Stuart Scheiderman wrote a post about something I have encountered even with complementarian Christian women.

He writes:

In England a reporter named Sarah Bridge… has just written a book about bettering her dating skills. It is unabashedly entitled: First Catch Your Husband: Adventures On The Dating Front Line.

To promote her book she has offered a synopsis in the form of a long article in the London Daily Mail.

In Bridge’s analysis, successful thirty-something women have developed habits and routines that are perfectly suited to singlehood. Independent and autonomous, they make their own decisions,conduct their lives as they see fit and do not answer to anyone.

For a single person, these are good habits. When you are unattached they will serve you well.

Unfortunately, a woman who is looking for a man will find these same habits to be an obstacle.

[…]Normally, a woman who has earned her independence will defend it fiercely. She will refuse to compromise her habits, her rituals or her routines. An alien life form, i.e., a man, will seem to be undermining her equanimity. The closer he gets, the more she connects, the more she will feel threatened.

Even if she has not undergone any dating traumas, she will, under normal circumstances have a difficult time engaging a relationship, to say nothing of a marriage.

When such a woman meets a man the impulse to defend her singlehood will overpower her wish to connect.

As Bridge sees it, independent women defend themselves by being critical, overbearing, and, to use her word, “snippy.”

Here’s one of the women interviewed by the author about her dating technique:

She was not connecting with them but was asserting her superiority at their expense. She was playing out a scenario that she could report to her girlfriends, thus providing them with endless entertainment. It’s called solidarity with the sisterhood.

Seeing that the sisterhood finds it uproarious women who share these anecdotes cannot understand why the men in question never call them again. Often they console themselves by saying that these men are easily intimidated by strong women.

Beyond showing off their ability to provide an endless stream of criticism, these women insist on being in complete control. They must be in charge.

X Factor judge Kelly Rowland explains that she chooses the restaurant, opens the door for herself and pays the bill. Of course, she is asserting her independence, but she is also acting as though he is not there and is not a man.

Evidently, the man is will be thinking to himself: why does she need me for? If he has been rendered superfluous, a piece of furniture, then he is not likely to stay around very long.

Bridge says that her generation learned these bad habits from their mothers. One must add that their mothers were simply mouthing the feminist party line.

It seems to me that the problem that modern feminists are having is that they are treating relationships as something that is all about their fulfillment and not putting a moment’s thought into marriage as an institution with certain requirements. If marriage is the goal they are trying to reach, and they want to have a husband and children, then they need to think about how to reach that goal realistically.

Here’s what they should be asking about husbands:

• what is the goal of having a husband?
• why should a man be interested in marriage and fatherhood at all?
• what are the responsibilities of a husband and father?
• what should men be able to do before they are ready for marriage?
• what does a husband need from his wife?
• what should a woman be able to do meet those needs?

• what is the goal of having children?
• what do children need from their mother?
• what do children need from their father?
• what should a woman do to prepare to raise children?
• why are marriage and biological parents important to children?

And about marriage:

• what is the purpose of marriage?
• how should men and women form their characters to be ready for marriage?
• what worldview best grounds moral values like fidelity and self-sacrifice?
• what causes a man to remain faithful and committed to a woman into her old age?

I think if I had to pick one thing for a woman to focus on, it would be the need to take seriously the leadership role of the man in the relationship. Men (if they are good men) all have the desire to achieve certain goals through some plan. They are looking for the right woman to help them. If a woman wants to get a good man to commit, then she has to show him that she is willing to learn about his plan for marriage and to do what he expects her to do to help him to achieve those goals – or better, to come up with effective ways to achieve those goals that he did not even think of. A smart man will expect a woman to demonstrate her ability to help him and her willingness to help him before he thinks about marriage. What is needed is not the ability to take orders, but the ability to innovate in order to solve problems.

Men know how to find out if a woman has prepared for marriage and parenting and we know how to find out if she wants to understand and care for a husband. What I see quite a lot these days from women is 1) a refusal to believe that men know anything of value, and 2) a refusal to be led by men in a courtship, and 3) dismissing men’s emotional needs. I think a lot of this is caused 1) their mothers did not choose a man who would be there to teach them morality and religion when they were growing up, 2) lack of trust for men caused by past promiscuity, drug abuse and partying, 3) a prior commitment to feminism and career which causes them to be dismissive and disrespectful of men’s needs, goals and plans. Many women today think that men are there primarily to serve their needs, and not to lead them.

For men, the best piece of advice I have is to remain chaste. It is a capital error to allow women like the ones described in Stuart’s post to manipulate you with sex. Feminists use sex to get attention from men without having to listen to them, care about them, learn from them, or follow their lead. The best thing to do to detect a bad woman is to explain your plan to her and then ask her to help or to study something that will help or to solve problems or to take on obligations or anything that she doesn’t want to do herself. It is amazing how easy it is to detect women who want a selfish “fairy tale wedding” marriage if you know what to ask them.