Tag Archives: Courting

Commentary

Are radical feminists able to court and marry successfully?

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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?
And about children:
  • 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.

Podcasts

William Lane Craig’s advice for balancing your career with your marriage

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I got this lecture from the Reasonable Faith web site. (H/T straightright)

Dr. William Lane Craig is the top living Christian apologist and debater in the world today, and has 2 Masters degrees and 2 Ph.Ds. He also has scores of academic publications including books from Oxford University Press, etc.

The MP3 file is here. (14.5 Mb, about 41 minutes)

Topics:

  • the stresses of ministry on marriages
  • the Christian position on divorce
  • balancing marriage with academic pursuits
  • the importance of marrying the right person
  • Dr. Craig’s politically incorrect advice for choosing a spouse
  • Advice for men: Marry someone who believes in you and who supports you in your calling
  • Advice for women: Be the kind of person who can commit to being a helper and supporter
  • Advice for men: Beware of the career woman who will put their career over supporting you in your calling
  • Advice for women: Be careful about marrying if you think that your goals are more important than your husband’s goals
  • Advice: Don’t try to find the right person for you but instead focus on learning about marriage and preparing for marriage
  • Advice: Flee youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, love and peace
  • Advice: God intends for sex to be within the bounds of marriage, so you need to guard yourself against unchastity
  • Advice for men: be careful what images and movies you see with the goal of keeping your chastity
  • Advice: your highest responsibility after your relationship with God is your spouse, and your studies are third
  • Advice: it’s better to drop classes or give up your graduate studies entirely rather than destroy your marriage
  • Advice for women: understand that you have to work at the marriage in order to help your man finish his studies
  • Advice: set aside a period of the day for communicating and bonding with your spouse
  • Advice: cultivate the ability to talk with your spouse on a personal level, and maintain eye contact
  • Advice for men: do not break eye contact with your wife, and also hold her hand when communicating
  • Advice: do not be embarrassed to seek out a marriage counselor, but make it a good counselor
  • Advice:  don’t just be doing stuff for your mate, but also be vulnerable and transparent with your mate
  • How your relationship with your wife helps you with your relationship with God
  • How do you handle the rebellion of children without being overbearing and authoritarian?

There is a period of Q&A at the end. There is another piece of advice that comes out in the Q&A for women: take an interest in your spouse’s work even if you don’t care about it, and ask him about it every day and try to understand it. Go to the man’s workplace and see what he does. Go to his presentations. Get involved in the man’s ministry and help him in practical ways. Another piece of advice is to not paper over the differences – it’s good to argue, because it means that problems are being confronted and worked through. Husbands should have a good male friend to talk to, and wives should have a good female friend to talk to.

I like how Dr. Craig has thought about how to have a successful marriage, how to choose the right woman, and how to love his wife. I like how he calls out men on the chastity thing. I think that chastity is more important for men than for women, because it’s the men who take the lead in choosing and pursuing the right woman for their plan.

Here is my previous post on Craig’s advice for married couples and my previous post on Dr. Craig’s advice for choosing a good spouse, with illustrations from his own marriage.

If you want to hear another Christian husband talk about how his wife supports him, listen to this lecture called “Giants in the Land” with Dr. Walter Bradley. It’s actually my favorite lecture. I also really like his testimony lecture.

Commentary

Can recreational sex turn a selfish, irresponsible man into a marriage-minded provider?

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An article from the American Thinker answers the question that vexes many men. As you read this excerpt below, ask yourself if it is a man or a woman writing this.

First of all, liberal women seem to be having an awful lot of sex these days. They are losing their virginity early, and working their way through as many “alpha males” as possible, but all the while they insist that a stream of recreational-sex relationships is somehow a path to lifelong married love. Can you turn a man who wants nothing more than recreational sex into the perfect husband, simply by invoking the magical power of sex?

Liberal women think that you can:

On the one hand, liberal women believe wholeheartedly in the idiotic social construct they call, “sexual liberation.”  They pride themselves on losing their virginity, as though that “accomplishment” had ever been above the challenge-scale of an alley cat in heat.

These liberal women I’ve known, having given away their female V-card over and over and over again, all the while scour their host of intimate “trial runs” searching for that mythical, Hollywood-construct, Mr. Right.  This Mr. Right guy, for whom they are searching, is known to them up front as even more sexually-liberated than they, but this little factoid seems not to register in their liberated little heads as they frantically search for the equally mythical family home with the white picket fence, which somehow never gets hit by any of life’s roving tornadoes.  One can almost hear them say in unison, “And they all lived happily ever after.”

I think it’s one of the deepest mysteries of the world why women think that a man who has lots and lots of recreational sex is somehow marriage material. When I think of men who are qualified for marriage, I think of men who have studied hard subjects, gotten marketable skills, worked and worked, saved and saved, and shown that they can be faithful in marriage by exhibiting self-control in the courtship. But liberal women think that all of this reasoning is junk, and you must just jump right into sex to see if the relationship will “work out” or to find out what you “like”. Recreational sex, they insist, is a superior way of finding a husband. Discussing who will do what in a marriage and what the marriage is for is apparently ineffective.

More:

Evidently, the liberal woman is capable of the most severe form of psychological denial known to humankind.  Certain that one of the men with whom she has copulated without strings will suddenly morph into a faithfully monogamous creature the minute she can convince one of them to say “I do” in front of a few witnesses, the liberal woman marches blindly down the aisle towards near-certain, adulterous doom.  Yet, no amount of honest reason can dissuade liberal women from this self-destructive, moral myopia.

What other term but “morally schizoid” could possibly describe this blatantly contradictory tendency among liberal women?

Having spent their youth casually throwing their own sexual morality to the winds of fairytale “liberation,” these liberal women still steadfastly cling to the faithfully monogamous ideal for that sometime-later moment when they actually do desire all the traditional things — the husband, the kids, the white picket fence — those pesky female-nature embedded longings, which coincidentally ensure the continuation of the human race.

But these liberal women somehow — in perfect schizoid manner — convince themselves that once married, they will be the gratuitous beneficiaries of the monogamous respect they still desire, but have never once demanded or deserved.  Intuitively, women know that strict monogamy provides the only real security for themselves and their own offspring.  Yet, they continue themselves to spurn the demands of monogamy until the very last minute, believing that fidelity springs forth naturally in miraculous profusion among all “married” humans.  Such pure poppycock can only be explained as a mental disorder.

I think women need to ask themselves questions honestly and rationally:

  • can recreational sex make an unemployed man get a job?
  • can recreational sex make a violent man be courteous and respectful?
  • can recreational sex make an atheist turn into a Christian?
  • can recreational sex make a male slut stay faithful?
  • can recreational sex make wastefulness turn into frugality?
  • can recreational sex make laziness turn into diligence?
  • can recreational sex make irresponsibility turn into commitment?

Marriages last because both partners have prepared themselves for self-sacrifice, rational discussions, problem solving and cooperation.

Previously, I provided the male perspective on liberal women’s poor decision-making about men and marriage. Read the article from the American Thinker (written by a woman), then read mine.

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