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:

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.

Listen to your grandma!

I’m battling a cold at the moment.  I went home for Easter, and on Monday I visited with my grandmother before flying back.  She had a cold and warned me not to touch her.  I, however, did not listen, and now I’m paying for it with a river of snot gushing out of my nose and a throat that makes me sound like an 80-year-old chain smoker.

Have things to say.  Will just have to say them when I’m feeling better.  Hope everyone is having a good weekend so far.

 

Three must-reads.

If you haven’t read these already, you should!

The Reason Beta Males Pedestalize Women by Heartiste.  If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many guys out there who refuse to take the red pill or just can’t imagine that there are Good Girls who do Bad Things, this post explains it.  It’s the most succinct and clear (not to mention, entertaining) explanation of the origin of white knight dogma that I’ve ever read.  A sample:

So you see, in the final analysis, it is very likely, by dint of the beta male’s ignorance, inexperience and habituated veneration of women and reflexive indulgence of women’s motives, that his view of women is severely constricted, child-like in its naivete. The beta male is not privy to what Tyler Durden famously called the secret society of women. He was never invited, and he was never apprised of the secret society’s goings-on by any woman in his life. He lives in a pinched world with only a peephole to the wonders beyond, given him not by insight but by stumbling into depravity or by the good grace of a sympathetic alpha male. As far as he knows, women don’t have much sex, and they are very nice and polite most of the time.

The beta male pedestalizes women because one, that’s all women have deigned to show him of their sexual inner world, and two, he cannot bear the contrary thought, affirming and cementing as it does his lackluster place on the sexual totem pole.

Women are innately good by Dalrock.  Here Dalrock goes after FOTF’s #1 Mangina Glenn Stanton and Stanton’s book Secure Daughters, Confident Sons: How Parents Guide Their Children into Authentic Masculinity and Femininity.  Anyone who’s been hanging around Haley’s Halo for a while probably knows my opinion of Stanton (read:  I enjoyed Dalrock’s article very much), but Dalrock’s post is just that much more satisfying after reading Roissy’s above post and seeing how Stanton fits that description to a T.  Is it any wonder that Stanton, born and raised to be the best of churchly betas, would find it impossible to believe that even the sweetest, most innocent, most Jesus-loving woman possesses the ability to transform into an unhinged sexual beast given the proper enticement?

Stanton repeatedly pushes the idea that women are genetically programmed to be good, while men are not, and it is the lack of good men (whom no one trained to be good, I guess) that results in women being bad (violating their natural propensities).  Yes, it’s obvious that this makes zero sense.  Dalrock sums it up nicely:

There is a special kind of irony in him lecturing about how good men hold those who do wrong accountable just before he goes on to not hold women accountable for having children out of wedlock, frivolously divorcing, and for choosing cads over dads.

Also stick around to read the comments by deti and van Rooinek.  Good stuff from guys who’ve been in the churchly trenches.

Dating Advice: How to Pick Your Right Girl by Art of Manliness.  Brett McKay found a book from 1944 entitled How to Get Along With Girls.  (The Greatest Generation didn’t have the internet or rappers with advice for handling shorties.)  The first chapter of the book is “How to Pick Your Right Girl” and gives a checklist of traits to consider.  The charm is in the old-fashioned language.  The wisdom is timeless.  Among the things a young man contemplating marriage should consider:

• She is attractive, of course, but is that her chief asset? (Try to imagine her ten years from today.)
• Could you spend seven consecutive evenings in her company without being bored? (If the answer is affirmative, it is a good sign.)
• Is she a flirt? Does she make you jealous? (Decide whether you can stand the strain; your jealousy will persist until you grow indifferent.)
• Does she tell lies? Do you mind?
• Do you agree on children, or a career, or both? (Better settle this beforehand.)
• Does she expect you to support her in a definite style? Could you count on her cooperation in hard times? Would she go to work if necessary?

Read the whole article.  I’m sure we can all think of at least a couple people in our lives who would have benefited from having such a list and taking it seriously.

I’m planning on seeing The Hunger Games tonight.  Last year I wrote a post on the book, so if you’re new here and have an interest in the book/movie, there’s something else you can put on your reading list.  Ha!