Tag Archives: Immaturity

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Unmarried 34-year-old woman vows to change shark into loving, faithful husband by hand-feeding him raw meat

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Melissa Brunning dispenses advice and posts exotic selfies on her page “Wild and Free”

Melissa Brunning is a 34-year-old unmarried woman who operates a Facebook page called “Wild and Free“. On that page, she posts inspirational quotes about travel, fun, following your heart, as well as pictures from all her exotic vacations. The “about” section of the (public) page says “My mission is to inspire others to break free from 9-5 & live LIFE on their terms, to be WILD and FREE to follow their dreams, to explore & go on adventure”.

Here is her philosophy in one photo:

Life is too short to waste time listening to wise people
Life is too short to waste time listening to people with demonstrated ability and success

Anyway, you can look at all the selfies of her with her cat, her bikinis, etc. on her personal Facebook page. The reason for this post is because Melissa met a new guy on Match.com. He has everything that she wants. He’s tall. He’s strong. He’s smooth. He has really great teeth. And most importantly, he gives the impression that he could really lose his temper at any minute and attack other men violently. Melissa is sure that she can get around that problem somehow, though. Although the man lived 1500 miles away from her, this was no problem, because Melissa loves to travel, and  this trip was a once-in-a-lifetime exotic adventure!

The West Australian reported on her date:

Melissa Brunning was on a “once-in-a-lifetime” trip cruising the majestic Kimberley on a friend’s superyacht, so when an opportunity arose to feed a placid shark she was scared, but her adventurous spirit willed her to give it a go.

But it all ended in a freak shark bite incident that left the Perth woman grateful she didn’t lose a finger.

The last of her friends to try feeding the three to four Tawny nurse sharks hanging around the back of the boat, what Ms Brunning didn’t realise until it was too late was that she shouldn’t hand feed the 2m shark, rather place the piece of fish in front of her and watch it go by and suck it up.

With a suction “like a Hoover”, the shark sucked Ms Brunning’s right index finger into its mouth full of rows of razor sharp teeth.

Mobile phone footage filmed by a friend of the incident at the end of May shows Ms Brunning screaming as she’s pulled from the back of the boat into the croc-infested water as the shark swims off.

Oh no! The hot alpha male bad boy ate her food, bit her, and swam away without even leaving his phone number. Typical whale! Er, I mean shark. It wasn’t her fault! There was no way to predict from his appearance that he would become violent and unfaithful. It was the shark’s fault – he lied to her. He presented himself as kind and sweet. The shark’s toxic masculinity was clearly to blame. #Patriarchy #MeToo

Melissa is quoted in the article about the break-up with the sharp-looking thug: “We’re not meant to be in the water, if we were we’d have gills.” It was a love not meant to be. But while in the hospital getting taxpayer-funded health care for the “unexpected” result of her irrational choices, a nurse gave her the phone number of a hot looking crocodile who was just being released from prison. Maybe things will work out with him? At least her friends will be envious if she posts a selfie with him.

You can have a lot of fun reading the inspirational quotes on her Wild and Free page, and even more fun if you insert something about trying to hand feed a shark into each one.

Here are some:

  • When it feels scary to jump, that is exactly when you jump, otherwise you end up staying in the same place your whole life
  • Take every chance you get in life because some things only happen once
  • Life is an adventure, dare it
  • Live in the moment
  • When was the last time you did something for the first time?
  • If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try
  • Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing
  • Be crazy, be stupid, be silly, be weird, be whatever – because life is too short to be anything but happy

I think the common denominator here is this glorification of thrill seeking and fun, at the expense of having a slow, deliberate plan that achieves a real result. When your sole purpose in life is to have good feelings, it becomes impossible to exercise self-control for the sake of something higher, like serving God. The pattern of always choosing self, self, self becomes impossible to break.

This sort of thrill-seeking lifestyle works when you’re young and pretty, but it doesn’t really set you up for success in the last 50 years of your life. A woman needs to use her pre-marriage time wisely. She needs to train up her wife and mother skills, and develop patience and maturity by doing hard things. She has to train herself to keep commitments if her marriage is to last. A stable marriage requires her to get comfortable with self-sacrifice. She has to train her character to be content with stability. She needs to stop seeking thrills and learn how to delay gratification.

I am seeing this attitude of hers a lot in young Christian women. There doesn’t seem to be much of a vision for marriage and family being taught to women today. Women don’t see Christianity as something that overrides their pleasure-seeking and self-centeredness. Instead, they just sing praise hymns, read devotionals, listen to Joyce Meyer’s prosperity gospel sermons, and focus on themselves. Nutrition, fitness and travel are all good, but they cannot be the main things in life for an authentic Christian.

