Tag Archives: Dating

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Courting rules: what should a Christian woman be looking for in a man?

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Here’s a post from Christian men’s issues blogger Dalrock, in which he gives advice to Christian women about how early they should marry. He himself is happily married, but he does not like the way that Christian women have been influenced by feminism inside and outside of the church.

Excerpt:

I propose that young women should take their husband hunt seriously from the beginning.  This means not looking for boyfriends, dates, friends with benefits, etc.  They should be looking for a husband from day 1, focusing exclusively on men who meet all three of the following criteria:

  1. Men who are (or are likely to be) interested in marrying her.
  2. Men she finds attractive enough that she is able to fall head over heels in love with him.
  3. Men she is ready to submit to as a wife and follow his leadership for the duration of her life.

Bullet number one should be obvious, but it is certainly worth stating.  One difference I’ve noted between men and women is women often don’t stick to the set of available options when making their selection.  A woman considering her options in marriage shouldn’t consider the recent interest (accepted or otherwise) from the exciting guy in the local band for some no strings attached sex, or even for a long term relationship.  If he isn’t interested in marriage, she shouldn’t consider him when considering her options.  The same goes for men who might be interested in marriage but don’t demonstrate an interest in marryingher.  Of course, none of the above is always a valid option so long as the woman is honest with herself that this means she is willing to risk foregoing marriage altogether with the hope that her available options will ultimately improve.

Bullet number two is an interesting one.  Many young women set out on a path to what Mentu describes as pursuing the serial monogamy hall of fame, falling in love with a series of (they hope) ever better men.  Early in their search they would no doubt have this as their number one must have criteria.  However, after some period of time even chaste women who find they haven’t located a husband are tempted to lower their standards in this area in order to not have to compromise in the areas of wealth and success.  I’ve argued strongly that women should not do this, and continue to feel this way.

Bullet number three is where it gets interesting.  While wives submitting to their husbands is a clear command in the new testament, very few devout Christians even take this seriously in practice.  It flies against the norms of our culture, and even those who are very traditional are likely to be alarmed by the statement.

In fact, bullet number three should frighten you.  If it doesn’t, you likely aren’t understanding the gravity of the situation.  I’m assuming it immediately raised questions in your mind like:

  • What if he is abusive?
  • What if he won’t take her needs and wants into sufficient consideration when making decisions?
  • What if he is prone to make risky or irresponsible decisions?
  • What if he isn’t faithful?
  • What if he isn’t motivated to work to provide for his family?
  • What are his religious and moral values?
  • Is he a kind person?
  • Is he mentally and emotionally stable?
  • Is he capable of leading her in a way which she is comfortable following? (leadership style/game)

The proof that this is the right process is that these are all of the right questions.  These are the questions women looking to marry should be asking but very often aren’t.

I think it is important to focus on that third point. Women today often are not evaluating men for the purpose of finding one who will lead them, especially on spiritual and moral issues. Many women today think that they can get into a relationship with a man and that the man will be happy with not being the spiritual and moral leader in the relationship. However, it must be said that men are meant to lead the relationship, and if they don’t lead, then both the woman and the man will be miserable.

So it’s important that both men and women have an idea of what leadership looks like. Here are some suggestions. The man should have certain goals. For example, mine are 1) earning and saving enough to keep my wife at home once the children arrive so we get effective children, 2) impacting the church with apologetics, 3) impacting the university with apologetics, 4) impacting the culture through writing about economics, politics, etc. The point of relationships is for the woman to ask the man what he intends to do, what preparations he has made, and what he needs her to do, and then to build her up so that she can do what’s needed. The purpose of courting is for the man to explain how he wants to lead, and then the woman chooses the man who will lead her wisely and well, and while taking her needs into account.

What should happen during the relationship is that the man should communicate what he wants to do and then he should try to get the woman to participate in it. She should let the man know that she is interested in his plans and is willing to be prepared to support him. For example, she can ask for things to read and then take action on problems that he cares about. If he is concerned about the skyrocketing debt, she should read economics and then write or speak about the problem convincingly to her friends. If he is concerned about single motherhood by choice or same-sex marriage, then she should read about those issues and then write or speak about those problems and move the ball forward. His job is to state his plan and supply her with tools, like books and lectures and tickets to apologetics conferences. The man practices leading and the woman practices supporting and helping. She is able to see whether she likes his plan and whether she likes helping him with it and whether he is good at motivating her and supplying her material and emotional needs so that she can help him properly.

