Tag Archives: Advice

Commentary

Advice for single women struggling to get a man to commit

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Here’s Cassy writing about it at PJ Media.

Excerpt:

So every single guy you start dating ends up being a jerk, huh? They cheat on you, they cut and run after just a few weeks, or after a few promising months they announce that they’re not ready for a relationship. So you sit there and bemoan your poor, pitiful dating life and wonder why – why? – you can’t meet any good guys.

Well, here’s the thing: you do meet good guys. And then you go on to ignore them in favor of the bad boy who has a reputation, because you just know that the magic of your love will change him. Or you refuse to take a look in the mirror to figure out why every guy you date runs away as fast as his feet can take him. You come on too strong, you’re too clingy, you’re too needy. Heck, maybe it’s all of the above.

If every single guy that you date ends up being someone that you label as a jerk and a heartbreaker, well, the problem isn’t everybody else. You can lie to yourself and say that you just can’t meet any good guys, but they’re out there all right. You just ignore them, put them in the “friend zone,” or scare them away with your psychotic, desperate behavior.

And more:

Guy and girl meet. They exchange numbers, go on a date or two, and really hit it off. Sparks are flying, guy says all the right things, and girl thinks he might be the one. So what does she do? She hops into bed with him, thinking that sex will seal the deal… and their budding romance will turn into a full-blown exclusive relationship. Unfortunately for girl, guy is just happy to score, and that magical night of passion will do absolutely nothing to convince guy to stick around. Now he’s even more likely to bolt, having already gotten what he wants out of her. Meanwhile, she’s telling herself that having sex with him after two dates was totally a good idea, because he liked her so much.

In reality, having sex with a guy right away is never a good idea. You don’t need to sleep with someone in order to make your bond stronger. If you do have this amazing connection, then you don’t need sex to solidify it. And if he’s any kind of decent man who is actually interested in you, then he’ll wait anyway.

Stuart Schneiderman adds this:

Fiano’s advice might seem redundant, but as long as so many women get hurt in bad relationships, it’s worth examining her observations.

Given the anguish that attends a failed relationship, it makes sense that women have devised a series of face-saving explanations.

All begin with the staple: all men are jerks.

Fiano responds that perhaps all the men you are choosing are jerks, but if that is the case, then you are choosing the wrong men.

There are good men out there. Unfortunately, women who have followed the modern dating plan are more likely to go with their hearts and guts than with their heads.

If they have involved themselves in hookups or friends with benefits relationships they have been traumatized to the point where they continue to be attracted to the same kind of man, over and over again.

Women who have suffered a series of relationship failures have learned how to deal with relationship failure. They have not, however, learned how to conduct a successful relationship.

Women rationalize their bad decision by saying, Fiano suggests, that their love can transform a man from a frog into a prince.

It cannot.

Get over yourself.

I’ve blogged before about how many single women choose men based on shallow criteria, especially appearance – and also about how many single women rely too much on their emotions instead of studying male roles and choosing the right man for the job. Single women often believe that they can change a bad, but attractive, man into a good man by giving him recreational premarital sex. They actually think that it is easier to convert a bad man with sex than to pick a good man and give him respect – but it doesn’t work, as I explained before. They are looking to control a man without having to respect him or serve him. This early sex practice does not work: early sex ruins the quality of the relationship.

Stuart ends his post with this:

Women should ask themselves how they could have believed that men would find them more attractive if they were strong, independent feminists.
Women should ask themselves who told them. 
It wasn’t men. In fact, today’s modern woman has been trained not to listen to men or to respect men.
They reaping what they and their feminist handlers sowed.

Men love to have someone intelligent and experienced as a companion, but that woman has to be willing to help them achieve their goals by following the man’s lead. Men have a need to lead. They absolutely need to be respected as leaders. What I have found is that you cannot even get most single women today to read anything harder than C.S. Lewis these days – they are not willing to follow you even when you are grooming them to be effective wives and mothers – to raise quality children and to impact the university, the church and the public square.

