You are a delusional Christian if you think you can have a very long courtship and/or engagement and not have sex.

A post at Athol’s from July got me all fired up on this topic.  (So I wrote a post and then sat on it for several weeks.  ANYHOW.)  A mid-20s Christian reader wrote to Athol asking for advice about his relationship with his girlfriend of three years.  Christian Guy hasn’t had intercourse with his girlfriend yet because she wants to wait for marriage, so they’ve decided that guilt over handjobs and occasional oral sex is a more tolerable way to have a relationship.  Most recently, the girlfriend has stated that she wants to cut off ALL sexual contact so she can be sure that CG truly loves her.

Athol’s advice to CG was that he should just go ahead and bang his girlfriend because cutting off sexual contact was her sexual rejection of CG and that a future marriage would not suffer from premarital sex due to their being each other’s first sexual partners.  Additionally, girlfriend’s rejection is a shit test because she wants CG to alpha up and just go for it.

Obviously, as a Christian, I disagree with this advice even though I can understand the reasoning behind it.  (And I do agree that the girlfriend’s rejection is a shit test.)  But that doesn’t really address the underlying issue here, which is why are CG and his girlfriend waiting so long to get married in the first place?  They’re both in their mid-20s, have been together for three years already, and are succumbing to sexual sin in what sounds like an unhappy cycle of hopelessness.  Athol’s blog article doesn’t mention any extenuating circumstances such as abject poverty, or someone is waiting to get out of prison, or someone’s gender reassignment surgery is not yet complete.  And yet CG and his girlfriend are not on schedule to get married for another TWO YEARS.

Does ANYONE in their right mind think that this is a plan for success?!?

The thing about sex is that it only goes in one direction, and it is only designed to have one ending point.  In other words, once you start going down the physical road with someone, it becomes nearly impossible to back up to an earlier point; the only solution is to stop associating with that person completely (i.e., a breakup).  And the ending point of sex is intercourse.  A prolonged stay in Hand Job City or endlessly cruising down Blow Me Bypass is sexually dysfunctional for a healthy couple.  It’s like an Olympic diver climbing to the top of the high dive, bouncing up and down on the springboard, and then…not diving into the water.  Repeatedly.  And convincing yourself that this is a cool way to get close to the water without getting wet.  At some point you’ll either fall in in a way you never intended to, or you’ll psych yourself out when it’s finally time to dive (after two years of training yourself to stop at the end of the board).

I think the church has done a real disservice to its young men and women by going along with the cultural flow of delayed marriage rather than promoting young marriage.  Expecting the vast majority of young Christians to keep their clothes on and hands off for 15-20 years after hitting puberty is ridiculous.  By age 25-ish, a lot of young people are just going to give up on waiting if they don’t see imminent light at the end of the tunnel.  They’ve already waited a decade or more, and the prospect of waiting another decade has the pallor of death.  Besides, all of their friends are doing it and lightning hasn’t struck them yet, plus the church has abortion and homosexuality to worry about.  As long as there are genuine feelings of love and no one gets pregnant and no one gets a disease, is it really that big of a deal? (whispers Satan’s Hamster.)

That said, I think a bigger problem is long courtships and engagements.  When two people are sexually attracted to each other but committed to not having sex until marriage, a four-year courtship followed by a one-year engagement sounds like insanity to me.  Once you’ve gotten the big issues out of the way, like faith, money, character, and goals, and you know that you enjoy each other’s company and are attracted to each other, and others whose opinions you value approve of the match, how much longer do you really need to decide someone is “the one”?  What more could the other person possibly do to prove to you that you should spend the rest of your lives together?  For people who are beyond college-age, I think it’s entirely possible to go from meeting to married within a year to 18 months.  Extending the timeframe longer than that is just setting yourself up for failure, not to mention a lot of gnashing of teeth (as it were) due to having to repress a great deal of your physical desire for each other.

By the way, shorter courtships mean more intentional dating.  You can enjoy the company of a whole lot more people than those who are serious marriage material.  Limit your dating pool to marriageable prospects, and you will give yourself a leg up in the decision-making process.  (Plus, you will help yourself avoid the temptation to get physical with someone you have no intention of marrying.)

Just a guess!

 

World magazine: “Christian Boy Meets Christian Girl.”

Back in June, World magazine (a biweekly politically conservative evangelical newsmagazine) did a cover story on the problems Christian singles are having finding someone to marry.  The viewpoints espoused by the interviewees sound nearly verbatim to opinions I’ve encountered (both online and in real life).  Among them:

• Guys don’t know how to pursue in a manly or godly way
• Too many rejections
• Fear of divorce
• Dating scene crippled by IKDG – pressure not to date unless reasonably certain the other person is “the one” or at least realistically could be
• Too much focus on group activities
• Women don’t want to ask men out
• Women feel men are content with apathy towards dating and women
• Men feel women are too picky and only want to be asked out by certain men
• Men are overwhelmed by choice and keep holding out for someone better-looking, more spiritual, more intelligent, etc.
• Churches don’t do anything to help singles

Did the article miss anything?  (Well, other than pointing out that everyone in America is just too darn fat and dresses like a slob.)