And that’s what women should be doing with men when they are young. Men are not for fun. Men are leaders. And women should be evaluating men to see which one has a good plan and good leadership skills. Women are not choosing entertainment and pleasure when they choose a man – they are choosing the person who will prepare them and lead them. And that’s what men should be selected for. Life is an adventure. It’s important to have goals and to work with someone you like.

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Commentary

Is cohabitation a better way to prepare for marriage compared than courting?

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Matt from Well Spent Journey sent me this assessment of cohabitation from the liberal New York Times.

Excerpt:

AT 32, one of my clients (I’ll call her Jennifer) had a lavish wine-country wedding. By then, Jennifer and her boyfriend had lived together for more than four years. The event was attended by the couple’s friends, families and two dogs.

When Jennifer started therapy with me less than a year later, she was looking for a divorce lawyer. “I spent more time planning my wedding than I spent happily married,” she sobbed. Most disheartening to Jennifer was that she’d tried to do everything right. “My parents got married young so, of course, they got divorced. We lived together! How did this happen?”

Cohabitation in the United States has increased by more than 1,500 percent in the past half century. In 1960, about 450,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now the number is more than 7.5 million. The majority of young adults in their 20s will live with a romantic partner at least once, and more than half of all marriages will be preceded by cohabitation. This shift has been attributed to the sexual revolution and the availability of birth control, and in our current economy, sharing the bills makes cohabiting appealing. But when you talk to people in their 20s, you also hear about something else: cohabitation as prophylaxis.

In a nationwide survey conducted in 2001 by the National Marriage Project, then at Rutgers and now at the University of Virginia, nearly half of 20-somethings agreed with the statement, “You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live together with you first, so that you could find out whether you really get along.” About two-thirds said they believed that moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce.

That’s a nice idea – wanting protection against divorce. If you asked me, I would tell you that courting is protection against a bad marriage. And the aim of courting is to interrogate and stress the other person so that you can see whether they understand the demands of the marriage and their duties to their spouse and children. In particular, men should investigate whether the woman has prepared to perform her roles as wife and mother, and women should investigate whether the man has prepared to perform his roles as protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. Courting is not fun. It is not meant to make people feel happy. And this is because you cannot translate fun and happy into marriage, because marriage is about well-defined roles, self-sacrifice and commitment. Marriage is about following through for the other person, whether you get what you want or not.

Cohabitation is particularly stupid because what it says is that sex is not to be confined to marriage, but it is instead for recreational purposes outside of marriage. If men and women cannot demonstrate that they are capable of self-control prior to marrying by functioning in a relationship based on commitment and not based on pleasure, then they are not qualified for marriage. And that’s why cohabitation is associated with higher risks of divorce – because thinking that relationships are recreational is inconsistent with a life-long self-sacrificial commitment. Research has shown that pre-marital chastity produces more stable and higher quality marriages. And that’s because chastity helps people to focus on conversations and obligations instead of recreational sex which clouds the judgment and glosses over the seriousness of marriage.

Now look, the key to the difference between courtship and cohabitation is right in the article. You guys know about my evil ten questions to scare fake Christian women away ten questions to test Christian women for marriage, right? Those questions are designed to weed out women who are not interested in marriage as a commitment to serve God, regardless of whether it makes them happy or not. By making the woman work to prove herself in the courtship, the man is able to lead her to see that marriage is not some fairy tale of bliss where she will get her own way all the time. Those ten questions, if acted on by the woman, will clearly drive into her mind the idea that marriage is about her caring about her husband and children as a way of serving God. This sort of deliberate questioning is a reality check to women who think that peer-approval of the boyfriend and great sex and happy feelings and a big expensive wedding are all predictors of marital stability. That’s a popular delusion that is unsupported by research.

More:

Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages — and more likely to divorce — than couples who do not. These negative outcomes are called the cohabitation effect.

Researchers originally attributed the cohabitation effect to selection, or the idea that cohabitors were less conventional about marriage and thus more open to divorce. As cohabitation has become a norm, however, studies have shown that the effect is not entirely explained by individual characteristics like religion, education or politics. Research suggests that at least some of the risks may lie in cohabitation itself.

As Jennifer and I worked to answer her question, “How did this happen?” we talked about how she and her boyfriend went from dating to cohabiting. Her response was consistent with studies reporting that most couples say it “just happened.”