Most single women want happiness – they don’t want a man to lead them – not even to lead them into effective influence for the Lord Jesus’ sake. It’s amazing. 20 years of church, and few Christian women (in my experience) have the desire to let a man lead them to serve God more effectively. They just don’t care. They just read Harry Potter. They just want to travel. They just want to have a good time. The pastors never tell single women anything to counteract the feminism.

Send Cassy’s article far and wide! Maybe we’ll save the culture from the ravages of radical feminism. Maybe more children will grow up with a mother and a father.

Mentoring

The Elusive Wapiti updates his “Marry a Zealot” post

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The Elusive Wapiti updates his marital advice for young Christian men.

He begins like tis:

Ten months ago, I published the second installment in the ‘Advice to My Sons’ series, titled “Marry a Zealot“, in which I exhort them and others to become fervent Believers–and seek out other Believers as mates–to best insure them against the ravages of divorce should they marry.

The point of that post was to highlight the additional protection that serious religious conviction, as indicated by active religious attendance, provides them against divorce, an important consideration for men in the post-Christian West nowadays. By way of contrast, a secondary point of that post was to show that mere self-identification or occasional participation in religious services exposed a fellow of the marrying kind to greater risk of marital disruption than if he and/or his wife had no religious affiliation at all.

Since the link to the pdf that supported that post has since disappeared, I did some spadework to recover the data that supports this advice.  I was able to locate it here, on page 9 of the scholarly article Bad News about the Good News–The Construction of the Christian-Failure Narrative, Journal of Religion & Society, volume 14.  The article drew the data shown in the following tables from the General Social Survey, 1980-2009.

His main concern is how religious belief correlates with divorce.

Here shows the evidence then says this:

When one takes one’s faith seriously enough to put it into action, as measured in this case by attending church at least once per week, this behavior appears to yield anti-divorce benefits.  Yet I am thoroughly unimpressed with a 38% divorce rate for Evangelicals, a group whose noisy claims to family values are belied by their itchy dissolutive trigger fingers. Moreover, the picture for active black Protestants remains dark and grim; their marriages garner no protection whatsoever from church attendance.  The data for Roman Catholics is much more encouraging, and it seems that the RCC has been more effective than Protestant denominations at countering the scourge of divorce. Perhaps the theological rigidity and hierarchical structure associated with Marianism makes it less vulnerable to socio-political contagions like feminism and divorce, while the, ahem, diversity, of Protestantism makes it more prone to worldly influences.

I think that it is a good idea in general for young men to not leave marriage at the level of feelings. I have posted before a list of questions to find out if a woman is a zealot. I think that young Christian men should read Wapiti’s post and then my post and then act accordingly.

Mentoring

Marriage advice from Christian philosopher William Lane Craig

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Here is a question of the week from Dr. Craig on “Marriage Advice”!

Here’s the question:

Dear Dr. Craig,

Marriage is in the foreseeable future, and I would like to ask you for any advice before it happens. Can we avoid any mistakes? Would it be helpful to meet with a pastor for premarital counseling? Are there any helpful tips you could give from a Christian perspective or from your own experience?

Thank you in advance!

Zareen

Here are the main pieces of advice Dr. Craig gives:

  1. Resolve that there will be no divorce
  2. Delay having children
  3. Confront problems honestly
  4. Seek marital counseling
  5. Take steps to build intimacy in your relationship

And here’s the controversial one (#2):

2. Delay having children. The first years of marriage are difficult enough on their own without introducing the complication of children. Once children come, the wife’s attention is necessarily diverted, and huge stresses come upon you both. Spend the first several years of marriage getting to know each other, working through your issues, having fun together, and enjoying that intimate love relationship between just the two of you. Jan and I waited ten years before having our first child Charity, which allowed me the finish graduate school, get our feet on the ground financially, establish some roots, and enjoy and build our love relationship until we were really ready to take on the responsibilities of parenthood. The qualifier here is that if the wife desperately wants children now, then the husband should accede to her wish to become a mother, rather than withhold that from her. Her verdict should be decisive. But if you both can agree to wait, things will probably be much easier.

I wonder if the married readers agree with him about the “waiting at least a year after marriage bafore having children”?