Christians should be concerned with God’s reputation and God’s goals. Christians are meant to serve God, not themselves. Christians have to do what works for God, like apologetics. There is no such thing as a Christian whose Facebook and Instagram page celebrates “self-love”, thrill-seeking, exotic vacations, etc. A real Christian always does what works to serve God. Jesus was good at self-denial and self-control. He was obedient to God even when it cost him his life. He didn’t go on exotic vacations and do pointless, risky things to get fun and thrills.

If you missed my previous post on radical feminists turning to mermen to get around the problem of “toxic masculinity” in normal men, then be sure to read that.

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Who suffers the most from the trend of extended adolescence?

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Marriage and family
Marriage and family

My friend Tracy sent me this interesting post. As I read it, I thought I was going to disagree with him about who is to blame for the mess he describes, but as we’ll see in a bit, I don’t.

Here’s his intro, which pretty much everyone agrees on:

The Five Traditional Milestones of Adulthood

Something magically happens between adolescence and young adulthood.  There are five traditional milestones of that mark entrance into adulthood that sociologists, psychologists, and the general population have used as a proxy to determine when someone has reached that tipping point of maturity.  It is at this time adolescence is shed and emotional maturity comes to full fruition.

These are:

  • Leaving Home
  • Becoming Financially Independent
  • Completing School
  • Marrying
  • Starting a Family

He has some examples to illustrate who is and isn’t mature:

Examples of Adults:

  • A 25-year old teacher with a college degree, who works full time, is married, has a child, owns her own home, and pays for her own living expenses
  • A 65-year old janitor with a high school diploma, who works full time, is married or widowed, has children, owns his own home, and pays for his own living expenses

Examples of Extended Adolescence: 

  • A 30-year old who has part of their rent and bills covered by parents, endlessly enrolls in colleges or universities seeking additional degrees or credentials, single, without children.
  • A 45-year old high-school dropout living on social welfare programs who spends his days getting drunk in bars

OK, then he talks about who suffers the most from “extended adolescence”:

What is particularly interesting is the interaction between biology and the paradigm shift that has occurred with so much of the younger generation suffering from extended adolescence. Women have a specific, limited window of time in which they can genetically reproduce and to which they are attractive to potential mates.  This so-called “biological clock”, written into the code at the very deepest core of our DNA, puts a limit on childbearing for females.

  • Fertility: Female fertility peaks at 20 to 30 years old.  After 30 years old, fertility drops by 20%.  After 35, it drops 50%.  After 40, it drops 95%.  As for in vitro fertilization, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine states that women in their early 40’s have, on average, only a 3% to 5% chance of having a baby through this method.
  • Down Syndrome: At 25, a woman has about 1 chance in 1,250 of having a baby with Down Syndrome; at age 30, a 1-in-1,000 chance; at age 35, a 1-in-400 chance; at age 40, a 1-in-100 chance; and at 45, a 1-in-30- chance.
  • Miscarriage: Only 9 percent of recognized pregnancies for women aged 20 to 24 end in miscarriage; 15 percent of women aged 25-30 miscarry; 40 percent of women over 40 do and more than 50 percent miscarry at 42 years of age.

These limitations do not apply to men (an 80 year old man can still reproduce).  Men have virtually no opportunity cost to waiting to find a mate.  If they want to spend their twenties working their way up their field, putting money in the bank, playing video games, and hanging out with friends, they can always wake up one morning and decide they are ready to settle down, get married, and have kids.  As such, the biological cost of extended adolescence is significantly and substantially higher for women than it is for men.  Females suffer from a Mother Nature-induced “use it or lose it” policy.

So, should men be expected to ride to the rescue of women who are the end of the their fertility period? Should men make things “work out” for women who refused to marry when they were in their 20s, when they were fertile and attractive?

Nope:

This fear was encapsulated by Kay Hymowitz in a book called Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys.

[…]As one reviewer somewhat critically noted of the book, “Hymowitz wants the child-men [those suffering from extended adolescence] to man up so that women don’t have to become spinsters or “choice mothers” at the expense of their careers. Might women alter their own behavior? “[T]he economic and cultural changes are too embedded, and, for women especially, too beneficial to reverse.” So the answer is no. Although it is women who are becoming disenchanted with the way things are, and although it is women who have created this situation, it is [in her opinion] men who ought to change.  And they are to change precisely when women are ready.”

The reviewer is correct because men are acting rationally within the confines the new paradigm.  In today’s world, men are presented no social, financial, emotional, or reproductive advantage by adjusting their own life to the ticking of a potential mate’s biological clock.  It is for the woman, to borrow a phrase, “too damn bad”.  It may not be fair, but in a finite world, there is an opportunity cost to every decision we make.  That has always been one of the central themes of this blog.  Incentive systems drive nearly everything in civilization from the type of people we attract into certain industries to the kind of behavior we reward.  The incentive system for men has changed and society now reflects this reality.