There’s also a sidebar one-page article called “A Man’s World,” in which (once again) the sexual economics of college campuses are discussed and (once again) the conclusion is reached that women are the losers and men are the winners.  Of course, without discussing the alpha/beta distinction among men, this isn’t exactly an accurate depiction of the reality of the SMP of the college and singles scenes.

Movie: Soul Surfer.

I recently saw the inspirational movie Soul Surfer, which is based on the real-life story of Bethany Hamilton, a Christian teenage surfer who lost her arm in a shark attack several years ago.  Unlike Fireproof, Soul Surfer had a multi-million dollar budget and major studio backing, and as a result offers viewers Hollywood production values and “name” actors who were able to bring the script to life.  The movie was shot in Hawaii and makes the island look gorgeous.  The surfing is also authentic – the real Bethany Hamilton did the surfing for her movie self – and is well-filmed.

Oftentimes when Christian stories go through the Hollywood machine, the Christian content gets watered down so as to draw a wider audience (i.e., not “offend” anyone).  That didn’t really happen in Soul Surfer.  We see the characters attending church and singing worship songs, Carrie Underwood shows up as the youth group leader to read scripture and go on missions trips, and Bethany’s dad is reading the Bible as he watches over her in the hospital.  I was surprised to see this degree of realism of a contemporary evangelical lifestyle in a major theatrical feature, but the movie manages the minor miracle of not being preachy or self-conscious about it.  The Hamilton family’s faith is presented as a normal part of their lives, not a Special Teachable Moment or Time Out For An Altar Call To The Heathens Unsaved We Tricked Into Seeing This Movie That’s Supposed To Be About Surfing  But Not Really HaHa.

Notable for readers of this blog is the portrayal of Bethany’s parents by Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt.  It’s not just that they were believable as parents and a married couple (they were), but they were believable as a married couple who loved each other and LIKED each other and still had a sexual spark between them.  It was a pleasure to see.  Too often in movies and TV, longtime married couples who get along are portrayed as kindly roommate-partners whose pinnacle of passion is a peck when the husband or wife comes home from work, or maybe an affectionate side hug.

Funnily enough, although Soul Surfer is primo youth group entertainment, I can see it being controversial in some circles because the girls wear string bikinis throughout much of the movie (although during the surf competitions, they wear colored surf shirts).  To someone familiar with beach/surf culture, this is ordinary and unremarkable, but I can already imagine the handwringing over whether to let hormonal teenage boys view the movie for fear of inciting lust.

(For parents – there is zero bad language, and even the shark attack is pretty benign.)

Companionship vs. sexual attraction.

Hana recently made a provocative statement (at least, for this corner of the internetz) at her blog:

…close friendship, where two people share common interests, a compatible sense of humour, and similar intelligence, etc.   When a man and a woman are close friends in this way, the importance of sexual attraction seems to fade.  Sexual attraction is still present…Still, sexual attraction becomes less important when a man and a woman are truly close friends.

She then made an even more provocative statement:

As long as you’re somewhat attracted to him or her, why not marry your best friend?

This seems like a pretty far cry from Dalrock’s and Badger’s insistence that a woman feel “head over heels” for any potential spouse, but in my opinion, it seems like a good recipe for a stable, enduring marriage.  If women are able to grow in attraction to a mate and will feel more attracted and more attached to him once they have sex, and the woman at least meets a man’s minimum physical attractiveness requirements, and there is a preexisting emotional/intellectual bond and the two enjoy each other’s company, then that sounds like pretty solid grounds for marrying (assuming there are no red flags in other areas).  God willing, you’re both going to be old and achy a lot longer than you’re going to be young and hot, so it’s worth investing in someone who will still be fun when your collagen production has reached its nadir and you can’t see each other clearly up close without bifocals anyway (not that you would necessarily want to, due to the wrinkles).

Speaking anecdotally, I had a friend who fit this description.  We attended the same church and got along swimmingly.  It was very easy for us to have lengthy conversations, and our senses of humor meshed well.  We weren’t superclose friends, but I could tell that we were on the same wavelength.  After knowing him for a couple of years, I started to think that if he hadn’t been married with kids, he was someone I probably could have married.  I didn’t feel “head over heels” for him.  I didn’t even have a crush on him.  I wasn’t physically attracted to him (but whatever my minimum standard of physical attractiveness was, he met that, because I wasn’t repulsed by him).  He was just someone I got along with really, really well.