“We were sleeping over at each other’s places all the time,” she said. “We liked to be together, so it was cheaper and more convenient. It was a quick decision but if it didn’t work out there was a quick exit.”

She was talking about what researchers call “sliding, not deciding.” Moving from dating to sleeping over to sleeping over a lot to cohabitation can be a gradual slope, one not marked by rings or ceremonies or sometimes even a conversation. Couples bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean.

The problem with young people today is that they want marriage as “a blissful state where I will get whatever I want without having to do anything, and where I am free from the consequences of my own selfishness”.  They don’t want marriage as commitment, moral obligations, serving others and self-sacrifice. By avoiding conversations about who will do what, and what needs doing, they can fool themselves by thinking that happy sex and happy drinking and happy dancing will naturally turn into happy marriage. As if marriage is just an extension of drinking, friends and dancing, and nothing more. I once asked a woman to give me her vision of marriage and she literally said that it would be having her friends over to drink wine and dance around. They want happiness, they think marriage is a path to happiness, and that cohabitation will lead to marriage without the nasty work of having to answer questions and perform duties during a formal courtship. They don’t want the work. They don’t want the questions. They don’t want the obligations. They don’t want the self-sacrifice.

And that’s why I encourage men to very gently and subtly guide the relationship in a way that will allow the woman to demonstrate her seriousness about marriage as marriage – the real marriage of self-sacrifice and commitment and serving God – instead of letting the relationship be about avoiding difficult conversations and just drifting from fun to happy and back again.  Marriage is a job, and you need to be prepared to hold up your end of it, and to make sure that your partner is able to hold up their end.

Commentary

Research paper explains why college students abandon courtship for hook ups

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This study is from the Institute for American Values. It was done by Elizabeth Marquardt.

The PDF of study is here.

If you download the 88 page PDF, the first few pages are an executive summary.

I’d been exposed to this research before when I read Dr. Miriam Grossmann’s book “Unprotected”. (Boundless review here) I just got Dr. Miriam Grossmann’s new book “You’re Teaching My Child What?” and I also got Elizabeth Marquardt’s new book “Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce”. I don’t think either of them is conservative, but I like their research anyway.

There are a couple of things that really struck me about this IAV study on hooking-up.

First, this one from p. 15:

A notable feature of hook ups is that they almost always occur when both participants are drinking or drunk.

A Rutgers University student observed, “You always hear people say, oh my gosh, I was so drunk, I hooked up with so and so…” Perhaps not surprisingly, many noted that being drunk helped to loosen one’s inhibitions and make it easier to hook up. A number of students noted that being drunk could later serve as your excuse for the hook up. A Yale University student said, “Some people like hook up because they’re drunk or use being drunk as an excuse to hook up.” A New York University student observed, “[Alcohol is] just part of an excuse, so that you can say, oh, well, I was drinking.”

A Rutgers University student commented, “If you’re drinking a lot it’s easier to hook up with someone… [and] drugs, it’s kind of like a bonding thing… and then if you hook up with them and you don’t want to speak to them again, you can always blame it on the drinking or the drugs.”

Other women observed that being drunk gives a woman license to act sexually interested in public in ways that would not be tolerated if she were sober. For instance, a University of Michigan student said, “Girls are actually allowed to be a lot more sexual when they are drunk…”

A University of Chicago junior observed, “One of my best friends… sometimes that’s her goal when we go out. Like she wants to get drunk so I guess she doesn’t have to feel guilty about [hooking up].”

Some reported that drinking had led them to do things they later regretted. A University of Virginia student said, “My last random hook up was last October and it was bad. I was drunk and I just regretted it very much.”

And this one from p. 30 on the effects of hooking-up on their future commitments:

A few women did see an unambiguous connection between present relationships and future marriage.

[…]Many women either saw little or no connection between present and future relationships, or their understanding of this connection was curiously flat. A student at New York University said, “[The present and the future are] connected because I will still have the same values and principles that I have now, but I just won’t be single anymore.”A number of women said that the present and the future are connected because whatever heartache or confusion they experience now gives them lessons for the future.

A University of Michigan student said, “Early relationships prepare you for marriage because it’s like, oh, what type of person do I want to be with? Oh, I’ve had these bad experiences. Or, I’ve learned from this relationship that I should do this and I shouldn’t do this.”

A sophomore at Howard University said that “I am kind of learning from a lot of the mistakes that I have made.” At a further extreme, some women saw their future marriage as the reason to experiment widely in the present. A Rutgers University student said,“I think hooking up with different people and seeing what you like and don’t like is a good idea. Because eventually you’re going to have to… marry someone and I’d just like to know that I experienced everything.”

