do find myself a little frustrated that it went on so long without any negative indications of her interest. I was very straightforward, honest and intentional with her. I don’t know why she couldn’t have done the same.

What should I do in the future to make sure we’re both on the same page and avoid this from happening again? Or is it just one of the unavoidable risks of being a man?

Now, on the one hand, I do feel for this guy, because finding out that the girl you are dating doesn’t even like being around you is cold.  But on the other hand, what does “her body language was affirming” even mean?!?!  That doesn’t sound like flirty touching or kissing.  This dude sounds like he was completely de facto LJBFed by a girl who wanted the ego massage of his attention.  And this guy isn’t even angry at her over her behavior?  MESSAGE TO DUDE:  THAT IS WHY SHE DIDN’T LIKE YOU AND WILL NEVER LIKE YOU.

Not surprisingly, Boundless can’t come up with a good answer for why this girl strung this guy along while not actually liking him.  John Thomas responds:

I can’t explain why she acted the way she acted. I am just as surprised as you are at the outcome. There isn’t anything you could have done to change the decisions she made. For all we know, in His sovereignty, God could have protected you from something He saw, but you didn’t. Maybe time will shed more light on it, but whatever the case, you can absolutely trust His good for you and for her.

So women just remain an ephemeral mystery to all of Christendom.  It might have been God.  You just can’t know.

But not men.  No, men and their wicked motives are transparent in Boundlessworld.  Carolyn McCulley recently got yet more cyberspace to remind men that they need to work harder to live up to women’s standards.  In “Gentlemen in a Digital Age,” she invokes Jane Austen as the height of a more civilized time and casts contemporary men in the role of sneaky Petes who are out to scam women on the internet.  She advises:

Be willing to become known. Yeah, it’s risky. Yeah, it can come off weird. But it doesn’t have to. You can be charming, low-key and reassuring in offering this information. Tell her why you are making the connection (“I have heard a lot about you from our mutual friends, and then I saw your profile on Facebook”). Tell her why you want to be in contact (“You sound like a lot of fun, so I’d like to get to know you a little better”). Offer information that will make you legitimate in a cesspool of spambots and viruses (“I’m sure you’d like to check me out, and that’s cool. Here’s the contact info of some people we know in common/my pastor/my family, etc. Or if you prefer I first talk to someone you know, I’d be glad to do that. Whatever makes you comfortable”).

My knee-jerk reaction to this advice was CREEPY CHRISTIAN ROBOT BEHAVIOR THAT WILL SCARE OFF WOMEN.  It’s all too much, too soon, tries way too hard, and takes ANY mystery out of the equation.  It also completely ignores the reality that women judge strangers by their looks.  If you’re not reasonably attractive, and you send a message like McCulley’s to a single Christian woman, she will not want to get to know you better, or think YOU sound like a lot of fun, or have much belief that any action you take will make her feel comfortable.

McCulley’s final paragraph is a passive-aggressive kick in the teeth to men, too:

The fine folks of Jane Austen’s world might strike us today as being a bit rigid in their manners. But they demanded character and accountability even among the limited relationships of a small town. How much wiser would we be to honor the same practices in a world without boundaries.

Translation:  You should emulate Mr. Darcy, you spineless, greedy perv.

 

You can only have two.

The Christian dating version of this:

is this:

A truth universally acknowledged.

After a certain age, when you break up with a man, he will be married to someone else within a year.

The latest example of this phenomenon?  Nathan Zacharias of Boundless, who writes that a year ago on January 8, he was depressed and distraught after a difficult break-up.  One year later, he is on his honeymoon with his “beautiful” (read “SHE’S AN 8!“) bride.

Ten bucks says his ex-girlfriend is breathing fire and drowning her sorrows in Haagen-Dazs and “You go girl!” sessions with girlfriends.  Note also that the first three comments on the post are from admiring female readers saying how “inspiring” and “encouraging” they find Zacharias’s story.  (Read:  the power of preselection!)

The lesson?  Girls, if you want to get married, find an emotionally wrecked Christian man coming off a bad break-up, smile at him, and you, too, can be married within a year!