I actually blame the pastors and parents for allowing women to delay marriage, and then blaming men for not marrying women who pass their fertility date. Pastors and parents don’t challenge young women’s feelings with the truth about what she ought to be doing in order to grow up early and attract a man during the time when she is younger and fertile. They want to let women decide what to do at every point in their lives, based on their feelings “in the moment”. The refusal to make judgments leads to women having delusions like “I can have children when I’m 35” and “I can change a bad man into a good man after I marry him” and “a degree in English is as worthwhile as a degree in computer science”.

Feminism has a lot to do with it. Women used to be taught by pastors and parents that they should choose chaste men with good jobs, work histories and savings. But feminism says that men don’t have any special provider role, and now the main things that women look for in a man is that he is attractive, fun, and lets her do whatever she feels like doing – no matter how crazy and irrational it is.

One woman recently told me that a female friend of ours, who is dating a penniless 28-year-old student, who has never worked a day in his life need not worry about him. She said “if they marry, he’ll drop out of school and start to work and provide for her”. She is 33, and she thinks that marrying a full-time student is a good idea, because he enthusiastically supports her crazy plans to pursue fun, thrills and travel into her mid-30s. She tells him that God is telling her (through her feelings) to pursue fun and thrills through travel – a position she held when she still an atheist in college, mind you. And she intends to keep up the traveling for as long as she can, even if she isn’t out of debt until she turns 40. And he, in response, is both unwilling to, and incapable of, questioning her plan from a practical point of view. She likes that he lets her fly the plane, even it it means she’ll crash it and kill them both. There is something mentally wrong with a man who stays in school until he is 30, and thinks that he is fine to be in a relationship with a woman. Only men who show aptitude for the provider role should be taken seriously by women.

Pastors and parents don’t dare hurt the self-esteem of sensitive little girls by telling them to study hard things, get full-time jobs, move out of the house and focus on marrying a man who can provide during their 20s. And what happens when the “fun-thrills-travel until you’re 35” plan explodes and no one wants to marry her? Well, then, all pastors and parents who applauded when she delayed marriage blame men for not wanting to marry her. But men don’t marry 35-year-old women. At age 35, the value proposition of marriage to men has been greatly diminished by age and infertility. (Or worse: by promiscuity, cohabitation, divorce, and children from other men) There is a window of opportunity for a woman to invest in a man with her youth, beauty, support and encouragement. Once that window is closed, a man who has a good education, a good resume and good amount of savings has no obligation to marry. All the battles have already been fought as well as they are going to be, and without a woman there to help him. He doesn’t have any emotional connection to a woman that would cause him to either get married or stay married, because of the help he received when it really mattered. Believe me when I tell you that single women today are very intentional about passing up good men so that they can be “free” to travel and have fun. They know exactly what they are doing, but hope to somehow escape the responsibility for their choices later.

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What should a woman do if she is attracted to a man who isn’t ready for marriage?

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Man helping a woman with proper handgun marksmanship
Man helping a woman with proper handgun marksmanship

I have a friend who is now 33 and who has invested all of her relationship time with men who, although they were fun, were never equipped to pull the trigger on marriage. I’ve been investigating her method of choosing men, and it turns out that she basically chooses men based on which one gives her the “tingles”. When pressed, she can’t really explain the pathway forward to marriage from the tingles. And indeed a closer look at the men shows that they are not prepared for marriage responsibilities.

When I look at her, I think “if only women could train themselves to have tingles for men who were actually good at marriage, and interested in getting married”. Is there a way for these women to transfer the tingles from immature boys to marriage-capable men?

Here is a post by super-mom Lindsay, who married young, has three children, and has wisdom beyond her years.

She writes on her blog:

The world has it all backwards when it comes to building romantic relationships. The world says, find someone who is fun to be with and that you’re attracted to, then build a relationship (often built primarily on sex first) and if you don’t break it off and can still stand each other after awhile, maybe start thinking about marriage. Then, once marriage happens, the rest of the world’s advice has to do with how to deal with the various issues that inevitably crop up when you’ve built a relationship on fun and physical attraction and later find out your goals and values are different. The world will also tell you to leave the relationship, even a marriage, as soon as you find attraction waning or problems that aren’t easily solved.

Too often, the church tries to do things the way the world does, except without the sex before marriage. Too many Christian young people were never given guidance on what to look for in a spouse and make the decision based on feeling in love after spending time having fun together. But even where guidance is given, it’s often still focused on finding someone you’re attracted to who happens to have the right qualities rather than learning first to be attracted to the right kind of person. In other words, even Christians usually believe that attraction is fixed and involuntary and try to center relationships around it anyway.