Although it is admirable to take risks and learn from one’s mistakes, these women would probably find it difficult to explain how having your heart broken a few or even many times in your early years — or trying to separate sex from feeling, as in hooking up — is good preparation for a trusting and happy marriage later on.

And on p. 42, we learn what women think marriage is and isn’t for:

For instance, in the on-campus interviews one student complained, “[With] marriage…you have to debate everything… Why do you need a piece of paper to bond a person to you? …But I know if I don’t get married I’ll probably feel like… [a] lonely old woman… If anything, I’d get married [because of] that.”

This student went on to say that she would be satisfied to live with a man, but added that, if the man was committed to her, he would offer to marry her, and that this was the kind of commitment that she wanted. A student at the University of Washington said,“I don’t want to get married right after I graduate from college. I just think that would stunt my growth in every way that there is. I would like to be in a very steady, committed relationship with a guy.”

And on p. 44, we learn that they like co-habitation, which increases the risk of divorce by about 50% (but they don’t know that):

In the national survey, 58 percent of the respondents agreed that “It is a good idea to live with someone before deciding to marry him.” This belief often coexists with a strong desire to marry, because it was embraced by 49 percent of the respondents who strongly agreed that marriage was a very important goal for them.

[…]Women we interviewed on campus reflected a similar range of attitudes about cohabitation. Some women thought that cohabitation was a good way to test whether one could spend a lifetime with a potential partner. In such cases, women often cited fears of divorce as the reason for trying cohabitation first. A senior at the University of Washington said, “I kind of don’t really see marriages work ever, so I want to make sure that everything’s all right before [we get married]. I don’t see how people can get married without living together because I know like I have a best friend and I live with her and we want to kill each other, like, every few months.”

Other women felt that, in an age of divorce, cohabitation was a preferable alternative to marriage. A student at New York University said, “You see so [many] people getting divorces… I just don’t see the necessity [of marriage].” She went on to say, “I think that I don’t have to be married to [the] person that I’m with…. You know like… Goldie Hawn [and Kurt Russell]? They’re not married.”

But let’s get back to the drinking and the hook-up sex…

Once a woman abandons femininity for feminism, then sex is all that she can use to get noticed by a man. Men are like hiring managers, and courting is like a job interview for the job of marriage and mothering. If a woman tries to get the job by having sex with the interviewer, he isn’t going to hire her since sex has nothing to do with the job. There are children involved, you know – he has to think of them when he makes the hiring decision. But women have been taught to think bad things about men (they’re rapists) and marriage (it’s slavery) by feminists – so they don’t even try to understand men, or to respect men, or prepare their character for being a wife and mother. Feminists just don’t understand that hard work is needed to understand men and prepare for marriage.

In a previous post, I explained how feminists wanted to get women to drink like men, have sex like men, and to abolish courtship and marriage. Under the influence of feminism and Hollywood celebrities, women began to choose men to have sex with without any consideration of morality, religion, marriage, etc. They thought that sex was an easy way to trick a man into committing to them without having to treat him like a real person, or to take the demands of marriage and parenting seriously. (They have been taught to value education and careers over husbands and children, you understand). This results in a cycle of binge-drinking, one-night-stands, cheating, co-habitating, breaking-up, stalking, aborting, etc., until the woman’s ability to trust and love anyone but herself is completely destroyed. And yet these college women somehow believe this is “adventurous”, that it makes them feel “sexy”, and that the experience of being selfish and seeing the worst kind of men acting in the worst possible ways, point blank, somehow prepares them for marriage and motherhood.

Often, a young unmarried woman’s biological father was NOT selected by her mother based on his ability to make commitments and moral judgments. Many feminists prefer men who do not judge women morally, nor impose his religion on her. But those very things that young unmarried  women today seem to dislike most about men, because they fear rejection on moral and religious grounds, are exactly the things that make men good husbands and fathers. They don’t want to be judged or led spiritually, so they choose immoral, non-religious men. Men who are not firm on morality and religion do cannot be counted on to act morally and self-sacrificially. And when they fail, and the marriages break up, the children grow up fatherless and may develop negative views of men.

Every young unmarried woman who chooses a bad man, and then has a bad experience with him is pushing away marriage with both hands. The more she destroys her ability to trust, love and care for others, the less she is able to be happy and effective in a marriage.