When you consider that when you marry someone, you’re signing up to wake up to that person’s face every day for the rest of your life, and when you come home there’s no escaping that person, getting along really well becomes a pretty important consideration.

A picture is worth a thousand words!

Character matters: Morf and Bee edition.

Yesterday my mom told me that Morf, the son of one of her best friends, is definitely splitting up with his wife Bee after four years of a marriage that, as far as I can tell, never really took off.  There’s a “for sale” sign in their yard, and Bee has apparently already moved out.  Again.

Morf is a pastor’s son and attended Christian school all his life, including college.  He was popular, good-looking, and athletic, and seems to be a romantic.  (He gave his college girlfriend a promise ring.  I remember groaning when my mom told me.)  After college, Morf found some success as a salesman in the Chicago area, and it was during this time that he met Bee in (of all places) an internet chat room.  In a stroke of fate, Bee turned out to be a hometown girl who had attended the same high school that Morf did, only she was four or five years younger.  Bee had actually seen Morf way back when and immediately knew he would be her future husband.  Morf and Bee began dating and married when Bee was 20 in a ceremony where they had written their own vows.  The only thing keeping their story from being a Nicholas Sparks novel was that no one was terminally ill or in the military.

Unfortunately, the wedding was the pinnacle of their relationship.  About a year or so later, my mom told me that Bee had moved back in with her mom and wanted out of the marriage.  Morf tried to reason with her, explaining that they had entered into marriage for life, especially as Christians, but Bee flat-0ut told him that those rules didn’t apply to her.  Eventually, Morf was able to convince Bee to come back, and for a while it seemed that things were back on track.

Except, obviously, they weren’t.  Morf and Bee went to marriage counseling, but Bee had already checked out of the relationship.  Her friends were still in school or starting jobs, living it up in Wrigleyville (the fashionable young people’s neighborhood in Chicago), while she was stuck in podunk town married to a guy who now was working for his dad’s ministry, a.k.a. not a road to riches and earthly glory.  It seems pretty obvious that Bee had decided that a better life, free of the constraints of Morf, was out there waiting for her.

My mom is quite grieved that Morf and Bee’s relationship cratered, but in retrospect, the warning signs had always been there.  For starters, Bee was an only child of divorce and was used to getting her own way all the time.  She lived with her mom, and if her mom wouldn’t get her something she wanted, she would just turn around and get it from her dad.  The fact that her mother allowed her to move back in the first time Bee left was a bad sign as well.  Instead of telling her that she’d made her bed and now she had to sleep in it, Bee’s mother enabled Bee’s selfish behavior.  But it’s not Bee’s fault alone:  I suspect that Morf acted like a big, fat beta during their marriage.  Even before Morf and Bee got married, Morf’s mom had mentioned that Morf could never say no to Bee.  (Of course he couldn’t; he was the kind of guy who goes around buying promise rings.)  When I spoke to my mom, she said that when Bee came back to Morf, Morf acquiesced to every single thing that Bee demanded.  Which, as those of us steeped in manosphere principles know, NEVER WORKS.  By trying to make Bee happy, Morf just confirmed to Bee that he was not the man she had signed up to marry.

I suppose the golden lining is that Morf and Bee’s marriage is a classic “starter marriage,” which means that other than any emotional lumps they’ve taken through this whole thing, they’ll pretty much be right back where they started.  Not being rich, they have no significant assets to split.  They have no children.  And each is good-looking enough to attract a new spouse easily; Bee is cute, young, and vivacious, which is enough to make many men ignore all the warning signs, and women LOVE taking care of the good-looking, vulnerable men that other women abandon (it’s always a competition with women:  “I won’t treat you like dirt the way she did!”).  I expect both to be remarried within a few years, tops.

I could say that we should learn some very obvious lessons from Morf and Bee, but being human, we probably won’t.  No one wants to believe that their beloved is a statistic, rather than the exception.  Still, I believe Morf could have saved himself a lot of grief if he had more closely examined Bee’s character while they dated.  Her cuteness, along with his general desire and readiness to Be Married, probably blinded him to her shortcomings, and now he’s paying the price for that.  So, readers, choose carefully and look at the details as well as the whole picture.  Being a Christian isn’t in and of itself enough to save a marriage, nor is being cute, or young, or popular, or nice, or “having good values.”  You really have to get to the root of someone’s convictions.

P.S.  As far as I know, there is no third party involved in this split.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

I was talking to my parents on the phone today and my mom told me about an experience she’d had that I thought would be relevant to the blog.  While we were on the subject of American Idol, talk turned to Adam Lambert, and my mom asked if she had told me about her fellow election volunteer.  I said no (and wondered what prompted this particular non sequitur).  Well, my mom informed me, I needed to get a load of this lady.

