“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.

Sex goggles.

I am convinced that most bad relationships do not end because of sex goggles.  They say that sex changes everything between two people, and it does…because of the sex goggles.  The Bible describes this as two people becoming one flesh, but it basically means sex goggles.

Sex goggles magically add anywhere from +1 to +5 points of attractiveness to a person, which is why two homely fat people can think each other gorgeous, and why men stay with drab, frumpy, personality-free women even though it’s obvious the men could do better.  Sex goggles boost the other person’s attractiveness to the point where it makes leaving the other person difficult due to the fear of not being able to find someone at least equally attractive.  Sex goggles are so powerful that a lot of guys will stay with a woman who doles out very little sex, just because a woman is more attractive when you know you’re assured of sex twelve times a year rather than face the unknown of possibly having sex zero times a year.  Once you put the sex goggles on, it’s hard to take them off.

I’m not saying that sex goggles are bad per se.  Sex goggles are actually a feature of sex as designed by God.  God designed sex to bind two people together, and how else to facilitate the longevity of that binding than by throwing sex goggles into the mix?  I mean, if you’re going to grow old with someone, and growing old means you’re both going to turn into droopy, wrinkled hags, then by all means, bring on the sex goggles to make me forget I’m swapping spit with an 85-year-old geezer.

The problem that people run into with the sex goggles is when they have sex outside of God’s design.  Now you too often have two people viewing each other with sex goggles who should never have been bound together.  The problem is twofold:  first, the sex goggles obscure all of the problems with the relationship upfront.  Second, the sex goggles make it very difficult to walk away into a sexless unknown.  Whenever you read stories of guys agonizing about whether or not they should commit to a woman, or girls trying to decide if Mr. Right Now can transition into being Mr. Until I Die, and there are some noticeable warning signs, you can usually determine that all the drama and dithering originates from sex goggles.  I mean, think about it.  If you removed sex from the equation, how easy would it be to walk away from someone who was making you miserable?  Who was selfish?  Who handled money poorly?  Who was abusive?  Who was not supportive?  But if you’re wearing sex goggles, suddenly it becomes this very arduous process of trying to decide if you should stay, and it’s so complicated, and you need the advice of so many people, and you find yourself rejecting good advice even though you agree they’re right.  Does this not sound like insanity?  But sex goggles make it possible.

So, respect the sex goggles.  Follow God’s plan and don’t put them on until you’ve tied the knot.

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.

 

 

Keeping each other in the dark.

How Relationships Are Supposed to Work:

The job of women is to let men think that they’re in charge of everything and are the smartest and best at everything everrrrr, even though it’s really the woman running things.

The job of men is to let women think that they’re the cleverest and most charming and most capable everrrrr, even though it’s really the man running things.

Do people ever really learn lessons from dating?

The mainstream CW on dating is that you should date a lot of (or at least several) people prior to marrying so you can sample what’s out there, “learn,” and “grow.”  There seems to be some sort of social law stating that you will not marry your high school sweetheart (should you be lucky enough to have one), followed by muddling through the carousel dating around during your 20s until sometime between 28 and 32 you settle down with The One.  During this dating around time, you will “learn about yourself” and “learn about what you want.”  The One will also during this time have been learning the same things, thus ensuring that he (or she) is truly The One.

This all sounds fine and dandy, but in practice, is this really what happens?  Doesn’t everyone know girls who date jerk after jerk after jerk, all the while lamenting that they keep ending up dating jerks?  Doesn’t everyone know guys whose girlfriends are all clones of each other?  (For famous examples, look at Rod Stewart and all of his wives.  Or Bruce Willis’s current wife, who looks like a younger version of Demi Moore.  Or Leonardo DiCaprio’s string of blonde models.  Or, to cite a female celebrity, Kate Hudson’s penchant for procreating only with rock stars.)

I really don’t think that people actually learn much of anything through serial dating, because if attraction is uncontrollable, then people are always going to be attracted to the same kind of thing.  And that means that the person will keep making the same mistakes over and over again.  Few people surprise their friends every time they start dating someone new.  The only time that surprises tend to happen is when the person has had their fun and/or was scarred by the previous breakup and is now truly serious about finding a life partner.  Cue manosphere screeching about carousels and leftovers – not that plenty of women haven’t had the experience of their ex turning around after the breakup and marrying the woman’s opposite mere months later.

A better strategy seems to be to sit down and think hard and shrewdly about what you want and what you absolutely need, and then target only people who fulfill that profile.  But in a world where women follow the tingle and men (at least most beta men) accept scraps, such tactics seem unlikely to catch on on a wider scale….

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.

Why I subscribe to Game.

There’s a lot less of Game disparaging now that Jennifer is no longer commenting, but I figured now would be as good a time as any to talk about how I came around to taking the red pill.

I grew up believing the standard churchly evangelinist dogma of men and women being Equal and that dating should be very egalitarian as to who initiates and all that.  (I had read an unfortunate article in a teen magazine that stated that guys LIKE it when they are asked out.)  When I got to college, it didn’t take long for this advice to blow up in my face.  The older I got, the more experiences I had, or my friends had, that ran counter to the prevailing C.W.  Still, this wasn’t enough for me to disembark full stop from the cultural ship, though the thickness of cognitive dissonance was gradually wearing down.

It was when I read that Weekly Standard article, which subsequently led me to seek out Roissy’s blog, that everything clicked.  The more I read, the more a litany of experiences made sense that I previously could never make sense of.

It explained why I had had crushes on the guys I had had crushes on, even though the crushes were hopeless and I knew they were hopeless, yet I couldn’t stop being attracted even though I wanted to.

It explained why I never was attracted to guys that I felt I should be attracted to.

It explained why I never believed girls who claimed until they were blue in the face that they couldn’t stand some guy.  It explained female group behavior.

It explained why on my college campus, a handful of guys went to every single dorm dance.

It explained why it’s futile to try to convince women to walk away from truly bad relationships.

It explained why self-professed ultra-liberal feminists can rationalize away being some guy’s part-time #2 as A-OK.

It explained why I’ve seen so many guys who probably could have a wife/girlfriend at least 1 to 2 SMV points higher, if the guy would just gain a smidgen (more?) alpha attitude.

It explained why so much Christian dating advice is terrible and doesn’t work.

It explains a friend’s current endless choice, self-imposed emotional drama over two guys, neither of whom she can have, yet she has been angsting over her feelings for both of them for years.  It explains why women would prefer to be stuck in an infinite dramatic loop of their own making rather than going out to face “the real world” and get serious about genuinely available options.

I’m not saying that Game is pure Natural Law, but I have yet to come across a theory that better explains the behavior of the sexes.  Since I have red pilled, I’ve seen very few, if any, relationships that can’t be analyzed pretty accurately according to Game.

My feelings about Game can be summed up by this monologue by Meryl Streep from The Devil Wears Prada: