Tag Archives: Men

News

Study: remaining a virgin longer leads to more satisfying relationships

14 Comments
Boys and girls playing the famous co-operative board game
Boys and girls playing the famous co-operative board game “Pandemic”

OK, so this week I got to be a facilitator between a man and a woman in a relationship. I got to hear a bit about what they thought was appropriate in the area of physical touching. These two had made great decisions, and it protected them both. Anyway, thinking about them caused me to think about the studies I had posted about boundaries in sexual matters a few years back. So I’m going to re-post them to remind everyone not to be in a rush to say yes to premarital sex.

The first article from the UK Daily Mail is about study showing the benefits of abstinence for relationship quality.

Excerpt:

People who lose their virginity later than their teenage years are more likely to enjoy satisfying relationships later in life, according to a new study.

Researchers found that people who didn’t have sex until they turned 20 or even later are more likely to end up in a happy relationship.

[…]Previous research suggests that there may be cause for concern, as timing of sexual development can have significant immediate consequences for adolescents’ physical and mental health.

However, until now little had been done to study long-term outcomes, and how early sexual initiation might affect romantic relationships in adulthood.

Psychological scientist Paige Harden, of the University of Texas in the United States, set about changing this.

She wanted to investigate whether the timing of sexual initiation in adolescence might predict romantic outcomes – such as whether people get married or live with their partners, how many romantic partners they’ve had, and whether they’re satisfied with their relationship – later in adulthood.

Doctor Harden used data from the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health to look at 1,659 same-sex sibling pairs who were followed from around the age of 16 to about the age of 29.

Each sibling was classified as having an ‘early’ (younger than 15), ‘on-time’ (age 15 to 19), or ‘late’ (older than 19) first experience with sexual intercourse.

Those who lost their virginity later on in life were more likely to have a well-paid job.

They found, as expected, later timing of first sexual experience was associated with higher educational attainment and higher household income in adulthood when compared with the early and on-time groups.

People who had a later first sexual experience were also less likely to be married and they had fewer romantic partners in adulthood.

Among the participants who were married or living with a partner, later sexual initiation was linked with significantly lower levels of relationship dissatisfaction in adulthood.

This sounds a lot like the results from the previous studies that were featured in this UK Daily Mail article.

Excerpt:

“Courtship is a time for exploration and decision-making about the relationship, when partners assess compatibility, make commitments and build on emotional and physical intimacy.”

“The rapid entry into sexual relationships may, however, cut short this process, setting the stage for “sliding” rather than “deciding” to enter co-habiting unions.”

“Around a third of the men and women said they’d had sex within the first month of dating, while about 28 per cent waited at least six months, the Journal of Marriage and Family reported.”

“Analysis of the data clearly showed the women who had waited to have sex to be happier. And those who waited at least six months scored more highly in every category measured than those who got intimate within the first month. Even their sex lives were better.”

“The link was weaker for men. However, those who waited to get physically involved had fewer rows.

[…]‘A strong sexual desire may thwart the development of other key ingredients of a healthy relationship such as commitment, mutual understanding or shared values,’ the report said. ‘Good sex is sometimes confused with love; some couples overlook problematic aspects of their relationship that ultimately matter more in the long run.’”

So, it looks like you lose some stability if you push too hard on the premarital sex. Is stability important to you? Well, divorce is a financial disaster for men and women – so that’s one reason to care about stability. If your plan for marriage is to provide a stable environment for your kids, then that’s another good reason to care about stability. If you are getting married in part to advance your cause through effective children, then you have to control yourself now in order to be the person who can give them what they need later. This is not out of your control, this is not unpredictable. There are best practices.

If you keep rushing into things and experiencing painful break-ups, you will naturally stop the behaviors that allow you commit out of self-preservation. You will begin to resent having to care for that other person, except maybe when it makes you feel good. When you invest a lot and break up, you become less willing to invest in that other person. You retreat into your shell. You resent having responsibilities and obligations to that other person. You expect things to work on their own, apart from your efforts to make them work, because that’s how you avoid getting hurt. You try not to invest too much, because you imagine that things will fall apart and you’ll get hurt again. You focus on just feeling good now, so that when the relationship fails, you come out “ahead”. But this is not the way to make a stable marriage.

Marriage requires you to give 100% and regardless of how you feel. That’s what a commitment is – it’s a decision to perform regardless of feelings. To get stability, you want to be comfortable with investing in that other person – taking on responsibilities, satisfying expectations, performing obligations. Both of you have to be comfortable with the selflessness of commitment, and be ruled by your own decisions, instead of your feelings. And your goal here is not to find someone who gives you good feelings right now. Your goal is to find someone who will not hurt you the more that you give of yourself, up to an including marriage. It’s not good feelings that you are looking for, it’s the safety to commit everything you have to this other person, and not get hurt. The real joy of a relationship is not fun and thrills, it’s giving everything you have to another person, and knowing that if you fall, they will catch you.

If you choose candidates carefully, involve wise mentors, and set proper boundaries, you’ll find that relationships are a lot less painful, and that when you really want to commit, then you will be able to commit with your whole heart, and to be content with the commitment. There are plenty of ways to love and serve another person other than sex, as you both get to know each other and size each other up for a life-long commitment. Premarital sex is counterproductive… it’s speaking in a language that is designed for two people who have already made a lifelong commitment to have a common plan and a common purpose. Sex makes sense when you have that commitment, but it undermines communication and objective evaluation if it’s done before that commitment commitment is in place.

News

Two horror stories of women who put selfishness over responsibilities and obligations

7 Comments
Is it OK to tell women they are wrong?
Is it OK to tell women they are wrong?

This article from Life News is the kind of article that Dina loves to send me to try to break my idyllic picture of women as always right and never wrong.

It says:

In 2014, wannabe model Josie Cunningham said she was getting an abortion so she could star on the reality television show Big Brother. However, she ended up rejecting abortion and having her third child.

At that time she said, “I really thought I would be able to but I couldn’t. I’d felt the baby kick for the first time 24 hours earlier and I couldn’t get that feeling out of my head. I’d forgotten what the feeling was like. It was magical. It was like the baby was telling me not to go through with it.”

She added, “I was in the taxi driving to the clinic and felt physically sick. I was shaking. When the driver told me we were a minute away I burst into tears. I wanted to throw myself out of the moving car to get away. I had my hands on my bump and I had the strongest feeling I couldn’t let anyone take my baby away.”

Sounds very dramatic, doesn’t it? She certainly got a lot of attention at the time.

More:

Unfortunately, now the Daily Mail reports that Cunningham has aborted her fourth child because she wanted to get a nose job to further her career as a porn star.

She told Sunday People the following about her decision: “I’d had the boobs done, I had the body, but I realized that to be really successful in the adult industry I needed the face too. People can hate me – but the pregnancy was going to ruin my chance of finally making it. Next year I’ll be posing for glamour shots instead of nine months pregnant lying on the sofa with fat ankles. That’s my decision and no one else’s.”

Later Cunningham explained that her pregnancy was a “major obstacle” in her life and abortion was the answer because surgeons refused to operate on her since she was pregnant.

She explained, “I spoke to the advisor at the cosmetic surgery clinic three weeks ago and she was telling me about the different kinds of surgery. I was getting really excited. But when I mentioned I was pregnant she immediately said the surgeon wouldn’t operate on me. I was told it could harm the baby and they even recommend waiting a year even after I gave birth before having it done. I called a few other clinics and they all said the same. My heart sank but I knew what I had to do.”

Her decision to abort her child is confusing to some because in January she announced that she was pro-life. She said, “I did consider having an abortion with my third child, which I am ashamed to say. The way I saw it was that I’d rather be able to provide further for the two children I already had than not be able to provide for all three. It wasn’t an easy decision. But now I am anti-abortion, I came close to making the biggest mistake of my life.”

Although Cunningham did give birth to a healthy child last year, she bragged about her unhealthy lifestyle during her pregnancy, which included smoking 20 cigarettes a day.

She’s not the only woman who just goes crazy of her own free will. I wanted to blog about Suzy Favor Hamilton for some time, so I’ll just add her story to this post:

Three years ago, Suzy ­Favor Hamilton was best known as a three-time middle-distance Olympic runner, an all-American beauty with mainstream fame, sponsorships with Nike and promotional work with Disney, and a loving husband and daughter.

[…]Favor Hamilton, now 47, was born in Stevens Point, Wis., the youngest of five. She led a comfortable, middle-class existence and displayed a talent for running at just 9 years old. By high school, she was training for the Olympics.

[…]Favor Hamilton attended the University of Wisconsin on a full running scholarship, and there she met her future husband, Mark Hamilton, a freshman pitcher. By the time they graduated, Mark had switched to law, and Suzy had a six-year, five-figure contract with Reebok. By the spring of 1992, as she was going into the Olympic trials, she had been written up not just in Olympian magazine but Vogue, Elle and Rolling Stone. She loved the attention.

“Being a celebrity became more and more attractive to me,” she writes.

[…]Her sister, Kris, she writes, “was generous enough to make sacrifices for me, but I never thought of doing so for her because I couldn’t focus on anything but crossing the finish line first.”

[…]In 2005, she got pregnant with their daughter, Kylie. But Favor Hamilton was bored and her husband annoyed by her entitlement. To alleviate the strain in their marriage, Favor Hamilton suggested celebrating their 20th anniversary with a threesome in Las Vegas. He was dubious.

[…]“‘Flat and stale” is how she describes her life right after that trip. For Favor Hamilton, life with her husband and daughter in the Midwest was never going to be enough. She longed to be in Vegas, earning thousands of dollars, being paid for sex by rich and powerful men.

[…]“It was as if I’d suddenly ­become a teenager,” she writes. “I wanted what felt good and fun, all the time.”

[…]Within a month, Favor Hamilton was consumed with her new life in Vegas. “I was barely there when I was in Madison,” she writes. “My concern was no long­er making it easier for Mark to accept my next return trip to Vegas, but simply how soon I could get back there.” She had hooked up with a chef who bought her $500 in clothes and jewelry for sex. She wanted more of that.

[…]When Mark told her he’d probably begin sleeping with other women, she was relieved. “It made me feel even more entitled to do what I wanted,” she writes.

[…]As he opened the door, she realized the room “was full of men.” She wasn’t afraid — she was into it. “The only question on my mind,” she writes, “was how much sex, and with how many of these men.”

[…]Just a few months in, Favor Hamilton had all but abandoned her husband and child. They couldn’t compete with clients who bought her thousand-dollar meals, took her on shopping sprees, sent her for spray tans and manicures.

[…]When her daughter called her in Vegas, Favor Hamilton was annoyed.

“‘I miss you, Mommy,’ she said, tears in her voice,” Favor Hamilton writes. “I didn’t want that . . . I needed a glass of wine and some of that Vegas glamour to feel like [her alter ego] again.”

Favor Hamilton was picking up men on her own when she had a free hour or two between scheduled clients and specialized in threesomes. Her behavior was becoming wilder: She had sex in broad daylight on a golf course twice with one client.

[…]“I can’t stop, Mark,” she said. “I’ve never been happier.”

[…]And she’s not sorry for any of it.

“I cannot pretend to feel ashamed,” she writes, “for having done something I don’t think is wrong.”

I think Dina and I agree that there is a lot of bad behavior going on in the world that can be attributed to selfish, reckless, emotional behavior by women. Dina thinks that men ought to be doing a better job of setting boundaries and talking to women about morality and the likely consequences of their poor choices. Well, I hope that by talking about these two stories, I encourage all the men to be more confident about telling women “NO” when they make bad decisions.

Here is what I would like Christian men to do when confronted with a woman who is making selfish decisions that are likely to harm her and those around her in the long term. I would like them to recognize when they are being manipulated by women, which younger men are especially prone to doing. They have to learn to do without attention from women if it means not being able to analyze and judge her actions. Men also need to be very skeptical of women who invoke God leading her through her feelings. As far as I’m concerned, God should always be leading women to do things they DON’T FEEL LIKE DOING. If the woman felt like doing something selfish when she was a non-Christian (e.g. – traveling to Europe for 2 years), then it can hardly be the case now that God is leading her to do exactly what she wanted to do when she was a non-Christian. She was already wanting to do that before she became a Christian. So men need to be careful about approving a bad plan just because the woman hollers Jesus over it. A bad plan is a bad plan, and hollering Jesus doesn’t make it a good plan.

I would also like to see men understand that decisions about education, career and finances are best made by people who have degrees that led to good jobs, by people with gapless resumes, by people with high salaries, and by people with savings. I want to see men focus on getting STEM degrees, getting STEM jobs, and then saving and investing so that they have a quarter of a million dollars saved by age 30. I don’t want to see unemployed students handing out advice to women about education, career and finances when they don’t even know what they are talking about themselves. I don’t want them accepting the pronouncements of a woman about education, career and finance when her own past shows that she has made poor choices in these areas. Newsflash: if a woman is 30, unemployed and living at home with thousands of dollars of debt from a degree she has never used, then anything she has to say about education, career and finance is literally garbage. I don’t want to see you men approving of such clowning.

I also don’t want to see men praying for women’s crazy plans to succeed. If you find a woman who is uneducated, unemployed, in debt and living with her parents, then the thing to do is to encourage her to choose a plan that is reasonable likely to work on its own, not one that requires God’s intervention in order to work. In my case, I found a woman a job in a Fortune 100 company that was related to her (unused) college degree in business. It would have got her out of debt, and out of her parents’ house. Unfortunately, she turned it down because the job was “too boring and hard”. I expect the men in her life to hold her accountable for putting fun and thrills over building up a resume and investing early. Young people seem to be completely unaware of the advantages of investing early so they can retire early. I expect Christian men to be telling young women how important it is to save and invest as early as possible. I also want to see young men making moral judgments and sharing wisdom to women about the important of working, saving and investing. I want men to warn women about the delays of putting off marriage and child-bearing for too long, as well.

If even Christian men cannot speak up, then how much more cowardly and weak would non-Christian men be, especially when they are being pacified with sex? We have a crisis of masculinity, with men exchanging their leadership role in order to be liked by as many people as possible. Men have to have more courage.

Commentary

What do men want from a marriage?

14 Comments
A man leading a woman upward
A man leading a woman upward

Well, my friend Curby sent me this article from a very conservative Calvinist blog. It talks about one of the things that men want from a marriage. I thought I would post it here, and affirm its truth.

Excerpt:

Men are created different than women. And man’s priorities, deep in his very being, are very different from the woman’s priorities.

[…]The family was created to be an institution, and that institution has a purpose and function in God’s order for the things: to expand the dominion of God’s people over the whole world (Gen. 1:27-28). The purpose and function were first given to the man, and he is supposed to be the chief carrier and executive of that function. And just as the woman was uniquely designed and gifted to discern and understand the issues of relationships, the man was uniquely designed and gifted to fulfill the purpose of taking dominion over the earth. The father’s and the husband’s position of the man is not primarily focused on relationships – that’s what he was given a wife for. That responsibility is given to man to ensure that his family fulfills its purpose in the plan of God in conquering the earth. Man’s very being is outward-oriented, not inward-oriented. His interests would be in work and war, not in feelings and relationships. While women also have their part in business (Prov. 31) and war (Judges 4), by creation ordinance it is man’s realm and sphere of responsibility and authority.

And therefore a church that preaches only relationships and no purpose, will tend to attract mostly women, not men. And when the family is preached as mostly relationships but the purpose and the functions of the family are not preached, men influenced by that preaching won’t be interested in having families. That’s just the created nature of things.

Men feel obligated to do something that is going to please God. And relationships and feelings are not the something they are trying to do:

The Bible has little to say about a “relationship with Jesus.” In fact, Jesus Himself speaks about a personal relationship between Him and His disciples only in two places, and He gives a very simple explanation of what a personal relationship with Him is: obedience to His will. In Matt. 12:46-50 He explains how one gets to be a member of Jesus’s family: “For whoever does the will of My Father who is in heaven, he is My brother and sister and mother.” And then again, in John 15:14, “You are My friends if you do what I command you.” There is no special theology of “personal relationship with Jesus” in the Bible; that personal relationship is very simple: do what He commands. It is not based on emotions or feelings. It is based on the self-conscious commitment to do what He commands.

But what He commands is given in the whole Bible. And it starts with the Dominion Mandate for man and his family to fill the earth, and subdue it. And this means that there is purpose and calling to man as a father and husband to work, fight, educate, care, build, lay foundations, protect, conquer, establish. There is a purpose to man’s life. And that purpose is matched by the inclination in the heart of man to do these things. A man’s heart is thrilled by the possibility to work and conquer. And when the family is presented to him not as an institution of dominion – that is, an institution for work and conquering – but only as a place for “relationships,” he won’t get excited about it. He will leave the church and find another place to work and conquer.

So let me say something about this, and please don’t be offended. My views do go against the popular view of marriage today.

If I were to get married it would be to a woman who understood that my purpose in working from age 20 to age 60 is not primarily to provide a her with feelings and relationships and peer approval.

My purpose in marrying is to make the marriage promote the things that God likes, and oppose the things that God doesn’t like.

In my case that means:

  • impacting the university with apologetics and conservatism
  • impacting the church with apologetics and conservatism
  • impacting the public square to promote policies that enable Christian living
  • producing as many effective, influential children as I can afford to raise

So if I were courting a woman interested in marrying me, then that would be my time to persuade her that the areas I want to work on are important and suited to our skills. I would not be trying to put God on hold so that I could focus on giving her fun, thrills and happiness. Instead, I would be trying to convince her that we could do better for God as a pair than as two singles. And she would have the opportunity to listen to and improve our plans to serve God and decide whether to sign with me or not. No one is forcing her to marry me, she gets to choose if she thinks that my plan to make the marriage serve God is acceptable to her.

So, during the courting, we would look in the Bible together and then look at the culture and decide what areas needed our efforts and what would be the best way for us to impact those areas. But always with the goal of being effective on the things that God cares about. So, no expensive vacations to foreign countries every year just because she wants to travel, that money can be used to organize apologetics events. We have to agree that the purpose of the marriage is not to go have adventures abroad when there is a culture perishing right here at home.

That’s what I mean when I say that men ought to lead in a marriage. I mean that men should have a plan for making the marriage serve God in a practical way. A man needs a wife in order to help him execute his plan to serve God, especially if the plan involves children and other relationships with people outside the home. I do think it is a good idea for a woman to get a degree and have some experience in the workplace before she marries, although she should stay home once children arrive. She should certainly make every effort to be debt free, moved out of her parents’ house, and investing in a retirement fund. There should not be any fun-pursuing, or thrill-seeking going on unless the financial and professional situation is under control.

Now what shall I do if no woman accepts this idea that marriage is about negotiating a plan and then achieving it for God’s benefit?

Well, that is fine with me. Although I budgeted for a stay-at-home wife and tuition for four PhD-credentialed children, if I cannot find such a woman, then I should take my earnings (after taxes) and spend them on Christian scholars instead. And I should use some of that money on blogging and other related activities that I can do myself. At least that way, I am going to get some sort of a return on my earnings for my client (God). So far, I’ve run into a lot of kickback from the single women I’ve approached because they want to sort of wing it, and make their feelings and their relationships the goal of the marriage. Very often, they consider their feelings God speaking to them. But what God is telling them is never good for God, and always for making themselves happy. But I want a wife who puts serving God above her feelings, and empowers me to serve him instead of trying to serve herself first and foremost.

Moreover, I would just add that any woman who accepts her husband’s plan as her own, and develops the skills necessary to help him, is going to have more love than she can handle. The experience of being listened to, understood, respected and assisted by a woman produces lots of affection, devotion, protectiveness and desire from a man. Think of it this way. Very few people in this world care about what we are trying to do for God, except potentially our wives, if we choose wisely. Right now, the environment is very much against the plans of Christian men. The experience of having a woman help a Christian man to execute his plan is Earth-shaking for him. After so many years of struggling to do everything himself for God, suddenly another human being comes along who can understand what he is trying to achieve and can freely choose help him to achieve the things he cares so much about. That is what a man really needs from a woman. Respect for his deepest aspiration – to serve God and to make his life count for the Kingdom. And when a woman gives a man that respect, she will have something much better than fun, thrills, and freedom from responsibilities and obligations. She will have love from a husband – love that lasts a lifetime.