So, apparently there’s another lady who volunteers on election days, too, and my mom has gotten to know her a little in the standard “we’re both stuck here all day so we might as well be friendly” kind of way.  According to my mom, this other woman is probably in her late 40s or early 50s, is married, and has three sons, the youngest of which has now graduated from high school.  I don’t know this woman’s name, so for the purposes of this blog post, I’ll just call her Rhonda.

Anyhow, Rhonda has been very nice and seemed relatively normal until the most recent election, where she showed up dressed like a goth and had a dyed-red streak in her hair.  It turns out that Rhonda is divorcing her husband.  Also, two of her three sons are gay (the middle one is the straight one).  The youngest son dropped out of school and got his GED because he was bullied so much for his flamboyance.

I told my mom that Rhonda was in the throes of a mid-life crisis.  My mom then told me (bringing the discussion full circle) that Rhonda also had a tattoo of Adam Lambert’s autograph.  A couple of years ago, Adam Lambert came to town to perform a concert at a major city festival that Rhonda and her family worked at.  They were able to go backstage and meet Adam, and Rhonda got Adam’s autograph not on a piece of paper but on her body.  The very next day, Rhonda had Adam’s autograph tattooed onto herself.

My question was, Where was the husband in all of this?  What self-respecting man allows his wife to get a (young, gay) male singer’s autograph tattooed onto her body?**  For a middle-aged Midwestern mom, that’s practically adultery.  I couldn’t help but think that either the husband had checked out of the marriage emotionally years ago, or he was fatally unequipped to deal with his wife and children.  Wielding some pimp hand along the way would probably have helped save his marriage.  It would even help him now, if he cared to exercise it.  A woman acting out to the extent that Rhonda is is BEGGING for an alpha to come into her life and show her what’s what.

The whole story made me sad to hear it.  Divorce stories are always sad.  But one thing is clear:  Female nature abhors an alpha vacuum.

**But blah blah blah, a woman is the sole boss of her body, blah!  In this case, NO:  the tattoo is a subconscious FU to her husband’s betaness.

Wedding band not required.

Glenn Stanton is back at Boundless, now demanding that Kate Middleton demand that Prince William wear a wedding band.  Apparently the prince has decided not to wear one as a “personal choice.”  He also does not like jewelry.

My opinion about wedding bands is whatever.  I don’t think they are necessary, and the absence of one doesn’t necessarily signify anything.  My dad stopped wearing his early on in his marriage to my mom on account of work safety issues, and as far as I can tell, his not wearing it has never been an issue.  My mom wore her wedding ring, but then it got stolen when my parents moved, so now neither of my parents wear the rings they gave each other on their wedding day.

For me, the main thing that would matter is the reason for not wearing a ring.  If it’s because my future husband doesn’t want to advertise his marriage, that’s obviously going to be a problem.  If there are other considerations, then fine.  The second main consideration would be whether he would demand that I wear a ring.  A man who feels his ring is optional should also feel that his wife’s ring is optional.  I can’t imagine any other attitude not resulting in a screaming match.

As for Stanton, he goes off on how Prince Charles never wore his when he was married to Diana, and DUN DUN DUN LOOK WHAT HAPPENED THERE.  And now Charles wears a ring for Camilla, so clearly the absence of a ring is an ominous portent of the future for William and Kate.  Stanton also thinks that William’s refusal to wear a ring is William’s refusal of Kate’s commitment to him because that is what the ring is a symbol of.  Stanton ends the post with a quote from Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon character from 30 Rock.  Why do they let this guy write?  At least Ted Slater and Motte Brown didn’t come across like chiding church ladies.

A premature proclamation?

Suzanne Gosselin recently wrote an article at Boundless called “Recognizing the One,” in which she recounts that she knew her now-husband was “the one” when the Holy Spirit told her so (which just so happened to be at a moment when Kevin, to whom she was already attracted, was alpha-ly going on about his passions and plans for life…funny how that works).

In the comments, someone named Andrew3 wrote of his criteria for a future wife:

This is my criteria for knowing if a woman is “The One” for me:

1. She believes in Jesus Christ as her Saviour.

2. I can imagine her bearing my children through the method designed by God at the beginning of creation. (Genesis 4:1)

3. She wants to marry me.

That is it! The first woman who fulfills all three of the above criteria will be my wife for the rest of our years on earth.

Now, maybe he really means this, but I highly doubt that these are his only criteria.  What if the woman also…

…had three kids by three other guys?

…pole-danced not for Jesus?

…had $50,000 worth of credit card debt?

…had two ex-husbands?

…had a lot of male Facebook friends who liked to message her?

…liked to post pictures of herself in a bikini on Facebook?

…had no female friends?

…made more money and/or had more education than he did?

Maybe Andrew3 is just really young and therefore hasn’t thought any deeper than his three criteria.

 

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.”]