I suggest a better way. My advice is that we learn to be attracted to good character and the types of traits that make a good spouse. Attraction isn’t something that just happens to us. Attraction can be controlled to a large extent. We all have preferences for physical characteristics in the opposite sex, but attraction is more than just noticing someone is good looking, even if that does play a part. These other factors that influence attraction are primarily driven by our mindset and can be modified by our patterns of thought.

In order to control our attraction properly, we should actively think about good character qualities and notice them in others around us and think positive thoughts about those who have them in order to develop a mental pattern of appreciating good character. The opposite should be true of bad character qualities – we should practice seeing them as unattractive. In addition to this, it’s important to actively work to downplay the role of physical traits in our attraction so that character becomes the main factor, not more superficial characteristics like height, hair color, or facial features.

For example, a single woman should learn to appreciate men with a good work ethic, leadership qualities, self-control, and an interest in studying the things of God. She should control her thoughts so as to make character the main thing she evaluates about others and so that she values good character. Thus, she should find her interest in an available man growing when she observes good character while she should find her interest in him waning if she finds bad character such an inability to keep a job, passiveness, sexual immorality, or an anger problem (to name just a few issues).

If we teach our young people to value the kinds of traits that make a good spouse and to actively work to be attracted by their presence and repelled by their absence, they will make better choices when it comes to marriage.

Well, I tried to present this to the 33-year-old, and she assured me that men who are perpetual students are “responsible”, and that men with empty resumes are “hard workers”, and that men with zero earned savings are “good providers”. She said that my concerns about men having good educations, non-empty resumes, and substantial earned savings, etc. are “only valid within a limited scope”. She went on to suggest that a boy in his mid-30s could still be serious about marriage, even if he lives with his parents, has no college degree, has an empty resume, and has zero savings. I am not sure how this would work because marriage requires a certain level of income, and a certain buffer from savings. A standard marriage with 2 children costs hundreds of thousands of dollars – not counting tuition. More if you keep the kids out of public school. Whenever I ask the women in their 30s for the numbers, they haven’t done the analysis. One of them is actually majoring in business (!) but still isn’t able to calculate the cost of marriage enough to know not to marry an unemployed, penniless student. The tingles override all fiscal concerns.

The tragedy is that the youth, beauty and chastity that men find attractive is wasted on men who were chosen because they were free, easy and fun. The tingles must be obeyed, and the solution to criticisms of the tingles is to push the critics away, no matter how accomplished they may be in real life at things that matter: education, career and finances. Only the advisers who agree with the tingles are trustworthy, no matter how much those advisers may have screwed up their own lives. It doesn’t matter how many times the tingles fail to deliver, either, because the alternative to following the tingles (i.e. – growing up) is unthinkable.

It’s sad because men are learning that the easiest way to get a woman to like them is to spiritualize their feelings and intuitions as “God speaking to her”. The 33-year-old woman praised the “spiritual leadership” of a 28-year-old boy who told her that her feelings were God speaking to her. She tried to marry this man, even though he was an unemployed penniless student, before breaking up with him. In other words, you can easily get some crazy young women into a relationship if you tell her that following her heart will work, because God is going to make it all work out. That’s what they want to hear, that’s what they trust. That’s what gives them the tingles.

For some reason, this works on many, many women – it gives them the tingles. But do you know what doesn’t work? Actually being competent at husband roles because you have taken your education, career and investing seriously. That’s really bad, because what you know about practical matters scares many women, making them feel like their feelings and intuitions will not rule over the man’s proven ability. They don’t “trust” men who can demonstrate responsibility and competence, because they know that those men will want to lead, overriding their feelings and intuitions. Demonstrated ability actually causes mistrust.

Marriage-ready men are scary because they have plans for marriage, which may involve obligations for the woman, as she steps into the roles of wife and mother. Obligations such as staying home to homeschool, taking care of the husband’s sexual needs, not wasting money on fun, thrills or travel, having children (which many women do not want because children have needs). Obligations mean that the woman has to care for others, not just be self-centered. Marriage-ready men make the tingles go away, because marriage means obligations, and many women have been taught by feminism to resent the obligations inherent in marriage roles.

In short, some young women want to fly the plane, even if they are going to crash it. The repeated experience of grabbing the controls and crashing over and over does nothing to restrain the desire to let feelings and intuitions rule, either. All a “man” has to do gain her favor is to tell her that this time for sure, she will be able to fly the plane just by following her heart. He just needs to abdicate his duty to protect her by telling her the truth, and she will have the tingles for him. And that’s why many women, under the influence of feminism, have the tingles for the wrong men. Confident promises about an optimistic, easy, fun future mean more to them than the realistic judgment that comes from demonstrated ability as a man.